The political, economical and ideological tussles that plagued the peace quotient of Russia in the early twentieth century led the Bolshevik party react and respond to the whole situation in a manner beyond the understanding of mere political theories. The economic low Russia that plunged into, after the Revolution, made the scenario worse for the now in power Bolshevik party, which, we must keep in mind were novice administrators. Their course of action was defined within their ideological tendencies of a Marxist response. Therefore whether what we encompass as war communism were merely pragmatic economic policies or whether they were more about the ideology is a debate that continues to intrigue historians. We will see in lots of instances that their policy took its shape due to their Marxist subscriptions rather than their understanding of what the situation demanded. Also in certain instances the two, pragmatic policies and ideological imperatives very comfortably overlapped, like in the case of nationalization and state distribution of assets. The belief, underlying the later economic policies of War Communism, that Russia was on the brink of the definitive transition to communism, had scarcely any justification in Marxist theory.
Whatever economic theories had sprung up during the time, did so due to two fold reasons, the need to fight a civil war and the Party’s notion of how to build a socialist party. David Christian calls War Communism ‘the uneasy combination of Utopian and practical elements that characterized the economic structures”.
Propaganda was a crucial tool in the eyes of the Bolsheviks. Their propaganda included all that they’d require to build the idealized socialist state they’d dreamt of before coming to power. But the economic conditions held them from painting their dreams true. To cope with a desperate situation, they turned to more radical policies and, in the process, tried to extend the sphere of centralized government control much further and faster than they had originally intended. Faced with numerous threats they start to build a coercive machinery of power, the army, a new police system, a disciplined ruling group and the fiscal machinery needed to support these structures. The defensive forces, there was a conflict whether it should be more like a socialist militia or if it should be more like the traditional trained, disciplined and mobilized.
In response to the crisis of May, 1918 about the advancing Czechs, the government announced compulsory military services for the working class and began to mobilize the Red Armies. Here was where they showed their power to go beyond ‘social support’. With the triumph of proletarian revolution, the transition to communism was imminent.
Socialists in principle believe that all members of the society should have some share in the control of society’s resources. The problem arises with the issue as to how this shared control was to be exercised. In practice, The Civil War forced the Bolsheviks to control it from the centre. Thus comes up one of their key policies, which was Nationalization of assets. In December the Supreme Council of the National Economy was set up. Soon after the October Revolution they nationalized banking and credit. As far as private industries are concerned, they began with something like Putilov, which was already closely involved in Government projects on defense. Local soviets expropriated plants on their own authority. Some of the plants were nationalized on the petition of their workers, who had driven out the old management, or even on the petition of managers who wanted protection against unruly workers. Summer of 1918, the government issued a decree nationalizing all large-scale industry, and by the autumn of 1919 it was estimated that over 80 per cent of such enterprises had in fact been nationalized. But the workers or owners or managers at times, in practice were not able to manage running these plants and industries. Because workers themselves could not keep the plants going by organizing the supply of raw materials and distribution of finished products, the plants often just closed down. So amidst an already sinking economy Russia’s industries shut down because of their inability to sustain, thus adding to the economic pressure on the government. Although in theory the entire sphere of production was in the hands of the Bolsheviks. It was a ‘centrally directed’ economy, as put by Fitzpatrick.
Many ideological theorists saw in this traces of socialism although some accepted they might have merely been the result of social and military crisis.
The second blow to the Bolshevik effort was their strategy of prohibition of free trade. It rendered them penniless by the end of Civil War. Fitzpatrick says-“From their predecessors they inherited rationing in the towns (introduced in 1916) and a state monopoly on grain which in theory required the peasants to deliver their whole surplus (introduced in the spring of 1917 by the Provisional Government).” But these weren’t enough to satisfy the huger of millions in the mass, especially in the villages. The peasants refused to sell their grains because of the unavailability manufactured goods in the market to buy. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to increase grain deliveries by offering the peasants manufactured goods instead of money in exchange, sort of bringing back the system of barter. They also nationalized wholesale trade and, after the outbreak of the Civil War, prohibited free retail trade in most basic foodstuffs and manufactured products and tried to convert the consumer co-operatives into a state distribution network. There was even an attempt to construct a budget on a commodity rather than a money basis. Justifying this in ideological terms the explanation came in the form of the phrase 'withering away of money'. It indicated how close the society had already come to communism. In a way it was disguised runaway inflation. Such was their disillusionment that they failed to identify the difference between rampant inflation currency devaluation and the withering away of money under communism.
One of the most delicate balances was to be built on the rungs of the peasantry. The sensitive crowd had to be dealt with, especially after being subjected to a horrible economic scenario, for which the government was totally accountable. The basic problem the Bolsheviks faced with the peasantry was the unavailability of food. State procurements of grain were not improved either by outlawing private grain trading or by offering manufactured goods instead of money in payment. The State had a whole Red Army to feed. They had little choice but to take the peasants' produce by persuasion, cunning, threats, or force. The Bolsheviks adopted a policy of grain requisitioning; they called it Prodrazverstka. It included sending workers' and soldiers' brigades-usually armed, and if possible provided with some goods for barter-to get the hoarded grain out of the peasants' barns. These took a toll on the class that once was in their league.
The impact of the war communism policies was profound. It left every section of the society affected, mainly bruised after the depressing years of Civil War. . In the first place, they tried to facilitate grain procurements by splitting the village into opposing groups. Believing that the growth of rural capitalism had already produced significant class differentiation among the peasants, the Bolsheviks expected to receive instinctive support from the poor and landless peasants and instinctive opposition from the richer ones. They therefore began to organize village Committees of the Poor, and encouraged them to co-operate with Soviet authorities in extracting grain from the barns of richer peasants. But the poorer peasants were now in a better position to have really aroused to the angst of being the underprivileged, therefore rendering their attempt a failure.
Though the Bolsheviks had let the peasants have their way in 1917-18, their long-term plans for the countryside were quite as disruptive as Stolypin's had been. They disapproved of almost every aspect of the traditional rural order, from the mir and the strip system of dividing the land to the patriarchal family. The Bolsheviks' real interest was large-scale agriculture, and only the political imperative of winning over the peasantry had led them to condone the breaking up of large estates that took place in 1917-18. On some of the remaining state lands, they set up state farms (sovkhozy). They were the socialist equivalent of large-scale capitalist agriculture, with appointed managers supervising the work of waged agricultural labourers. The Bolsheviks preferred collective farms (kolkhozy) in political terms to traditional or individual small-holding peasant farming. The collective farms did not divide their land into strips, like the traditional peasant village, but worked the land and marketed produce collectively.
Coming to the policies affecting the working classes, the Bolsheviks had egalitarian instincts rather than a strictly egalitarian policy in practice as far as wages were concerned. In the interests of maximizing production, the Bolsheviks tried to retain piece-work in industry, though the workers regarded were not happy with this kind of payment. Shortages and rationing reigned the Civil War period but that’s hardly an achievement even though it helped bridgethe gap between the urban and the rural. In fact, the rationing system under War Communism favoured certain categories of the population, including Red Army personnel, skilled workers in key industries, Communist administrators, and some groups of the intelligentsia.
When it came to factories, as to who runs them and how, they were always in support of managers appointed by the State, centrally guided and directed. But this varied from place to place. Some factories continued to be run by elected workers' committees. Others were run by an appointed director, often a Communist but sometimes the former manager, chief engineer or even owner of the plant. In yet other cases, a worker or group of workers from the factory committee or local trade union was appointed to manage the plant, and this transitional arrangement-halfway between workers' control and appointed management-was often the most successful.
Ideologically their utopian texts were mainly Marx and Engels, the all encompassing explanation of all their policies. Lenin's State and Revolution (1917) where he suggested that administration would ultimately cease to be the business of full-time professionals and would become a rotating duty of the whole citizenry. Lenin’s approach was highly realistic and he believed more in meeting the situation demands than following Marxist ideals to the letter.
The ethos of revolutionary liberation and the cause of the women and the family formed a major part of the Bolshevik concern. The Bolsheviks supported the emancipation of women, as most members of the Russian radical intelligentsia had done since the 1860s. By the end of the Civil War, laws that made divorce easily attainable, removed the formal stigma from illegitimacy, permitted abortion, and mandated equal rights and equal pay for women were enacted. The Bolshevik Party established special women's departments (zhenotdely) to organize and educate women, protect their interests, and help them to play an independent role.
The political power also changed hands by the end of the Civil War. Their war communism strategies created a separate wing to handle administration altogether. At first, the central government (Council of People's Commissars) seemed the hub of the new political system. But by the end of the Civil War, there were already signs that the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee and Politburo were tending to usurp the government's powers, while at local level the party committees were becoming dominant over the soviets. The Bolsheviks' political thinking revolved around the belief that society was divided into antagonistic classes, and that the political struggle was a reflection of the social one, and that members of the urban proletariat and other formerly exploited classes were the revolution's natural allies. The internal conspiracy was all the more threatening coming from the old privileged class because, as both theory and the reality of foreign intervention in the Civil War demonstrated, it was backed by the forces of international capitalism. Bolsheviks believed, it was necessary not only to eliminate the old patterns of class exploitation but also to reverse them.
This primacy of party over state organs was to become a permanent feature of the Soviet system. Fitzpatrick rightly puts it-“Lenin, the realist, wanted a real government, not some kind of improvised directorate, just as he wanted a real army, real laws, and perhaps even, in the final analysis, a real Russian Empire. It was a party with authoritarian tendencies, and one that had always had a strong leader-even, according to Lenin's opponents, a dictatorial one.” The party's authoritarian, illiberal, rough, and repressive traits may well have been reinforced by the influx of working-class and peasant members in 1917 and the Civil War years. The peasants came to see the Civil War as a struggle between socialist parties and therefore they chose to remain indifferent to it.
There was shift from spontaneity to discipline thus reinforcing the ideals of socialism. Secret police, The Cheka, rigid press censorship, suppression of internal opposition, apparently democratic constitution, again and again revealed a disguised form of extreme socialism, only failing to acquire a totalitarian form, as of now. The Civil War had murdered the democratic traditions of revolutionary underground ever. It was almost as if opposition was intolerable. Instead a new ruling group was formed, organized and managed by the Communist party. Thus Socialism had already taken roots.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Humanism:the making of Renaissance
To begin with, I believe what we need to clarify is whether Renaissance is to be studied as a period or a movement. Renaissance, literally means ‘rebirth’. The concept of labelling the cultural achievements of a particular period under the broad title of Renaissance I think is unfair, because due importance needs to be given to variety and diversity of the way in which the ideology of the period was professed. Instead what we must look at is the birth of a new idea, that of revolutionizing art and different facets of it. Burke specifies that Renaissance should be seen as a movement rather than as an event or a period. Firstly it would encompass more than the general cultural achievements of the chronological time span. And secondly it would explain the underground eventualities in other words the underlying instruments of Renaissance.
Renaissance simply put is the study of a revival. Revival of what? That which was lost in antiquity, hence merely the cumulative outcome of humanistic studies. It is the study of the extraordinary cluster of cultural achievements, placed within a particular context, often identified as an elite movement.
Often the birth of Renaissance has been synonymously associated with the advent of modernity. Because it professes a novelty that previous ages hadn’t probably witnessed. Or even if they had, it must not have been as diverse and widespread as Renaissance was. However Burke disagrees with this view, saying that one must dissociate Renaissance with Modernity. The very idea behind a movement is to revive the culture of the distant past: a doctrine that contradicts the notion of progress or modernity. He views the culture of Western Europe as one culture co-existing and interacting with others, among which were the Byzantine and the Islamic cultures, both of which had their own Renaissances of Greek and Roman antiquity.
Humanism as a discipline could be defined as a collection of all that needs to be studied to study the human, the individual. The aspects of entities created, modified and involved into by the humans. Chronologically its development can be dated to the fourteenth and turn-of-the fifteenth century. It emerged probably as a response to the challenge of medieval scholastic education, which emphasized on practical, pre-professional and scientific studies. In the refined civilization that was the Renaissance, the humanists believed they were the ancients reincarnate.
They spread the gospel of eloquence and wisdom, which would enable a human to engage in a civic life effectively. This was to be accomplished through the study of the studia humanitatis, today known as the humanities: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy. Although logic was one of surprisingly missing elements of Renaissance humanism. It was a movement to revive the cultural—and particularly the literary—legacy and moral philosophy of classical antiquity. With every aspect of Humanism was embedded the sense of Renaissance, the revival of what is lost in antiquity.
The leading intellectual feature of the era was the recovery, to a certain degree, of the secular and humane philosophy of Greece and Rome. The primary humanist ideology was the rebirth of individualism, which, developed by Greece and Rome to a remarkable degree, had been suppressed by the rise of a caste system in the later Roman Empire, by the Church and by feudalism in the Middle Ages. The Church considered individualism to be identical with arrogance, rebellion, and sin. Medieval Christianity restricted individual expression, fostered self-abnegation and self-annihilation, and demanded implicit faith and unquestioning obedience. The humanists worked in favour of the general emancipation of the individual. The writings of Dante, and particularly the doctrines of Petrarch and humanists like Machiavelli, emphasized the virtues of intellectual freedom and individual expression.
In Italy, the humanist educational program won rapid acceptance and, by the mid-fifteenth century, many of the upper classes had received humanist educations. Some of the humanists we study are Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, they were great collectors of antique manuscripts. Giovanni brought 200 ancient Roman manuscripts from Constantinople. Many worked for the organized Church and were in holy orders (like Petrarch), while others were lawyers and chancellors of Italian cities, like Petrarch's disciple, Salutati, the Chancellor of Florence, and thus had access to book copying workshops. Among the ones who were a part of the order of the church were Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), Pope Nicolas V. Humanism was identified in two contexts, one in that of Rome and the other in that of Florence. Renaissance humanists borrowed from Socrates, Plato and Cicero was their happy, natural and wholesome enjoyment of human life.
The emphasis was not only on learning, but also of bringing back the impact and assessment of classical texts, preferably in their original language. Hence there was this interest in the study of Latin and Greek, so that ancient Roman and Greek texts could be revived. Humanists literally hunted for manuscripts of classical texts, from Petrarch onwards. Bruni, Salutati and some of his colleagues are considered a part of the bracket of civic humanists, a slight variation of the stereotypic humanists. Civic humanism is basically the application of principles of humanity in public life, stressing on morals, ethics, although slightly non-aligned towards the Church’s perspective on the same.
Renaissance also saw the deviation from the dominance of Christian influence to the revival of paganism, again owing to the most fundamental Humanistic principle-reviewing that which has been forgotten, or perhaps (as some humanists believed) deliberately buried. The paganism of Ancient Greece and Rome had been lost for about one thousand years, when Europe followed the warning of Augustine against becoming too engrossed in earthly affairs. Humanism directly and indirectly revived the pagan scale of virtues. When men like Petrarch and his fellow humanists read pagan literature, they were infected with the secular outlook of the Greeks and Romans. This view, however, of the Renaissance as a return to "paganism", although popular in the nineteenth century, is no longer accepted by historians. Nevertheless, the discovery of classical philosophy and science would eventually challenge old beliefs.
Renaissance Neo-Platonists, such as Marsilio Ficino, whose translations of Plato were still used into the nineteenth century, attempted to reconcile Platonism with Christianity, according to the suggestions of the early Church fathers, Lactantius and Saint Augustine. Petrarch, a devout Christian, worshipped the pagan eclecticism of Cicero. Much humanist effort went into improving the understanding and translations of Biblical and early Christian texts.
Why we consider Renaissance a different period is because of the perceptible shift that can be noticed in the culture of the preceding times. In Brunelleschi’s architecture the shift from Gothic tradition of the medieval times is visible in the semicircular arches(replacing pointed ones), flat tops of doors and windows instead of arches. There seemed to be an emphasis on architecture of antiquity (alla antica), and Florentine Baptistery (12th century architecture). Brunelleschi followed classical and medieval models in whatever he designed. Other Florence humanists include Alberti and Donatello. Donatello’s contribution is very well known, his revival of ancient Roman sculpture, David and the equestrian statue of the professional soldier “gattamelata”.
Decline in depiction of civic values occurs with the incoming of the Medicis around 1434. Landino, Poliziano and Ficino were humanists who illustrated this trend. Landino wrote extensive commentaries on Virgil and Dante, while Ficino wrote comprehensively on Plato. Whatever be the case, the emphasis was on the revival of precious past.
As far as Rome is concerned, it emerged only due to Florentian incluences. And within a few years, in the middle of the 15th century Rome was more of a centre of humanism than Florence was, The two Popes Nicholas V and Pius II have made several contributions to Renaissance, in a humanistic approach. Nicholas commissioned a series of translations of Greek classics into Latin, asking another humanist Poggio to translate Xenophon. He also got Lorenzo Valla, another leading humanist from Rome to translate Thucydides. He received a treatise on architecture from Alberti. The papal chancery offered employment to humanists, allowing scholars from all over Italy to get together. The Humanist popes built libraries, museums(one of the first in the world), repaired walls and doors, aqueducts, new bridges. They also undertook the project of St. Peter’s Basilica, the magnificent structure where artists like Michelangelo, Boticelli, Bernini and Raphael have also displayed their mastery. Pope Paul II built the fountain complex and gave Vatican city its characteristic look. Therefore in the spread of Renaissance, as we can see, humanists played a characterizing role.
And the fact that antiquity to them was not just confined to ancient Greece and Rome comes across when we discover their studies on Hebrew and Arabic texts too. So the extent of humanistic, as in hard core humanism, in the Renaissance culture is evident from the character and incentive that lies behind the creation of every piece of work in the period. Therefore I do not see why should the credibility of the statement that Humanistic approaches did have a major influence in the birth, the spread and the character of Renaissance, be questioned.
Renaissance simply put is the study of a revival. Revival of what? That which was lost in antiquity, hence merely the cumulative outcome of humanistic studies. It is the study of the extraordinary cluster of cultural achievements, placed within a particular context, often identified as an elite movement.
Often the birth of Renaissance has been synonymously associated with the advent of modernity. Because it professes a novelty that previous ages hadn’t probably witnessed. Or even if they had, it must not have been as diverse and widespread as Renaissance was. However Burke disagrees with this view, saying that one must dissociate Renaissance with Modernity. The very idea behind a movement is to revive the culture of the distant past: a doctrine that contradicts the notion of progress or modernity. He views the culture of Western Europe as one culture co-existing and interacting with others, among which were the Byzantine and the Islamic cultures, both of which had their own Renaissances of Greek and Roman antiquity.
Humanism as a discipline could be defined as a collection of all that needs to be studied to study the human, the individual. The aspects of entities created, modified and involved into by the humans. Chronologically its development can be dated to the fourteenth and turn-of-the fifteenth century. It emerged probably as a response to the challenge of medieval scholastic education, which emphasized on practical, pre-professional and scientific studies. In the refined civilization that was the Renaissance, the humanists believed they were the ancients reincarnate.
They spread the gospel of eloquence and wisdom, which would enable a human to engage in a civic life effectively. This was to be accomplished through the study of the studia humanitatis, today known as the humanities: grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry and moral philosophy. Although logic was one of surprisingly missing elements of Renaissance humanism. It was a movement to revive the cultural—and particularly the literary—legacy and moral philosophy of classical antiquity. With every aspect of Humanism was embedded the sense of Renaissance, the revival of what is lost in antiquity.
The leading intellectual feature of the era was the recovery, to a certain degree, of the secular and humane philosophy of Greece and Rome. The primary humanist ideology was the rebirth of individualism, which, developed by Greece and Rome to a remarkable degree, had been suppressed by the rise of a caste system in the later Roman Empire, by the Church and by feudalism in the Middle Ages. The Church considered individualism to be identical with arrogance, rebellion, and sin. Medieval Christianity restricted individual expression, fostered self-abnegation and self-annihilation, and demanded implicit faith and unquestioning obedience. The humanists worked in favour of the general emancipation of the individual. The writings of Dante, and particularly the doctrines of Petrarch and humanists like Machiavelli, emphasized the virtues of intellectual freedom and individual expression.
In Italy, the humanist educational program won rapid acceptance and, by the mid-fifteenth century, many of the upper classes had received humanist educations. Some of the humanists we study are Petrarch, Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, they were great collectors of antique manuscripts. Giovanni brought 200 ancient Roman manuscripts from Constantinople. Many worked for the organized Church and were in holy orders (like Petrarch), while others were lawyers and chancellors of Italian cities, like Petrarch's disciple, Salutati, the Chancellor of Florence, and thus had access to book copying workshops. Among the ones who were a part of the order of the church were Cardinal Basilios Bessarion, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (Pope Pius II), Pope Nicolas V. Humanism was identified in two contexts, one in that of Rome and the other in that of Florence. Renaissance humanists borrowed from Socrates, Plato and Cicero was their happy, natural and wholesome enjoyment of human life.
The emphasis was not only on learning, but also of bringing back the impact and assessment of classical texts, preferably in their original language. Hence there was this interest in the study of Latin and Greek, so that ancient Roman and Greek texts could be revived. Humanists literally hunted for manuscripts of classical texts, from Petrarch onwards. Bruni, Salutati and some of his colleagues are considered a part of the bracket of civic humanists, a slight variation of the stereotypic humanists. Civic humanism is basically the application of principles of humanity in public life, stressing on morals, ethics, although slightly non-aligned towards the Church’s perspective on the same.
Renaissance also saw the deviation from the dominance of Christian influence to the revival of paganism, again owing to the most fundamental Humanistic principle-reviewing that which has been forgotten, or perhaps (as some humanists believed) deliberately buried. The paganism of Ancient Greece and Rome had been lost for about one thousand years, when Europe followed the warning of Augustine against becoming too engrossed in earthly affairs. Humanism directly and indirectly revived the pagan scale of virtues. When men like Petrarch and his fellow humanists read pagan literature, they were infected with the secular outlook of the Greeks and Romans. This view, however, of the Renaissance as a return to "paganism", although popular in the nineteenth century, is no longer accepted by historians. Nevertheless, the discovery of classical philosophy and science would eventually challenge old beliefs.
Renaissance Neo-Platonists, such as Marsilio Ficino, whose translations of Plato were still used into the nineteenth century, attempted to reconcile Platonism with Christianity, according to the suggestions of the early Church fathers, Lactantius and Saint Augustine. Petrarch, a devout Christian, worshipped the pagan eclecticism of Cicero. Much humanist effort went into improving the understanding and translations of Biblical and early Christian texts.
Why we consider Renaissance a different period is because of the perceptible shift that can be noticed in the culture of the preceding times. In Brunelleschi’s architecture the shift from Gothic tradition of the medieval times is visible in the semicircular arches(replacing pointed ones), flat tops of doors and windows instead of arches. There seemed to be an emphasis on architecture of antiquity (alla antica), and Florentine Baptistery (12th century architecture). Brunelleschi followed classical and medieval models in whatever he designed. Other Florence humanists include Alberti and Donatello. Donatello’s contribution is very well known, his revival of ancient Roman sculpture, David and the equestrian statue of the professional soldier “gattamelata”.
Decline in depiction of civic values occurs with the incoming of the Medicis around 1434. Landino, Poliziano and Ficino were humanists who illustrated this trend. Landino wrote extensive commentaries on Virgil and Dante, while Ficino wrote comprehensively on Plato. Whatever be the case, the emphasis was on the revival of precious past.
As far as Rome is concerned, it emerged only due to Florentian incluences. And within a few years, in the middle of the 15th century Rome was more of a centre of humanism than Florence was, The two Popes Nicholas V and Pius II have made several contributions to Renaissance, in a humanistic approach. Nicholas commissioned a series of translations of Greek classics into Latin, asking another humanist Poggio to translate Xenophon. He also got Lorenzo Valla, another leading humanist from Rome to translate Thucydides. He received a treatise on architecture from Alberti. The papal chancery offered employment to humanists, allowing scholars from all over Italy to get together. The Humanist popes built libraries, museums(one of the first in the world), repaired walls and doors, aqueducts, new bridges. They also undertook the project of St. Peter’s Basilica, the magnificent structure where artists like Michelangelo, Boticelli, Bernini and Raphael have also displayed their mastery. Pope Paul II built the fountain complex and gave Vatican city its characteristic look. Therefore in the spread of Renaissance, as we can see, humanists played a characterizing role.
And the fact that antiquity to them was not just confined to ancient Greece and Rome comes across when we discover their studies on Hebrew and Arabic texts too. So the extent of humanistic, as in hard core humanism, in the Renaissance culture is evident from the character and incentive that lies behind the creation of every piece of work in the period. Therefore I do not see why should the credibility of the statement that Humanistic approaches did have a major influence in the birth, the spread and the character of Renaissance, be questioned.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
a Treatise on Early Medieval India
The most significant changes in history have happened in a series of complex simultaneous processes of change, spanning over centuries to take the final shape. The fact that the early medieval period spans for not more than six centuries at the most, has often made historians regard it as merely a phase of transition between two major periods namely the ancient and the medieval. But in later years historians successfully identified embedded periods within the huge brackets of ancient and medieval. That came up because they failed to detect a minimal sense of homogeneity throughout these long periods, enough to label them broadly as one historical period.
The trends in periodizing history have perplexed interpretations. The one we are concerned with is the periodization of the ancient and medieval periods. New trends have incorporated the early historical and early medieval periods into this large chronological range. Unlike initial historical writing, modern historians and B.D. Chattopadhyay discarded the chronological layer paradigm to highlight the important changes that come about between the two major periods ancient and medieval, hence naming the interim ‘early medieval period’. He emphasizes on the fact that historical changes occur in various levels of cultural amendments which may or may not have evolved unilaterally. Thus in a way the early medieval period can be viewed as a transition phase, which is characterized by features that reveal the complex processes of change from the early historical society to the early medieval period. And thus this period can rightfully be regarded as a thread of continuity between two historical periods. This is the perspective from which, despite an awareness of the elements of continuity, the course of history is seen in terms of stages of change. Identifying all such parameters within the Indian context, we thereby completely reject the European concept of Asiatic Mode of Production which describes Indian historical society as a static, changeless society.
The chronological stretch of the early medieval period would be from the seventh to twelfth centuries AD. Niharranjan Ray does not expand on the characteristics of each of the subdivisions he makes of the medieval period, but then he identifies certain broad specific features which, according to him, define medievalism in India perfectly. Besides those we’d be looking into what B. D. Chattopadhyay has to say about the basic changes that we associate with this major transition. The Marxist historians list major traits of medievalism which include the concept of regionalized polities and economies which come up in this period (thus comparable to the emergence of European nation-states), which perhaps is the most characteristic feature of the early medieval period. The Marxist historians have very often talked in terms of decentralization of political authority. B. D Chattopadhyay says that they talk in terms of “the duality of centrifugalism and centripetalism in Indian polity has been replaced by the image of a structure which provides a counterpoint to the centralized, bureaucratic state, the crystallization of which is located only in the post-Gupta period.”
The emergence of landed intermediaries is considered to be the hallmark of Indian feudal structure, and hence Indian medievalism as well, because feudalism according to many scholars like R. S. Sharma, B. N. S. Yadav, Niharranjan Ray and D. N. Jha, is an exclusive phenomenon of the medieval times in India. It has been linked to various changes that come in agrarian relations which promote not only decentralization of state authority and regionalization of cultures, but also gives way to a visible shift from money economy to natural economy. Due to fragmentation of lands and power, the earlier authorities lose control. Land grants replace cash payments, even to non-secular entities. The various rights of jurisdiction enjoyed by these people who were granted land was comparable to the European model of feudalism. The inception of the concept of land grants has been placed in the Gupta-Post Gupta period. The system of land grants gave rise to an entirely new dominant landholding social group, the Brahmanas. Their position was strengthened due to the control over land, resources and people that they could now exercise owing to their land grants. They were now holders of both political support and economic power.
Historians like R. S. Sharma, B. N. S. Yadav and D. N. Jha subscribe to the idea of viewing this early medieval period as a period of social crisis, the ‘kaliyuga’. As R. S. Sharma points out the pure dharma symbolized by the Krta is again, re-established after the end of the Kali. Detailed descriptions of this age have been given in the Puranas. R. S. Sharma says ‘kali means the neglect of and predominance and influence of heretical sects and also of foreign non-Brahmanical rulers.’ They talk in terms of an economic crisis that is evident from the demonetization of economy and the decline of foreign trade. R. S. Sharma has often emphasized on the urban decay that he believes characterizes this period. He says it was a period of political instability, due to which, a profound effect had been inflicted on the social order of the period. The political instability owes itself to the decentralization of political authority and the regionalization of polities and entities. These changes bring about a considerable change in the societal dimensions of the time. These societal crises can be inferred from the tensions between the different classes and castes existent in the time. They may also be a result of the interaction between the Brahmanized society and the tribals, which is elaborated by B. D. Chattopadhay and is seen by him as one of the major historical processes to sustain the continuity of historical periods. This social crisis is explained by BNS Yadav and RS Sharma, with the support of D. N. Jha in terms of the Kali age. The highlights of the Kali Age as realized by these historians are about the Varnasamkara(mixing of varnas), hostility between sudras and vaisyas to pay and sacrifice, oppression of the people with taxes, widespread theft and robbery, insecurity of family and property, destruction of yogaksema, growing importance of wealth over ritual status, and dominance of mleccha princes.
R. S. Sharma also talks in terms of decline of urbanism important to explain certain aspects of Indian feudalism. His theory of 2 stages of urban decay is chronologically set in firstly the 2nd half of the 3rd or 4th century and secondly starting after 6th century. He refers to mainly writings of Xuanzang and Arab writers. According to him supposed decline of long distance trade undermined the position of urban traders, artisans thus forcing them to migrate to rural areas. Urban contraction was accompanied by agrarian expansion. Feudalization of trade and commerce was an entirely coordinated process that happened through the transfer of power over markets to donees; merchants transferring a part of their profit to temples; transfer of custom dues from the State to the temple.
But refuting this argument of Sharma, B. D. Chattopadhyay points out that in the early medieval period some urban centres decline while some continued to flourish. Eg. Xuanzang mentions Kaushambi, Shravasti, Vaishali, kapilavastu as the declining centres. Whereas Thaneswar, Kanyakubja and Varanasi are seen considerably flourishing. Literature, sculpture, architecture were substantially if not entirely patronized by urban elites.
John Deyell examines carefully and concludes that money was not scarce in the early medieval period. Also a lot of coins in circulation but the aesthetic quality of coins had reduced by then. This may not be necessarily be interpreted as a sign of any financial crisis or something. Ranabir Chakravarti points out the significance of Mandapikas which were local centres of exchange that constituted an intermediate level between the small, periodic markets (hatta, hattika), larger trade centres(pattana). They were Nodes of various exchanges of cash crops and edible staples, also for collection of commercial tolls and duties. They can be considered analogous to oenthas in Deccan and Nagarams further south.
In time and later researches the dominantly accepted explanation became the one given by B. D. Chattopadhyay, the so called-integrated paradigm/model of explaining the transition which he does in terms of local state formation. In his attempt to enumerate the various changes that come about in the early medieval period, B. D. Chattopadhyay explains the process of transition in terms of expansion of State Society, under which he describes three vital courses of historical changes namely, the local state formation, the peasantization of tribes and the appropriation and integration of cults.
His entire thesis circles around the emergence of different categories of ruling lineages distributed over a large geographical area. B. D. Chattopadhay has mentioned in his introduction to “The making of Early Medieval India” the various characteristics he thinks are reflective of the changes that came about in the early medieval period from the early historical period.
According to him around the 3rd-6th centuries the process of state formation resolved one issue when monarchy became the norm of polity. “This vindicated Brahmanical monarchical ideology, the view that anarchy pervaded the vacuums which signified an absence of monarchy”. This spread its influence beyond the political sphere to the social sector as well. It influenced the process of consolidation of conflict between heterodoxy and kingship, thus giving way to Varnasamkara.
The process of state formation included the consolidation of the existence of a surplus generating sector and a relationship of domination and subordination. B. D. Chattopadhyay very efficiently proves that these socio-political processes were interrelated.
A very important feature of the early medieval Indian society that B. D. Chattopadhyay has mentioned in his introduction of Early Medieval India is proliferation of castes and appropriation of cults. This, he says, happened in several ways, which included processes like creating new classes like Kayasthas; or incorporating tribal groups into the Brahmanized society by finding different ways to legitimize their statuses, whatever they’d been assigned when they got incorporated into their social paradigm. The Tribal groups which existed in pre-state societies also entered into interactive relationships with the so-called mainstream regionalities, thus integrating themselves into a society where they were accommodated along with new positions that became a part of the social hierarchy. The extension of state structure to such pre-state societies would inevitably bring about a host of changes in the polity, the collective economy and the society. B. D. Chattopadhyay believes that in this case the state would both integrate as well as disintegrate because a clear distinction of the ruling elites would be established which would in turn lead to ruptures within communities.
One example that he gives is that of the expansion of agrarian base and rural settlement in Tamil Nadu which was linked with the expansion of irrigation networks. Such irrigation networks and Nadus were under the ruling elites the Colas and Pallavas. Thus he goes on to refute the arguments made by the Marxist scholars namely, R. S. Sharma, B. N. S. Yadav and D. N. Jha that state that regional state formation derived from fragmentation of land which divided the authority of the State and its structure. He states that stabilization of state structures was an implication of another important process which was the peasantization of tribes and their assimilation into the mainstream social order as newer caste categories.
Thus complex societal changes cannot be viewed in the light of a single factor, and neither can an entire region be characterized by a dominant feature like Feudalism although it may be pretty much an exclusive aspect of the time. The characterization of early medieval period in India in terms of feudalistic order is justifiable in the view of arguments R. S. Sharma has put forth. But the coming of B. D. Chattopadhyay’s explanation of regional polities gaining importance due to processes like local state formation need to be considered more like they have been in the past, resulting in larger acceptance of this integrated paradigm than the unilateral Marxist notion of feudal India in early medieval times.
The trends in periodizing history have perplexed interpretations. The one we are concerned with is the periodization of the ancient and medieval periods. New trends have incorporated the early historical and early medieval periods into this large chronological range. Unlike initial historical writing, modern historians and B.D. Chattopadhyay discarded the chronological layer paradigm to highlight the important changes that come about between the two major periods ancient and medieval, hence naming the interim ‘early medieval period’. He emphasizes on the fact that historical changes occur in various levels of cultural amendments which may or may not have evolved unilaterally. Thus in a way the early medieval period can be viewed as a transition phase, which is characterized by features that reveal the complex processes of change from the early historical society to the early medieval period. And thus this period can rightfully be regarded as a thread of continuity between two historical periods. This is the perspective from which, despite an awareness of the elements of continuity, the course of history is seen in terms of stages of change. Identifying all such parameters within the Indian context, we thereby completely reject the European concept of Asiatic Mode of Production which describes Indian historical society as a static, changeless society.
The chronological stretch of the early medieval period would be from the seventh to twelfth centuries AD. Niharranjan Ray does not expand on the characteristics of each of the subdivisions he makes of the medieval period, but then he identifies certain broad specific features which, according to him, define medievalism in India perfectly. Besides those we’d be looking into what B. D. Chattopadhyay has to say about the basic changes that we associate with this major transition. The Marxist historians list major traits of medievalism which include the concept of regionalized polities and economies which come up in this period (thus comparable to the emergence of European nation-states), which perhaps is the most characteristic feature of the early medieval period. The Marxist historians have very often talked in terms of decentralization of political authority. B. D Chattopadhyay says that they talk in terms of “the duality of centrifugalism and centripetalism in Indian polity has been replaced by the image of a structure which provides a counterpoint to the centralized, bureaucratic state, the crystallization of which is located only in the post-Gupta period.”
The emergence of landed intermediaries is considered to be the hallmark of Indian feudal structure, and hence Indian medievalism as well, because feudalism according to many scholars like R. S. Sharma, B. N. S. Yadav, Niharranjan Ray and D. N. Jha, is an exclusive phenomenon of the medieval times in India. It has been linked to various changes that come in agrarian relations which promote not only decentralization of state authority and regionalization of cultures, but also gives way to a visible shift from money economy to natural economy. Due to fragmentation of lands and power, the earlier authorities lose control. Land grants replace cash payments, even to non-secular entities. The various rights of jurisdiction enjoyed by these people who were granted land was comparable to the European model of feudalism. The inception of the concept of land grants has been placed in the Gupta-Post Gupta period. The system of land grants gave rise to an entirely new dominant landholding social group, the Brahmanas. Their position was strengthened due to the control over land, resources and people that they could now exercise owing to their land grants. They were now holders of both political support and economic power.
Historians like R. S. Sharma, B. N. S. Yadav and D. N. Jha subscribe to the idea of viewing this early medieval period as a period of social crisis, the ‘kaliyuga’. As R. S. Sharma points out the pure dharma symbolized by the Krta is again, re-established after the end of the Kali. Detailed descriptions of this age have been given in the Puranas. R. S. Sharma says ‘kali means the neglect of and predominance and influence of heretical sects and also of foreign non-Brahmanical rulers.’ They talk in terms of an economic crisis that is evident from the demonetization of economy and the decline of foreign trade. R. S. Sharma has often emphasized on the urban decay that he believes characterizes this period. He says it was a period of political instability, due to which, a profound effect had been inflicted on the social order of the period. The political instability owes itself to the decentralization of political authority and the regionalization of polities and entities. These changes bring about a considerable change in the societal dimensions of the time. These societal crises can be inferred from the tensions between the different classes and castes existent in the time. They may also be a result of the interaction between the Brahmanized society and the tribals, which is elaborated by B. D. Chattopadhay and is seen by him as one of the major historical processes to sustain the continuity of historical periods. This social crisis is explained by BNS Yadav and RS Sharma, with the support of D. N. Jha in terms of the Kali age. The highlights of the Kali Age as realized by these historians are about the Varnasamkara(mixing of varnas), hostility between sudras and vaisyas to pay and sacrifice, oppression of the people with taxes, widespread theft and robbery, insecurity of family and property, destruction of yogaksema, growing importance of wealth over ritual status, and dominance of mleccha princes.
R. S. Sharma also talks in terms of decline of urbanism important to explain certain aspects of Indian feudalism. His theory of 2 stages of urban decay is chronologically set in firstly the 2nd half of the 3rd or 4th century and secondly starting after 6th century. He refers to mainly writings of Xuanzang and Arab writers. According to him supposed decline of long distance trade undermined the position of urban traders, artisans thus forcing them to migrate to rural areas. Urban contraction was accompanied by agrarian expansion. Feudalization of trade and commerce was an entirely coordinated process that happened through the transfer of power over markets to donees; merchants transferring a part of their profit to temples; transfer of custom dues from the State to the temple.
But refuting this argument of Sharma, B. D. Chattopadhyay points out that in the early medieval period some urban centres decline while some continued to flourish. Eg. Xuanzang mentions Kaushambi, Shravasti, Vaishali, kapilavastu as the declining centres. Whereas Thaneswar, Kanyakubja and Varanasi are seen considerably flourishing. Literature, sculpture, architecture were substantially if not entirely patronized by urban elites.
John Deyell examines carefully and concludes that money was not scarce in the early medieval period. Also a lot of coins in circulation but the aesthetic quality of coins had reduced by then. This may not be necessarily be interpreted as a sign of any financial crisis or something. Ranabir Chakravarti points out the significance of Mandapikas which were local centres of exchange that constituted an intermediate level between the small, periodic markets (hatta, hattika), larger trade centres(pattana). They were Nodes of various exchanges of cash crops and edible staples, also for collection of commercial tolls and duties. They can be considered analogous to oenthas in Deccan and Nagarams further south.
In time and later researches the dominantly accepted explanation became the one given by B. D. Chattopadhyay, the so called-integrated paradigm/model of explaining the transition which he does in terms of local state formation. In his attempt to enumerate the various changes that come about in the early medieval period, B. D. Chattopadhyay explains the process of transition in terms of expansion of State Society, under which he describes three vital courses of historical changes namely, the local state formation, the peasantization of tribes and the appropriation and integration of cults.
His entire thesis circles around the emergence of different categories of ruling lineages distributed over a large geographical area. B. D. Chattopadhay has mentioned in his introduction to “The making of Early Medieval India” the various characteristics he thinks are reflective of the changes that came about in the early medieval period from the early historical period.
According to him around the 3rd-6th centuries the process of state formation resolved one issue when monarchy became the norm of polity. “This vindicated Brahmanical monarchical ideology, the view that anarchy pervaded the vacuums which signified an absence of monarchy”. This spread its influence beyond the political sphere to the social sector as well. It influenced the process of consolidation of conflict between heterodoxy and kingship, thus giving way to Varnasamkara.
The process of state formation included the consolidation of the existence of a surplus generating sector and a relationship of domination and subordination. B. D. Chattopadhyay very efficiently proves that these socio-political processes were interrelated.
A very important feature of the early medieval Indian society that B. D. Chattopadhyay has mentioned in his introduction of Early Medieval India is proliferation of castes and appropriation of cults. This, he says, happened in several ways, which included processes like creating new classes like Kayasthas; or incorporating tribal groups into the Brahmanized society by finding different ways to legitimize their statuses, whatever they’d been assigned when they got incorporated into their social paradigm. The Tribal groups which existed in pre-state societies also entered into interactive relationships with the so-called mainstream regionalities, thus integrating themselves into a society where they were accommodated along with new positions that became a part of the social hierarchy. The extension of state structure to such pre-state societies would inevitably bring about a host of changes in the polity, the collective economy and the society. B. D. Chattopadhyay believes that in this case the state would both integrate as well as disintegrate because a clear distinction of the ruling elites would be established which would in turn lead to ruptures within communities.
One example that he gives is that of the expansion of agrarian base and rural settlement in Tamil Nadu which was linked with the expansion of irrigation networks. Such irrigation networks and Nadus were under the ruling elites the Colas and Pallavas. Thus he goes on to refute the arguments made by the Marxist scholars namely, R. S. Sharma, B. N. S. Yadav and D. N. Jha that state that regional state formation derived from fragmentation of land which divided the authority of the State and its structure. He states that stabilization of state structures was an implication of another important process which was the peasantization of tribes and their assimilation into the mainstream social order as newer caste categories.
Thus complex societal changes cannot be viewed in the light of a single factor, and neither can an entire region be characterized by a dominant feature like Feudalism although it may be pretty much an exclusive aspect of the time. The characterization of early medieval period in India in terms of feudalistic order is justifiable in the view of arguments R. S. Sharma has put forth. But the coming of B. D. Chattopadhyay’s explanation of regional polities gaining importance due to processes like local state formation need to be considered more like they have been in the past, resulting in larger acceptance of this integrated paradigm than the unilateral Marxist notion of feudal India in early medieval times.
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Hellenistic Art
The Greece that we see surviving today, survives as a reminiscence of the glory that it once used to be. Everything about it beginning from its people right up to its mythology, its geography to its art-everything has always had a fascinating, attractive pull towards itself. Greece has always been associated with the symbol of beauty and grace.
Greek art-has always been an area of symbolic surprises and physical beauty for scholars to study. Because of the ravages of history, only a minor assortment of ancient Greek art has survived - most frequently in the form of sculpture and architecture and minor arts, including coin design, pottery and gem engraving. Greece also has a rich history of contemporary art from the revolution onwards.
Hellenistic Era technically begins with the conquest of Alexander of Macedon in the years from 323 BC to 146 BC. Hellenistic sculpture repeats the innovations of the "second classicism": perfect sculpture-in-the-round, allowing the statue to be admired from all angles; study of draping and effects of transparency of clothing; suppleness of poses. My favourite art period in Greek history.
Dying Gaul
The Dying Gaul, a Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic work of the late third century BC Capitoline Museums, Rome.
The Dying Gaul is an ancient Roman marble copy of a lost Hellenistic sculpture that is thought to have been executed in bronze, which was commissioned sometime between 230 BC and 220 BC by Attalus I of Pergamon to celebrate his victory over the Celtic Galatians in Anatolia. The identity of the sculptor of the original is unknown, but it has been suggested that Epigonus, the court sculptor of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon, may have been its sculptor.
The statue depicts a dying Celt with remarkable realism, particularly in the face, and may have been painted. He is represented as a Gallic warrior with a typically Gallic hairstyle and moustache. The figure is naked save for a neck torc. He lies on his fallen shield while sword and other objects lie beside him.
The statue serves both as a reminder of the Celts' defeat, thus demonstrating the might of the people who defeated them, and a memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries. The statue may also provide evidence to corroborate ancient accounts of the Gallic fighting style – Diodorus Siculus reported that "Some [Gauls] use iron breast-plates in battle, while others fight naked, trusting only in the protection which nature gives.
The depiction of this particular Gaul as naked may also have been intended to lend him the dignity of heroic nudity or pathetic nudity. It was not infrequent for Greek warriors to be likewise depicted as heroic nudes, as exemplified by the pedimental sculptures of the Temple of Aphaea at Aegina. The message conveyed by the sculpture, as H. W. Janson comments, is that "they knew how to die, barbarians that they were."
The Winged Victory of Samothrace
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of Samothrace, is a second century B.C. marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike (Victory).
Despite its significant damage and incompleteness, the Victory is held to be one of the great surviving masterpieces of sculpture from the Hellenistic period. The statue shows a mastery of form and movement which has impressed critics and artists since its discovery. It is particularly admired for its naturalism and for the fine rendering of the draped garments. The loss of the head and arms, while regrettable in a sense, is held by many to enhance the statue's depiction of the supernatural.
History- The product of an unknown sculptor, the Victory is believed to date to approximately 190 BC. When first discovered on the island of Samothrace and published in 1863 it was suggested that the Victory was erected by the Macedonian general Demetrius I Poliorcetes after his naval victory at Cyprus between 295 and 289 BC. Ceramic evidence discovered in recent excavations has revealed that the pedestal was set up about 200 BC, though some scholars still date it as early as 250 BC or as late as 180. Certainly, the parallels with figures and drapery from the Pergamon Altar (dated about 170 BC) seem strong. However, the evidence for a Rhodian commission of the statue has been questioned, and the closest artistic parallel to the Nike of Samothrace are figures depicted on Macedonian coins. The most likely battle commemorated by this monument is, perhaps, the battle of Cos in 255 BC, in which Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedonia won over the fleet of Ptolemy II of Egypt.
Laocoon and groups
The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group, is a monumental sculpture in marble, attributed by the Roman author Pliny the Elder to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polyclitus. It shows the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being strangled by sea serpents.
The story of Laocoön had been the subject of a now lost play by Sophocles, and was mentioned by other Greek writers. Laocoön was killed after attempting to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse by striking it with a spear. The snakes were sent by Athena, and were interpreted by the Trojans as proof that the horse was a sacred object. The most famous account of these events is in Virgil's Aeneid (See the Aeneid quotation at the entry Laocoön), but this very probably dates from after the sculpture was made.
Various dates have been suggested for the statue, ranging from about 160 to about 20 BCE. Inscriptions found at Lindos in Rhodes date Agesander and Athenedoros to a period after 42 BC, making the years 42 to 20 the most likely date for the Laocoön statue's creation.
Greek art-has always been an area of symbolic surprises and physical beauty for scholars to study. Because of the ravages of history, only a minor assortment of ancient Greek art has survived - most frequently in the form of sculpture and architecture and minor arts, including coin design, pottery and gem engraving. Greece also has a rich history of contemporary art from the revolution onwards.
Hellenistic Era technically begins with the conquest of Alexander of Macedon in the years from 323 BC to 146 BC. Hellenistic sculpture repeats the innovations of the "second classicism": perfect sculpture-in-the-round, allowing the statue to be admired from all angles; study of draping and effects of transparency of clothing; suppleness of poses. My favourite art period in Greek history.
Dying Gaul
The Dying Gaul, a Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic work of the late third century BC Capitoline Museums, Rome.
The Dying Gaul is an ancient Roman marble copy of a lost Hellenistic sculpture that is thought to have been executed in bronze, which was commissioned sometime between 230 BC and 220 BC by Attalus I of Pergamon to celebrate his victory over the Celtic Galatians in Anatolia. The identity of the sculptor of the original is unknown, but it has been suggested that Epigonus, the court sculptor of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon, may have been its sculptor.
The statue depicts a dying Celt with remarkable realism, particularly in the face, and may have been painted. He is represented as a Gallic warrior with a typically Gallic hairstyle and moustache. The figure is naked save for a neck torc. He lies on his fallen shield while sword and other objects lie beside him.
The statue serves both as a reminder of the Celts' defeat, thus demonstrating the might of the people who defeated them, and a memorial to their bravery as worthy adversaries. The statue may also provide evidence to corroborate ancient accounts of the Gallic fighting style – Diodorus Siculus reported that "Some [Gauls] use iron breast-plates in battle, while others fight naked, trusting only in the protection which nature gives.
The depiction of this particular Gaul as naked may also have been intended to lend him the dignity of heroic nudity or pathetic nudity. It was not infrequent for Greek warriors to be likewise depicted as heroic nudes, as exemplified by the pedimental sculptures of the Temple of Aphaea at Aegina. The message conveyed by the sculpture, as H. W. Janson comments, is that "they knew how to die, barbarians that they were."
The Winged Victory of Samothrace
The Winged Victory of Samothrace, also called the Nike of Samothrace, is a second century B.C. marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike (Victory).
Despite its significant damage and incompleteness, the Victory is held to be one of the great surviving masterpieces of sculpture from the Hellenistic period. The statue shows a mastery of form and movement which has impressed critics and artists since its discovery. It is particularly admired for its naturalism and for the fine rendering of the draped garments. The loss of the head and arms, while regrettable in a sense, is held by many to enhance the statue's depiction of the supernatural.
History- The product of an unknown sculptor, the Victory is believed to date to approximately 190 BC. When first discovered on the island of Samothrace and published in 1863 it was suggested that the Victory was erected by the Macedonian general Demetrius I Poliorcetes after his naval victory at Cyprus between 295 and 289 BC. Ceramic evidence discovered in recent excavations has revealed that the pedestal was set up about 200 BC, though some scholars still date it as early as 250 BC or as late as 180. Certainly, the parallels with figures and drapery from the Pergamon Altar (dated about 170 BC) seem strong. However, the evidence for a Rhodian commission of the statue has been questioned, and the closest artistic parallel to the Nike of Samothrace are figures depicted on Macedonian coins. The most likely battle commemorated by this monument is, perhaps, the battle of Cos in 255 BC, in which Antigonus II Gonatas of Macedonia won over the fleet of Ptolemy II of Egypt.
Laocoon and groups
The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group, is a monumental sculpture in marble, attributed by the Roman author Pliny the Elder to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polyclitus. It shows the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being strangled by sea serpents.
The story of Laocoön had been the subject of a now lost play by Sophocles, and was mentioned by other Greek writers. Laocoön was killed after attempting to expose the ruse of the Trojan Horse by striking it with a spear. The snakes were sent by Athena, and were interpreted by the Trojans as proof that the horse was a sacred object. The most famous account of these events is in Virgil's Aeneid (See the Aeneid quotation at the entry Laocoön), but this very probably dates from after the sculpture was made.
Various dates have been suggested for the statue, ranging from about 160 to about 20 BCE. Inscriptions found at Lindos in Rhodes date Agesander and Athenedoros to a period after 42 BC, making the years 42 to 20 the most likely date for the Laocoön statue's creation.
Did Ancient Indians possess a sense of History?
History is defined as the presentation, in chronological order, of successive developments in the means and relations of production’.
This question of Indians possessing a sense of history or not, arose when the colonial historians mostly comprising of British scholars like William Jones, James Mill and Vincent Smith said that Indians totally lacked a sense of history especially time and chronology because most Indian sources did not display that sort of history writing which was prevalent in Britain and other European countries. So basically what Indians did not posses was that sense of history which the Europeans possessed. Dismissing Indian sources as writings lacking in a sense of history completely would be a very incorrect statement to make.
Although ancient Indians knew how to write from times as early as 2500 BC (Harappan civilisation) we do not come across any written historical record till about fourth century AD which were found in Central Asia. Now the gradual shift to a very crude form of historical records is definitely a sign of progress in the sense of history and record-keeping among the ancient Indians.
Literary sources
There are a variety of literary sources which are available for ancient period of Indian history. Most of them were not meant to be read. They were orally transmitted from one generation to another in the form of something that was recited, heard or performed. Thus ancient Indians had a different way of keeping their traditions alive and within the records for future references. Most early texts were not authored by one. Mostly the authors remain anonymous, but these texts reflect a certain background, certain perspectives and biases such as those of class, religion and gender. And all these pieces of information are vital to reconstruct the history of the social set up of the background location. The majority ancient books were written based on religious themes. Most of these texts were not written with the intention of maintaining an account of historical records. But in an unconscious effort all these texts have come out to be versatile. The remembered texts in the ancient Indian context were the Puranas, epics, Dharmashastras and the Nitishastra whereas the Vedas were a part of ‘shruti’ meaning that which is heard.
The Vedas: The Vedas hold a very important position in the history of ancient India. They sort of form the base to all the other religious and cultural texts. They are a reflection of eternal, self-existent truths realized by the rishis in a state of meditation or revealed to them by the gods. The Rigveda-the earliest surviving text of all times, contains the world oldest philosophical poetry. It is a collection of 1028 hymns arranged in 10 books called ‘mandalas’. The Samaveda contains 1018 verses written in musical notations. The Yajurveda deals with details of performance of rituals. And the last of the Vedas the Atharvaveda contains some of the Rigvedic hymns and spells and charms which talk about the practices that subsisted during the Atharvavedic times. So the idea of recording or conserving the traditions and cultures in the Vedic times is quite apparent. A numerous other parts of the Vedas explain every aspect of the texts in great details which amplifies the argument of ancient Indians possessing a sense of elaboration of historical references. Such as the Aranyakas deduce sacrificial rituals in an emblematic manner. Vedic texts were essentially religious in nature; therefore expecting references to dynasties and other historical events in them could be sort of faulty. But then there are instances of some mentions of battles for example, book 7 of Rigveda cites the instance of a battle of 10 kings in which Sudas defeated a number of adversaries who had confederated against him. But since it is very difficult to date such old texts, the argument of those for the proposition, stating that Indians did possess a sense of history, falls weaker because of the apparent absence of sense of time. But these reflect the religious beliefs and practices prevalent among the Brahmana males and about North and North-western part of the subcontinent during 2nd and 1st millennium BCE.
The Epics: The two Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana fall within the category smriti as well as itihaasa. These epics are magnificent texts with powerful stories that have captured the imagination of millions of people over the centuries. The writing of Mahabharata spans many years. Its period of composition is placed somewhere between 400 BCE to 400 CE. And the Ramayana’s spans between 5th or 4th century BCE too the 3rd century CE. These epics have several chronological layers which are needed to be identified in order to use these as historical sources. The Mahabharata consists of 18 Parvas(books) and 2 main recensions-northern and southern. The conflict between 2 sets of royal cousins forms the core of the entire story including gospels of the Great War fought at Kurukshetra. Apart from the core the epic contains a lot more irrelevant material-other stories, sermons, didactic portions containing teachings, in it which has been added over centuries thus giving it an encyclopaedic nature. It is clearly not just Vyasa who authored this. The Ramayana exists in seven Kandas(books) of which Bal Kanda(1st) and Uttara Kanda(last) were later inter-polations.It has two recensions-northern and southern. The basic story is about Rama the prince of Kosala: his banishment to the forests due to the intrigues of his wicked stepmother; the abduction of his wife Sita by Ravana, the King of Lanka; Sita’s rescue and Rama’s return to the capital and he becoming king. The compact vocabulary of entire text suggests that it was the work of a single individual, traditionally identified as Valmiki. Unlike Mahabharata Ramayana offers some sort of archaeological evidence from Ayodhya: settlement of the Northern Black Polished Ware phase which dates back to around 700 BCE. The Ramayana has several versions coming from varying locations. These epics not only have a historicity which makes it important. They are cradles of several cultural layers. Even if they were true(or not) these epics do convey a great deal of clues about the social classes and class conflicts and political set up that might have existed sometime near the composition of the entire text.
Puranas (4th-5th century CE): It is not so that the sense of time and space which is essential to determine the historical identity and significance of a particular text was totally absent in the ancient Indian sources. For example the Puranas, the text divides time into four ages or Yugas: krita, treta, dwapara and kali, each age considered to be worse than the one preceding it. In the Indian context sense of time is not linear as it is in the European context. In Indian context the cyclic form of time is what the Puranas depict. The cycle of time is connected with the cyclical decline and revival of dharma. So that precisely is a glaring example of the kind of sense the ancient Indian authors of the Puranas had about historical time, and they also had an idea of categorisation which is sort of imperative for any historical text to be interpretable. The Puranas are eighteen in number. They provide a huge account of royal political history as they mention historical dynasties from Chandravamshi and Suryavamshi to Haryankas, Shaishunagas, Nandas, Mauryas, Shungas, Kanvas, and Satavahanas right upto the Guptas. They also have sections that deal with genealogies although most genealogies were mythical as far as the kali age was concerned. They also talk about places and events which were considered significant and hence discuss these events in great detail. It is an important source of geographical history and history of emergence of religious cults. They also reflect the interaction between Brahmanical and Non-Brahmanical traditions. So the idea of significance in the context of record was present. “The authors of Puranas were not unaware of the idea of change, which is the essence of history.” This fact is evident as the descriptions of these events were written in the future tense, even though these events had occurred long before they were written about. So it is evident that ancient Indians possessed a sense of history. They now survive as religious fables and cant. Most of the historical content, with a large percentage of myths and diluted with semi-religious legends, the true nature of the works got wiped out during successive redactions copied by innumerable, careless scribes.
Dharmashastras: “Dharma refers to the proper, ideal conduct of a person living in a society, a course of action which leads to the fulfilment of goals of human life.” A special group of Sanskrit texts dealing with dharma are the Dhaarmashastras. Apart from norms of social behaviour Dharmashastras also deals with a number of other issues including personal, civil, and criminal law. Although the laws were not obligatory they were rather recommendations. They talk about how things should be rather than acting as penal codes. Although the Dharmashastras do not reflect the society of those times directly, inferences can be made about the practices and social and religious norms. They also reveal the tension between theory and practice within the Brahmanical tradition. One important aspect that the Dharmashastras disclose are the varnas, which later goes on to be the intriguing factor of the Indian society. They offer many examples of contradicting the so thought Vedic codes which actually talks of the flexibility of the society then and also of the unawareness of some parts of our texts which lead to greater complication.
Biographies: An immensely impressive sense of history can be witnessed in the biographies or ‘charitas’ written in the ancient Indian times. These biographies not only were a direct reflection on the subject who was usually a king, but also on his rule, his administration and societal status. Thus with the help of one biography the historical reconstruction of an entire kingdom or society can be formulated. The idea of glorifying a subject itself suggests that the ancient Indians had written the text because they wanted the subject to be remembered-a very justified sense of record keeping, though all in a sort of unconscious manner. The 7th century work “Harshacharita” by Banabhatta is one of the best examples one can offer as far descriptive biographies are concerned. The biography deals with the early career of Harsha. “Although highly exaggerated, its gives an excellent idea of the court life under Harsha and the social and religious life in his age.” Other such biographies include ‘Ramacharita’(12th century) written by Sandhyakara Nandi which talks about the Pala prince Rampala and his victory in the clash against the Kaivarta peasants. Bilhana’s ‘Vikramankadevacharita’ unfolds the glorious stories of Vikramaditya VI (1076-1127), the Chalukya king of Kalyan. From the south Mushika Vamsha is another clear example narrating an account of the Mushika dynasty who ruled northern Kerala. In the thirteenth and the twelfth centuries the biographies of some merchants were written, maybe not with the idea of projecting the commercial set up of those times but the texts were ample enough to recreate the mercantile framework which would have existed in those times.
The earliest chronicle, in the true sense of the term, which we know of in India, is Rajatarangini, written in 1148 AD by Kalhana. The book is essentially an account of the kings of Kashmir from the earliest times up till the rulers of the 12th century AD. The book has been written in quite a vivid manner where political events have also been described in a dramatic fashion and beautiful character sketches were woven. In fact the whole piece of writing was given a poetic touch, maybe because “Kalhana considered himself primarily a gifted and skilful poet.”
Others: Comparing Indian historical writers with contemporary writers in the world context like Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy and Tacitus is not just. That is because even with similar contemporary rulers to kings like Harsha, who was also associated with great wars and administrative policies, no narrative like that of Caesar’s Commentaries or Xenophon’s Anabasis was ever written in India. Instead the trend was that of graceful court drama, hymns, epigrams and sort of a bit dramatic poetry.
“In case of poetry or drama, the analysis requires sensitivity to the literary conventions of the time and the writer’s style and imagination.” This is why Indian history sources do not seem to project the proper sense of history that Europeans look for. The art of glorifying every bit of history is an ancient tradition that has been carried on.
Language literature: Even when the grammatical texts were written like Panini’s “Ashthadhyayi”, Patanjali’s “Mahabhashya” and Vararuchi’s “Prakritaprakasha”, it was with a certain intention of laying down certain codes that these texts were written. And these codes were written only to be referred to in the future and remembered at appropriate instances, thus exhibiting quite a justified sense of history. And these very texts are highly significant in the interpretation of languages which was crucial in understanding other epigraphic and literary sources, thus providing a vital insight into the literary world of ancient India.
Archaeological Sources
Archaeology is basically the study of human history with reference to historical material remains. The term ‘culture’ is very frequently used by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. It encompasses every aspect of patterns of human learnt behaviour, their way of thinking and all those features which identify them as a part of a certain social group. The different components of archaeological sources as in material remains are vestiges of grand palaces and temples, small discarded products of everyday human activity which speaks a lot about ancient societies and also things like structures, artefacts, bones, seeds, pollens, seals, coins, sculptures, and inscriptions. All of these components each play a very significant role in reconstructing the past.
The idea of constructing a monument itself speaks volumes about the sense of history they possessed as it reveals an aesthetic sense as well as the idea of building something grand so as to establish and sort of record the greatness that was involved in the concerned times so as to praise the subject of the monument. Inscriptions-even if not written in a very historically emphatic way, is nevertheless a means to record events so as to capture the importance of the moment and carry it forward to generations. So every aspect has a role to play and everything that connects us to the past is, deliberate or not, definitely an indication of the sense of history possessed by the ancient Indians.
Conclusion: A historian’s perspective and other kinds of sources
“India had some episodes, but no history.” D.D. Kosambi argues that ‘it is the episodes-lists of dynasties and kings, tales of war and battle spiced with anecdote, which fill school texts-that are missing from Indian records.’ It is only in the case of Indian history that history has to be reconstructed without episodes, not as it is in the case of European histories.
For other kinds of sources like archaeological sources or ritualistic sources which also convey a lot of information about the lifestyle and religious convictions that prevailed during those times, D.D. Kosambi comments saying that “The existence of any classical literature implies the class-division of society: literacy in the oldest times meant the pre-existence of a temple, priesthood, urban life, division of society into producing groups and others who expropriated the relatively low surplus produced. Only the latter wrote the epigraphs with which the historian must work, the producers had not the leisure for literacy.” So this in itself gives us a lot of idea about what existed and what did not. Even though in an unconscious effort, the whole idea of producing any literature itself involves the presence of a sense of record-keeping among ancient Indians.
Another aspect of unusual kind of sources is rites and practices that have descended from ancient times up till today. Some rites have been dated back to the Stone Age though the votaries are not aware of such long continuity. ”Such rites may not have found foundation in the Brahmin scriptures but other portions of Sanskrit ritual works show equally primitive sacraments adopted at almost all periods, down to the last century.” Most of the rites that are practiced now though are not justified by Vedic references.
There is a lot more to Ancient Indian sources and their nature and interpretive character, which are yet to be unfolded.
This question of Indians possessing a sense of history or not, arose when the colonial historians mostly comprising of British scholars like William Jones, James Mill and Vincent Smith said that Indians totally lacked a sense of history especially time and chronology because most Indian sources did not display that sort of history writing which was prevalent in Britain and other European countries. So basically what Indians did not posses was that sense of history which the Europeans possessed. Dismissing Indian sources as writings lacking in a sense of history completely would be a very incorrect statement to make.
Although ancient Indians knew how to write from times as early as 2500 BC (Harappan civilisation) we do not come across any written historical record till about fourth century AD which were found in Central Asia. Now the gradual shift to a very crude form of historical records is definitely a sign of progress in the sense of history and record-keeping among the ancient Indians.
Literary sources
There are a variety of literary sources which are available for ancient period of Indian history. Most of them were not meant to be read. They were orally transmitted from one generation to another in the form of something that was recited, heard or performed. Thus ancient Indians had a different way of keeping their traditions alive and within the records for future references. Most early texts were not authored by one. Mostly the authors remain anonymous, but these texts reflect a certain background, certain perspectives and biases such as those of class, religion and gender. And all these pieces of information are vital to reconstruct the history of the social set up of the background location. The majority ancient books were written based on religious themes. Most of these texts were not written with the intention of maintaining an account of historical records. But in an unconscious effort all these texts have come out to be versatile. The remembered texts in the ancient Indian context were the Puranas, epics, Dharmashastras and the Nitishastra whereas the Vedas were a part of ‘shruti’ meaning that which is heard.
The Vedas: The Vedas hold a very important position in the history of ancient India. They sort of form the base to all the other religious and cultural texts. They are a reflection of eternal, self-existent truths realized by the rishis in a state of meditation or revealed to them by the gods. The Rigveda-the earliest surviving text of all times, contains the world oldest philosophical poetry. It is a collection of 1028 hymns arranged in 10 books called ‘mandalas’. The Samaveda contains 1018 verses written in musical notations. The Yajurveda deals with details of performance of rituals. And the last of the Vedas the Atharvaveda contains some of the Rigvedic hymns and spells and charms which talk about the practices that subsisted during the Atharvavedic times. So the idea of recording or conserving the traditions and cultures in the Vedic times is quite apparent. A numerous other parts of the Vedas explain every aspect of the texts in great details which amplifies the argument of ancient Indians possessing a sense of elaboration of historical references. Such as the Aranyakas deduce sacrificial rituals in an emblematic manner. Vedic texts were essentially religious in nature; therefore expecting references to dynasties and other historical events in them could be sort of faulty. But then there are instances of some mentions of battles for example, book 7 of Rigveda cites the instance of a battle of 10 kings in which Sudas defeated a number of adversaries who had confederated against him. But since it is very difficult to date such old texts, the argument of those for the proposition, stating that Indians did possess a sense of history, falls weaker because of the apparent absence of sense of time. But these reflect the religious beliefs and practices prevalent among the Brahmana males and about North and North-western part of the subcontinent during 2nd and 1st millennium BCE.
The Epics: The two Sanskrit epics Mahabharata and Ramayana fall within the category smriti as well as itihaasa. These epics are magnificent texts with powerful stories that have captured the imagination of millions of people over the centuries. The writing of Mahabharata spans many years. Its period of composition is placed somewhere between 400 BCE to 400 CE. And the Ramayana’s spans between 5th or 4th century BCE too the 3rd century CE. These epics have several chronological layers which are needed to be identified in order to use these as historical sources. The Mahabharata consists of 18 Parvas(books) and 2 main recensions-northern and southern. The conflict between 2 sets of royal cousins forms the core of the entire story including gospels of the Great War fought at Kurukshetra. Apart from the core the epic contains a lot more irrelevant material-other stories, sermons, didactic portions containing teachings, in it which has been added over centuries thus giving it an encyclopaedic nature. It is clearly not just Vyasa who authored this. The Ramayana exists in seven Kandas(books) of which Bal Kanda(1st) and Uttara Kanda(last) were later inter-polations.It has two recensions-northern and southern. The basic story is about Rama the prince of Kosala: his banishment to the forests due to the intrigues of his wicked stepmother; the abduction of his wife Sita by Ravana, the King of Lanka; Sita’s rescue and Rama’s return to the capital and he becoming king. The compact vocabulary of entire text suggests that it was the work of a single individual, traditionally identified as Valmiki. Unlike Mahabharata Ramayana offers some sort of archaeological evidence from Ayodhya: settlement of the Northern Black Polished Ware phase which dates back to around 700 BCE. The Ramayana has several versions coming from varying locations. These epics not only have a historicity which makes it important. They are cradles of several cultural layers. Even if they were true(or not) these epics do convey a great deal of clues about the social classes and class conflicts and political set up that might have existed sometime near the composition of the entire text.
Puranas (4th-5th century CE): It is not so that the sense of time and space which is essential to determine the historical identity and significance of a particular text was totally absent in the ancient Indian sources. For example the Puranas, the text divides time into four ages or Yugas: krita, treta, dwapara and kali, each age considered to be worse than the one preceding it. In the Indian context sense of time is not linear as it is in the European context. In Indian context the cyclic form of time is what the Puranas depict. The cycle of time is connected with the cyclical decline and revival of dharma. So that precisely is a glaring example of the kind of sense the ancient Indian authors of the Puranas had about historical time, and they also had an idea of categorisation which is sort of imperative for any historical text to be interpretable. The Puranas are eighteen in number. They provide a huge account of royal political history as they mention historical dynasties from Chandravamshi and Suryavamshi to Haryankas, Shaishunagas, Nandas, Mauryas, Shungas, Kanvas, and Satavahanas right upto the Guptas. They also have sections that deal with genealogies although most genealogies were mythical as far as the kali age was concerned. They also talk about places and events which were considered significant and hence discuss these events in great detail. It is an important source of geographical history and history of emergence of religious cults. They also reflect the interaction between Brahmanical and Non-Brahmanical traditions. So the idea of significance in the context of record was present. “The authors of Puranas were not unaware of the idea of change, which is the essence of history.” This fact is evident as the descriptions of these events were written in the future tense, even though these events had occurred long before they were written about. So it is evident that ancient Indians possessed a sense of history. They now survive as religious fables and cant. Most of the historical content, with a large percentage of myths and diluted with semi-religious legends, the true nature of the works got wiped out during successive redactions copied by innumerable, careless scribes.
Dharmashastras: “Dharma refers to the proper, ideal conduct of a person living in a society, a course of action which leads to the fulfilment of goals of human life.” A special group of Sanskrit texts dealing with dharma are the Dhaarmashastras. Apart from norms of social behaviour Dharmashastras also deals with a number of other issues including personal, civil, and criminal law. Although the laws were not obligatory they were rather recommendations. They talk about how things should be rather than acting as penal codes. Although the Dharmashastras do not reflect the society of those times directly, inferences can be made about the practices and social and religious norms. They also reveal the tension between theory and practice within the Brahmanical tradition. One important aspect that the Dharmashastras disclose are the varnas, which later goes on to be the intriguing factor of the Indian society. They offer many examples of contradicting the so thought Vedic codes which actually talks of the flexibility of the society then and also of the unawareness of some parts of our texts which lead to greater complication.
Biographies: An immensely impressive sense of history can be witnessed in the biographies or ‘charitas’ written in the ancient Indian times. These biographies not only were a direct reflection on the subject who was usually a king, but also on his rule, his administration and societal status. Thus with the help of one biography the historical reconstruction of an entire kingdom or society can be formulated. The idea of glorifying a subject itself suggests that the ancient Indians had written the text because they wanted the subject to be remembered-a very justified sense of record keeping, though all in a sort of unconscious manner. The 7th century work “Harshacharita” by Banabhatta is one of the best examples one can offer as far descriptive biographies are concerned. The biography deals with the early career of Harsha. “Although highly exaggerated, its gives an excellent idea of the court life under Harsha and the social and religious life in his age.” Other such biographies include ‘Ramacharita’(12th century) written by Sandhyakara Nandi which talks about the Pala prince Rampala and his victory in the clash against the Kaivarta peasants. Bilhana’s ‘Vikramankadevacharita’ unfolds the glorious stories of Vikramaditya VI (1076-1127), the Chalukya king of Kalyan. From the south Mushika Vamsha is another clear example narrating an account of the Mushika dynasty who ruled northern Kerala. In the thirteenth and the twelfth centuries the biographies of some merchants were written, maybe not with the idea of projecting the commercial set up of those times but the texts were ample enough to recreate the mercantile framework which would have existed in those times.
The earliest chronicle, in the true sense of the term, which we know of in India, is Rajatarangini, written in 1148 AD by Kalhana. The book is essentially an account of the kings of Kashmir from the earliest times up till the rulers of the 12th century AD. The book has been written in quite a vivid manner where political events have also been described in a dramatic fashion and beautiful character sketches were woven. In fact the whole piece of writing was given a poetic touch, maybe because “Kalhana considered himself primarily a gifted and skilful poet.”
Others: Comparing Indian historical writers with contemporary writers in the world context like Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy and Tacitus is not just. That is because even with similar contemporary rulers to kings like Harsha, who was also associated with great wars and administrative policies, no narrative like that of Caesar’s Commentaries or Xenophon’s Anabasis was ever written in India. Instead the trend was that of graceful court drama, hymns, epigrams and sort of a bit dramatic poetry.
“In case of poetry or drama, the analysis requires sensitivity to the literary conventions of the time and the writer’s style and imagination.” This is why Indian history sources do not seem to project the proper sense of history that Europeans look for. The art of glorifying every bit of history is an ancient tradition that has been carried on.
Language literature: Even when the grammatical texts were written like Panini’s “Ashthadhyayi”, Patanjali’s “Mahabhashya” and Vararuchi’s “Prakritaprakasha”, it was with a certain intention of laying down certain codes that these texts were written. And these codes were written only to be referred to in the future and remembered at appropriate instances, thus exhibiting quite a justified sense of history. And these very texts are highly significant in the interpretation of languages which was crucial in understanding other epigraphic and literary sources, thus providing a vital insight into the literary world of ancient India.
Archaeological Sources
Archaeology is basically the study of human history with reference to historical material remains. The term ‘culture’ is very frequently used by archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians. It encompasses every aspect of patterns of human learnt behaviour, their way of thinking and all those features which identify them as a part of a certain social group. The different components of archaeological sources as in material remains are vestiges of grand palaces and temples, small discarded products of everyday human activity which speaks a lot about ancient societies and also things like structures, artefacts, bones, seeds, pollens, seals, coins, sculptures, and inscriptions. All of these components each play a very significant role in reconstructing the past.
The idea of constructing a monument itself speaks volumes about the sense of history they possessed as it reveals an aesthetic sense as well as the idea of building something grand so as to establish and sort of record the greatness that was involved in the concerned times so as to praise the subject of the monument. Inscriptions-even if not written in a very historically emphatic way, is nevertheless a means to record events so as to capture the importance of the moment and carry it forward to generations. So every aspect has a role to play and everything that connects us to the past is, deliberate or not, definitely an indication of the sense of history possessed by the ancient Indians.
Conclusion: A historian’s perspective and other kinds of sources
“India had some episodes, but no history.” D.D. Kosambi argues that ‘it is the episodes-lists of dynasties and kings, tales of war and battle spiced with anecdote, which fill school texts-that are missing from Indian records.’ It is only in the case of Indian history that history has to be reconstructed without episodes, not as it is in the case of European histories.
For other kinds of sources like archaeological sources or ritualistic sources which also convey a lot of information about the lifestyle and religious convictions that prevailed during those times, D.D. Kosambi comments saying that “The existence of any classical literature implies the class-division of society: literacy in the oldest times meant the pre-existence of a temple, priesthood, urban life, division of society into producing groups and others who expropriated the relatively low surplus produced. Only the latter wrote the epigraphs with which the historian must work, the producers had not the leisure for literacy.” So this in itself gives us a lot of idea about what existed and what did not. Even though in an unconscious effort, the whole idea of producing any literature itself involves the presence of a sense of record-keeping among ancient Indians.
Another aspect of unusual kind of sources is rites and practices that have descended from ancient times up till today. Some rites have been dated back to the Stone Age though the votaries are not aware of such long continuity. ”Such rites may not have found foundation in the Brahmin scriptures but other portions of Sanskrit ritual works show equally primitive sacraments adopted at almost all periods, down to the last century.” Most of the rites that are practiced now though are not justified by Vedic references.
There is a lot more to Ancient Indian sources and their nature and interpretive character, which are yet to be unfolded.
Decline of the Harappan Civilisation:theories and analysis
What brought Indus civilisation to an end has long been an area of mystery for most scholars. The civilisation has been thought of as a social, economic and cultural phenomenon involving a delicate balance of internal relations between cities, towns and villages, and of external relations with the neighbouring peasant societies and with more distant urban societies. It takes a lot to disintegrate the entire consistency and essence of a civilisation as major as Harappa. This could have been because of a variety of causes, acting either singly or in combination. It is basically the character, coherence of the civilisation as an overarching system with its regional crafts, modes of elite control and long distance procurement of materials which collapsed or rather I must say, faded gradually.
Explaining the expression-“DECLINE OF THE HARAPPAN CIVILISATION”
The expression “end of civilisation”- does not literally refer to a social death of all that existed within the Harappan paradigm. It means the gradual or sudden disappearance of all those factors which gave Harappa its special character of being a civilisation. In other words, the urban aspect of Harappa which formed the crux of the civilisation was lost. Not that the Harappan people stopped existing. What stopped existing was the Harappan aspect of their existence.
What it meant by “DE-URBANISATION”
The character and features that we are talking about here need to be sort of defined in the context of Harappa. According to A Ghosh, the ten abstract features listed down by Gordon Childe are apt enough to describe an urban civilisation. Though he mentions that all of these criterions must not be primarily met but most of them should form an integral part of the prevailing community to qualify as a civilisation. The character varies from civilisation to civilisation. And de-urbanisation would mean simply the reversal of these criteria. Let us just briefly cover this bit of the thing mentioning the various aspects of de-urbanisation of a civilisation which sort of hold true for Harappa:
1. POPULATION DENSITY-Thus the settlements extensive and densely populated would become thinner and smaller.
2. LESSER SURPLUS-The non food producing people such as full time specialists in crafts, art architecture would dwindle in number and so the food producing community would be left will much lesser incentive to produce surplus.
3. MONUMENTAL BUILDINGS-sign of social surplus would no longer dominate a settlement.
4. SCRIPT-Usage of script would become obsolete unless it is adopted by some other urban community.
5. LONG DISTANCE TRADE relations would not survive though import concept prevalent even in Neolithic times would continue to exist.
6. Fall in MATERIAL PROSPERITY
7. CENTRALISED STATE-Need for central enforcement would be reduced.
Another thing that we need to remember is that in the case of Harappa we cannot attribute a single theory to explain its decline. Each of the regions sees their own separate reasons to decline. This is simply because of the diversity that the entire civilisation exhibits throughout its course. Urban decline can be explained only in terms of multiple causes as none of the theories are uniformly applicable to all the regions of the mature Harappan stage.
The origin of an idea like this is the archaeological evidence which shows that cities and towns began being abandoned. Mohenjo-Daro was abandoned, Harappa saw people living in squatters or removing bricks from proper buildings to form crude structures and using the cemetery for their own burials. Other sites which we know of being abandoned were-Ganweriwala, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi. The Hakra belt- only one village site out of the 80 sites continued to be inhabited in the Cemetery H culture period. The question then arises-Did the inhabitants shift to pastoralism, or did the villagers start going upstream in search of places with more assured availability of groundwater resources?
THE THEORIES OF DECLINE:
Because of the large scale desertions the scholars have thought about some kind of holocaust or calamity or a catastrophic event like maybe the Aryan invasion. This is a very simplistic way to interpret. Though I don't think it must have such a trivial thing that led to the decline of such a massive civilisation.
FLOOD THEORY BY LAMBRICK IN 1967:
This applied basically to Mohenjo-Daro. The flood is often referred to as ‘the catastrophe’. Disastrous changes in the course of Indus resulting in desiccation of areas which were essential for the feeding of city’s population, could have been a more believable cause. Mohenjo-Daro was in some way the epicentre of the entire balance that held the whole of Harappan structure together. Therefore such an event would lead to depredations by tribesmen from the nearby hills and might have well brought about the desertion of the city and of the outlying settlements. The latest levels of Mohenjo-Daro show a marked decadence in the civic control (clear signs of de-urbanisation). It is only after the complete abandonment of the sites that we see new squatter populations moving in. The famous Cemetery H occupation at Harappa and Jhukar occupation at Chanhudaro. Terming these cultures as being the continuation of the Harappan people seems to a little problematic. The Sind area is prone to earthquakes as well as floods. 15 floods in a century is not a surprising figure. In 1818 there was a major up thrust of the ground at Sehwan, downstream of Mohenjo-Daro and upstream of Amri and Chanhudaro, which pushed the Indus River back and a gigantic lake was formed for about two years. It is this kind of phenomenon that the scholars suggest might have the cause of the decline of Harappan culture in Mohenjo-Daro and the adjoining areas.
Another problem with this theory was that there wasn’t enough archaeological evidence to back the validity of this theory. Definitive evidence for 3rd millennium floods. What some archaeologists took to be laid by still water on the southern edge of Mohenjo-Daro is now believed to be the remains of mud platforms.
CLIMATE CHANGE
We have seen earlier that evidence for climatic change comes from pollen in Rajasthan lake deposits. This evidence prompted that there was more winter rainfall during Harappan times than later, and that summer rainfall was appreciably higher. But when did the rainfall begin to decrease? We cannot, especially without evidence say that, the eventual decrease in rainfall essentially began during the later years of the late Harappan phase. That would be moulding an ‘indefinite archaeological evidence’ according to our own convenience. In fact it has been earlier stated that 1800 bc, a time when Harappa wasn’t exactly flourishing, the rainfall was fairly higher. Also we must remember that climatic change is a world phenomenon. And all the Bronze age civilisations or cultures would have met the consequences equally, in terms of collapse.
At this juncture if we compare it with the Mesopotamian civilisation then we will see that a civilisation as ancient and around the same time as Harappan civilisation could withstand the climatic changes and also the other ecological changes that took place for example-in spite of westward shifts of the channel of the Euphrates, soil salinity brought about canal irrigation and repeated invasions and immigrations of pastoralists from the desert, retained its language, writing methods, literary forms and texts, pantheon and temple architecture well into the 1st millennium BC, while there were no changes in the social and economic structure.
ENVIRONMENTAL FACTOR
The environmental aspect of the reasons for decline was a theory that was formulated by Walter Fairservis decades ago. He studied Mohenjo-Daro and the settlement and population patterns of the area. And based on all his data he formulated his theory on the argument that the needs of the ‘over-sized’ population forced people into over exploiting the natural resources around the place. A specific piece of information that we got to know from his studies is about the population of Larkhana town near Mohenjo-Daro in the 19th century was somewhere near 11000, which is fairly low for Mohenjo-Daro’s standards. What this leads us to think is that maybe, some areas were over populated and in years of inhabitation-depleted of natural vegetation. The last stage of Mohenjo-Daro expresses trouble quite explicitly. The structure of the finely paved pillared hall was altered; the granary went out of use; shell-cutting was done in the northern citadel area; kilns encroached in the northern residential area; 2 different sizes of bricks were used for the same wall and were laid out without precision; scored goblets roughly made on the wheel and shaped so that they could be tied with a string have also been found frequently in the later levels. Several massive columns of limestone bases were gathered together in one room, which Fairservis assumes was gathered after the city’s final desertion.
At Kalibangan neither the flood nor the invader can be invoked. Here perhaps the drying up of Ghaggar-gradual or sudden, owing to either climatic changes or to sudden diversion of the waters resulting from the factors at or near their source-may have been the cause of desertion of the site. But this hypothesis does not hold true for the other Mature Harappan sites. Pestilence, erosion and over exploitation of surrounding landscape may have also been the reason for the end of certain settlements.
Population during the peak time runs over 8000 people. He calculates ratio available. And calculates d food requirements of the population. 2200 and 2100 BCE. Estimated food requirement is calculated a grade croops each yr. So much more area would have to be cultivated. Ratio bw available food resources and the over growing population. Steady increase in demand. Would have
But again, Fairservis takes only Mohenjo-Daro into account. And again I must re-stress the fact that one theory does not hold valid for the diverse Harappan Civilisation.
THE WARFARE OR THE much talked ARYAN INVASION
Mortimer Wheeler-The argument supporting the invasion was based on the subsequent culture of Vedic corpus using a language- indo Aryan that had affinity with the central Asian Indo-European particularly the Old Iranian. That this language gained currency in northern India was thought to be the result of a conquest of the local population by the Indo-Aryan speakers, the evidence being drawn from the hostility of the ‘arya’ towards ‘dasa’ from the ‘Rigveda’. The reference to ‘Indra’ attacking the purs, enclosed settlements of dasas was erroneously read as referring to the Indus civilisation. The later stages of Mohenjo-Daro, as pointed out by many scholars, depicted signs of tension and uncertain possibilities of warfare/strife/invasion. For example-the jewellery and the semi precious items (caches of gold, strings of etched carnelian beads, silver foil, a silver lump and bracelet, jade and long carnelian beads) began being hidden away under the floor and for some reason never recovered by owners. The nature of the feared group could not be determined whether they were Kirthars from the hills, or the enemies in the plains, or the local rebel factions. The head of the much known ‘priest-king’ seems to have been broken and to have fallen together with a wall, into a passage. The archaeological contexts of such desecrated sculptures “speak for internal dynastic feuds or ideological confrontation in the last days of Mohenjo-Daro.” Jewellery and vandalised stone statuaries left behind, give us an idea of the urgency of abandonment that dawned on the people of Harappa.
35 skeletons have been found from the last level of Mohenjo-Daro some though not belonging to the last occupation phase of the city. Some of them were hastily buried. Northern part of the city-2 skeletons lay on some steps of a well room. South-western part of the city 5 more skeletons have been found which lay at the place where the person had died. Other unburied skeletons indicate that marauders from outside or city gangs themselves fought over the last spoils. If the nerve centre of the political system suffered a serious blow, the repercussions could have spread far and wide.
The early theory about Aryan invasions has been dismissed on the following grounds. This view however seems untenable.
1. The skeletons do not all belong to one and the same occupational level, which should also be the latest, marking the end of Indus settlement.
2. At the site there is no evidence of an alien culture immediately underlying the Indus one.
3. The post Indus cemetery at Harappa has been brought into picture. It has although elsewhere demonstrated by some writer that this cemetery had come years after the Indus civilisation had collapsed. (There had been a considerable time-lag b/w the end of Indus civilisation and the beginning of Cemetery H. Thus the people of Cemetery H can hardly be regarded as those people who had invaded Indus civilisation if the invaded had ceased to exist at the time. Also evidences of these Cemetery H people is absent from other Harappan sites like Ghaggar, Satluj, and upper Ganga valleys-regions from where the early Aryans are known from their own literary sources to have resided.
4. There is evidence for movements out of Central Asia, the homeland of the Indo-Europeans and their Indo-Iranian branch, after about 2000 BC. We had seen that settlements like Yarim Tepe and Hissar were abandoned, so too the settlements in southern Turkmenia. In southern Baluchistan we find new kinds of pottery, seals and burial practices which point to newcomers. At Sibri and Pirak we had seen the influx of Central Asian elements. None of this, is however the proof of movement of people speaking a particular language. There is no necessary link between a particular kind of material culture and its geographic relied on elite/taste sponsorship or demand, experience with different soils and rainfall regimes, knowledge of different varieties of crop, observation of animal breeding behaviour, and the fuel properties of different trees, these would be a part of popular sciences and would endure. So the house forms and construction techniques of Mohenjo-Daro did not endure.
TRADE FACTOR
The long distance trade between Harappa and Mesopotamia is an aspect that has been well covered in Shereen Ratnagar’s works. Around 1800 BC the trade between Mesopotamia, Bahrain, Kuwait and India came to an end. Discoveries at-Lothal(seals), Oxus(Afghanistan), Makran Coast. The sort of accepted identification of the repeatedly mentioned “meluhha’ in the Mesopotamian texts as the Harappan civilisation. The trade relations are said to have declined with the decline of the 3rd dynasty of Ur and virtually stopped in the Isin-Larsa period. In southern Mesopotamia there had been an agricultural decline due to shifts of the Euphrates and soil salinity. Therefore individual settlements as well as total settled area shrank appreciably in the south and the political gravity moved northwards. The newly formed important centres of Iraq developed links with Levant and Anatolia for their wood and metal requirements, the routes moving along the Euphrates. Therefore a source of wealth for the Harappan elite thus declined. Quoting Shereen Ratnagar in her work “Understanding Harappa” We could say economic structure was dependent on foreign trade if there was an expansion of settlement to, or colonization of, mineral resource areas, the establishment of sea ports, the institution of ancillary activities like forestry and shipbuilding, the deployment of labour for the manufacture of craft items for export and so on. The end of the trade would mean that the population would relocate over the land with changed economic imperatives. Reversions to individual households engaged in subsistence agriculture and/or pastoralism is a likely consequence.
It would suffice to point out that in all the regions-Sind, Gujarat and Rajasthan-the catastrophe took place in the early centuries of the 2nd millennium BC and it is not insignificant that Harappan trade ceased at about the same time. The people must have been heavily caught up in their troubles so it bothered them to worry about an ongoing luxuries trade relation outside.
A LITTLE ON THE MATERIAL CULTURE AND SITE WISE ANALYSIS-as in what happened after the decline
1. Kathiawar-had very few major mature Harappan sites like Lothal and Rangpur. But for the early 2nd millennium there have been more than 100 sites found here. Ragi and Jowar were to become the main stay of Kathiawar agriculture, being better suited to the soil and climate of the area. The changes in agriculture may be connected with the proliferation of the villages. Meanwhile in this period the dockyard of Lothal had gone out of use; no Rohri chert was available; small blades of local jasper came into use. Weights and shell; faience gold and carnelian became scarce. Therefore disappearance of Harappan traits gave way to a more sustainable form of subsistence. Though it still meant the decline of the great urbanised Harappan culture. There is also a spread of sites towards Saurashtra and it was surprising to find people choosing rocky areas and elevated grounds to settle.
2. Cemetery H sites on Hakra plains-the drying of Hakra could have been one reason for the abandonment of the site though, as M.R. Mughal suggests it was certainly not the exact cause of the decline of the Harappan civilisation.
1. Mainland coast of Gujarat S.A. Sali discovered 50 sites in the Tapti valley, Dhule district. 2 of them have only Late Harappan material while the others have Harappan mixed with the Salvada and Jorwa wares. And there’s a site where only the red ware was found which is so strongly characterised by a Harappan culture. It is thicker, sturdier, made of finer fabric here and plus the typical Harappan shapes such as the dish on stand and the vase continue to feature in this Red ware case as well. But the paintings consist of monotonous geometric designs and lack the varied designs of the “Indus” and “provincial” styles, thus signifying the urban discipline of the mature Harappa at these sites.
2. Further south- Dogavari valley, Daimabad- reveal late Harappan culture overlying the Salvada culture, followed successively by the Malwa and Jorwa cultures. Mud walls give place to mud brick walls and an excavated grave is lined with mud bricks of two sizes-the continuation of the Harappan tradition. The late Harappan pottery shows a marked degeneration over that of the Tapti valley, but the painting continues to be of the monotonous geometric designs. Despite the occurrence of three Indus signs on the rim fragments of a pot the deurbanisation process now seemed to be complete.
4. Recent discoveries in the north like Jammu, Punjab and Haryana show that the late Harappans lived with even the very different Painted Gray Ware people. Further east in western uttar Pradesh- at sites like Bargaon and Ambkheri the admixture of the late Harappans with the so-called Ochre Colored ware is also found though at other OCW sites, Harappan traits are absent. Could this mean that local cultures were taking over the centralised and fairly uniform culture of the Harappans gradually?
“Abandonment”
It is difficult to differentiate between the gradual house by house depopulation and the sudden desertion of a city. If abandonment is quick and due to a calamity then the people would have probably left behind jewellery, wooden doors and heavy grinding stones. It is also noted that when social coherence is weak or absent then it is easier to depopulate villages. The causes can range from sudden deaths in the residential area due to an epidemic or famine or floods or maybe because the inhabitants found a better place to live elsewhere. Village abandonments are not the same as civilizational collapse.
CONCLUSION
Ratnagar- To sum up, the Harappan people after 1800 BC had failed to see sustained occupation, and people seemed to have emigrated. In settlement form, metallurgy, writing system, house construction, crafts using ivory or carnelian or in the use of seals, as also in major aspects of city life and maritime orientations, there was very little continuation of the Bronze way of life. There was instead a reversion to rural, tribal cultures, of what we call the chalcolithic stage, where metal may have been used, but was definitely not a primary raw material for the making of tools. It still remains that the Harappan was a remarkably cosmopolitan and outward looking phase of South Asian history. The Harappan world was an open one with foreign trade, external influences and migrations. The urban centres had interaction with the hunters of Rajasthan, tribesmen in Makran and settlers in Kashmir. Meluhha entered the literary tradition of Mesopotamia as a source of exotic wares and fine boats. We could say that cultural dynamism lies in openness, interaction, inert-marriage and bilingualism, not in cultural closure and ethnic purity.
Basham- The Indus civilisation no doubt fell; all the same it left many inedible imprints on the latter-day cultures of the subcontinent.
Explaining the expression-“DECLINE OF THE HARAPPAN CIVILISATION”
The expression “end of civilisation”- does not literally refer to a social death of all that existed within the Harappan paradigm. It means the gradual or sudden disappearance of all those factors which gave Harappa its special character of being a civilisation. In other words, the urban aspect of Harappa which formed the crux of the civilisation was lost. Not that the Harappan people stopped existing. What stopped existing was the Harappan aspect of their existence.
What it meant by “DE-URBANISATION”
The character and features that we are talking about here need to be sort of defined in the context of Harappa. According to A Ghosh, the ten abstract features listed down by Gordon Childe are apt enough to describe an urban civilisation. Though he mentions that all of these criterions must not be primarily met but most of them should form an integral part of the prevailing community to qualify as a civilisation. The character varies from civilisation to civilisation. And de-urbanisation would mean simply the reversal of these criteria. Let us just briefly cover this bit of the thing mentioning the various aspects of de-urbanisation of a civilisation which sort of hold true for Harappa:
1. POPULATION DENSITY-Thus the settlements extensive and densely populated would become thinner and smaller.
2. LESSER SURPLUS-The non food producing people such as full time specialists in crafts, art architecture would dwindle in number and so the food producing community would be left will much lesser incentive to produce surplus.
3. MONUMENTAL BUILDINGS-sign of social surplus would no longer dominate a settlement.
4. SCRIPT-Usage of script would become obsolete unless it is adopted by some other urban community.
5. LONG DISTANCE TRADE relations would not survive though import concept prevalent even in Neolithic times would continue to exist.
6. Fall in MATERIAL PROSPERITY
7. CENTRALISED STATE-Need for central enforcement would be reduced.
Another thing that we need to remember is that in the case of Harappa we cannot attribute a single theory to explain its decline. Each of the regions sees their own separate reasons to decline. This is simply because of the diversity that the entire civilisation exhibits throughout its course. Urban decline can be explained only in terms of multiple causes as none of the theories are uniformly applicable to all the regions of the mature Harappan stage.
The origin of an idea like this is the archaeological evidence which shows that cities and towns began being abandoned. Mohenjo-Daro was abandoned, Harappa saw people living in squatters or removing bricks from proper buildings to form crude structures and using the cemetery for their own burials. Other sites which we know of being abandoned were-Ganweriwala, Dholavira, Rakhigarhi. The Hakra belt- only one village site out of the 80 sites continued to be inhabited in the Cemetery H culture period. The question then arises-Did the inhabitants shift to pastoralism, or did the villagers start going upstream in search of places with more assured availability of groundwater resources?
THE THEORIES OF DECLINE:
Because of the large scale desertions the scholars have thought about some kind of holocaust or calamity or a catastrophic event like maybe the Aryan invasion. This is a very simplistic way to interpret. Though I don't think it must have such a trivial thing that led to the decline of such a massive civilisation.
FLOOD THEORY BY LAMBRICK IN 1967:
This applied basically to Mohenjo-Daro. The flood is often referred to as ‘the catastrophe’. Disastrous changes in the course of Indus resulting in desiccation of areas which were essential for the feeding of city’s population, could have been a more believable cause. Mohenjo-Daro was in some way the epicentre of the entire balance that held the whole of Harappan structure together. Therefore such an event would lead to depredations by tribesmen from the nearby hills and might have well brought about the desertion of the city and of the outlying settlements. The latest levels of Mohenjo-Daro show a marked decadence in the civic control (clear signs of de-urbanisation). It is only after the complete abandonment of the sites that we see new squatter populations moving in. The famous Cemetery H occupation at Harappa and Jhukar occupation at Chanhudaro. Terming these cultures as being the continuation of the Harappan people seems to a little problematic. The Sind area is prone to earthquakes as well as floods. 15 floods in a century is not a surprising figure. In 1818 there was a major up thrust of the ground at Sehwan, downstream of Mohenjo-Daro and upstream of Amri and Chanhudaro, which pushed the Indus River back and a gigantic lake was formed for about two years. It is this kind of phenomenon that the scholars suggest might have the cause of the decline of Harappan culture in Mohenjo-Daro and the adjoining areas.
Another problem with this theory was that there wasn’t enough archaeological evidence to back the validity of this theory. Definitive evidence for 3rd millennium floods. What some archaeologists took to be laid by still water on the southern edge of Mohenjo-Daro is now believed to be the remains of mud platforms.
CLIMATE CHANGE
We have seen earlier that evidence for climatic change comes from pollen in Rajasthan lake deposits. This evidence prompted that there was more winter rainfall during Harappan times than later, and that summer rainfall was appreciably higher. But when did the rainfall begin to decrease? We cannot, especially without evidence say that, the eventual decrease in rainfall essentially began during the later years of the late Harappan phase. That would be moulding an ‘indefinite archaeological evidence’ according to our own convenience. In fact it has been earlier stated that 1800 bc, a time when Harappa wasn’t exactly flourishing, the rainfall was fairly higher. Also we must remember that climatic change is a world phenomenon. And all the Bronze age civilisations or cultures would have met the consequences equally, in terms of collapse.
At this juncture if we compare it with the Mesopotamian civilisation then we will see that a civilisation as ancient and around the same time as Harappan civilisation could withstand the climatic changes and also the other ecological changes that took place for example-in spite of westward shifts of the channel of the Euphrates, soil salinity brought about canal irrigation and repeated invasions and immigrations of pastoralists from the desert, retained its language, writing methods, literary forms and texts, pantheon and temple architecture well into the 1st millennium BC, while there were no changes in the social and economic structure.
ENVIRONMENTAL FACTOR
The environmental aspect of the reasons for decline was a theory that was formulated by Walter Fairservis decades ago. He studied Mohenjo-Daro and the settlement and population patterns of the area. And based on all his data he formulated his theory on the argument that the needs of the ‘over-sized’ population forced people into over exploiting the natural resources around the place. A specific piece of information that we got to know from his studies is about the population of Larkhana town near Mohenjo-Daro in the 19th century was somewhere near 11000, which is fairly low for Mohenjo-Daro’s standards. What this leads us to think is that maybe, some areas were over populated and in years of inhabitation-depleted of natural vegetation. The last stage of Mohenjo-Daro expresses trouble quite explicitly. The structure of the finely paved pillared hall was altered; the granary went out of use; shell-cutting was done in the northern citadel area; kilns encroached in the northern residential area; 2 different sizes of bricks were used for the same wall and were laid out without precision; scored goblets roughly made on the wheel and shaped so that they could be tied with a string have also been found frequently in the later levels. Several massive columns of limestone bases were gathered together in one room, which Fairservis assumes was gathered after the city’s final desertion.
At Kalibangan neither the flood nor the invader can be invoked. Here perhaps the drying up of Ghaggar-gradual or sudden, owing to either climatic changes or to sudden diversion of the waters resulting from the factors at or near their source-may have been the cause of desertion of the site. But this hypothesis does not hold true for the other Mature Harappan sites. Pestilence, erosion and over exploitation of surrounding landscape may have also been the reason for the end of certain settlements.
Population during the peak time runs over 8000 people. He calculates ratio available. And calculates d food requirements of the population. 2200 and 2100 BCE. Estimated food requirement is calculated a grade croops each yr. So much more area would have to be cultivated. Ratio bw available food resources and the over growing population. Steady increase in demand. Would have
But again, Fairservis takes only Mohenjo-Daro into account. And again I must re-stress the fact that one theory does not hold valid for the diverse Harappan Civilisation.
THE WARFARE OR THE much talked ARYAN INVASION
Mortimer Wheeler-The argument supporting the invasion was based on the subsequent culture of Vedic corpus using a language- indo Aryan that had affinity with the central Asian Indo-European particularly the Old Iranian. That this language gained currency in northern India was thought to be the result of a conquest of the local population by the Indo-Aryan speakers, the evidence being drawn from the hostility of the ‘arya’ towards ‘dasa’ from the ‘Rigveda’. The reference to ‘Indra’ attacking the purs, enclosed settlements of dasas was erroneously read as referring to the Indus civilisation. The later stages of Mohenjo-Daro, as pointed out by many scholars, depicted signs of tension and uncertain possibilities of warfare/strife/invasion. For example-the jewellery and the semi precious items (caches of gold, strings of etched carnelian beads, silver foil, a silver lump and bracelet, jade and long carnelian beads) began being hidden away under the floor and for some reason never recovered by owners. The nature of the feared group could not be determined whether they were Kirthars from the hills, or the enemies in the plains, or the local rebel factions. The head of the much known ‘priest-king’ seems to have been broken and to have fallen together with a wall, into a passage. The archaeological contexts of such desecrated sculptures “speak for internal dynastic feuds or ideological confrontation in the last days of Mohenjo-Daro.” Jewellery and vandalised stone statuaries left behind, give us an idea of the urgency of abandonment that dawned on the people of Harappa.
35 skeletons have been found from the last level of Mohenjo-Daro some though not belonging to the last occupation phase of the city. Some of them were hastily buried. Northern part of the city-2 skeletons lay on some steps of a well room. South-western part of the city 5 more skeletons have been found which lay at the place where the person had died. Other unburied skeletons indicate that marauders from outside or city gangs themselves fought over the last spoils. If the nerve centre of the political system suffered a serious blow, the repercussions could have spread far and wide.
The early theory about Aryan invasions has been dismissed on the following grounds. This view however seems untenable.
1. The skeletons do not all belong to one and the same occupational level, which should also be the latest, marking the end of Indus settlement.
2. At the site there is no evidence of an alien culture immediately underlying the Indus one.
3. The post Indus cemetery at Harappa has been brought into picture. It has although elsewhere demonstrated by some writer that this cemetery had come years after the Indus civilisation had collapsed. (There had been a considerable time-lag b/w the end of Indus civilisation and the beginning of Cemetery H. Thus the people of Cemetery H can hardly be regarded as those people who had invaded Indus civilisation if the invaded had ceased to exist at the time. Also evidences of these Cemetery H people is absent from other Harappan sites like Ghaggar, Satluj, and upper Ganga valleys-regions from where the early Aryans are known from their own literary sources to have resided.
4. There is evidence for movements out of Central Asia, the homeland of the Indo-Europeans and their Indo-Iranian branch, after about 2000 BC. We had seen that settlements like Yarim Tepe and Hissar were abandoned, so too the settlements in southern Turkmenia. In southern Baluchistan we find new kinds of pottery, seals and burial practices which point to newcomers. At Sibri and Pirak we had seen the influx of Central Asian elements. None of this, is however the proof of movement of people speaking a particular language. There is no necessary link between a particular kind of material culture and its geographic relied on elite/taste sponsorship or demand, experience with different soils and rainfall regimes, knowledge of different varieties of crop, observation of animal breeding behaviour, and the fuel properties of different trees, these would be a part of popular sciences and would endure. So the house forms and construction techniques of Mohenjo-Daro did not endure.
TRADE FACTOR
The long distance trade between Harappa and Mesopotamia is an aspect that has been well covered in Shereen Ratnagar’s works. Around 1800 BC the trade between Mesopotamia, Bahrain, Kuwait and India came to an end. Discoveries at-Lothal(seals), Oxus(Afghanistan), Makran Coast. The sort of accepted identification of the repeatedly mentioned “meluhha’ in the Mesopotamian texts as the Harappan civilisation. The trade relations are said to have declined with the decline of the 3rd dynasty of Ur and virtually stopped in the Isin-Larsa period. In southern Mesopotamia there had been an agricultural decline due to shifts of the Euphrates and soil salinity. Therefore individual settlements as well as total settled area shrank appreciably in the south and the political gravity moved northwards. The newly formed important centres of Iraq developed links with Levant and Anatolia for their wood and metal requirements, the routes moving along the Euphrates. Therefore a source of wealth for the Harappan elite thus declined. Quoting Shereen Ratnagar in her work “Understanding Harappa” We could say economic structure was dependent on foreign trade if there was an expansion of settlement to, or colonization of, mineral resource areas, the establishment of sea ports, the institution of ancillary activities like forestry and shipbuilding, the deployment of labour for the manufacture of craft items for export and so on. The end of the trade would mean that the population would relocate over the land with changed economic imperatives. Reversions to individual households engaged in subsistence agriculture and/or pastoralism is a likely consequence.
It would suffice to point out that in all the regions-Sind, Gujarat and Rajasthan-the catastrophe took place in the early centuries of the 2nd millennium BC and it is not insignificant that Harappan trade ceased at about the same time. The people must have been heavily caught up in their troubles so it bothered them to worry about an ongoing luxuries trade relation outside.
A LITTLE ON THE MATERIAL CULTURE AND SITE WISE ANALYSIS-as in what happened after the decline
1. Kathiawar-had very few major mature Harappan sites like Lothal and Rangpur. But for the early 2nd millennium there have been more than 100 sites found here. Ragi and Jowar were to become the main stay of Kathiawar agriculture, being better suited to the soil and climate of the area. The changes in agriculture may be connected with the proliferation of the villages. Meanwhile in this period the dockyard of Lothal had gone out of use; no Rohri chert was available; small blades of local jasper came into use. Weights and shell; faience gold and carnelian became scarce. Therefore disappearance of Harappan traits gave way to a more sustainable form of subsistence. Though it still meant the decline of the great urbanised Harappan culture. There is also a spread of sites towards Saurashtra and it was surprising to find people choosing rocky areas and elevated grounds to settle.
2. Cemetery H sites on Hakra plains-the drying of Hakra could have been one reason for the abandonment of the site though, as M.R. Mughal suggests it was certainly not the exact cause of the decline of the Harappan civilisation.
1. Mainland coast of Gujarat S.A. Sali discovered 50 sites in the Tapti valley, Dhule district. 2 of them have only Late Harappan material while the others have Harappan mixed with the Salvada and Jorwa wares. And there’s a site where only the red ware was found which is so strongly characterised by a Harappan culture. It is thicker, sturdier, made of finer fabric here and plus the typical Harappan shapes such as the dish on stand and the vase continue to feature in this Red ware case as well. But the paintings consist of monotonous geometric designs and lack the varied designs of the “Indus” and “provincial” styles, thus signifying the urban discipline of the mature Harappa at these sites.
2. Further south- Dogavari valley, Daimabad- reveal late Harappan culture overlying the Salvada culture, followed successively by the Malwa and Jorwa cultures. Mud walls give place to mud brick walls and an excavated grave is lined with mud bricks of two sizes-the continuation of the Harappan tradition. The late Harappan pottery shows a marked degeneration over that of the Tapti valley, but the painting continues to be of the monotonous geometric designs. Despite the occurrence of three Indus signs on the rim fragments of a pot the deurbanisation process now seemed to be complete.
4. Recent discoveries in the north like Jammu, Punjab and Haryana show that the late Harappans lived with even the very different Painted Gray Ware people. Further east in western uttar Pradesh- at sites like Bargaon and Ambkheri the admixture of the late Harappans with the so-called Ochre Colored ware is also found though at other OCW sites, Harappan traits are absent. Could this mean that local cultures were taking over the centralised and fairly uniform culture of the Harappans gradually?
“Abandonment”
It is difficult to differentiate between the gradual house by house depopulation and the sudden desertion of a city. If abandonment is quick and due to a calamity then the people would have probably left behind jewellery, wooden doors and heavy grinding stones. It is also noted that when social coherence is weak or absent then it is easier to depopulate villages. The causes can range from sudden deaths in the residential area due to an epidemic or famine or floods or maybe because the inhabitants found a better place to live elsewhere. Village abandonments are not the same as civilizational collapse.
CONCLUSION
Ratnagar- To sum up, the Harappan people after 1800 BC had failed to see sustained occupation, and people seemed to have emigrated. In settlement form, metallurgy, writing system, house construction, crafts using ivory or carnelian or in the use of seals, as also in major aspects of city life and maritime orientations, there was very little continuation of the Bronze way of life. There was instead a reversion to rural, tribal cultures, of what we call the chalcolithic stage, where metal may have been used, but was definitely not a primary raw material for the making of tools. It still remains that the Harappan was a remarkably cosmopolitan and outward looking phase of South Asian history. The Harappan world was an open one with foreign trade, external influences and migrations. The urban centres had interaction with the hunters of Rajasthan, tribesmen in Makran and settlers in Kashmir. Meluhha entered the literary tradition of Mesopotamia as a source of exotic wares and fine boats. We could say that cultural dynamism lies in openness, interaction, inert-marriage and bilingualism, not in cultural closure and ethnic purity.
Basham- The Indus civilisation no doubt fell; all the same it left many inedible imprints on the latter-day cultures of the subcontinent.
Apostle of Antiquity
Hey!
Okay.. here's to this new junction of historical balabaloo! :)
Since I am now into the world of history, completely.. I thought maybe I'd create a little space somewhere, where I could really talk about the one thing I love. I mean, the one thing I can never betray, the one thing I've fallen head and heels over! :))
Most of the posts here would be very scholarly. But then there would be some which would be not so scholarly. just a basic analysis of an interesting piece of history. I'll star mark those, for people, who'd want to read up interesting stuff and not boring lecture like write ups. :)
History it is, History It shalt always be. :)
Tannishtha Bhattacharjee :)
Okay.. here's to this new junction of historical balabaloo! :)
Since I am now into the world of history, completely.. I thought maybe I'd create a little space somewhere, where I could really talk about the one thing I love. I mean, the one thing I can never betray, the one thing I've fallen head and heels over! :))
Most of the posts here would be very scholarly. But then there would be some which would be not so scholarly. just a basic analysis of an interesting piece of history. I'll star mark those, for people, who'd want to read up interesting stuff and not boring lecture like write ups. :)
History it is, History It shalt always be. :)
Tannishtha Bhattacharjee :)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)