Chapter One

Inventing Ancient

Civilization

South Asian history has no one beginning, no one chronology, no single plot or narrative. It is not a singular history, but rather many histories, with indefinite, contested origins and with countless separate trajectories that multiply as we learn more about the past. In recent decades, history's multiplicity, antiquity, and ambiguity have become more complicated as scholars have opened new perspectives on the past and made new discoveries.

Not long ago, it seemed that South Asian history began at a singular moment in the second millennium bce, when the oldest known texts, the Vedas, were composed. A clear, continuous stream of cultural tradition once seemed to flow from Vedic to modern times, allowing modern scholars to dip into ancient texts to savour the original essence of a culture that we can still see around us today. The early flow of culture seemed to swell into a fully developed classical civilization under the ancient empires of the Mauryas (321--181 bce) and Guptas (320--520 ce), which arose on the banks of the sacred river Ganga. Classical societies seemed to follow Vedic norms, and seemed to preserve sacred traditions recorded in other ancient Sanskrit texts that also prescribed the division of society into ritual strata, called varna, containing social groups called jati. Classical tradition seemed to provide a blueprint for caste society down to modern times. After the Gupta Empire collapsed, apparently under the impact of foreign invasions, political fragmentation was seen to have characterized medieval times; but despite a long series of foreign conquests, the clear stream of cultural tradition seemed to flow on continuously. After the end of the ancient empire, history brought political turmoil and social and economic change, but ancient cultural tradition seemed to maintain its purity, responding and adapting to the challenges of history.

In this now antiquated view of ancient history, we hear echoes of modern nationalism resounding in the idea that indigenous resistance to foreign invasion spurred the early formation of ancient empires. It is indeed true that in the wake of victories by Darius, king of Persia, who conquered Sind and Gandhara in the sixth century bce, and after several early efforts at empire building by rulers along the banks of the Ganga, the Maurya empire rose at the same time as Alexander the Great entered Punjab from Persia in 327 bce. But now we can see that modern national identities had projected themselves into the distant past to imagine that Mauryan armies were defending their homeland against foreign invaders from Greece and Persia. This same idea of defensive response was also used to explain the later rise of the Guptas, who finally managed to unify the Ganga basin once again after centuries of conquest by Indo-Greeks, Sakas, Indo-Parthians, and Kushanas, who came from Central Asia and marched down the Hindu Kush into the Indus valley lowlands. The same idea was used again to show how invading Hunas (Huns) from Central Asia broke up the Gupta empire, in the fifth century. But then, political fragmentation inside India was seen to have prevented imperial unity, and internal fragmentation continued to prevent unity against many later invaders. In the eighth century, Arabs came by sea to conquer Sind. From the twelfth century onwards, invading conquerors included Afghans, Turks, Mongols, Persians, and, finally, Europeans. From 1290 until 1947, Muslims and Christians ruled most of the land of Indic civilization. The British were the last foreign rulers, from 1757 to 1947. Thus it fell to modern nationalism to unify native peoples against foreign conquerors once and for all.

This grand narrative of history in South Asia -- based on the idea of an original, indigenous culture facing foreign invasions -- provided the first framework for modern historical studies. It informed national cultures and national identities. It perpetuated the idea that Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians represent different civilizations, each with their own ancient, native territories. Thus it helped to bolster the modern association of national polities with separate domains of world history in Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia.

New discoveries and new perspectives now provide many different avenues for exploring South Asia's ancient, medieval, and modern history. We now see that rather than having one singular origin, South Asia has always included many peoples and cultures, which had different points of departure and followed distinctive historical trajectories. What once seemed like a single tree of Indic culture, rooted in the Vedas, with many branches spreading out over centuries, has come to look more like a vast forest of many cultures filled with countless trees of various sizes, ages, and types, constantly cross-breeding to fertilize one another. The profusion of cultures blurs the boundaries of the forest. Cultural boundaries drawn by modern scholars in and around South Asia have come to be seen more as artefacts of modern national cultures than as an accurate reflection of pre-modern conditions. Prehistoric cities in the Indus river valley much older than the Vedas participated in a vast prehistory of urbanism that ran across southern Eurasia and they also participated in the indigenous evolution of agro-pastoral societies in South Asia. Pre-Vedic cultures should not be assigned exclusively to the prehistory of modern South Asia, West Asia, India, or Pakistan: they participate in all of these at the same time. The singers of the Vedas also moved among prehistoric pastoral cultures of Central and West Asia as they informed cultures in ancient South Asia. A mingling and fusion of cultures has always crossed the boundaries that today divide national states in and around South Asia.

With all this in view, it becomes obvious that we must now separate the academic study of pre-modern history from contemporary efforts to construct modern cultural boundaries. We need to separate the study of collective identities and everyday experience in the distant past from our current cultural politics of national identity. As we will see, pre-modern history does indeed help us to understand the present, not by its immanent foreshadowing of the present or by its revelation of classical truths to guide modern life, but rather by its indication that distinctively modern modes of social existence came into being in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, setting them apart from medieval and ancient histories that came before. Using ancient and medieval evidence to validate modern boundaries, identities, and cultures obscures more than it reveals about pre-modern histories in South Asia, which moved across all the regions of southern Eurasia and were unique to their own time.

South Asia was a radically different world during the millennia before it took on its modern character. The first basic lesson of this book is that travelling back into the distant past reveals cultures, identities, and environments that are as distant from those of today as are their physical surroundings. The landscapes in which pre-modern populations lived would be very unfamiliar to people today. For most of its history, South Asia was thinly populated. Its countless small communities were widely scattered. In ancient and medieval times, much more of the land was covered by forests full of wild animals than by farms, villages, towns, and cities. Entering into the history of this vast pre-modern world provides us with a critical perspective on the novelty of modernity.

Land and Water

Eons ago in the geological past, a triangle of rocky land broke off from East Africa, drifted north in the Indian Ocean, and crashed into Eurasia. The upheaval produced the Himalayas; its violence still visits the pivotal point of geological merger when earthquakes rock Gujarat, as they did in January 2001. Merging tectonic plates produced volcanoes that spewed ash across the new peninsula that they formed. Monsoon rains washed this fertile black volcanic soil into wide seams along peninsular rivers. Rain and melting ice and snow scoured Himalayan slopes to make the great rivers, Indus, Ganga, and Brahmaputra. These rivers washed Himalayan silt across the plains and still dump it continuously into the Bengal delta; and today, silt visible in satellite photos is washing along the floor of the Indian Ocean almost as far south as Sri Lanka. Over millennia, flowing silt has routinely changed the course of Indo-Gangetic rivers. In Bengal, the Ganga shifted steadily eastward and by the eighteenth century, the Ganga and Brahmaputra merged in what is now Bangladesh. Silt routinely forms new islands, called char, in Bangladesh, where the rivers just as routinely wash land along their banks out to sea.

South Asia lies in the south-western expanse of monsoon Asia. Embracing the Himalayas and Sri Lanka, it stretches from Afghanistan to Burma, between five and forty degrees north latitude. It is hot at mid-day all year round, but temperatures do vary between winter and summer, especially in the north, where winters are quite cold, even severe at high altitudes, and the peak summer heat is brutally extreme. Yet the seasons are marked more by rainfall than by temperature. When Central Asia heats up each spring, rising hot dry air draws in wet cooler air from oceans and generates barometric disparities that spark storms of varying scope and ferocity all across Asia, from Baluchistan to Korea. These seasonal rainstorms are called monsoons.

Rain is always the big weather news in South Asia and there is usually very little rain to report from January to June. At the peak of the hot season in May, the mid-day sun can fry an egg on the ground. Then the monsoon hits. Its starting date varies but its arrival normally falls at the beginning of June. First, the monsoon rains soak the coast and the east, which comprise South Asia's wet half, where rainfall normally exceeds eighty centimetres per year, and peaks in Assam, Bangladesh, and the north-east mountains at three metres per year. In these wet regions, cyclones and floods normally bring the worst weather news. On the east coast, from Madras to Chittagong, killer cyclones strike every few years. A `super cyclone' hit Orissa in 1999, washing away villages hundreds of miles inland. In Bengal, storms from the sea often combine with flooding. In the eastern Ganga basin and all along the Brahmaputra, severe flooding is a constant threat. In Bangladesh, much of the land floods annually; the area covered by water exceeds that covered by land in the live delta regions; and fish are as essential in the diet as waterways are in transport. The meaning of flooding has changed dramatically over centuries. In the eighteenth century, sea-going ships were built in the Sylhet mountains above the Bengal plains and floated out to sea across a hundred miles of flooded forest; but now that same land is full of farms, villages, towns, and cities, including Dhaka, with ten million people, so that today flooding causes death and destruction.

The monsoon arrives later in the western dry half of South Asia, as late as the end of July in Baluchistan and Multan in what is now Pakistan. In the dry west and in the dry central peninsula, the bad weather news is normally drought, though flash floods do occur when swollen rivers wash suddenly over hard parched land, as they did in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh in 2000. The monsoon is often late and stingy in dry South Asia, full of hot air. All of the interior peninsula and western plains from Gujarat north to the Khyber Pass and from Baluchistan east to Malwa and Delhi are parched and dusty most of the year. Most rivers are bone dry in the summer. Rain rarely measures more than eighty centimetres annually, often less than twenty, and in the Thar Desert, in Rajasthan, less than ten. Desert winds from Rajasthan blow dust storms across Delhi in the late summer. The long-term climatic trend seems to be toward aridity. The drying up of the Saraswati river, which once flowed from the Himalayas into Rajasthan across eastern Punjab, was one of the major ecological events of prehistoric times. The great prehistoric Indus valley cities probably declined in part because they could not get enough water to survive; as did Fatehpur Sikri, the first major Mughal fortress capital, which was built a little too far west, too far into the desert. Modern deforestation has been broadly blamed for increasing aridity. Current trends in global warming may be dooming South Asia's dry plains to increasing desertification and its wet coastal lowlands to submersion beneath the sea.

Open Geography

Human living environments span a wider range of climatic variation in South Asia than anywhere else in the world at these latitudes. Continental environments to the west (in the Middle East and Africa) are uniformly dry; and to the east (in South-East Asia and China), uniformly wet. South Asia has both extremes. South Asia's dry half is climatically part of a vast geographical zone that covers western Asia and northern Africa: the natural ground cover is thin scrub forest; nomadic tribes and pastoral economies have been historically prominent; millet and wheat are ancient staple grains; irrigation is the key to agrarian wealth; and old oasis towns dot sandy expanses of thinly populated land like port cities on the sea coast. South Asia's wet half is instead climatically part of a humid climatic zone running along the eastern Indian Ocean rim, from Bombay to Sri Lanka and through Bangladesh and Burma south to Indonesia, where heavy rain, cloudy humid days, dense tropical jungles, slash-and-burn farming, rice paddy cultivation, fishing, and seafaring have historically been prominent features of everyday life. The people who live at high altitudes inhabit other environments altogether, which in the arid west shade off into Central Asia and in the north resemble Tibet more than South Asia's wet or dry lowlands. High mountain rain forests in the north-east resemble interior South-East Asia much more than Rajasthan or Gujarat. Places along the coast physically resemble coastal Indonesia more than arid inland or high altitude South Asia.

Environmental similarities among regions that straddle today's political boundaries also embrace ancient human terrains. South Asia has always been open geographically for movement and communication across all its current borderlands. To and from its dry half, routes of migration, trade, and resettlement lead to and from Asia's dry west and north, into the arid home of the Central Asian Silk Road. Human cultivation of millet and wheat began somewhere along these routes; where, exactly, is unknown. Recent carbon dates for pollen found in dry lakes in Rajasthan indicate that a period of increasing moisture occurred in Asia's dry zone at the time of the earliest known grain cultivation in the Middle East, around 7500 bce; this means that archaeological finds at Mehrgarh and elsewhere may represent a roughly simultaneous origination of dry grain cultivation in South Asia and the Middle East. In Himalayan localities, settlers, herders, and migrants have moved regularly across borders with Tibet. Tibetan Buddhism is as deeply entrenched as Hinduism in Nepal. Borders with Burma are open in Assam and Bengal even today. The earliest evidence of rice cultivation in South Asia is roughly contemporary with evidence from South-East Asia. In the eighteenth century, migrants from Arakan did much of the most arduous new land clearance in southern Bengal. In Shillong, now in India's north-eastern state of Meghalaya, people speak Mon-Khmer, Tibeto-Burman, and Indo-European languages. The coastal regions are also intimately connected: the Sinhala and Bangla languages are closely related; southern India has sent many waves of migrants to Sri Lanka; and coastal sites have long been their own best trading partners, including those in South-East Asia, where a major historical period of so-called `Indianization' occurred during the first millennium ce, when merchants from Gujarat arrived regularly in Java. In 1800, fishing ships from many towns along India's east and west coast brought workers and equipment for digging pearls from the ocean floor in the Gulf of Manaar off the coast of Sri Lanka.

From ancient times, cultural elements of all sorts have spilled in all directions across what are today national borders separating and enclosing state territories. We find Hindu temples and Sanskrit texts in Cambodia and Indonesia. Buddhism flourished more in East and South-East Asia than in its birthplace in northern India. Japanese Buddhists today tour holy sites in India the way Christians visit Jerusalem. Christians and Jews came by sea to settle on the Kerala coast in the early centuries of the Common Era. Islam spread across southern Asia by land among inland regions, and by sea among Indian Ocean ports, until the majority of the world's Muslims lived east of Iran. The definitive linguistic components of South Asian languages are found in languages that are spread all across Central, North, and West Asia. Examples are endless of cultural mobility and dispersion along the inland and coastal routes of southern Eurasia. In addition, as we will see, the boundaries of historical activity and networks of interaction that determined the character of change in everyday life in South Asia have never corresponded to the boundaries constructed by modern cultural authorities or by modern states.

To understand history inside South Asia, we must escape the confines of modern boundaries that enclose and separate civilizations to explore a wider world within which these boundaries have been invented, contested, defended, and redrawn historically. As we will see, the political boundaries of South Asia have changed dramatically at various points in time. It is therefore most appropriate to study South Asia as a huge open geographical space in southern Eurasia, rather than imagining it to be a fixed historical region with a single territorial definition.

Prehistoric Societies

Humans may have lived in South Asia for half a million years. Relics of their activity for much of that time are preserved in so many places that we can surmise that the earliest human settlers lived in virtually every feasible ecological niche. They all would have migrated from somewhere else at some point in time, but some places have been continuously occupied since the eighth millennium bce, when agro-pastoral settlements were established. Mehrgarh, in central Baluchistan, is now the oldest site where archaeology can show that a microlithic tool-using people produced a complex farming society; it is in the dry, mountainous borderlands between the Indus valley and Afghanistan, where physical remains survive much better than they do in wet lands. From the seventh to the fourth millennium bce, Mehrgarh underwent an indigenous process of technological development that was connected to but apparently not dependent on migratory trade with West and Central Asia.

Similar sites dating to about 3000 bce also reflect a culture that is now named after a later Indus valley site at Harappa, which included large, solid buildings, pottery, wool and cotton textiles, copper ware, seals, and female figurines. Along the Indus valley, large cities were built by about 2500 bce at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa; but five hundred years later, they were being depopulated; and a few centuries later, they were abandoned completely. As they and other Indus urban settlements declined, other smaller sites containing similar cultural material multiplied in adjacent Gujarat and Punjab. Recent findings suggest that Harappan cultural production may have continued into the first millennium bce alongside settlements that are distinguished by later archaeological finds of Painted Grey Ware pottery. The famous prehistoric cities along the Indus emerged within a very old, resilient cultural complex that covered a vast area of dry land and river valleys stretching from Afghanistan to Sind, Punjab, and the western Gangetic plain. These cities engaged in long distance trade and their material culture was at the same time indigenous to South Asia.

If we toured South Asia around 2000 bce, we would certainly want to begin with its impressive cities along the Indus, which boasted advanced hydrology and architecture. But we would soon find that South Asia's scant prehistoric human population was composed primarily of hunters, gatherers, herders, and farmers, who lived in tiny and, typically, temporary settlements. Wild animals -- including elephants, tigers, deer, and buffalos -- outnumbered humans many times over. Dry, wet, high altitude, and coastal climates offered different kinds of opportunities for human communities.

In the wet regions, dense tropical jungles were naturally endowed with food supplies for humans but also with wild animals (notably snakes and tigers) and micro-organisms (notably water-borne parasites) that killed humans. To create stable living environments in tropical settings, people had to clear jungles to create farming communities, arduous work that needed to be done repeatedly because the jungle growth was tenacious. Before the advent of iron tools around 1200 bce, jungles constantly defeated human efforts to create permanent farming settlements; shifting cultivation was the only agricultural option, which combined with hunting, gathering, and fishing provided ample human diets. Rice, originally a swamp grass, was first domesticated on temporary fields. Slash-and-burn farming remained the norm long after agrarian societies began to cut, burn, and build permanent fields and settlements. This agrarian transformation of the wet lowlands began in the first millennium bce.

In dry lands, prehistoric migratory life typically moved over wider spaces. Where water failed to come to the land, people and animals moved to water. Animal herding and nomadism combined naturally with extensive hunting, warfare, and trade; these all developed productive but often conflict-ridden synergies with sedentary farming. Nomads bred animals that settled farming communities used for manure and ploughing, for edible meat and milk, and for skins, fur, and wool. Pastoral nomads also engaged in trade and carried craft products and implements among settled communities far from one another. Animal-herding pastoral peoples exchanged goods with farmers who provided them with staple grains (millets and wheat), fruits, vegetables, and manufactures, including metal tools and weapons. To sustain their animals, herders needed water and grass that often lay on land controlled by farmers. Farmers and herders were also hunters and hunting skills were often turned toward human competitors for land and water. Nomads herding and riding horses became the most successful warriors ranging over wide distances. Agro-pastoral communities combining the skills and resources of herders, farmers, and craft workers built the small prehistoric homelands that we see scattered in archaeological remains in dry regions from Baluchistan to Punjab and the Deccan.

Mixtures of hunting, gathering, herding, farming, manufacturing, and trade supported prehistoric communities that combined sedentary and migratory ways of life and whose human geography was thus both intensely local and extensively widespread. Archaeological remains from Gujarat in the second millennium bce indicate that pastoral circuits of animal grazing and nomadic migration ran through sedentary farming communities like thread through beads on a necklace.

Elements of sedentary cultures moved along circuits of migration and trade that connected and sustained small, separate communities. Cultural assemblages thus emerged that were composed of various symbolic and material elements, which we see in archaeological evidence. As elements dispersed geographically they formed distinct cultural areas that changed shape and overlapped. The cultural complex that includes Mehrgarh and Harappa is now the oldest we know. Physical remains indicate that a different but perhaps related Banas culture characterized by white pottery painted black and red developed in Rajasthan and Malwa in the millennium after 2500 bce. At the same time, another Malwa culture was spreading south in central India, as a Savalda complex formed in Maharashtra, and as other areas of settlement marked by distinctive pottery and metal tools developed in the eastern Vindhyas and southern Deccan. Other cultural areas of comparable antiquity are also visible in the southern peninsula, which contained megalithic tombs, urns, cists, rock-cut caves, cairns, sarcophagi, and stone tombs that resemble hats, called topi kals. Especially in the wetter regions, most of the evidence of cultural activity in prehistory returned to nature and is invisible today, though later evidence indicates many cultural contributions from prehistoric forest dwellers.

In Punjab, a dry region whose grasslands received water from five rivers draining the western Himalayas (hence the name: panch-ab), one prehistoric culture left no material remains but produced ritual texts that priests preserved over millennia. This culture is called Aryan. Evidence in its texts indicates that it slowly spread southeast, following the course of the Yamuna and Ganga rivers. Its elite called itself Arya (`pure') and led kin groups organized into nomadic horse-herding tribes. Aryan ritual texts are called Vedas; their language, Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit is recorded only in the hymns that were sung in Vedic rituals for Aryan gods. To be Aryan apparently meant to be a member of an elite among pastoral tribes. The texts that record Aryan culture cannot be dated precisely, but they seem to emerge around 1200 bce in four collections of Vedic hymns (Rg, Sama, Yajur, and Artharva).

The textual evidence of the expanding use of Sanskrit and Vedic rituals is spread unevenly across the next millennium. Six hundred years after the first Vedas, ritual texts called Brahmanas and numerous mystical and philosophical Aranyakas and Upanishads appear that describe activity farther and farther east in the Ganga basin. Two epic poems, Ramayana and Mahabharata, probably refer to wars among tribes in the first half of the first millennium bce in the watershed between the Indus and Ganga and in the western part of the Ganga basin; but these epics were composed many centuries after the wars they recount and they were added to and revised many times over the centuries that followed. The major ancient grammatical text of the Sanskrit language, Pannini's Astadhyayi (with a geographical appendix, Ganapatha), is datable to the late fourth century bce by references to contemporary events and personalities. By this time, the corpus of ancient Sanskrit texts comprised a culture of Vedic Brahmanism. In this textual culture, social rituals prescribed that rulers should protect and enforce stratified ranks among four varnas: Brahman (priest), Kshatriya (warrior), Vaisya (merchant), and Sudra (workers). Ritual texts also describe the territory of Aryan culture, called Madhyama Dis or Madhya Desh, `the central country'. By about 500 bce, Aryan cultural evidence had spread east from Gandhara (in the hills above Punjab, where Pannini composed his grammar), across the plains of Kurukshetra (around Delhi), where the Mahabharata war occurred), as far east as the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna at Pratisthana or Prayaga (around Allahabad). Sanskrit geographical knowledge was wider than this, however. Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, travelled south across the peninsula and over the water to Lanka (Sri Lanka) to save his wife, Sita, from her captor, Ravana. Even so, Pannini indicates in his detailed list of peoples and places that ancient Sanskrit authors were at home in Punjab, Haryana, and the Ganga-Yamuna Doab. Their culture was only one among several in these regions, though we know much less about others.

Ancient Transformation

Prehistory shades into history as ancient documentation becomes firmly datable. This begins to occur in the sixth century bce, during the reign of the Magadha kings in the eastern Ganga basin, when Buddhist texts can be dated along with recorded activity by Achaemenid Greek rulers in Persia and Afghanistan. Early historical texts come into being during major changes in the human landscape that become more visible over the next millennium as documentary evidence becomes ever richer in descriptive detail and chronological specificity.

During the first thousand years of recorded history in South Asia, an ancient transformation produced entirely new social environments. Prehistoric societies were many but small and they had no institutions holding them together. In the sixth century bce, history's curtain rises on a dramatic scene of political invention as powerful people begin to make powerful states. By 300 bce, societies in the Ganga basin were part of vast networks of politics, economy, and culture; settlements stretching from Afghanistan to Bengal were connected to one another by regular flows of ideas and goods that ran through cities that became central sites for imperial society. By 100 ce, competing imperial armies ranged from Central Asia to Sri Lanka. By 500 ce, complex regions of social change all across South Asia were connected intricately to one another and to the wider world.

The vast epoch of ancient transformation from circa 500 bce to circa 500 ce produced a new order that would be called `classical' in later times. The changes that occurred in this millennium are so vast, complex and poorly documented that we may never be able to explain them adequately. The arrival of iron-making technologies around the time of the Vedas certainly made a major impact. Chopping and digging with iron tools gave new advantages to the people who struggled against the forest, for they could now burn trees to make farms and keep new jungle growth away with arduous manual labour. In the Ganga basin, land clearance to make permanent farms spread from west to east and created a new productive landscape that spanned wet and dry regions of monsoon Asia for the first time. Rice-growing societies in the eastern basin could sustain larger populations with their more productive agriculture, and they also had closer access to iron ores and other minerals in mountains south of the Ganga in Jharkhand. River routes into and out of the eastern mountains provided rapid entry into the Gangetic transport system for people working the uplands north and south of the Ganga. Iron tools increased agricultural output everywhere but made a much bigger difference in the east, where iron weapons also strengthened armies. People with iron tools made the boats that travelled the highway of the Ganga and the carts that plied roads along the Ganga basin. It was thus in the east that early states arose.

Major routes ran along the river basins from Bihar to Gujarat and to the Hindu Kush. People living in the western dry regions had superior access to most of the length of these routes and they took full advantage of trading opportunities. Kautilya's Arthasastra indicates that by the start of the Common Era, long-distance trade sustained widely known sites of commodity specialization stretching from Central Asia and Sind to Assam. Horses came from Punjab; pearls from Sind; cotton and sandalwood from Malwa; elephants, stones, and minerals from the southern mountains; cotton and silk from Bengal; and sandalwood from Assam. Cotton, silk, and wool cloth came from many places along the Ganga. Iron and silver came from mines in Jharkhand.

Connected localities spanning lands from Kabul to Gujarat and Assam formed one of the largest integrated economic regions in the ancient world. By 300 bce, production and trade in this region generated enough profit, taxation, tribute, and consumption to sustain a burst of social invention, most visibly along the highway of the Ganga, especially in the east. The first big cities built after the fall of Harappa arose around Pataliputra (now Patna in Bihar). They had a distinctive urban culture, elites, and expressive arts. Social stratification became more complex. The first recorded political elites were lineage elders in agro-pastoral domains called janapada and maha (great) janapada. These small domains were named after their dominant clans and are described in epics, in Pannini's grammar, in Buddhist texts, and in other sources. Pannini indicates that in 300 bce, janapadas and mahajanapadas were the most prominent political features of the Indo-Gangetic flatlands from Punjab to Bengal. By this time, however, new ruling elites and institutions had also appeared in eastern regions, where new rulers came to power in political systems that embraced many kin groups. Some of these early polities are called `republics' because elite lineages shared power inside them. Others are called `kingdoms' because single ruling dynasties became supreme. In these new political territories, urban capital cities emerged at strategic military and commercial sites, where rising elites changed the face of the land forever.

Inventing Empire

Chandragupta Maurya was born into this changing ancient land, near Pataliputra, where, in the sixth century bce, Magadha rulers had raised armies to conquer widely and create the first large state in the region. From the obscure Moriya clan, Chandragupta may have owned some land around Magadha before he led Magadha armies to conquer janapadas as far west as Punjab and Sind. In doing so, he had crossed a cultural divide. Agro-pastoral warrior lineages controlling various janapadas had diverse cultural identities, but later Vedic sources indicate that some had embraced Aryan culture as far east as Prayaga (Allahabad). Magadha lay further east on the outer fringe of Aryan culture, and it was here in the east that Buddha Gautama had composed a spiritual and ethical path that diverged from Aryan Brahmanism. Having conquered local competitors, the armies of Magadha expanded west. Victorious commanders subordinated janapadas under an imperial authority whose main work was to maintain its own military strength. This rudimentary imperial scaffolding provided a framework for Chandragupta's ambition.

In the far west, Magadha troops faced Achaemenid Greek armies marching across Persia. As Greek soldiers marched east and Magadha troops marched west, they both knew they were following old routes of long-distance travel, but they did not know that they were creating a new world of politics that would stretch from Greece to Assam. Routes from Europe to the Orient and from Magadha to Persia met in Punjab; thus the Indus became the symbolic western border of a region that Greeks called `India'. The original division of Asia and Europe, East and West, Orient and Occident derived from military competition over routes and resources flowing across ancient Eurasia. Ancient empires thus invented cultural boundaries that we still live with today; how these territorial identities came down to the present is a long story that we will follow in the coming chapters.

Chandragupta won wars for Magadha in Sind and may have fought Alexander the Great in Punjab before Alexander's army mutinied to force a Greek retreat down the Indus in 327 bce. Alexander then sailed to Mesopotamia and died in Babylon at age thirty-four. Chandragupta marched east, conquered his overlords, and became South Asia's first emperor. He launched his Maurya imperial dynasty by building on Magadha victories to incorporate janapadas in a structure of military command that eventually deployed nine thousand elephants, thirty thousand cavalry, eight thousand chariots, and several hundred thousand soldiers on its many battlefields. Supporting its war machine with taxes, troops, provisions, commanders, and victories preoccupied the Maurya state, which sustained an official elite that was the first of its kind. Elite intellectuals became the brains of empire. One legendary figure was Kautilya, known as the author of the Arthasastra, a manual of statecraft and administration. This text was not completed until the Gupta age, six hundred years later, and thus it constitutes one of many links between the two classical empires of the Ganga basin.

Mauryan armies conquered widely from 321 until 260 bce. Chandragupta marched west to the Hindu Kush and Kashmir. His son, Bindusara, turned south to the Deccan. After a four-year war of succession, the emperor Ashoka conquered Kalinga, on the Orissa coast, where imperial conquest finally outstripped imperial resources. Subduing Kalinga cost one hundred thousand lives and displaced twice as many people. This suffering apparently stunned Ashoka into embracing Buddhism. Ashoka's intellectual elite invented a new, ethical imperialism. By Ashoka's time, the teachings of Gautama Buddha and Mahavira had defined distinctive strains of cultural activity that we know under the names of Buddhism and Jainism; they shared many elements with Aryan Brahmanism but opposed its sacred division of caste society and established another set of values for rulers, including universal ethical norms that made salvation a moral quest. Rulers could support this righteous vision by becoming great alms-givers for the learned monks who preached harmonious moral order and showed the way to enlightenment in their piety and learning. Buddhist righteousness (dhamma) became a moral compass for Ashoka's empire. Ashoka used his vast winnings at war to support Buddhist monks, ritual centres (stupas), preachers, and schools. Rather than conquering kingdoms south of Kalinga, Ashoka brought them under his spiritual patronage, supporting Buddhist kings in Sri Lanka and Buddhist centres in Andhra, Karnataka, and the Tamil country. Jain missions also prospered in his domain.

Thus Maurya dynastic elites invented imperial culture, including new social identities that were attached to imperial expansion, integration, and authority. In addition to supporting its war machine, the empire constituted an ethical ideology and infrastructure. In addition to commanding armies and gathering wealth for war, generals announced the arrival of good governance wherever they conquered. In addition to collecting tribute, imperial officers established a local presence to keep roads open, to adjudicate disputes, and to supersede the local authority of janapadas. Building on the legacy of Magadha and initially travelling the same routes, the Maurya regime protected merchants who were major patrons of Buddhism and Jainism. Empire increased the concentration of wealth at central places of imperial authority. It attracted ambitious lineage leaders and their disgruntled local competitors who allied with imperial officers and identified themselves with imperial authority. Imperial culture fostered a new elite cosmopolitanism, which elevated its own people and ideas and also reduced localities and local identities to the status of rustic parochialism. Empire institutionalized high and low culture at the same time.

Inventing Civilization

In new territories of empire and elite formation, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism represented three solutions to fundamental problems of human existence and political order. Their proponents obtained royal patronage in the circuits of urbane cosmopolitanism. All three became more prominent in dispersed localities on the tracks of imperial expansion. They had much in common, including their vast cosmology and complex ideas about reincarnation and karma (the effect of acts in past lives on future lives). They all emerged in the Ganga basin from the mixing of Aryan culture with other cultures during social changes underway in the first millennium bce. Their intellectuals also shared the creative spirit of the Upanishads, later Vedic texts that elaborated the nature of power in the fires of Vedic sacrifice, which could be internalized by humans through spiritual discipline, renunciation, contemplation, and mysticism.

By the later centuries bce, elements of Aryan ideology were adapted to local conditions by elites in diverse agrarian societies. The Brahmanas codified Vedic ritual in the changing contexts where learned Brahmans embodied and translated Aryan tradition. Newly emerging social elites found valuable assets in Sanskrit texts, Vedic rituals, and learned Brahmans, which they used to elevate themselves above others and to mark ranks of privilege in their domains. One hymn from the Rg Veda became particularly useful. It describes the origin of the world in the sacrificial dismemberment of the Lord of Being, Prajapati, into four varnas or human essences: his mouth became the Brahman priest; his arms became the warrior (Rajanya or Kshatriya); his thighs became the Vaisya (farmer and merchant); and his feet became the Sudra (worker and servant). Ancient landowners, merchants, warriors, army commanders, rulers, kings, and emperors used Brahmanical interpretations of varna to raise and validate their social status. Thus many elites became at least partially Aryanized by patronizing Brahman knowledge and rituals. Various aspiring groups collaborated with Brahmans to create higher status for themselves. Brahmanism allowed kin groups to form caste groups (jati) by assigning each kin group to a varna. Among the dharmasastra texts that defined the emerging Brahmanical social order, The Laws of Manu, composed circa 100 bce, explained in great detail how every marriage that mixed jatis produced a new jati with a definite status in the varna scheme. This was a recipe for taking the infinite complexity of ancient society and reducing it to a single schematic ideological order in which everyone knew their place.

Jains and Buddhists opposed the fixed social stratification of Vedic Brahmanism, the authority of Brahmans, and the all-pervasive power of Vedic ritual. Jainism and Buddhism arose around Magadha, where Mahavira (born circa 550) and Gautama Buddha (born circa 480) both originally preached. It is reasonable to surmise that these schools of thought represented restless spiritual aspirations among new elites who challenged Vedic ideas about social rank. Merchants relegated to lower varna ranks were clearly influential patrons for Buddhist and Jain monks who propagated the spiritual power of learning, piety, merit, discipline, and ethical values, and who rejected the idea that the highest spiritual purity is attainable only by Brahmans. The Buddhist or Jain path of liberation was open to anyone.

Supporters of Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism moved along routes of physical mobility and communication that extended their scope under Mauryan authority. Imperial cultural activists circulated among localities and settled locally to become local representatives of imperial authority and high culture. Locally, their elite status could attract patronage from aspiring donors who sought prized intermediary roles in imperial society. Locally, too, most people could only appreciate high culture when it was translated into local terms, in the local vernacular. Most local religious feelings, practices, and ideas could never attain wide currency; they remained local until they were translated into terms that could travel. A three-tiered cultural hierarchy thus developed. At the top, high culture emerged among imperial elites who communicated with one another across great distances at the apex of political authority. Intermediary elites arose in regions of political power as they translated and mixed imperial and local cultures. Many local cultural elements remained purely local, outside imperial circuits of power, though many others were incorporated and subordinated. Thus `great' and `little' traditions came into being with the expansion of empire and with efforts by aspiring local elites to lift themselves out of their local status. The interaction of these three levels of culture became a basic feature of social life. They are visible even today, though the centuries have changed their significance. In ancient times, local cultures were overwhelmingly predominant for people in everyday life. Very few people had access to high culture or elite traditions. Elite culture made its impact locally in proportion to the power of patrons in local society.

Buddhism exemplifies ancient high culture. It spread widely as elite cultural elements sank local roots from town to town in the ambit of Mauryan power and along routes of mobility running into Central Asia, the southern peninsula, and Sri Lanka. Buddhists always confronted proponents of Jainism and Brahmanism, and everywhere patronage from various sources decided the outcome. Ashoka's patronage indicates that rulers in his day devised ingenious means for making empire into civilization. Giving financial and moral support to high culture ideas, practices, and intellectuals like Buddhist monks enabled rulers to attract literate elites to their service and to bring cosmopolitan cultural activists into localities of ethical empire. At the same time, this strategy enabled conquerors to turn tribute extracted from vanquished local warriors into pious generosity. Religious patronage enhanced political supremacy and incorporation. Instead of suffering humiliating military defeat, a weaker rival could embrace imperial subordination by negotiating an acceptable contribution to charitable cultural projects endorsed by the emperor.

Such ingenious cultural politics suffused social struggles for power and rank. For rulers, patronizing religious leaders and institutions became indispensable for gaining local support that turned coercive force into public spirit. In everyday life, religious institutions that shaped social identities thrived in competitions for imperial patronage. Spiritual leaders became socially prominent as they cultivated patronage and turned wealth into moral authority. In local society, financing cultural institutions and religious activities like festivals and rituals became an indicator of social status. Social ranks thus took aesthetic, spiritual forms. The highest status people were those who participated in imperial rituals and commanded the language and culture of the imperial religion. The lowest status people were those who spoke only local tongues and worshipped local deities. Social mobility moved among tiers of culture as local people moved up in regional societies by incorporating themselves into elite culture, giving it local roots.

The project of civilizing conquered peoples proceeded within empire as influential people established religious institutions across wide spaces inside local societies. Buddhists and Jains seem to have been most successful among merchants. The Greek king of Punjab, Menander, adopted Buddhism as he sought to bring more merchants into his realm. Ashoka made Buddhism a moral compass that made his realm more attractive for merchants. In Mauryan times, kings, monks, and landed elites on the island of Sri Lanka came together under the banner of dhamma to create one of the world's longest-lasting Buddhist polities. Elsewhere, too, religious institutions became central in cultural politics by bringing disparate groups together in new, more extensive regional communities. Pious donors sanctified their own wealth with spending on festivals, shrines, stupas, or pious education; and they used public religious rituals to announce their own beneficence. Religious communities formed as emerging social elites pursued their common interests to forge shared identities in public piety.

Donations to Jains and Buddhists became increasingly popular among merchants who travelled routes protected by Mauryan armies. Merchant wealth flowed into religious centres in market towns, where it combined with royal patronage to finance a spiritual realm of public sentiment that brought together local elites and imperial officers, itinerants and residents, civilians and army commanders, and many other people in various professions. Buddhist and Jain sculpture became public art. Gigantic stone sculptures and buildings embodied the physical presence of spiritual and imperial power. Technologies of artistic beauty became media for the everyday experience of spirituality, transcendence, and political stability. A creative explosion in all the arts was a most remarkable feature of the ancient transformation for later generations. Mauryan territory was marked out visibly on the ground in its day by awesome armies and dreadful war, but future inhabitants saw instead its beautiful pillars, inscriptions, coins, sculptures, buildings, ceremonies, and textual accounts, particularly those by Buddhist writers.

Ancient imperialism created a new kind of social space, an imperial landscape. But all around it, most people lived in agro-pastoral communities, and lineages like those in janapadas dominated most localities. The geography of Mauryan empire resembled a spider with a small dense body and long spindly legs. The highest echelons of imperial society lived in the inner circle composed of the ruler, his immediate family, other relatives, and close allies, who formed a dynastic core. Outside the core, Mauryan empire ran along stringy routes dotted with armed cities. Outside the palace, in capital cities, the highest ranks in the imperial elite were held by military commanders whose active loyalty and success in war determined imperial fortunes. Wherever these men failed or rebelled, dynastic power crumbled. In the provincial urban centres of imperial authority, administrators applied official rules, merchants cherished law and order, elites gathered wealth, and pious people received patronage: all these groups carried imperial identities into everyday life.

Imperial society flourished where these elites mingled; they were its backbone; its strength was theirs. Kautilya's Arthasastra describes imperial elite power in the Maurya core, in old Magadha, where some key institutions seem to have survived for about seven hundred years, down to the age of the Guptas. Here, Maurya state institutions ruled local society. But not elsewhere. In provincial towns and cities, officials formed a top layer of royalty; under them, old conquered royal families were not removed, but rather, subordinated. In most janapadas, the Mauryas' empire consisted of strategic urban sites connected loosely to vast hinterlands through lineages and local institutions that were already there when the Mauryas arrived and were still in control when they left.

Aryavarta and Imperial Bharat

The Mauryas defined ancient Bharat. Following the contours of trade routes, the spidery empire took the geometrical shape of a tall triangle with a broad base, lying on its side with its apex in Magadha. One long northern leg ran west up the Ganga, across Punjab, into the Hindu Kush; and one long, jagged, leg ran south-west from Pataliputra, up the Son river valley, down the Narmada river, into Berar, Maharashtra, and Gujarat. The broad base of imperial space spanned Punjab, the Indus, Rajasthan, Gujarat, and western Maharashtra. The north-western frontier revolved around Gandhara and Kashmir; the south-western frontier, around Nasika in Maharashtra. North of Kashmir and west of the Khyber Pass, Greek dynasties held sway. South of Nasika, the Mauryan presence consisted primarily of diplomatic missions. Buddhist activity was particularly prominent in the east, from Bengal down the Orissa coast to Amaravati, Kanchipuram, Madurai, and Sri Lanka. Buddhism and Jainism both became most deeply rooted on the outer imperial fringe: Buddhism in the east, in the Himalayas, and on routes into Central Asia; Jainism in the west, in Rajasthan and Gujarat, and along trade routes in the southern peninsula.

Four hundred years after the last of the Mauryas, the Gupta dynasty reinscribed the same spaces of ancient Bharat with Brahmanical cultural supremacy. The new imperial dynasty's founder, Chandragupta, apparently renamed himself after Chandragupta Maurya. He began his imperial career by marrying a daughter of the Licchavi clan, which had controlled the Terai uplands between Magadha and Nepal since before Mauryan times and which would later go on to form a powerful dynasty in the Kathmandu valley. Using this strategic alliance, he conquered westward along the path of the Mauryas. In the late fourth century, his son, Samudragupta, declared himself maharaja adhi raja (great king of kings) and boldly recounted his conquests on a pillar in Prayaga (Allahabad) that dated back to the Mauryas. The Allahabad inscription divides Gupta lands into four categories. At the centre is Aryavarta, including all the Ganga plain, Naga domains in Bundelkhand and Malwa, Kota lands around Delhi, and Pundravardhana and Vanga in Bengal. Inside Aryavarta, conquered rulers were said to have been brought under direct Gupta administration. Outside this imperial territory, in southern regions of Dakshinapatha, twelve conquered kings were left on their thrones. In the mountains, unconquered rulers paid tribute. In the north and west, distant Kushanas and Mundas offered their obeisance, as did Sinhala kings in Sri Lanka.

Since Pannini's time, cultural elites had worked assiduously to describe and mark geographical space so as to give places identities defined by imperial societies. Places became visible in a wide world etched with a cultural design that encompassed localities. The region of highest privilege in Gupta classicism came into being with conscious efforts to create an imperial heartland with a timeless identity. It was called Aryavarta. Texts that depict this new imperial territory describe the homeland of Gupta elites whose cultural privilege set an enduring standard for classical civilization.

Samudragupta built the Gupta imperial system, first by using his army to throw another canopy of conquest over janapadas and then by displacing many janapadas with a more powerful administration than the Mauryas could have imagined. The Gupta imperial heartland was like a banyan tree with strong roots in cities, towns, rituals, and holy places -- a solid structure as awesome as the rivers, mountains, and heavens among which it formed a mythical and ritual universe. Aryavarta invoked imperial eternity as cosmic reality. In addition to Gupta arms, a Brahman intellectual elite wielding the magic of Sanskrit constructed this classical domain. Indian classicism became by definition Sanskritic and Brahmanical.

Gupta imperial society concentrated in the Gangetic lowlands. Its core region was much larger than the Mauryas', extending west to Mathura, and its cultural impact was deeper and more permanent. In Aryavarta, Samudragupta performed Vedic rituals on a grand scale and pursued a widely publicized policy of donating land to Brahmans, funding temple construction, and financing temple rituals. Gupta power launched imperial Brahmanism. Not surprisingly, Brahman authors saw the fall of the Guptas in the sixth century as a sign of cosmic chaos and degradation, Kali Yuga; and many later generations of Sanskrit authors looked back on the Guptas' reign as their golden age. The Gupta core region in Uttar Pradesh still has the largest Brahman population in India and the most Brahman politicians.

Brahmanism spread outward from the Gupta core and evolved into a diverse but coherent Hindu cultural complex that scattered across South Asia in the first millennium. Exactly how this occurred is still far from fully understood, though textual evidence appears in widely dispersed texts in Sanskrit and other languages. Clearly, Sanskrit and its learned authors were critical cultural elements wherever Hindu cultures emerged. When Pannini codified Sanskrit, it was already archaic, and he effectively compiled a codebook for a Brahman secret tongue, a user's guide for Brahman cultural software. Buddhist and Jain authors used Pali, Prakrits, and other vernaculars. Local cults expressed themselves in local vernaculars. The influence of Sanskrit spread with the influence of learned Brahman men who were the only people who could officially know the language and convey its magic. Elements of Sanskrit -- its sounds, words, grammar, and script -- could be learned, used, and enjoyed by anyone, however, and over time entered most languages; and translations out of Sanskrit conveyed its influence into literature almost everywhere in South Asia. Until in the seventeenth century, when it was partially displaced by Persian as the premier elite imperial language, Sanskrit enjoyed a status like that of Latin in Western Europe as an elite language of law, ritual, science, philosophy, literature, and high culture generally.

Patronage for Brahman literati spread their influence far and wide and the Gupta classical age emerged retrospectively in Puranic literature. Puranas form a large corpus of texts that recount `oldness' or `venerability' in genealogies and tales of the misty past, combining myth, folklore, history, and historical fiction. A typical Purana begins with the creation of the world and narrates a genealogy leading from heavenly gods to earthly kings and saints in some present time that can be mythical but can also be historical, as it is in the Sthala Purana genre, which explains how a particular god came to reside a specific temple. Puranas have their mundane, factual counterpart in laudatory introductions to inscriptions called prasasti, which describe the royal personage making temple donations, land grants, and public proclamations.

Ashokan edicts and Samudragupta's inscriptions were prototypes for millions of texts carved in stone and etched in metal that begin to appear by Gupta times and proliferate from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries. Prasastis recount genealogies and dynastic chronicles: though they often begin in the heavens in mythical times, they always come down to earth to the moment of the activity announced in the inscription. Prasastis, like Puranas, are typically in Sanskrit, though Puranas were also composed in vernaculars, and inscriptions introduced by Sanskrit prasastis typically include a vernacular text for the business or contractual portion of the record. Puranas and prasastis are two major textual media for evoking relations among gods, rulers, and everyday folk, thus between cosmic and mundane power.

The Guptas invested heavily in Puranic mythology and inscriptional documentation. Later rulers all over South Asia followed their example to produce inscriptional records in all the major languages, including Arabic and Persian. These texts provide a clear sense of cultural geography. In the accumulation of Puranic texts, Aryavarta became the desa, the cultured land of civilization where Prayaga (Allahabad) and Kasi (Varanasi/Benares) were the holiest places in the sacred geography of Bharat. The desa does not include the high mountains, Indus valley, Punjab, or western desert. The Puranic desa of Bharat are Madhya desa (the Ganga lowlands), Purva desa (Bengal and Assam), and Aparanta desa (including Avanti, Malwa, Gujarat, Konkan, and Nasik). Places outside the desa were frontiers and peripheries. The western plains, Punjab, high mountains, central mountains, and coast and interior peninsula outside Nasika-Konkana are not called desa in Puranas, but rather asreya, patha, and pristha. This Puranic geography travelled widely with migrating Brahman literati. Sanskrit cosmopolitanism made Aryavarta its cultural heartland. With the spread of Brahman influence in post-Gupta centuries, localities far and wide were named and located in relation to the Gangetic holy lands. Kings as far away as Java and Cambodia traced their genealogies to the Guptas and even to the early Aryans.

Imperial Regions

Ancient imperialists in the Ganga basin were surrounded by competitors in other regions whose power increased over the centuries. The Mauryas faced no serious obstacles in their quest for control of major routes and centres east of the Hindu Kush. But when the last Maurya fell and Sungas took Pataliputra, in 185 bce, new empires on Magadha's old western frontier foreshadowed a new future. In the south, in Maharashtra, Satavahanas (55 bce to 250 ce) conquered the Deccan and the eastern peninsula south to Kanchipuram. In the western plains, Sakas (70--409) expanded south and west into Gujarat from their capital at Ujjaini in Malwa. In the north-west, the Kushanas (0--250) formed the greatest of the new empires. They came from Central Asia and had twin capitals at Purusapura and Mathura. They conquered Afghanistan and the Ganga basin east to Pataliputra; and Kanishka, their most powerful ruler, also conquered Sakas and Satavahanas. Non-Gangetic armies formed a strenuous opposition to Gupta expansion outside Aryavarta. Hunas, Sakas, and Vakatakas hemmed in the Guptas throughout their reign, and competitors tore their realm to bits when Hunas rampaged down the Ganga to end the aura of Gupta supremacy.

After the Guptas, empires ruling Aryavarta came from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, which were markedly different from the Ganga basin as material and cultural environments. Agricultural land was not nearly as rich. Nomadic pastoral lineages were much more numerous, powerful, and prestigious. Elites were less sedentary and land-based; they depended more on trade, herds, and war for wealth; and their military control over routes between Delhi and Kabul and between Allahabad and Cambay provided a permanent strategic advantage in struggles for access to markets in Persia, Central Asia, and Indian Ocean ports. They often patronized Brahmans but they were eclectic, less inclined to Vedic ritual, and more respectful of nomadic warriors and itinerant merchants. Buddhism and Jainism flourished in their domains. Even Satavahanas, who were staunch Hindus, also patronized Buddhists. Jainism remained prominent in Gujarat and adjacent Rajasthan. All along the Indian Ocean coast, Zoroastrians, Christians, Arabs, and Jews became well established. Kushanas descended from Hsung-nu clans in China; and like Sakas and Hunas, they were aliens in Aryavarta. Kushanas represented a radical ethnic and ideological alternative to the Guptas. Buddhism travelled north along the routes of Kushana power into Central Asia and China.

When Chinese Buddhists toured India in the fifth and seventh centuries, they found that Buddhism had virtually disappeared in its Gangetic homeland, under the imperial force of Brahmanism, though it still thrived in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Outside the Ganga basin, however, cultures flourished across the length and breadth of South Asia that were markedly less Brahmanical. Culturally distinct regimes based outside the Brahmanical strongholds in the Gupta heartland struggled constantly against Gangetic imperialism and for control over Bharat.

Aryavarta was one region among others in ancient, medieval, and early modern times. Outside the geographical confines of imperial Bharat, political histories and collective identities flowing from them followed different trajectories. In the south, in the Deccan, in ancient Dakshinapatha, south of the Vindhyas, dynasties of Satavahanas, Vakatakas, Kalacuris, Rashtrakutas, and Yadavas conquered and defined cultural regions in central India; and in the seventeenth century, the Marathas followed suit, as we will see. In the west, in Rajasthan, Gurjara-Pratihara lineages launched five hundred years of military colonization in the ninth century when Rajput clans conquered all across the Ganga basin, into the Himalayas, and into central India, to form a long-lasting, far-reaching political and cultural force. In the north-west, in the land that straddles Punjab, Kashmir, and Afghanistan, Kushanas and later Turks and Afghans produced imperial spaces that repeatedly encompassed the Ganga basin and laid the historic basis for the sixteenth-century Mughal empire, whose land ran from Samarkand to Assam.

Medieval Transitions

Post-Gupta regimes produced another new mosaic of social environments; in recognition of this, historians treat the centuries from circa 550 to 1556, between the empires of the Guptas and Mughals, as a reasonably coherent, though very diverse, medieval epoch. One dominant feature of this epoch is documentation in dozens of languages and regions. By comparison with earlier times, medieval history is very well documented, and its principle actors are better known, because inscriptions, travel accounts, chronicles, literature, and other sources multiply with each passing century. In the first millennium, the most visible actors appear in the texts of inscriptions that were produced by medieval dynasties. Hundreds of thousands of inscriptions have been traced, transcribed, stored, translated, and studied by scholars; but they still have not received the attention they deserve. The medieval millennium needs many more historians.

Epigraphy indicates that royal Gupta lineages were still settling in the western frontiers of Aryavarta in the sixth century, when the empire crumbled. They carried with them the apparatus of Gupta power. They used royal gifts to finance temples and Brahmans, and such gifts became a hallmark of medieval dynastic authority. Marking the end of Gupta supremacy, a new Maukhari dynasty made grants in the western edge of the Gupta heartland, around Kanyakubja (Kanauj), in the Doab (Awadh). Then Pusyabutis did the same farther west along the Yamuna and in Haryana. In the seventh century, the Pusyabuti king Harsha moved his capital to Kanyakubja and celebrated the event with a land grant to two Brahmans. The grant was to be administered personally by one of his commanders under the official protection of janapadas in his realm. This indicates that janapada lineages were still in business and that Harsha relied for his authority on the wealth and power of subordinates supported by local community leaders.

Inscriptions announce the formation of more than forty new dynasties in the sixth and seventh centuries across the length and breadth of South Asia. Typical prasastis include elaborate genealogies that trace dynastic origins to mythical progenitors and sanctify royal domains by harking back to ancient regional kings. Regional societies become more historically visible in these centuries and many medieval dynasties laid foundations for long-lasting regional political cultures. The complexity of medieval political geography can be rendered by locating major dynasties in fifteen modern political regions (see Maps 3--5, pp.38--9 & 109):

1. Kashmir: Karkotas (620s--850s) and Loharas (900s--1300s) were based in the Vale, around Srinagar.

2. Nepal: Licchavis (400s--700s) and Mallas (900s--1700s) ruled the Kathmandu valley.

3. Punjab: a contested terrain where Shahis (900s--1100s) built a major medieval domain.

4. Rajasthan: Gurjara-Pratiharas gave way to ruling dynasties of Paramaras (800s--1300s), Cahamanas (900s--1100s), and Rathors (1200s--1500s), in Ujjaini, Ajayameru (Ajmer), and Jodhpur, respectively.

5. Gujarat: Caulukyas (900s--1200s) were the dominant medieval dynasty.

6. Uttar Pradesh: major dynasties included Hunas (500s); Maukharis (500s) at Kanyakubja and Ayodhya; Pusyabhutis (500s--840s), whose most famous ruler was Harsha of Kanauj; Varmans (700s); and Gurjara-Pratiharas (700s--1150s), who spread from Gujarat to Bengal.

7. Madhya Pradesh: Candellas (800s--1300s) spread across a region including Khajuraho, Awadh, and Gorakpur; and Kalacuris (500s--1200s) covered land from Kheda and Ujjaini to Tripuri and Bengal.

8. Maharashtra: divided among Vakatakas (200s--500s) at Vidarbha (Nagpur), Kalacuris (500s--1200s) at Nasik, Rashtrakutas (600s--900s) at Vidarbha, and Yadavas (800s--1300s) at Devagiri.

9. Orissa: Gangas at Kataka Bhuvanesvara (300s--1400s) were the longest lasting dynasties.

10. Bengal: Palas (750s--1100s) and Senas (100--1200s) define the medieval epoch.

11. Andhra Pradesh: Eastern Chalukyas ruled from the Krishna-Godavari delta (620s--1000s); Kakatiyas ruled from the interior at Warangal, near Hyderabad (1000s--1300s).

12. Karnataka: Chalukyas (500s--750s) at Vatapi (Badami) gave way to the imperial Hoysalas (1000s--1300s), whose domain stretched to the east and west coasts; and later to the greatest southern empire at Vijayanagar (1336--1672).

13. Tamil Nadu: the Pallavas (300s--900s), Cholas (800s--1200s), and Pandyas (600s--1300s) ruled the northern, central, and southern regions of the coast at Kanchipuram, Tanjavur, and Madurai, respectively.

14. Kerala: the Cheras and Kulasekaras ruled the region around Trivandrum from the fourth to the twelfth century.

15. Sri Lanka: Lambakanna dynasties ruled from later Mauryan times to the twelfth century.

The establishment of most medieval dynasties appears to represent emerging concentrations of wealth and power among agrarian warrior elites who controlled land and people in areas of agricultural expansion. These agrarian regimes were deeply rooted locally but they were also often politically expansive and they were all extensively connected to wide realms of trade, culture, and politics. Each dynasty had a strong territorial identity that concentrated in a specific core region, and when military expansion reached its limit, dynasties retreated into their homeland, unless they were driven out, which when it happened was often followed by the founding of a new homeland elsewhere. Over time, compact regional dynasties spread widely and they often produced permanent regional traditions preserved in monuments, literature, mythology, genealogies, and local rights and powers granted by medieval kings.

Many medieval dynasties emerged on routes from ancient Bharat. Ancient empires based inside and outside Aryavarta had produced networks of conquest, elite circulation, and cultural communication on long routes of human mobility that ran into and across the Ganga basin. Dispersed urban centres of late antiquity developed around army posts, administrative offices, markets, oases, ports, strategic mountain passes and river crossings, sacred sites, royal courts, lineage headquarters, stupas, monasteries, and other places valued by imperial elites. Human habitation and land use had intensified around cities where agro-pastoralism and shifting cultivation gave way to permanent farming, manufacturing, and commerce. When political leaders in imperial satellite towns challenged imperial elites for local leadership, vying for local support, new regional polities emerged with political cultures that combined local parochialism and imperial cosmopolitanism.

The Pallava regime at Kanchipuram is a good example. It emerged from under the canopy of empire thrown across the southern peninsula by imperial Guptas, Vakatakas, and Chalukyas. Pallava kings rose from vassal status to become imperial powers in their own right. Kanchipuram had been a centre of Buddhist learning featured in Manimekalai, a Buddhist epic composed in the Tamil language in Gupta times, when Pallavas were Vakataka feudatories. Under the Pallavas, Kanchipuram became a Hindu sacred site and a royal capital; its seaport, Mahaballipuram, was adorned with monumental rock sculpture and temple carving to popularize the worship of supreme Hindu gods, Siva and Vishnu. Under the Pallavas, Kanchipuram became a Hindu pilgrimage site and centre for Sanskrit learning, whose temples received endowments from dignitaries and gifts from patrons in localities all across the southern peninsula. On its temple walls, dynastic inscriptions record the Pallava cosmic genealogy and wars of imperial expansion that spawned Pandya and Chola regimes farther south. Thus ancient imperial authority was slowly transformed into numerous independent medieval regimes across the wide frontiers of late antiquity.