India's past in the present

This lucidly written and persuasively argued book pushes readers to think about ancient India beyond the prevailing stereotypes

The history of ancient India is not a monochromatic jubilee. Rather, it is a mosaic with variegated and often contradictory patterns. This is one of the attractions for studying the ancient Indian past — its innumerable layers, its openness to different interpretations and the many different kinds of sources that allow us to access it, albeit not in its entirety, from archaeological remains to different kinds of texts. The study of India’s past, Upinder Singh reminds us, “can be beautiful and inspiring; it can also be ugly, unsettling and disturbing”. Her book by “focusing on the co-existence of certain radical tensions and oppositions” seeks to persuade readers to abandon “simplistic stereotypes and to try to grasp some of its complexities”. The themes through which she attempts to present and analyse the complexities are social inequality and salvation, desire and detachment, goddesses and misogyny, violence and non-violence, and debate and conflict.

The idea and the practice of social inequality in ancient India originated in one of the hymns of the Rig Veda, which describes how human beings emerged from four different parts of Purusha (“a primaeval giant”). The hymn says, Purusha’s “mouth became the Brahmana, his arms were made into the Kshatriya, his thighs the Vaishya and the Shudra was born from his feet”. Thus was born the theory of varna that had embedded in it a four-fold hierarchy that was a part of an organic whole. Since the same hymn also described the creation of the natural world — earth, the sky, sun and the moon — it was assumed that the four-fold hierarchy of human beings was part of the “natural and immutable order of the world”. This idea of hierarchy and social inequality became an integral part of the Brahminical social discourse and became a powerful ideology from around 1000 BCE. On the idea and practice of varna came to be overlaid the idea of jati. The nearest English equivalent to jati is caste, which is derived from the Portuguese castas.

Through history, the system of caste has become much more important than varna and the two are often seen as being synonymous. Singh is careful to draw out the differences. “The characteristics of the Indian caste system include hierarchy, endogamy (marriage within the group), commensality (rules about inter-dining and the giving and accepting of food and drink), and hereditary occupation.” The caste system, it goes without saying, has been the most enduring endorsement of social inequalities in Indian history. This is not to suggest that the caste system went unchallenged in ancient India. Jaina and Buddhist ideas represented the two most significant challenges to Brahminical orthodoxy that upheld social inequalities. There were other forms as well, especially through satire. These critiques are significant but the caste system continues as a prominent feature of life in India.

One of the frozen ideas within the ancient culture of Brahminical orthodoxy is the notion of chastity. Singh shows through her erudition how in ancient love poetry, sensuous art and scholarly works on pleasure, desire and sexuality have been celebrated. There is a corpus of writing that also emphasised the conquest of desire. One important social manifestation of this attempt to control desire was the intellectual and social project to restrict the sexuality of women within the domain of patriarchy. The other manifestation was more spiritual and philosophical — the tradition of renunciation. In spite of the misogyny embedded in Brahminical orthodoxy, there was the prevalence of the worship of powerful goddesses. Singh analyses this ambivalence and notes most pertinently, “The story of goddess worship in India is not one of diminishing significance, but of increasing vibrancy and importance. ‘Goddess culture’ formed a strong, continuing aspect of popular belief and practice, cutting across sectarian identities and divides. From the nineteenth century onwards, the nation too has been visualized as a goddess.” This has in no way eroded the dominance of males in society and in discourse.

Every era of Indian history saw large-scale violence. War in ancient India was regarded as an essential element of statecraft. Kings and emperors celebrated their conquests. Social inequalities and patriarchy engendered and justified violence. Yet in conventional wisdom, cutting across ideologies, the Indian tradition is seen to be non-violent. Noting this “amnesia about violence”, Singh writes, “It comes from an idealized interpretation of Indian history, from a hop, skip and jump approach that magically connects Mahavira, the Buddha, Ashoka, and Gandhi and leaves out everything in between.” It was the overwhelming presence of violence that gave salience to the lives and the messages of the individuals mentioned above. Non-violence has no meaning without its Other.

It is precisely because the ancient Indian culture was riddled with contradictions that there was space within it for different traditions of thought and of discussions and debates within those strands of thought. This highlights the richness, the diversity and complexity of the ancient Indian world. It is impossible to capture it under one single rubric. The contradictions of the ancient Indian world make it attractive for study. Upinder Singh’s book — lucidly written and persuasively argued — pushes readers to think about ancient India beyond the prevailing stereotypes. A noteworthy feature of her writing is that occasionally through asides she reminds us how the ancient past continues to live in the present. The ancientness of India intrudes into the modernity of India. She invites her readers to be participants in the unending dialogue between the past and present.

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The reviewer is Chancellor and professor of history, Ashoka University