The Story of India Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Map

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  ONE

  ORIGINS AND IDENTITY

  TWO

  THE POWER OF IDEAS

  THREE

  THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATION

  FOUR

  MEDIEVAL INDIA: AGE OF GOLD AND IRON

  FIVE

  THE RULE OF REASON: THE GREAT MUGHULS

  SIX

  FREEDOM AND LIBERATION

  Further Reading

  Picture Section

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Credits

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In The Story of India, Michael Wood weaves a spellbinding narrative out of the 10,000-year history of the subcontinent. Home today to more than a fifth of the world’s population, India gave birth to the oldest and most influential civilization on Earth, to four world religions and the the world’s largest democracy.

  Now, as India bids to become a global economic giant, Michael sets out on an epic journey across this vibrant country to trace the roots of India’s present in the incredible riches of her past. The Story of India is a magical mixture of history and travelogue, and an unforgettable portrait of India – past, present and future.

  About the Author

  For more than 20 years, historian and broadcaster Michael Wood has made compelling journeys into the past, which have brought history alive for a generation of readers and viewers. He is the author of several highly praised books on English history including In Search of the Dark Ages, The Domesday Quest, In Search of England and In Search of Shakespeare. He has over 80 documentary films to his name, among them Art of the Western World, Legacy, In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great, Conquistadors and In Search of Myths and Heroes.

  Michael was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester Grammar School and Oriel College Oxford, where he did postgraduate research in Anglo-Saxon history. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

  With love to Jyoti and Minakshi

  Nagaratinam, ‘Tatta’, Punnidah, Shanti,

  Chitra, Akila, Kartik and Sivakumar,

  Lakshmi Vishwanathan and Sushila Ravindranath

  INTRODUCTION

  THIS BOOK HAS COME OUT of a long attachment to India – an attachment filled with deep respect and admiration, but most of all love for India and its cultures. I have made twenty or thirty journeys to the subcontinent during the last three decades, and feel that in some ways my life has become enmeshed with India. Those journeys have so often made me think what a great privilege it is to be welcomed into another culture and to spend time in it, especially one so rich and diverse and perennially illuminating. My wife and I fell in love in India and were married there; our children have Indian names. We have travelled together in India as a family, and some of our most vivid memories are associated with the children when they were young: celebrating Pongal, the spring festival in the traditional household of Tamil friends; travelling the south by local bus to visit the old shrines of the Cavery delta; or, most memorably perhaps, staying with friends in a tent in the middle of the Kumbh Mela of 2001, the greatest human gathering on Earth – not to mention escaping afterwards to semolina pudding and fruit cake at our favourite little Parsee hotel in Allahabad.

  But this is also a book by a historian. I have been travelling the world for forty years, most of that time working as a historian, writing books and making films, nearly a hundred of them, on travel, history and adventure (sometimes, as when we followed in the steps of Alexander over the Hindu Kush, all three at once). I have filmed with traditional civilizations in the Americas and Africa, in the great Old World civilizations of Iraq, Egypt, Iran and China, and have been lucky enough to see at first hand the incredible beauty, richness and diversity of human life on Earth. If there is a uniting theme in these experiences, it is the continuance of the past in our present. It is almost a truism that we live in a time when human identities – civilizations, cultures, tribes, individuals – are being erased everywhere across the globe; identities built up often over thousands of years and lost in just a few generations. When you travel you see, no less than with the environment, landscapes, climates and species, that modernity and globalization are rubbing out human differences too, the intricate web of languages, customs, music and stories that makes us who we are. We may be the last generation to see many of these things still alive. But it seems to me that nowhere on Earth can you find all human histories, from the Stone Age to the global village, still thriving, as you can in India. And that is the big story told in this book.

  India became a free nation only sixty years ago, but in a real sense it has existed for thousands of years. The story of India is a tale of incredible drama, great inventions, enormous diversity, phenomenal creativity and the very biggest ideas. But it is also the history of one of the world’s emerging powers. Today the population of the subcontinent as a whole – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – is currently 1.5 billion, more than a fifth of all the world’s people, and India itself will soon overtake China as the world’s most populous country. India has twenty-two official languages (including English), and 400 smaller tongues and dialects: as a medieval Indian writer noted proudly, ‘the people of Asia, the Mongols, the Turks and the Arabs get tongue-tied speaking our Indian languages, but we Indians can speak any language of the world as easily as a shepherd tends his sheep’. India, no doubt, has always been polylingual. It has also always been pluralist: its great regional cultures are civilizations in themselves (Tamil alone, to give one example, has a literature going back to the third century BC – richer and older than that of most western European nations). And that pluralism and diversity imbue everything from large to small. Indian society is made up of nearly 5000 castes and communities, each with its own rules, customs and stories. India gave birth to four world religions, and, along with its legendary 33 million gods, has a bewildering plethora of sects and sub-sects. It is also the second largest Muslim country on Earth, and the subcontinent as a whole has half of all Muslims in the world. India welcomed Christianity long before Europe embraced it, and has welcomed adherents of many other faiths, including Jews and Parsees (the Zoroastrians of Iran), as refugees from persecution.

  And now, as the brief hegemony of the West is coming to an end, India, with all this amazing diversity, is rising again. Historical economists conjecture that India’s GDP was the largest in the world until around 1500, when it was overtaken by China, only for both to be eclipsed in the age of the European empires when the centre of history shifted away from the landmass of Asia to the western European seaboard, transformed by the wealth of the New World. By 1900 both China and India had sunk to generating a tiny percentage of the world’s wealth (in India’s case, less than 3 per cent). For the first forty-five years after Independence in 1947, the Indian government followed a protectionist policy, loyal to the ideals of its founders, liberal socialists, but also Gandhians, espousing self-sufficiency, non-alignment and non-violence. Only in the last fifteen years has India followed China’s lead in terms of growth. The chief factor in today’s global world is sheer population, but mastery of information technology, skill in mathematics, and technical and linguistic skills are all playing their part, along with the widespread use of English as a lingua franca, and the size, spread and influence of the Indian diaspora. Leading financial analysts now predict that on present trends India’s GDP will overtake that of the USA in the late 2030s. The twenty-first century, then, is seeing the history of the great ancient civilizations of Asia return to centre stage.

  India
’s modern transformation started later than China’s, and without the massive state-directed focus of that country. India also faces many problems, especially with social inequalities, rural poverty, overpopulation and environmental degradation. But India has immense advantages. It is an open society and a vibrant democracy, with formidable practical and language skills, and, as a civilization that has attempted to be pluralist and tolerant over a vast period of time, can draw on huge cultural resources from its past. The age-old life goals of Indian civilization – artha (worldly wealth and success), kama (pleasure and love), dharma (virtue) and moksha (knowledge and liberation) – are still major forces in people’s lives, rich and poor, and, it seems to me, will be for the foreseeable future. Despite difficulties and setbacks, the establishment and acceptance of a dynamic working democracy has been a remarkable achievement over last sixty years: and it is a democracy that has many things to teach us all.

  This book is a traveller’s-eye view of the history of India, a brief and selective account of the country from the deep past to the present, highlighting some of the key moments and key themes in its story. Inevitably, it is only an introduction: the history of India is so vast, so rich and complex, that to contain even its outline in one volume is barely possible. Working there intensively over the last eighteen months has been a wonderful experience, seeing something of the latest exciting phase of India’s amazing story; and on a personal level, I can only express my profound gratitude to all the people who gave us their time and their knowledge on the way. I leave the last word to the fourteenth-century Indian poet Amir Khusro: he was a Muslim, he wrote in Persian, and his ancestry was Turkic, but he counted himself the luckiest man alive to have been born in India, and to have India as his motherland.

  How exhilarating is the atmosphere of India!

  There cannot be a better teacher than the way of life of its people.

  If any foreigner comes by, he will have to ask for nothing

  Because they treat him as their own,

  Play an excellent host and win his heart,

  And show him how to smile like a flower.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ORIGINS AND IDENTITY

  THE RAIN HAS stopped, and the canopy of palms on the steep slope behind the house is drenched and dripping; dark green fronds glisten in the last light. Outside my room I can hear the roar of the undertow and the crash of breakers along the reef at the mouth of the bay. On the beach towards the lighthouse, knots of people are strung along the edge of the water watching the sunset. The monsoon sky is clearing now, and a golden light is spreading over the Arabian Sea. I’m standing on the balcony of a lodging house on the Kerala coast near the southern tip of India. On the table are maps, guidebooks, a traveller’s clutter. In the last few days we’ve come south down the coast from Calicut, through Cranganore and Cochin, along palm-fringed beaches under the red cliffs of Varkala, down the narrow strip between the sea and the forested foothills of the Western Ghats, the spine of India. A tourist resort like this might seem an unlikely place to begin a tale about the great migrations of the past, but this was the route taken by the first humans out of Africa perhaps 80,000 years ago: it’s the first journey in Indian history.

  BEACHCOMBERS

  They were beachcombers, making their way barefoot down India’s long, surf-beaten shores, driven as human beings always have been by chance and necessity. But also, surely, by curiosity, that most human of qualities. In only a few thousand years they skirted the Indian Ocean from the Horn of Africa to Cape Comorin on India’s southern tip, and on to the Andamans, Indonesia and Australasia. Sea levels then were lower: the pale blue shelf around India that can be seen so clearly from space is the old shoreline, lost 20,000 years ago when the sea began to rise. Back then there was a land bridge to Sri Lanka, and North and South Andaman were all one island, but right around the Indian Ocean the beachcombers’ modern descendants have picked up faint traces of their ancestors’ passage. Even now, small pockets of aboriginal peoples still survive around its shores. Opposite the Horn of Africa, humankind’s first crossing-point out of the continent, the white beaches of Yemen, strewn with crimson coral, were their first stopping places. Along this coast their campsites have yielded Middle Palaeolithic tools, similar to those from the African Middle Stone Age. Across the Persian Gulf, on the coast of Pakistan too, in one of the most inhospitable landscapes on Earth, are the Makran people, who also have a very ancient strand in their DNA. (They were probably the nomadic population described by Alexander’s Greeks in the fourth century BC as ichthyophagoi, or fish eaters, the most primitive people the Greeks met on the whole of their journey.)

  Continuing around the ocean shore, in the forested hills of southern India, relatively undisturbed till the modern world, are pockets of tribal peoples who may also be descended from those very first beachcombers who came out of Africa. Long before the modern breakthrough with the Human Genome Project, their cultures and their African appearance had marked them out from the people surrounding them. British district gazetteers recorded their names: the Kadar, Paniyan and Korava, the Yanadi Irula, Gadaba and Chenchu. Older than the Dravidian speakers around them, they remain distinct, self-contained, outside the caste system of Hindu India.

  Over the hills in Tamil Nadu I have made arrangements to meet Professor Pitchappan, a geneticist from Madurai University. He has made an extraordinary discovery working among the Kallar tribal people here. He’s found traces of the ancestral mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomes from the earliest genetic heritage of India. By chance, his team tested a man called Virumandi and discovered that he carries the M130 gene from the first wave of migrations of modern humans out of Africa. To their surprise, they subsequently discovered that Virumandi’s whole village has M130 – carried down by isolation, by the strictures of the caste system, and by endogamy: the Kallar practice of first cousin marriage, the oldest and most characteristic form of kin marriage in southern India.

  ‘There were at least two early waves of migration,’ Professor Pitchappan tells me. ‘We think spoken language only developed later – maybe only 10,000 or 15,000 years ago. Language, of course, is not the same as ethnicity. Language is easily adopted. And the same is true with religion too. Compared with custom, kin relations and so on, it’s a surface layer, just a belief system: you believe in your system, your gods, whatever you feel like. It is for this reason that I believe India has become such a cosmos of humanity with all its diversity, but still unity.’

  ‘Is that what makes you an Indian, then?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, probably,’ he laughs. ‘More a human being. A human being all the more, I would say.’

  Despite all the waves of history, these people have remained in isolated groups since that original long walk. It is an incredibly exciting scientific breakthrough of the last few years, to begin to pin down such deep identities. And the professor even thinks that those first beachcombers provided the basis for the genetic inheritance of the rest of us. In other words, the world was populated from here: ‘If Adam came from Africa, Eve came from India.’ Mother India indeed!

  It was a dizzying vista at the start of a journey through Indian history. And Kerala is a great place to understand the later layers of human culture in India. Spared violence, war and mass migrations, the modern horrors of population exchanges and ethnic cleansing, people came here as peaceful immigrants or traders. Its beautiful landscape and climate, its fertility and productivity made it a desirable stopping point throughout history. Its little harbours were the landfall of Hippalos the Greek, the Chinese admiral Zheng He and Vasco da Gama, who sailed here around the Cape in 1492. And then there are the lesser people we will meet in these pages: Greek and Roman merchants in the spice trade, Muslim Arab traders from the Gulf, Chinese immigrants who left their spidery nets fringing the Kerala backwaters. You see it in the architecture too: Syrian Christian basilicas, pillared Jewish synagogues, baroque Portuguese spice warehouses, the over-grown ruins of the British and Dutch East
India companies, and now the tourist havens of Varkala and Kovalam served by budget package flights into Trivandrum. All are part of the ceaseless movement and intermixing of humanity that is the story of India.

  Here you see a reality that happens not through war but through peace; the waves of people, cultures and religions that all make India what it is today. India may have hundreds of languages and thousands of castes, but here in a small area you see what that means on a human scale: incredible diversity, yet unity. On that conundrum we will have more to say.

  Between 3000 and 4000 years ago a new wave of migrants came into India from central Asia. Some of them moved into the south in the last millennium BC. They brought their Vedic rituals and their worship of Agni, the god of fire, but over time, the gods and rituals of the indigenous peoples were assimilated, and this was the synthesis out of which today’s Indian religions emerged. They called themselves ‘Aryans’ (the Sanskrit word for ‘noble ones’), a term much abused in modern times by Nazis and other racial fundamentalists. Although most of the immigrants intermixed, their high-caste priests, or Brahmins, practised separation, handing down the ancient rituals and taboos.

  India is a land of miracles. Here in Kerala anthropologists and district officers of the nineteenth century recorded a sect of Brahmins called nambudiri, who regarded themselves as the purest Aryans, and whose rituals were an ancient amalgam of the Aryan religion and indigenous rites, preserved zealously over thousands of years. At that time they still performed the most elaborate of all rituals, that to the god of fire. It took twelve days, some of them continuing right through the night. The last time that this twelve-day rite took place was more than thirty years ago; but this year, at the behest of a wealthy patron, a shorter version will be performed. It is, so far as we know, the oldest surviving ritual of mankind.

  SOUNDS FROM PREHISTORY