In Buddhist texts, and in common parlance even today, the more usual word for caste is not varna but jati. Jati derives from a verb meaning ‘to be born’, the emphasis being less on the degree of ritual purity, as in the four-tier varna, and more on caste determination as a result of being born into a particular kinship group. If varna provided the theoretical framework, jati came to represent the practical reality. With society assuming a complexity undreamed of in Vedic times, caste formation was veering away from ritual status to take greater account of the proliferation of localised and specialised activities. Geographical, tribal, sectarian and, above all, economic and professional specialisations determined a group’s jati.
Specialisation plumbed the depths of the social hierarchy, with tasks like disposing of the dead keeping the lowly candala as outcastes, irredeemably degraded by the nature of their work. It also cleft the pinnacles of the system, with some brahman groups artfully deploying their expertise as kingmakers and dynastic-legitimisers, while others had to rest content with handling ritual requirements at domestic and village level.
In the monarchical states leading associates of the ruling lineage assumed quasi-bureaucratic functions within the royal retinue. As the ratnins, or ‘treasures’, of ancient ritual, their designations date back to Vedic times and include such functionaries as the charioteer, the huntsman and the bard. Out of their ranks arose the senapati, or senani, who became commander of the army, and the purohita, or high priest. The charioteer seems to have become a treasurer, and the messenger ‘an official who looked after the state horses and was responsible for the maintenance of dynastic tradition’.15 A similar process whereby household officials became officers of state would apply in Europe: in the Norman kingdoms the master of the royal stables (comes stabuli) became the ‘constable’ of the realm, and the keeper of the royal mares (mareschal) the ‘marshal’ of the realm.
But it is in trade and manufacturing that specialisation is most apparent. The carpenter, once one of the royal retinue, or ratnins, by reason of his skill in building chariots, was now joined by a host of other craftsmen – ironsmiths and goldsmiths, potters, weavers, herbalists, ivory-carvers. Some were tied to a particular locality or village by their source of raw materials; others were encouraged to settle in designated areas of the new cities and towns by their predominantly royal patrons. Physically segregated and learning their skills by hereditary association, such groups were readily accorded jati status which, in the context of their specialisation, bore a close affinity to a professional fraternity or guild. Besides being more numerous and capable of endless proliferation, each jati was firmly based on an economic community. They contained an element of mutual support, and they may be seen as extending caste organisation deep into the burgeoning economies of the new states.
Similar changes may have been underway in peninsular India. Since neither Mahavira nor the Buddha ventured south, their followers had little to record of the area and there are no textual sources for it before the end of the first millennium BC. But it is clear that by then proto-states were well established in the extreme south and that they were already engaged in maritime trade. How much they owed to Aryanising influences is debatable. Although the epics were evidently known and brahmans respected, social stratification took a rather un-Aryan form, with different taboos and no place for two of the four varnas. In fact to this day indigenous vaisya and ksatriya castes are practically unknown in peninsular India.
4 Out of the Myth-Smoke C520–C320 BC
INDUS AND INDIA
MAPS PRINTED AFTER 1947 sometimes show the republic of India not as ‘India’ but as ‘Bharat’. The word derives from Bharata-varsha, ‘the land of the Bharatas’, these Bharatas being the most prominent and distinguished of the early Vedic clans. By adopting this term the new republic in Delhi could, it was argued, lay claim to a revered arya heritage which was geographically vague enough not to provoke regional jealousies, and doctrinally vague enough not to jeopardise the republic’s avowed secularism.
In the first flush of independence ‘Bharat’ would seem preferable, because the word ‘India’ was too redolent of colonial disparagement. It also lacked a respectable indigenous pedigree. For although British claims to have incubated an ‘India consciousness’ were bitterly contested, there was no gainsaying the fact that in the whole colossal corpus of Sanskrit literature nowhere called ‘India’ is ever mentioned; nor does the term occur in Buddhist or Jain texts; nor was it current in any of South Asia’s numerous other languages. Worse still, if etymologically ‘India’ belonged anywhere, it was not to the republic proclaimed in Delhi by Jawaharlal Nehru but to its rival headed by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Pakistan.
Partition would have a way of dividing the subcontinent’s spoils with scant reference to history. Pakistan inherited the majority of the main Harappan sites, so depriving India of the most tangible proof of its vaunted antiquity. Conversely, India inherited most of the subcontinent’s finest Islamic architecture, so depriving Muslim Pakistanis of what they regard as their own glorious heritage. No tussle over the word ‘India’ is reported because Jinnah preferred the newly coined and very Islamic-sounding acronym that is ‘Pakistan’ (see p. 496). Additionally, he was under the impression that neither state would want to adopt the British title of ‘India’. He only discovered his mistake after Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy, had already acceded to Nehru’s demand that his state remain ‘India’. Jinnah, according to Mountbatten, ‘was absolutely furious when he found out that they [Nehru and the Congress Party] were going to call themselves India’.1 The use of the word implied a subcontinental primacy which Pakistan would never accept. It also flew in the face of history, since ‘India’ originally referred exclusively to territory in the vicinity of the Indus river (with which the word is cognate). Hence it was largely outside the republic of India but largely within Pakistan.
The reservations about the word ‘India’, which had convinced Jinnah that neither side would use it, stemmed from its historical currency amongst outsiders, especially outsiders who had designs on the place. Something similar could, of course, be said about terms like ‘Britain’, ‘Germany’ or ‘America’; when first these words were recorded, all were objects of conquest. But in the case of ‘India’ this demeaning connotation had lasted until modern times. ‘Hindustan’, ‘India’ or ‘the Indies’ (its more generalised derivative) had come, as if by definition, to denote an acquisition rather than a territory. Geographically imprecise, indeed moveable if one took account of all the ‘Indians’ in the Americas, ‘India’ was yet conceptually concrete: it was somewhere to be coveted – as an intellectual curiosity, a military pushover and an economic bonanza. To Alexander the Great as to Mahmud of Ghazni, to Timur the Lame as to his Mughal descendants, and to Nadir Shah of Persia as to Robert Clive of Plassey, ‘India’ was a place worth the taking.
The first occurrence of the word sets the trend. It makes its debut in an inscription found at Persepolis in Iran, which was the capital of the Persian or Achaemenid empire of Darius I, he whose far-flung battles included defeat at Marathon by the Athenians in 490 BC. Before this, Darius had evidently enjoyed greater success on his eastern frontier, for the Persepolis inscription, dated to C518 BC, lists amongst his numerous domains that of ‘Hi(n)du’.
The word for a ‘river’ in Sanskrit is sindhu. Hence sapta-sindhu meant ‘[the land of] the seven rivers’, which was what the Vedic arya called the Panjab. The Indus, to which most of these seven rivers were tributary, was the sindhu par excellence; and in the language of ancient Persian, a near relative of Sanskrit, the initial ‘s’ of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as an aspirate – ‘h’. Soma, the mysterious hallucinogen distilled, deified and drunk to excess by the Vedic arya, is thus homa or haoma in old Persian; and sindhu is thus Hind[h]u. When, from