Because of the difficulty in assigning an exact chronology to the sources [i.e. the epics] it is impossible to be precise or dogmatic as to when particular changes took place … Consequently the major significance of these sources lies more in their indication of the nature of the trend of change which they delineate rather than in the precise dating of the change.5
The historicity of a hero demands that his place and dates be established; no such figure graces Indian history until the Buddha illumines the scene after 500 BC. But ‘the nature of a trend of change’ can reasonably be assigned to an entire river basin and a timespan of centuries.
The ‘trends’ which emerge from such studies are numerous and important though seldom explicit. For instance, central to both of the great epics is the question of succession. The Pandava heroes of the Mahabharata (Yudhisthira, Bhima, Arjuna, Draupadi, etc.), like their counterparts in the Ramayana (Rama, Sita and Lakshmana), are initially denied ‘kingdoms’ which would seem to be theirs by birthright and are forced into exile. Primogeniture evidently influenced succession and there are hints about the divine sanction of kingship; both of these ideas would become cardinal features of later monarchies. Yet Puranic references can be highly ambiguous about kingship as an institution, although one should not perhaps read too much in its oft-repeated adage: ‘As bad as ten slaughter houses is one oil-presser’s wheel, as bad as ten oil-pressers’ wheels is one inn sign, as bad as ten inn signs is a harlot, and as bad as ten harlots is a king.’6
But it is also clear that society at the time, though now settled and familiar with agriculture, was still clan-based. Kingship was subordinate to kinship and probably amounted to no more than chieftainship-among-equals. Succession by primogeniture was thus heavily qualified; much depended on the physical and moral perfection of the candidate, on the approval of his peers, and on his successful avoidance of fortuitous mishaps and curses. Ideas of a kingship which transcended clan affiliation and of automatic succession by right of birth, though obviously important to those who reworked the original stories, would only become the norm towards the middle of the millennium and then only among certain tribes.
As for the retreat into exile, the other central theme in both epics, this is taken to indicate the process by which clan society resolved its conflicts and at the same time encroached ever deeper into the subcontinent. Eventually population pressures on land and other resources would encourage greater social specialisation and the assertion of a central authority, two of the prerequisites of a state. But during the first centuries of the first millennium BC, these same pressures seem merely to have encouraged a traditional solution whereby clans segmented and split away to explore new territories.
Exile meant withdrawing from settled society not into the desert (which even renunciates seem to have shunned) but into the aranya, the forest. Here life was challenging though full of possibilities; numerous venerable sages and barely-clad nymphs could even make it idyllic. Something of the later antithesis between the safely settled, caste-based society of the village and the dangerously peripatetic and egalitarian society associated with the forest is already apparent. But for every agreeable sylvan experience there also lurked amongst the trees a monstrous demon or some other species of hostile primitive. These creatures, even if recognisably human, possessed no houses and subsisted as hunter-gatherers. To exiles who prided themselves on being settled agriculturalists, the nomadic ways and uncouth habits of the forest were anathema. The monsters had therefore to be exterminated, while harmless savages, like the snake-worshipping ‘Nagas’, could be enlisted as allies or tributaries, usually through marriage and through inventing acceptable pedigrees for them. In effect the relationship between the epic heroes and their forest foes mirrored the presumed pattern of Aryan ‘colonisation’ and settlement.
‘The people move from west to east and conquer land,’ says the Satapatha Brahmana. By the time of the Mahabharata they had evidently reached the upper Ganga, for there stood Hastinapura, the story’s disputed capital. Forest exile in this geographical context could only mean that, in their eastward spread, the pioneers of Aryanisation were entering the main Gangetic basin. Decidedly different from today’s dusty chequerboard where tufts of trees survive only as shade for huddled villages, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were then a moist green wilderness of forest and swamp, a tropical taiga of near-Siberian extent. Here, unlike in the drier Panjab, land clearance posed a formidable challenge. The soils were heavier and the jungle thicker; even fire-breathing Agni’s work must have been quickly undone as smoke-blackened stumps burst back into leaf. On the other hand the forest was rich in resources. The exiles invariably used their sojourn in the wilderness to re-arm with a formidable arsenal of new weapons. Though ascribed to divine provenance, these unbreakable swords, bows with unerring arrows, and devastating missiles may more plausibly have been fashioned from the exotic timbers and minerals only to be found in the terra incognita beyond the then confines of the western settlements.
Although copper from Rajasthan had been used by the Harappans, the best-quality deposits lie much further east in what is now southern Bihar. Thence too came iron. Whether its use was first learned from indigenous smiths in peninsular India or whether through trade contacts with west Asia is uncertain. Likewise the revolution it eventually effected. After 500 BC iron axes and probably ploughshares were indeed helping to solve the problem of clearing the land and working heavier soils; but until that time the ‘black metal’ seems to have been reserved almost exclusively for weapons and knives. Access to the new metallurgy may not, then, have eased the settler’s lot, but it could at least have given the exiled Pandavas a military edge – literally – over their enemies. Adopted by the other clans, iron represented a major technological advantage, comparable to the horse-drawn chariots of their arya ancestors and perhaps of more utility in the closer confines of the new environment.
Unfortunately, charting the eastward progress of Sanskritic but still tribal intruders was not germane to the purposes of those who retold the epics for the edification of later generations. Indeed surviving versions of the Mahabharata would have us believe that the Pandavas and their Kaurava rivals were not only far from primitive but that they already monopolised the resources of the subcontinent. When not in exile, they are described as living in pillared pavilions and marble halls, their interiors opulently furnished and their floors so highly polished that visitors hitched up their robes in the belief that across such glimmering expanses they must needs wade. The Kuru ‘kingdom’, centred on Hastinapura, is projected as being of vast extent and untold wealth, its armies feared throughout the subcontinent and its potential allies extending from coast to coast.
Such descriptions served solely to legitimise the grandiose ambitions of later empire-builders. (And if one may judge by the television serialisations of the 1980s, they still serve to underpin conceits about a pan-Indian prehistory of spectacular sophistication.) In reality, though, the core geography of the Mahabharata is limited to a small area of the Ganga-Jamuna Doab which was the maximum extent of Kuru territory. This is self-evident from an early episode in the story when, the territory having been divided, the Pandavas set out to the ends of the ‘kingdom’ to found a new capital. They choose Indraprastra, just sixty kilometres away and still so named – indeed still fortified; its crumbling walls, although not those of the Pandavas, served the British designers of New Delhi as a suitable feature with which to terminate the vista from their own marbled halls of Viceroy’s House (now Rashtrapati Bhawan).
Further detail on the Indo-Aryan drang nach osten may be gleaned from the archaeological evidence for the first half of the first millennium BC. At Hastinapura and other sites that ‘unspeakably crude’ ochre-coloured pottery which is sometimes found with the copper hoards is succeeded by a very superior painted grey ware. ‘PGW’ was evidently produced on a wheel, and was confidently decorated with geometric and floral motifs. It is found principally throughout the Ganga-Jamuna Doab and in adjacent areas of the Panjab, Rajasthan and the western Gangetic valley, a distribution which tallies nicely with the geographical context of the Mahabharata. Often it occurs in quantities which imply a greater population density than previously, and thus ‘it marks an assertive society, richer than its immediate predecessors’.7 It was also a society which, judging by associated finds,