The Penguin History of the World

Yet Indian history has a unity in the fact of its enormous power to absorb and transform forces playing on it from the outside. This provides a thread to guide us through the patchy and uncertain illumination of its early stages which is provided by archaeology and texts long transmitted only by word of mouth. Its basis is to be found in another fact: India’s large measure of insulation from the outside world by geography. In spite of her size and variety, until the oceans began to be opened up in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD India had only to grapple with occasional, though often irresistible, incursions by alien peoples. To the north and north-west she was protected by some of the highest mountains in the world; to the east lay belts of jungle. The lower two sides of the subcontinent’s great triangle opened out into the huge expanses of the Indian Ocean. This natural definition not only channelled and restricted communication with the outside world; it also gave India a distinctive climate. Much of India does not lie in the tropics, but none the less that climate is tropical. The mountains keep away the icy winds of Central Asia; the long coasts open themselves to the rain-laden clouds which roll in from the oceans and cannot go beyond the northern ranges. The climatic clock is the annual monsoon, bringing the rain during the hottest months of the year. It is still the central prop of the agricultural economy.

Protected in some measure from external forces though she has always been before modern times, India’s north-western frontier is more open than her others to the outside world. Baluchistan and the frontier passes were the most important zones of encounter between India and other peoples right down to the seventeenth century AD; in civilized times even India’s contacts with China were first made by this roundabout route (though it is not quite as roundabout as Mercator’s familiar projection makes it appear). At times, this north-western region has fallen directly under foreign sway, which is suggestive when we consider the first Indian civilizations; we do not know much about the way in which they arose but we know that Sumer and Egypt antedated them. Mesopotamian records of Sargon I of Akkad report contacts with a ‘Meluhha’, which scholars have believed to be the Indus valley, the alluvial plains forming the first natural region encountered by the traveller once he has entered India. It was there, in rich, heavily forested countryside, that the first Indian civilizations appeared at the time when, further west, the great movements of Indo-European peoples were beginning to act as the levers of history. There may have been more than one stimulus at work.

The evidence also shows that agriculture came later to India than to the Middle East. It, too, can first be traced in the subcontinent in its north-west corner. There is archaeological evidence of farming in Baluchistan in about 6000 BC. Three thousand years later, signs of settled life on the alluvial plains and parallels with other river-valley cultures begin to appear. Wheel-thrown pottery and copper implements begin to be found. All the signs are of a gradual build-up in intensity of agricultural settlements until true civilization appears as it did in Egypt and Sumer. But there is the possibility of direct Mesopotamian influence in the background and, finally, there is at least a reasonable inference that already India’s future was being shaped by the coming of new peoples from the north. At a very early date the complex racial composition of India’s population suggests this, though it would be rash to be assertive about it.

When at last indisputable evidence of civilized life is available, the change is startling. One scholar speaks of a cultural ‘explosion’. There may have been one crucial technological step, the invention of burnt brick (as opposed to the sun-baked mud brick of Mesopotamia) which made flood control possible in a flat river plain lacking natural stone. Whatever the process, the outcome was a remarkable civilization which stretched over more than a quarter of a million square miles of the Indus valley, an area greater than either the Sumerian or Egyptian.

Some have called Indus civilization ‘Harappan’, because one of its great sites is the city of Harappa on a tributary of the Indus. There is another such site at Mohenjo-Daro; three others are known. Together they reveal human beings highly organized and capable of carefully regulated collective works on a scale equalling those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. There were large granaries in the cities, and weights and measures seem to have been standardized over a large area. It is clear that a well-developed culture was established by 2600 BC and lasted for something like 600 years with very little change, before declining in the second millennium BC.