The Penguin History of the World

Strictly speaking, ‘Aryan’ is a linguistic term, like ‘Indo-European’. None the less, it has customarily and conveniently been used to identify one group of those peoples whose movements make up so much of the dynamic of ancient history in other parts of the Old World after 2000 BC. At about the time when other Indo-Europeans were flowing into Iran, somewhere about 1750 BC, a great influx began to enter India from the Hindu Kush. This was the beginning of centuries during which waves of these migrants washed deeper and deeper into the Indus valley and the Punjab and eventually reached the upper Ganges. They did not obliterate the native peoples, though the Indus valley civilization crumbled. No doubt much violence marked their coming, for the Aryans were warriors and nomads, armed with bronze weapons, bringing horses and chariots, but they settled and there are plenty of signs that the native populations lived on with them, keeping their own beliefs and practices alive. There is much archaeological evidence of the fusion of Harappan with later ways. However qualified, this was an early example of the assimilation of cultures which was always to characterize Indian society and was eventually to underlie classical Hinduism’s remarkable digestive power.

It seems clear that the Aryans brought to India no culture so advanced as that of the Harappans. It is a little like the story of the coming of Indo-Europeans in the Aegean. Writing, for example, disappears and does not emerge again until the middle of the first millennium BC; cities, too, have to be reinvented and when they are again to be found they lack the elaboration and order of their Indus valley predecessors. Instead, the Aryans appear slowly to have given up their pastoral habits and settled into agricultural life, spreading east and south from their original settlement areas in a sprawl of villages. This took centuries. Not until the coming of iron was it complete and the Ganges valley colonized; iron implements made cultivation easier. Meanwhile, together with this physical opening up of the northern plains, the invaders had made two decisive contributions to Indian history, in its religious and in its social institutions.

The Aryans laid the foundations of the religion which has been the heart of Indian civilization. This centred on sacrificial concepts; through sacrifice the process of creation which the gods achieved at the beginning of time was to be endlessly repeated. Agni, the god of fire, was very important, because it was through his sacrificial flames that men could reach the gods. Great importance and standing was given to the brahmans, the priests who presided over these ceremonies. There was a pantheon of gods of whom two of the most important were Varuna, god of the heavens, controller of natural order and the embodiment of justice, and Indra, the warrior god who, year after year, slew a dragon and thus released again the heavenly waters which came with the breaking of the monsoon. We learn about them from the Rig Veda, a collection of more than a thousand hymns performed during sacrifice, collected for the first time in about 1000 BC but certainly accumulated over centuries. It is one of our most important sources for the history not only of Indian religion but also of Aryan society.

The Rig Veda seems to reflect an Aryan culture as it has been shaped by settlement in India and not as it had existed at earlier times or in its original form. It is, like Homer, the eventual written form of a body of oral tradition, but quite different in being much less difficult to use as a historical source, since its status is much more certain. Its sanctity made its memorization in exact form essential, and though the Rig Veda was not to be written down until after AD 1300, it was then almost certainly largely uncorrupted from its original form. Together with later Vedic hymns and prose works, it is our best source for Aryan India, whose archaeology is cramped for a long time because building materials less durable than the brick of the Indus valley cities were used in its towns and temples.

There is a suggestion again of the world of Homer in the world revealed by the Rig Veda, which is one of Bronze Age barbarians. Some archaeologists now believe they can identify in the hymns references to the destruction of the Harappan cities. Iron is not mentioned and appears only to have come to India after 1000 BC (there is argument about how late and from what source). The setting of the hymns is a land which stretches from the western banks of the Indus to the Ganges, inhabited by Aryan peoples and dark-skinned native inhabitants. These formed societies whose fundamental units were families and tribes. What these left behind, though, was less enduring than the pattern of Aryan social organization which gradually emerged, to which the Portuguese later gave the name we use, ‘caste’.