India

History > The development of Indian civilization from c. 1500 BC to c. AD 1200 > C. 1500–c. 500 BC > Early Vedic Period

In addition to the archaeological legacy discussed above, there remains from this period the earliest literary record of Indian culture, the Vedas. Composed in archaic, or Vedic, Sanskrit, generally dated between 1500 and 800 BC, and transmitted orally, the Vedas comprise four major texts—the Rig- (Rg-), Sama-, Yajur-, and Atharvavedas. Of these, the Rigveda is believed to be the earliest. The texts consist of hymns, charms, spells, and ritual observations current among the Indo-European-speaking people known as Aryans (from the Sanskrit arya, “noble”), who entered India from the Iranian regions.

Theories concerning the origins of the Aryans, whose language is also called Aryan, relate to the question of what has been called the Indo-European homeland. In the 17th and 18th centuries AD, European scholars who first studied Sanskrit were struck by the similarity in its syntax and vocabulary to Greek and Latin. This resulted in the theory that there had been a common ancestry for these and other related languages, which came to be called the Indo-European group of languages. This, in turn, resulted in the notion that the Indo-European-speaking people had had a common homeland from which they had migrated to various parts of Asia and Europe. The theory stirred unlimited speculation, which continues today, regarding the original homeland and the date of the dispersal from it. The study of Vedic India is still beset by “the Aryan problem,” which often clouds the genuine search for historical insight into this period.

That there was a migration of Indo-European speakers, possibly in waves, dating from the 2nd millennium BC, is clear from archaeological and epigraphic evidence in western Asia. Mesopotamia witnessed the arrival, in about 1760 BC, of the Kassites, who introduced the horse and the chariot and bore Indo-European names. A treaty from about 1400 BC between the Hittites, who had arrived in Anatolia at about the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, and the Mitanni empire invoked four deities—Indara, Uruvna, Mitira, and the Nasatyas (names that occur in the Rigveda as Indra, Varuna, Mitra, and the Asvins). An inscription at BoYazköy in Anatolia of about the same date contains Indo-European technical terms pertaining to the training of horses, which suggests cultural origins in Central Asia or the southern Russian steppes. Clay tablets dating to about 1400 BC, written at Tell El-Amarna in Akkadian cuneiform, mention names of princes that are also Indo-European.

Nearer India, the Iranian Plateau was subject to a similar migration. Comparison of Iranian Aryan literature with the Vedas reveals striking correspondences. Possibly a branch of the Iranian Aryans migrated to northern India and settled in the Sapta Sindhu region, extending from the Kabul River in the north to the Sarasvati and Upper Ganges-Yamuna Doab in the south. The Sarasvati, the sacred river at the time, is thought to have dried up during the later Vedic Period. Conceived as a goddess, it was personified in later Hinduism as the inventor of spoken and written Sanskrit and the consort of Brahma, promulgator of the Vedas. It was in the Sapta Sindhu region that the majority of the hymns of the Rigveda were composed.

The Rigveda is divided into 10 mandalas (books), of which the 10th is believed to be somewhat later than the others. Each mandala consists of a number of hymns, and most mandalas are ascribed to priestly families. The texts include invocations to the gods, ritual hymns, battle hymns, and narrative dialogues. The 9th mandala is a collection of all the hymns dedicated to soma, the unidentified hallucinogenic juice that was drunk on ritual occasions.

Few events of political importance are related in the hymns. Perhaps the most impressive is a description of the battle of the 10 chiefs or kings: when Sudas, the king of the preeminent Bharatas of southern Punjab, replaced his priest Visvamitra with Vasistha, Visvamitra organized a confederacy of 10 tribes, including the Puru, Yadu, Turvasas, Anu, and Druhyu, which went to war against Sudas. The Bharatas survived and continued to play an important role in historical tradition. In the Rigveda, the head of a clan is called the raja; this term has commonly been translated as “king,” but recent scholarship suggests “chief” as more appropriate in this early context. If such a distinction is recognized, the entire corpus of Vedic literature can be interpreted as recording the gradual evolution of the concept of kingship from earlier clan organization. Among the clans there is little distinction between Aryan and non-Aryan, but the hymns refer to a people, called the dasas, who are said to have had an alien language and a dark complexion and to worship strange gods. Some dasas were rich in cattle and lived in fortified places (pur) that were often attacked by the god Indra. In addition to the dasas, there were the wealthy Panis, who were hostile and stole cattle.

The Early Vedic was the period of transition from nomadic pastoralism to settled village communities intermixing pastoral and agrarian economies. Cattle were initially the dominant commodity, as indicated by the use of the word gotra (“cowpen”) to signify the endogamous kinship group and gavisti (“searching for cows”) to denote war. A patriarchal extended family structure gave rise to the practice of niyoga (“levirate”), which permitted a widow to marry her husband's brother. A community of families constituted a grama. The term vis is generally interpreted to mean “clan.” Clan assemblies appear to have been frequent in the early stages. Various categories of assemblies are mentioned, such as vidatha, samiti, and sabha, although the precise distinctions among these categories are not clear. The clan also gathered for the yajña, the Vedic sacrifice conducted by the priest, whose ritual actions ensured prosperity and imbued the chief with valour. The chief was primarily a war leader with responsibility for protecting the clan, for which function he received a bali (“tribute”). Punishment was exacted according to a principle resembling the wergild (“man payment”) of ancient Germanic law, whereby the social rank of a wronged or slain man determined the compensation due him or his survivors.