History of India/Volume 1/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
ANCIENT INDIA AND THE RIG-VEDA
THE history of Ancient India is a history of thirty centuries of human culture and progress. It divides itself into several distinct periods, each of which, for length of years, will compare with the entire history of many a modern people.
The earliest date claimed by modern scholars for its oldest literary monument, the Rig-Veda, is about 2000 B. c. Even at that remote age, Hindu civilization must have been hundreds or thousands of years old, and from that time the literary works of successive periods form a continuous picture of the culture and the history of India for three thousand years, so full, so clear, that he who runs may read. The oldest records were not written on parchment or inscribed on stone; they were written in the faithful memory of the people, who handed down the precious heritage from century to century with a scrupulous exactitude that would be considered, in modern days, a miracle.
Scholars who have studied the Vedic hymns historically are aware that the materials they afford for constructing a history of civilization are fuller and truer than any accounts which could have been recorded on stone or papyrus. And those who have pursued Hindu literature through the different periods of ancient Hindu history are equally aware that they form a complete and comprehensive story of the progress and gradual modifications of Hindu civilization, thought, and religion through three thousand years. The philosophical historian of human civilization need not be a Hindu to think that the Hindus have preserved the fullest, the clearest, and the truest materials for his work.
We wish not to be misunderstood. We have made the foregoing remarks simply with a view to remove the very common and very erroneous impression that Ancient India has no history worth studying, no connected and reliable chronicle of the past which would be interesting or instructive to the modern reader.
Ancient India has a connected story to tell, and so far from being uninteresting, its special feature is its intense attractiveness. We read in that ancient story how a gifted Aryan people, separated by circumstances from the outside world, worked out their civilization under natural and climatic conditions which were peculiarly favourable. We note their intellectual discoveries age after age; we watch their religious progress and development through successive centuries; we mark their political career, as they gradually expand over India and found new kingdoms and dynasties; we observe their struggles against priestly domination, their successes and their failures; we study with interest their great social and religious revolutions and their far-reaching consequences. And this great story of a nation's intellectual life is nowhere broken and nowhere disconnected. The great causes which led to great social and religious changes are manifest to the reader, and he follows the gradual development of ancient Hindu civilization through thirty centuries, from 2000 B.C. to one thousand years after Christ.
The story of India's success is not more instructive than the story of her failure. The hymns of Visvamitra, the philosophy of Kapila, and the poetry of Kalidasa have no higher lessons for the modern reader than the decadence of her political life and the ascendency of priests. The story of the religious rising of the people under the leadership of Gautama Buddha and Asoka is not more instructive than the absence of any efforts after popular freedom. And the great heights to which the genius of Brahmans and Kshatriyas soared are not more suggestive and not more instructive than the absence of genius in the people at large in their ordinary pursuits and trades in mechanical inventions and maritime discoveries, in sculpture, architecture, and arts, in manifestations of popular life and the assertion of popular power.
The history of the intellectual and religious life of the ancient Hindus is matchless in its continuity, its fulness, and its philosophical truth. But the historian who paints only the current of that intellectual life performs but half his duty. There is another and a sadder portion of Hindu history, and it is necessary that this portion of the story, too, should be faithfully told.
We have said before that the history of Ancient India divides itself into several distinct and long periods or eras, marked by great historical events. We shall begin with the earliest period of India's history, that of Aryan settlements in the Panjab. The hymns of the Rig-Veda furnish us with the materials for a history of this period, which we may call the Vedic, and which we may approximately date from 2000 to 1400 B.C., or later according to some authorities.
In this priceless volume, the Rig-Veda, we find the Hindu Aryans as conquerors and settlers on the banks of the Indus and its five branches; and India beyond the Sutlaj was almost unknown to them. They were a conquering race, full of the self-assertion and vigour of a young national life, with a strong love of action and a capacity for active enjoyments. They were, in this respect, far removed from the contemplative and passive Hindus of later days; they rejoiced in wealth and cattle and pasture-fields; and, with their strong right arm, they won by force new possessions and realms from the aborigines of the soil, who vainly struggled to maintain their own against the invincible conquerors. Thus the period was one of wars and conflicts with the aborigines; and the Aryan victors triumphantly boast of their victories in their hymns, and implore their gods to bestow on them wealth and new possessions and to destroy the barbarians.
It is needless to say that the entire body of Aryans was then a united community, and the only distinction of caste was between the Aryans and the aborigines. Even the distinction between professions was not very marked; and the sturdy lord of many acres, who ploughed his fields and owned large herds in times of peace, went out to defend his village or to plunder the aborigines in times of war, and often composed spirited hymns to the martial gods in his hours of devotion. There were no temples and no idols; each patriarch of a family lighted the sacrificial fire on his own hearth, and offered milk and rice offerings, or animals, or libations of the Soma juice to the fire, and invoked the "bright" gods for blessings and health and wealth for himself and his children. Chiefs of tribes were kings and had professional priests to perform sacrifices and utter hymns for them; but there was no priestly caste and no royal caste. The people were free, enjoying the freedom which belongs to vigorous pastoral and agricultural tribes.