ANCIENT INDIA IN A NEW LIGHT
ANCIENT INDIA
IN
A NEW LIGHT
I.The Challenge of India's Traditional Chronology
II.The Momentous Evidence of Megasthenes
III.A Reconstruction of Ancient Indian History:
Aśoka - and Before and After
K. D. SETHNA
ADITYA PRAKASHAN
NEW DELHI
First Published: 1989
© K. D. Sethna (1904-)
Rs. 500.00
ISBN: 81-85179-12-3
Published by Rakesh Goel for Aditya Prakashan,
4829/1, Prahlad Lane, 24 Ansari Road, New Delhi
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry - 605 002
PRINTED IN INDIA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much against his own wish, I acknowledge my happy debt to Shri Sita Ram Goel - keen student of Indian Culture, enterprising publisher and generous friend - for considering my unconventional book of historical research "valuable".
I owe a great deal to several modern historians whose writings have provided me with reliable information and with plausible theories which I have used either as starting-points to go still further in the same direction or else as provocations to strike out new pathways which in my opinion would go better with the data supplied. My debt to these writings on which I have often drawn is acknowledged by footnote-references to the books concerned and by the bibliographical list at the end of the wide-ranging, many-themed yet hopefully unconfusing and unified thesis that has been attempted in the present work.
K. D. Sethna
History is often thought to be a straight narration of ascertained facts, in which all historians are at one about dates as well as events. In reality it is far otherwise, especially where ancient times are concerned.
There are many differences, occasionally quite serious, about dates no less than events, and ascertained facts are frequently interwoven with a good deal of convenient interpretation, not a little of preconceived theory and some pragmatic blurring of a situation's complexity. Simply because a particular picture has been accepted for long and subscribed to by many historians we should not fear to suggest major alterations or even a complete reversal.
But we must appreciate the patient extensive research and the constant move to integrate a multiplicity of details, that distinguish history as it has been written by scholars like (to mention a few Indians) H. C. Raychaudhuri, R. C. Majumdar, D. R. Bhandarkar, K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, A. D. Pusalker, R. K. Mookerji, A. S. Altekar, D. C. Sircar, A. K. Narain and Romila Thapar. Whenever we disagree with any of them we must do so not without the same admirable method of analysis and synthesis which they bring to both their concurrences and their divergences among themselves.
In the field of history, disagreement, even among those who have a large measure of common belief, is nothing unusual. The identity of Aśoka's "Alikasudara" is still being debated: was he Alexander of Epirus or his namesake of Corinth? Another living issue is the identity of "Chandra" of the celebrated Meherauli Iron Pillar: three or four candidates have been put up. Opinion is also divided on the date of Kanishka I, rather widely: 78, 128 and 144 A.D.1 - unless one agrees with Dr. H. Haertel's recent pronouncement that the coins of this Kushāna king occur at Sankh in a stratum definitely datable to the 1st century A.D. Then there is the problem: "Was there a Vikramāditya of Ujjayinī who is associated with the Era of 57 B.C.?" Allied with it is the question whether Kalidasa wrote at his court in the 1st century B.C. or at
1. The Classical Age, edited by R. c. Majumdar and a. D. Pusalker (Bhāratiya Vidyā Bhavan, Bombay, 1954), p. 50.
the end of the 4th century A.D. where Chandragupta II of the Imperial Guptas, who bore the title Vikramāditya, is at present made to stand? While the latter dating is generally preferred, R. C. Majumdar1 honestly confesses: "...we must admit that the evidence adduced in support of it is neither definite, nor direct and decisive. The safest course is to hold that Kālidāsa flourished some time between 100 B.C. and A.D. 450" - A.D. 450 being the lower limit suggested by some verses of a Mandasor inscription currently dated to A.D. 473, which in the opinion of competent scholars seem to indicate knowledge of his works.2 Again, when did the Bhārata War take place? Long ago F. E. Pargiter suggested 950 B.C. by means of calculations drawn from the Purānas as he chose to interpret them against the background of the modern historical vision and with a determined cutting down of the average reign-length to a bare 18 years. Pusalker,3 basing himself on a more orthodox view of the Purānas and yet holding fast to that vision for the periods immediately before and after the invasion of India by Alexander the Great, deduced c. 1400 B.C. for the same event, an epoch which Altekar4 too proposed.
These different dates involve a split on some fundamental matters. 950 B.C. could be in consonance with the current view that there was an invasion of Dravidian India by Rigvedic Aryans at about 1500 B.C. But 1400 B.C. for the Bhārata War must rule out an invasion in this period and perhaps any traceable invasion: Pusalker5 regards the Rigvedic Aryans as autochthonous in India. And if they were autochthonous or at least practically so by their remote antiquity, what is their relation to the Harappā Culture, more popularly known as the Indus Valley Civilization, which is mostly envisaged as having preceded them? They cannot be contemporaneous with it, for the Indus Valley is their habitat too. Evidently they must be anterior. Chronology is thus very much in the melting-pot.
Nor can any reason be given why it should not be so. For one
1."Literature", ibid., p. 303.
2.Ibid.
3.Studies in the Epics and Purānas of India (Bhavan's Book University, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay, 1955), pp. 76-79.
4.Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, III, pp. 66-67.
5.Bhāratiya Vidyā (Bombay, January-June 1950), p. 115.
thing, as late as 1966 G. F. Dales,1 a prominent name in field-work, could confess: "...no one has any exact knowledge of the date when the Aryans first entered the Indus Valley area; they have not yet been identified archaeologically." We should add that their entry is not attested by any document, either. In the second place, chronology in general has changed, every now and then, even in major respects. In 1931, when Sir John Marshall wrote about Mohenjo-dāro and Harappā, the culture of these cities had for its lower limit c. 2500 B.C.; by 1950 this limit fell to c. 15(H) B.C. From 1964 onward, 1750 B.C. has often been favoured for it. As for the upper limit the majority view today is for c. 2300 B.C., but Sir Mortimer Wheeler would like to start at 2500 B.C., if not even earlier. The leading Indian archaeologist H. D. Sankalia concurs with Wheeler and reverts to the lower limit 1500 B.C. And the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization, whatever its exact time-bracket, has carried the antiquity of Indian history substantially upward. Later archaeology has penetrated still further beyond this civilization to one developed enough to have a sense of town-planning, build with moulded and kiln-baked bricks and make a distinctive pottery. M. R. Mughal has found in Cholistan (former, Bahawalpur State) the "Hakra Assemblage or Complex" dating back to c. 3500 B.C. Hence there is ample room for a pre-Harappān Rigvedic Culture. And if, as Pusalker and a few others contend, the Indus Valley Civilization was posterior and not anterior to the Rigveda, we may have on our hands a revolution changing much more than the mere relative ages of the two. So great an antiquity for the Rigveda may demand a shifting upward of several post-Rigvedic occurrences, including the Bhārata War if that conflict has been put anywhere close to Pargiter's date. Then we should have to question whether a number of historical events which we have thus far felt secure in dating within the 6 centuries before Christ - the death of Buddha, the advent of the Maurya dynasty, the Rock Edicts of Aśoka - are not to be chronologically reconsidered.
Here archaeology may lift up its spade in dire warning. We may be admonished: "The Aryans may not yet have been identified archaeologically. But do not the archaeologists have solid grounds to stand on for certain issues with radical historical relevance?" We should reply: "Even the conclusions of archaeology at any
1. The Scientific American (New York), May 1996, p. 95.
time are not always final and field-workers are often at variance with one another." Thus B. B. Lal,1 excavating several sites which are mentioned in the Mahābhārata, believed he had struck upon the Hastināpura of the Kurus and that the date of the Bhārata War was a little before 890 B.C. He went by some stratigraphical estimates and by the datable presence of Painted Grey Ware as well as by some Purānic genealogical sequences. But he was criticised not only by a historian like Sircar2 who wrote to me: "No archaeological discovery has thrown any light on the date of the Mahābhārata War... I consider the dating of the strata laid open by the Hastināpura excavation... as arbitrary and influenced by Pargiter's theory." Lai met with criticism from fellow-archaeologists too. D. H. Gordon3 considerably cut down his estimates for the breaks between the several "Periods". Perhaps the most pointed attack hailed from the archaeologist K. M. Sastri4 who subjected to devastating analysis both the stratigraphical estimates and the Purānic calculations Lai had made. He actually created a serious doubt whether the excavated site was at all the Hastināpura of the Kurus.
To take another example from India herself: Wheeler5 locates on the top layer many of the violently marked skeletons of Mohenjodāro, while Lal6 declares that "the skeletons do not all belong to one and the same occupational level" and that he is uncertain whether the top layer is anywhere involved.
As an example of a total archaeological change of mind, we may glance at the excavations of ancient Jericho, the first of the Palestinian towns said to have been conquered by the Israelites of the Exodus from Egypt in the course of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1500-1200 B.C.). Up to 1952 the debate about the two rows of concentric walls thought to have belonged to the time of the Exodus was between the followers of John Garstang and those of
1.Ancient India, Bulletin of the Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, Nos. 10 and 11, 1954-55, pp. 5-151.
2.Letters dated 23.4.1956 and 13.8.1957.
3.The Prehistoric Background of Indian Culture (Tripathi, Bombay. 1957). pp. 166-68.
4.New Light on the Indus Civilization (Atma Ram & Sons, Delhi. 1957), pp. 110, 112.
5.The Indus Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 129-31.
6."The Indus Civilization", The Cultural History of India, edited by A. L. Basham (Clarendon Press. Oxford, 1975), p. 19.
Father Hugues Vincent. The former opted for c. 1400 B.C., the latter for 1250-1200. Then Kathleen Kenyon1 came along and demonstrated that the double ramparts they had been talking about were not contemporaneous and that both of them were really under a massive scarp of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 2100-1500 B.C.) and belonged to different phases of the Early Bronze Age (c. 3000-2 100 B.C.) . Nothing of the late Bronze Age remained for Miss Ken yon except a few square feet of floor with an oven and a juglet.2 She tentatively gave them the date c. 1350-1300.3 Broadly speaking, she referred them to the 14th century .4 But W. F. Albright,5 another eminent archaeologist of Biblical sites . finding her out of tune with his own chronology of the Exodus, commented: "The problem of Jericho has become more obscure since Miss Kenyon's work , which showed that the Late Bronze Age was almost completely denuded by wind and rain" and, facing all the finds, he6 saw no reason to give up speaking in general of Palestine as having undergone " the invasion o f the Israelites in the thirteenth century". A link with Fat her Vincent is sought to be forged in spite of Miss Ken yon .
With so many things liable to be changed or challenged, it is hardly illegitimate to look for signs and clues for a reconsideration of ancient history. There is also a factor serving very strongly in our favour independently of the confrontation between the Rigveda and the Indus Valley Civilization. This factor is the traditional chronology of India herself drawn mainly from the pundits of the Purānas. That chronology, beginning as it does with 3138 B.C. as the year of the Bharata War and proceeding by the Purānas dynasty-tables, is absolutely in disagreement with the modern. Naturally it is dismissed in summary fashion by the majority of our historians, and we need not be too much surprised at their attitude. What else can we expect when the Purānic computations would have the Mauryas commence in the sixteenth century B.C. instead of the fourth as modern historians do? To put Chandragupta Maurya so far in time and Aśoka's Rock Edicts about half a
1.Digging up Jericho (Ernest Benn Ltd., London, 1957). pp. 44-46.
2.Ibid., p. 271
3.Ibid., pp. 261, 262.
4.Ibid., pp. 210-11, 261.
5.The Archaeology of Palestine (A Pelican Book, Harmondsworth, 1961), p. 108.
6.Ibid., p. 109.
century later is bound to strike a note of fatuity. But one has no right to go by first impressions and, though one may reject several items of the Purānic time-scheme, one is not entitled either to condemn its overall vision straight away or to style one's own dating infallible.
We may remember that even modern historians borrow the reign-lengths of Chandragupta Maurya, his son Bindusara and his grandson Aśoka from the Purānas or from the Ceylonese Chronicles. As the Chronicles are themselves rated as rather unrealistic for events beyond the second century before Christ and as the two sources do not differ much about the reign-lengths concerned, we may affirm that modern historians accept something of ancient indigenous evidence for the Mauryas. And when we come to the post-Mauryan dynasties - the Sungas, the Kānvas, the Āndhra Sātavāhanas - modern historians are in accord with the Purānas in numerous respects in regard not only to the king-names but also to the lengths of individual reigns, the duration of dynasties and the sequence both of the kings and their lines. When so much sense of historical time is manifested, can we discard as totally fictitious all the epochs to which Indian chronology assigns the several ruling houses?
To some extent the high-handedness of our historians towards the Purānic cause is due, on the one side, to the blind chauvinism exhibited by most of the champions of that cause, the uncritical mind they frequently bring to their task, the persistence with which they often lean on reeds,1 the absurd suspicion they occasionally entertain about the motives of their opponents - and, on the other side, to the conviction these opponents have with equal absurdity that the ancient Indians were capable of egregious historical error in every important matter and that the traditional chronology has at no point any support from non-Indian records, accounts left by foreigners Western or Eastern, and that certain Indian epigraphs provide a definite contradiction of it.
The present book may broadly serve as a sequel to the author's
1. A glaring instance is the continued reliance by Purānic enthusiasts on the Kaliyugarāja-vrittantā which is claimed to be a section of the Bhavishyottara Purāna. It has to be severely left alone. R. C. Majumdar (The Indian Historical Quarterly, XX, pp. 345-50), Jagan Nath (The Journal of the Bihar Research Society. XXXI, pp. 1 ff), D. C. Sircar (The Journal of the Numismatic Society of India, IV, pp. 34-35) and others have shown it to be a spurious source, a modern forgery.
two preceding historical publications which attempted on several lines to date the Rigveda earlier than the Harappā Culture.1 The sequel tries to approach without prejudice its own central issues. It is planned in three parts. Part One is basic. It lays out the traditional-Purānic scheme of Indian history and focuses on a crucial problem in India of the 4th century B.C. for which the Purānically derived answer opposes the current solution very, impressively. It goes on to drive the modern chronologist into a corner from which there seems to be no logical escape. Then some notions seeking to bypass the predicament are shown up to be quite mistaken. Part Two aims at setting forth, in considerable detail, supporting evidence from old Western records which mostly derive from the Indica of Megasthenes and bear upon the state of affairs in India in approximately 326-300 B.C. - upon the posture of the Indian historical mind looking back and around in that period as well as upon the shifting drama of history in our land during the quarter century or so in the wake of the invasion of the country by Alexander the Great. The main questions of readjustment raised by a radical change of perspective here are also taken up. But some of these questions extend into the succeeding century. So the period c. 300-230 B.C. too comes into the picture. Part Three, comprising two sections, is occupied in great detail with the events and announcements credited to this period. No doubt, much else remains to be discussed, but a large working foundation of some solidity has been essayed for a new historical structure.
The case for a fresh perspective in the post-Alexandrine epoch is argued in a positive tone which may create the impression in some places that the writer has no misgiving at all about any element of his thesis. As said at the very start of this Introduction, no historian can afford to be cocksure: he must always keep his mind plastic. But he is allowed to state as forcibly as he can whatever he believes to be worthy of audience - all the more if he is pleading on behalf of something that has seemed a lost cause. The present writer has no wish to appear in the eyes of historians a convinced heretic. He is prepared for criticism, open to correction and agreeable to further dialogue. What he has not bargained for is
1. The Problem of Aryan Origins (S. & S. Publishers, Calcutta. 1980). Karpāsa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue, with an introduction by H. D. Sankalia (Biblia Impex Pvt. Ltd., Delhi, 1981).
indifference. His hope is to deserve, by setting about his job as honestly and thoroughly as possible, the right of the Themistoc-lean appeal: "Strike, but hear!"
Especially on one particular point he would like a hearing. His whole elaborate pleading is meant to contribute to the establishment of it. The various approaches and the diverse details serve to form the background, the antecedents, the supporting environment, the consistent consequences for what, in regard to the theory in vogue, is basically an operation of the engineer being hoist with his own petard. A central self-contradiction is sought to be shown in the very process of the fundamental censure to which modern historians subject the traditional-Purānic chronology. The self-contradiction does not necessarily give a carte blanche to the chronologist going by the Indian tradition and the outlook of the Purānas. Several of their deliverances he might do well to question. For, nowhere else in the old chronology occurs exactly the same situation of self-evidence in its dictum. The utter wrong-headedness of the current historical view can be proved by sheer reasoning, without the need of any documentary or archaeological prop, at only one point: the substitution of Chandragupta I, founder of the Imperial Guptas, in place of Chandragupta Maurya in the time of Alexander and the years immediately following his invasion. There, as a section in Part One will dare to demonstrate, the modern time-scheme can be reduced to absurdity and its proponents caught in an unescapable predicament.
25 November, 1985 K. D. SETHNA
