INDIA
A History: From the Earliest Civilisations to the Boom of the Twenty-First Century
JOHN KEAY
COPYRIGHT
HarperPress
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This updated HarperPress edition published 2010
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2000
Published in paperback by Harper Perennial 2004, reprinted 12 times
Copyright © John Keay 2000 and 2010
Maps and tables by Jillian Luff
John Keay asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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DEDICATION
For Tara
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Maps
Charts and Tables
Author’s note to the Second Edition
Introduction
1 The Harappan World: C3000–1700 BC
2 Vedic Values: C1700–900 BC
3 The Epic Age: C900–520 BC
4 Out of the Myth-Smoke: C520–C320 BC
6 An Age of Paradox: C200 BC–C300 AD
7 Gupta Gold: C300–500 AD
8 Lords of the Universe: C500–700
9 Dharma and Defiance: C700–C900
10 Natraj, the Rule of the Dance: C950–1180
11 The Triumph of the Sultans: C1180–1320
12 Other Indias: 1320–1525
13 The Making of the Mughal Empire: 1500–1605
14 Mughal Pomp, Indian Circumstance: 1605–1682
15 From Taj to Raj: 1682–1750
16 The British Conquest: 1750–1820
17 Pax Britannica: 1820–1880
18 Awake the Nation: 1880–1930
19 At the Stroke of the Midnight Hour: 1930–1948
20 Surgical Procedures: 1948–1965
21 The Spectre of Separatism: 1962–1972
22 ‘Demockery’: 1972–1984
23 Midnight’s Grandchildren: 1984–
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Source Notes
Praise
Also by the Author
About the Publisher
MAPS
South Asia – Physical
South Asia Today
The Harappan world C1900 BC
Northern India at the time of the Buddha (C400 BC)
Alexander the Great’s invasion, 327–6 BC
India under Ashoka
The Karakoram route
Peninsular trading stations in the first century AD
Western India C150 AD (with Shatavahana cave-sites)
Gupta conquests
Harsha’s probable empire C640 AD
Chalukyas and Pallavas in the seventh century
India and south-east Asia in the seventh to twelfth centuries
The Arab conquest of Sind in the eighth century
The Kanauj triangle: Rashtrakutas, Palas and Gurjara-Pratiharas
The land of the Shahis C1000 AD
The Ghaznavid empire under Mahmud of Ghazni C1030
The Chola kingdom C1030 and the expeditions of Rajendra I
Avanti/Malwa: the incarnations of a proto-state
Chahamana defeat and Muhammad of Ghor’s conquests 1192–1200
Eastern India C1200
The peninsular incursions of Ala-ud-din and Malik Kafur, 1296–1312
Delhi old and new
The stillborn states: India in the fifteenth century
The campaigns of Babur, Humayun and Sher Shah
The Bahmanid kingdom and its successor sultanates
Expansion of the Mughal empire, 1530–1707
Rajasthan under the Mughals
The Deccan and the south in the reign of Aurangzeb
Successor states of the Mughal empire
European trading stations C1740
The peninsula in the eighteenth century (the Anglo – French and Anglo – Mysore Wars)
The British in Bengal, 1756–65
British India in 1792, after the Third Mysore War;
British India in 1804, after Wellesley’s acquisitions
The Anglo-Maratha Wars 1775–1818
British India in 1820, after the Maratha Wars
British India in 1856, after Dalhousie’s annexations
The north-west in the nineteenth century: British expansion into Panjab, Sind and Afghanistan
Northern India during the Great Rebellion 1857–8
The partition of the Panjab, 1947
CHARTS AND TABLES
The peaks and troughs of dominion
The Mauryas: probable succession 321–181 BC
The imperial Guptas: probable succession
The Chalukyas and the Pallavas: the rival successions
The rise and fall of the Cholas of Tanjore
Avanti/Malwa: the incarnations of a proto-state
The Delhi sultanates. 2: The Khalji Dynasty, 1290–1320
Muslim conquest to Mughal empire: the dynasties of the Delhi sultanate
The Delhi sultanates. 3: The Tughluq dynasty, 1320–1413
The Great Mughals
Intermarriage of Great Mughals with the family of Itimad-ud-Daula
The Sikh Gurus: the chosen successors of Guru Nanak
The royal house of Shivaji (Bhonsle Chatrapatis)
The later Mughals
Succession of the Peshwas of Pune
British governors-general
British viceroys
Countdown to Independence
The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty
Political Succession in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh 1947–2009
AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION
When this book was first published in 2000 I had it in mind to write a sequel that would recount the events of the last fifty years in greater detail than was possible in a 5000-year history of the subcontinent. That project is at last under way. But working on it has made me even more aware of the cursory and selective nature of the final chapters in the first edition of India.
Ten years on, therefore, this new edition endeavours to make amends. As well as some updates and corrections to the original text, it contains an extensively rewritten chapter 19, a replacement chapter 20 and completely new chapters 21, 22 and 23. The narrative has been extended into the twenty-first century and an attempt made to compare the fortunes and explore the fraught relationships of all three of the post-Partition states – Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as India.
To anyone over sixty this will be more current affairs than history. It deals with events and personalities that may be familiar and it invites a more engaged and su
bjective treatment. Sadly it also lacks the authority that stems from a longer scholarly perspective. Much vital documentation remains unavailable for reasons of confidentiality or national security. Access to Pakistan’s national archive, for instance, is so restricted that most histories of that country rely heavily on such documentation as can be consulted elsewhere, notably in the UK and the USA. Yet over-dependence on the reports and correspondence of foreign diplomats and observers may give a very false impression of decision-making within Pakistan’s ruling establishment. Contemporary history is partial – in every sense. The new chapters at the end of this book are no exception.
I am grateful to Arabella Pike and Martin Redfern for making the new edition possible and to Essie Cousins, Georgia Mason, Peter James and others at HarperCollins for processing it. Many readers were kind enough to comment on the original edition. Though it has not been possible to do justice to all their suggestions, I thank everyone and look forward to more of the same.
John Keay
Argyll
January 2010
INTRODUCTION
HISTORIES OF INDIA often begin with a gripe about the poverty of the available sources. These sources were once thought so inadequate as to make what is certainly one of the world’s longest histories also one of its more patchy. ‘Prior to the thirteenth century AD,’ wrote Professor R.C. Majumdar in the 1950s, ‘we possess no historical text of any kind, much less such a detailed narrative as we possess in the case of Greece, Rome or China.’1 Majumdar cited the thirteenth century because that was when northern India, succumbing to Muslim rule, attracted the attention of partisan writers keen to chronicle the triumphs of Islam. But given a good four thousand years of earlier pre-Islamic civilisation, it followed that for more than 80 per cent of attestable Indian history there were no histories.
‘It is difficult to give a rational explanation for this deficiency,’ continued Majumdar, ‘but the fact admits of no doubt.’ Rational explanations apart – and there have been many, most supposing an Indian indifference to treating antiquity as an academic discipline – this dearth of ready-made chronicles and memoirs weighed heavily on the historian. It handicapped his reconstruction of past events and hobbled his presentation of them in an acceptable narrative. His gentle readers were forewarned. A rough ride was in prospect.
Happily the situation has improved considerably over the last half-century. No unsuspected ancient chronicles have come to light but much new research has been undertaken and other disciplines have made important contributions. I have therefore stressed in the pages which follow those feats of discovery and deduction, the fortuitous finds and the painstaking analysis, whereby the documentational void has been gradually filled. While spiking the narrative with some lively debate, this explorational approach also has the advantage of mitigating my presumption in venturing, gownless, onto the campus sward. History based on histories looks to be the province of professionals; but where so much of the past, even its chronology, has to be teased from less articulate objects like coins and charters, or pieced together from random inscriptions, titbits of oral tradition, literary compositions and religious texts, and where such researches are then usually consigned to specialist publications and obscure monographs, there surely must be need for an overview.
Reconstructing the past from such reluctant materials can be intensely exciting, but it is not easy. The ingenuity of those scholars who from rocks and runes, bricks and rubrics, have wrested one of the oldest and richest civilisations constitutes something of an epic in itself. It deserved to be told, and in a previous book I had endeavoured to do so in respect of mainly nineteenth-century scholarship.2 But this is an ongoing epic of research which is itself part of India’s history. As well as being directly responsible for revealing those distant personalities and events by way of which, like stepping stones, the historical narrative progresses, it also betrays much about the age to which the stepping stones supposedly led. More personally, since what we know has been derived so largely from research and so little from testimony, it seemed perverse not to credit the discoverers while appropriating their discoveries. What follows, therefore, is both a history of India and to some extent a history of Indian history
I liked the idea that the variety of disciplines involved in this work of discovery – archaeology, philology, numismatics, phonetics, art history, etc. – seemed to admit the need for a generalist, and I hoped that the heavy ideological and religious distortions to which the findings have sometimes been subject might be countered by the reticence of a confirmed sceptic. Better still, thirty years of intermittent wandering about the subcontinent, reading about it and writing about it, could now be construed as other than pure indulgence. D.D. Kosambi, the most inspirational of India’s historians, reckoned that for the restoration and interpretation of India’s past the main qualification was a willingness to cover the ground on foot. He called it ‘field work’; and so it is.
The fields which Kosambi mainly quartered, and the inhabitants whom he questioned, belonged to a very small area around Pune (Poona) in Maharashtra. Freer to travel and drawn to more spectacular sites, I wanted to construct a history which took particular account of the country’s extraordinary architectural heritage. Lord Curzon, the most incisive of British India’s Viceroys, hailed India’s antiquities as ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’. To all but scholars steeped in the glories of Sanskrit literature it is the architectural and sculptural wonders of India which provide the most eloquent testimony to its history. They stimulated its first investigation by foreign antiquarians, and they continue to whet the curiosity of millions of visitors. A history which acknowledged the prominence of India’s buildings and provided a political, economic and ideological context for them looked to be useful.
Monuments also go some way towards compensating for that deficiency of historical texts. Of the Chola kings of Tamil Nadu, for instance, we would be poorly informed but for the great Rajarajeshwara temple, sublimely moored amidst acres of cloistered paving, which they built and maintained in eleventh-century Tanjore. From its inscriptions we learn of the Cholas’ remarkable expeditions and of their lavish endowments; we even gain some insights into the organisation of their kingdom. But equally instructive is the sheer scale of their monument and the grandeur of its conception. Here, clearly, was a dynasty and a kingdom of some significance. To construct and endow India’s largest temple, the Cholas must have commanded resources beyond those of their traditional wet-rice patrimony in the delta of the Kaveri river. In fact, were the temple devoid of inscriptions and were there no other clues as to its provenance, historians would surely have coined a name for its builders and have awarded them a dominion of either trade or conquest.
Buildings and sculptures so magnificent have done more than stimulate history-writing; they have sometimes hijacked it. Political and economic certainties being scarce while artefacts and literature, mostly of a religious nature, are plentiful, Indian history has acquired something of a religio-cultural bias. Whole chapters devoted to the teachings of the Buddha, the mathematical and musical theories of ancient India, or Hindu devotional movements are standard fare in most Indian histories. They are not without interest or relevance, and they conveniently bridge centuries for which the political record is deemed deficient or unbearably repetitive. But it might be hard to justify comparable digressions into, say, Greek drama or scholastic exegesis in a history of Europe.
The implication seems to be that Indian history, indeed India itself, has always been a place apart in which culture and religion often outdid armies and administrations in influencing the course of events. I remain unconvinced. Religious and cultural identities are important; but as a source of political differentiation and conflict they are not much in evidence in pre-Islamic India, were often exaggerated thereafter, and only became paramount during the last decades of British rule. Historically it was Europe, not India, which consistently made religion grounds for war and the state an instru
ment of persecution.
Whilst paying homage to architecture in particular, this is not, then, a cultural history of India, let alone a history of Indian cults. If it has a bias, it is in favour of chronology, of presenting such information as is available in a moderately consistent time sequence. This might seem rather elementary; but chronology is often a casualty of the interpretative urge which underlies much Indian history-writing. Whole centuries of no obvious distinction are cheerfully concertina-ed into oblivion, while their few ascertainable productions are either anticipated in an earlier context or reserved for inclusion under some later heading. If, as many authorities now concede, the Arthasastra of Kautilya, a manual of statecraft by the Indian Machiavelli, was not compiled in the fourth – third centuries BC, then our whole idea of the nature of authority during the great ‘imperial age’ of the Maurya kings (C320–180 BC) needs revision. Likewise if Kalidasa, ‘the Indian Shakespeare’, did not coincide with the next ‘imperial flowering’ – and only circumstantial evidence suggests that he did – then the ‘golden age of the Guptas’ (C320–500 AD) begins to look somewhat tarnished.
Analysis thrives on a synchronism of evidence which, in such cases, is often hypothetical or contrived. Indeed Indian history is altogether perverse when it comes to clustering. A curious feature of that ‘galaxy of monuments’ is that comparatively few are located around major power centres. Nor can many certainly be credited to pan-Indian dynasties like the Mauryas and the Guptas. The exceptions are the newer cities of Delhi and Agra on which Sultans, Mughals and British all lavished their patronage. But at earlier power centres like Pataliputra (at Patna in Bihar) or ‘imperial’ Kanauj (near Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh), tangible evidence of the great empires which their Maurya, Gupta or Vardhana rulers claimed to control is scarce. Instead, for the earliest temples one must travel more ambitiously to Sanchi or Ellora, Kanchi or Badami, places hundreds of kilometres away in central India, the Deccan and the south.