State and Society up to 1000 CE: Class 9 Social Science · Chapter 5

5.1 Understanding early Indian state and society

Imagine a historian, three thousand years from now, digging up your town. She finds broken cups, coins, a few walls and a phone with a dead battery. From these she could guess how people ate and traded, but not what they believed, how they chose their leaders or what they argued about. That is roughly our problem with the Harappans, whose writing nobody can yet read. For the centuries after them, we are luckier: we have texts.

In Chapter 4 you followed humans from the earliest times to the first cities. This chapter takes the story to about 1000 CE. From roughly the second millennium BCE, literary sources, beginning with the Ṛigveda, join pots, tools and buildings as evidence. With both kinds of evidence together, historians can ask sharper questions about ideas, institutions and everyday life. Keep these questions in mind as you read:

• Who held power before 1000 CE, and how was it shared?
• How did small clans grow into kingdoms and then empires, in the north and in the south?
• Which shared ideas, such as dharma and the dream of one ruler for the whole land, held rulers and people together?
• How did families, occupational groups and officials find their places and mix with one another?

Two threads run through the chapter. One is change: clans became territorial states, states became empires, and empires gave way to strong regional kingdoms (Fig. 5.1). The other is continuity. Some ideas lasted for many centuries: dharma, and the ideal of a chakravarti samrāṭ, a 'wheel-turning' emperor whose authority reaches every corner of the land. Kings advertised that ideal through grand rituals such as the aśhvamedha yajña, the horse sacrifice.

Before meeting kings and empires, we need two words that historians use all the time. Think of a wedding in your neighbourhood. No law says who sits where, which dishes are served or which songs are sung, yet everyone knows the customs and most people follow them. That shared web of customs, relationships and belonging is a society. Its building blocks are families and households, and institutions such as marriage.

Now think of a traffic signal. In a State, someone has the authority to make rules like this one, officials carry them out, and courts and police deal with those who break them. Rulers and subjects also owe each other certain things: the ruler protects and judges, the subject obeys and pays taxes. That organised authority over a territory and its people is the State.

Societies are older than States. When groups were small, custom and kinship could settle most disputes. As groups grew larger and more complex, they needed more formal authority to make rules, collect resources and defend everyone, and States slowly took shape. Historians study early sources to trace how this happened in India, beginning with the Vedic age.

5.2 The beginnings: the Vedas

Why begin with the Vedas? Because the Harappan script has not been deciphered, the Vedas are the oldest body of Indian literature that we can actually read. For many centuries they were not written down at all. Teachers recited them and pupils learnt them by heart, syllable by syllable, using special ways of chanting that guarded against even a small slip. Written manuscripts, such as the Ṛigveda copies in Devanagari script that libraries preserve today, came very much later.

When was the Ṛigveda composed? Historians disagree: some estimates go back as far as the fifth millennium BCE, while others place it in the second. They agree more about where: in the northwest of the subcontinent, the same broad region in which the Sindhu–Sarasvatī civilisation had flourished. One small shared clue links the two worlds: both the Harappans and the Ṛigvedic poets knew copper.

There are four Vedas, and each served a different purpose in the yajña, the ritual of offerings made into a sacred fire.

Each Veda in turn has four layers, put together over a long time (Fig. 5.2). Reading from the first layer to the last, you move from ritual towards philosophy.

Historians read the Vedas as evidence. The oldest hymns of the Ṛigveda name the rivers of the Sapta-Sindhu, the 'land of seven rivers': the Indus (Sindhu), the five rivers of Punjab and the Sarasvatī. The hymns also speak of cattle and chariots, battles and assemblies, prayers for rain and questions about how the world began. So they tell us about the economy, politics, beliefs and social life of their time. Many Vedic prayers, rituals and ideas are still part of Indian life, which is one reason the Vedas are seen as a cornerstone of Indian culture.

5.3 State and administration

How did people in the Vedic age decide who would lead them, settle their quarrels or take them to war? And how did the answers change as clans became kingdoms and kingdoms became empires? This section follows that story across almost two thousand years.

5.3.1 Political institutions in the Vedic period

In the early Vedic age, people did not think of themselves first as residents of a territory. They belonged to a jana, a clan or people bound together by kinship. The Ṛigveda names about thirty janas. Five of them, the Yadu, Turvaśha, Puru, Anu and Druhyu, are grouped together as the pañchajana, the 'five peoples'.

The leader of a jana was the rājā. In these early times he was closer to a chief than to a crowned emperor. His main tasks were to lead the clan in war and to keep its people and cattle safe. He did not decide everything alone: the Ṛigveda and the Atharvaveda mention three assemblies in which members of the jana met.

5.3.2 Early kingdoms and republics

Ask someone today where they are from, and they will name a place: a village, a town, a state. In the early Vedic age the answer would have been a people: 'I am one of the Purus' or 'one of the Bharatas'. Between about 1000 BCE and 600 BCE this began to change. The word janapada shows how: it means the place where a jana set its foot. Belonging now had an address as well as a family tree.

Land raised new questions. Who owns these fields? Who may use this road? Who must pay for the soldiers who guard it? Answering them needed officials, armies, records and taxes. From about 600 BCE, the texts of the time describe larger states of this kind, the mahājanapadas or 'great janapadas' (Fig. 5.4).

Buddhist and Jaina texts usually list sixteen mahājanapadas. The present-day regions given below will help you place them on an outline map of India.

• East (today's Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh): Anga, Magadha, Vṛijji, Malla, Kāśhī and Kosala.
• Upper Ganga–Yamuna and central India (today's Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh): Kuru, Pañchāla, Śhūrasena, Matsya, Vatsa, Chedi and Avanti.
• Northwest (now mostly in Pakistan and Afghanistan): Gandhāra and Kamboja.
• Deccan (on the Godavari): Aśhmaka.

Of all of them, Magadha, in present-day south Bihar, grew strongest. It had fertile river plains for rich harvests and forests that supplied timber and elephants for its army. Iron ore lay in the nearby hills, and rivers such as the Ganga and the Son served for transport and defence. Ambitious rulers used these advantages to absorb their neighbours. In the end Magadha became the base of the Mauryan Empire, founded in 321 BCE, one of the biggest and strongest states the subcontinent had yet seen.

The heartland of Vedic culture shifted as well, from the Indus–Sarasvatī lands of the early hymns to the Ganga plain of the later texts. There, by about 600 BCE, bigger harvests, bigger states and more elaborate social rules went hand in hand.

Not every state had a king. Alongside monarchies, called rājyas, there were gaṇas or saṁghas. In a gaṇa, power lay with a group of leading families whose heads met in an assembly and decided matters together. The Vṛijji confederacy, with its capital at Vaiśhālī, and the Śhākyas, the clan into which Gautama Buddha was born, are well-known examples.

Further south, after the Mauryas, the Satavāhanas ruled much of the Deccan for close to five hundred years, from about the 2nd century BCE to the 3rd century CE. Aśhoka's inscriptions name several independent peoples beyond his southern frontier. The Cholas held the lower Kaveri valley and the Pandyas the valleys of the Tamraparni and the Vaigai. The Keralaputras are identified with the Cheras of Kerala, and the Satiyaputras are placed in the north of present-day Tamil Nadu.

5.3.3 Duties and ideals of the king

From about the 6th century BCE, rulers used grander titles such as rājā, mahārāja or samrāṭ, depending on the traditions of their region. Grand titles did not mean freedom to do as one pleased. Early Indian texts set out clearly what a good ruler owed his people:

• Arthaśhāstra (Kauṭilya): a king must himself be energetic and hard-working, because his officers copy the effort they see at the top.
• Yajurveda, the coronation oath: the new king promises to judge the powerful and the weak by the same standard, to shield the land from every calamity and to work for the people's good.
• Śhānti Parva of the Mahābhārata: long advice to rulers on ethical conduct, justice and their responsibilities towards their subjects.

Two jobs came first. As protector, the king defended the kingdom against invaders and kept the peace inside it. As judge, he heard the most serious complaints: theft or robbery, kidnapping, adultery. For the gravest crimes, such as betraying the king, killing a cow or drinking intoxicating liquor, the texts lay down very harsh punishments, sometimes even death.

Was a king's throne always secure? Usually a son followed his father. But the sources also mention kings who were chosen by their people and others who were driven out. Royal power, in other words, had limits, and the throne did not always pass automatically.

Early Indian rulers also thought on a very large scale. Even the king of a modest kingdom imagined the whole subcontinent as one political space, and several words in the sources carry this idea.

Inscriptions and texts show the idea at work. In one edict, Aśhoka says that his own effort (pakama in Prakrit, parākrama in Sanskrit) brought about a real change in the religious and moral life of people across Jambudvīpa. The Arthaśhāstra explains prithivi as the land stretching from the Himalaya to the sea, and treats it as the realm of the chakravarti. Far to the south, Sangam poems praise the Chera king Nedunjeral Adan, who won the rank of adhirāja and is said to have carried his conquests to the Himalaya. Much later, in the 11th century CE, the Chola king Rajendra I took the title Gangaikonda, 'the one who took the Ganga', after his armies reached that river. Again and again, Indian kingship returned to the dream of authority over the whole subcontinent.

5.3.4 Council of ministers

How did ancient thinkers picture the State itself? Kauṭilya, the author of the Arthaśhāstra, listed seven things every State needs and called them its limbs (aṅgas), the saptāṅga, as if the State were a body (Fig. 5.5). A body with a broken leg cannot walk well; a kingdom with an empty treasury or disloyal ministers cannot be governed well.

No king governed alone. His closest helpers formed the mantri-pariṣhad, the council of ministers: a handful of senior, experienced men who advised him. Picture a meeting. Around the king sit the keeper of the treasury, the officer in charge of collecting taxes, the expert on law and the head of the army. Each speaks on his own field. One of Aśhoka's edicts shows the council discussing royal orders while the emperor was away, with its views to be sent to him at once. So in special situations the council could act on its own in the public interest.

5.3.5 How were empires administered?

A large kingdom cannot be run from one palace. Start at the bottom. In the Satavāhana kingdom of the Deccan, each village had a headman, the grāmika. Villages were grouped into āhāras, administrative divisions, each with its own amātyas (officials). The king had the final word, yet most of the daily work of governing happened far from him. District governors, such as the pradeśhikas of early records, were both judges and administrators. Before deciding, a district officer would often sit down with the town's bankers, caravan leaders, craftsmen and scribes. Big cities had their own governors to collect revenue and police the streets.

From about 300 to 800 CE, kingdoms became more decentralised: more power sat with officials and local bodies away from the capital. The rājya was cut into provinces, the provinces into smaller units, and so on down to the village. The levels were much the same everywhere, but north and south used different names for them (Fig. 5.7). A large staff of provincial governors and district officers ran the whole structure.

The Guptas kept much of the older system. As in the Arthaśhāstra, the mantri headed civil government. Senior posts also included the army's commander-in-chief, a general, and the officer in charge of the palace guard. One new post appeared: the sāndhivigrahika, minister of peace and war, who dealt with alliances and wars with other kingdoms. Officials called kumārāmātyas ran affairs in provinces and districts, a newer branch of the old amātya class of Kauṭilya's day.

Copper plates found at Damodarpur in Bengal show a Gupta district office at work under Kumāragupta I. It had five members. Beside the head district officer sat four leading townsmen: the town's chief banker, the head of the caravan merchants, the foremost artisan and the senior scribe, who kept the land and revenue records. Bankers, merchants and craftspeople thus had a voice in local government.

In the south, the Pallavas (c. 275–897 CE) ruled from Kāñchīpuram. The king stood at the top, but villages handled a great deal themselves. The kingdom was split, level by level, into provinces, districts, taluks and finally villages. The Pallavas are remembered for brahmadeya villages: land given to Brahmins free of tax. A village assembly divided its work among small committees called variyams: one might look after irrigation, another the gardens, another the temple.

The Chālukyas of Badami (c. 543–753 CE) ran their kingdom on much the same lines, with a monarch, decentralised government and self-managing village assemblies. Their version of the land grant to Brahmins was the agrahāram, and places such as Aihole and Badami grew into well-known seats of learning.

From about the 8th to the 10th century CE, the Gurjara-Pratihāras controlled much of the north and west, ruling mainly from Kannauj, in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Kannauj was such a prize that three powers fought over it for generations: the Pratihāras, the Pālas of Bengal and Bihar, and the Rāṣhṭrakūṭas of the Deccan. Historians call this the tripartite struggle. All three governed through provinces, districts and villages, and even in these big kingdoms villages largely managed their own roads and tanks, help for the needy, and teaching.

You met the early Cholas and their famous king Karikala in earlier grades. The imperial Cholas (9th–11th century CE) are known for efficient administration and revenue collection. Their empire was divided into maṇḍalams (provinces), valanāḍus (districts), nāḍus (groups of villages) and ūrs (villages). Village assemblies did a remarkable amount on their own: they settled disputes, collected revenue, managed land and irrigation, built roads and kept records, largely without royal help.

5.4 Ethics: the foundation of law and life

Laws tell people what they must do; ethics asks what they should do, even when nobody is watching. Indian thinkers wrestled with this from very early times, and their answers guided rulers and ordinary people alike. The oldest texts already ask big questions. What is real? Where did everything come from? How should a good person live? The Bhagavad Gītā answers the last question with a path that joins knowledge, faith, action and virtue.

One key idea is samatva, 'sameness'. Think of clay: pots, cups and lamps look different, but all are clay. In the same way, samatva holds that all bodies are formed of one kind of matter and all minds are expressions of a single supreme consciousness. The Vedas call this consciousness satya (the real) and ṛita (the right), the hidden source of everything. If that is so, looking down on anyone is a mistake. The epics make the point through stories: in the Mahābhārata, people of every varṇa defend samatva, and a good person or ruler is measured by care for every living being.

Ṛita, a concept found in the Ṛigveda, is the order that runs through everything: the sun rising on time, the seasons following one another, rivers flowing to the sea. It keeps nature in balance, upholds moral values and was expected to keep human society balanced too.

Justice is closely tied to dharma. In this sense, dharma is not a word for religion. It means duty, obligation, righteousness and moral conduct: a life guided first of all by ethics, in which each person does what their role and responsibilities demand. Buddhist texts use the Pāli word dhamma for very similar ethical ideas (Fig. 5.9).

Ethics was not only for sages. Aśhoka's edicts urged his subjects to follow dhamma: respect parents and elders, treat servants and workers kindly, avoid violence and show compassion to all living beings. More than a thousand years later, the Uttaramerur inscription required candidates for the village assembly to have honestly earned wealth and a clean character. Books of advice for rulers carried the same message. Kāmandaka's Nītisāra is a guide to statecraft, and Bāṇabhaṭṭa's Kādambarī, a 7th-century prose romance often called one of the world's first novels, includes reflections on kingship. Again and again, Indian thought tied political power to ethics.

5.5 Social structures and everyday life

5.5.1 Varṇa and jāti

If you asked someone in early Vedic times 'Who are you?', you might get several answers at once. In earlier grades you met the varṇa system with its four parts: brāhmaṇas, kṣhatriyas, vaiśhyas and śhūdras. Yet the early Vedic texts do not show a rank fixed simply by birth. A person could be known by many overlapping labels: their people or sub-group, region, village, gotra (kin group) and language, and above all their work. Such labels set groups apart, but trade, work and shared customs kept bringing them together. Jobs were not yet locked inside families.

A well-known verse of the Ṛigveda (9.112.3) gives a glimpse of this. The poet introduces his family: he himself is a kāru, a maker of hymns; his father is a bhiṣhak, a healer; and his mother grinds grain on a stone. Three people in one household follow three different kinds of work, and all of them, the poet says, are seeking prosperity in their own ways.

The earliest mention of four social categories, which historians identify as the varṇas, comes in the Puruṣhasūkta, a hymn in the tenth book of the Ṛigveda, one of its later parts. Over time each varṇa was linked with particular roles:

• Brāhmaṇas: learning and teaching the Vedas and other holy books, conducting yajñas, and both giving and accepting gifts (dāna).
• Kṣhatriyas (rājanya in early texts): to fight, protect the people and give justice, while also studying the scriptures, sponsoring yajñas, giving gifts and keeping social order.
• Vaiśhyas: farming, herding and trade, along with study, rituals and charity.
• Śhūdras: expected to serve the other three, though in practice they also farmed, raised animals, traded and practised arts and crafts.

The ranking said something about values: learning counted for more than power, and power for more than money. Your textbook describes the division as functional: it was about the work each group did for society. A Buddhist text, the Sutta Nipāta, puts it sharply: a person becomes a brāhmaṇa, or an outcaste, through deeds, not through birth. Over the centuries, however, this flexibility slowly shrank.

Why did jātis appear alongside the varṇas? Three forces were at work. Marriages across varṇa lines created new groups. Migrant communities that settled in a new region often married only among themselves, a practice called endogamy, and so became separate groups. And differences of region and territory kept groups apart. The varṇas stayed at four, but jātis could multiply without limit: every new craft or community could become one more.

5.5.2 Social mobility

Varṇa and jāti were not iron cages; people and groups could and did move within and across them. The clearest sign is at the very top. Ruling dynasties came from many social backgrounds; among them were the Guptas, Mauryas, Nandas, Puṣhyabhūtis, Satavāhanas, Śhuṅgas and Vākāṭakas.

Occupations changed too. An inscription of 473 CE from Mandsaur (ancient Daśapura, in present-day Madhya Pradesh) tells the story of a guild of silk weavers who moved there from Lāṭa in Gujarat during Gupta rule. Its members were not only weavers: some became skilled archers, some astrologers, and others took up still other professions. The guild was rich enough to build a temple to the Sun god from its own earnings and, decades later, to repair it.

Other records show brāhmaṇas working as managers of land. One example is the set of copper plates of Mahārāja Jayanātha found at Karitalai, from the late 5th century CE. (A copper-plate grant is a royal order engraved on thin sheets of copper, usually held together by a ring carrying the royal seal.)

The Tamil south shows the same blurring. The grammar Tolkāppiyam describes a fourfold division of society. It names groups such as the Arasar (kings), the Antanar (brāhmaṇas, who often enjoyed the support of kings and elites), the Vanigar (traders) and the Velar (farmers). But its categories seem to be based on occupation, and their edges were loose. The Paṭṭinappālai, a long poem about a busy port, gives a crowded picture of merchants, salt-makers, fishers, artisans, farmers and warriors working side by side. In such a place, what you did for a living mattered more than any fixed category.

5.5.3 Family and society

In Vedic society the smallest and most basic unit was the kula, the family. Several families made up a grāma, a village. Group several grāmas and you have a viśha, whose head was the viśhapati. Above the viśha stood the jana, whose chief protector was the rājā. Like a set of nested boxes, the family was always part of the wider people (Fig. 5.10).

By the later Vedic period, kula meant a household of several members linked by kinship. The gotra was a wider lineage traced back to a common ancestor, usually a Vedic sage (ṛiṣhi). Gotras were patrilineal: family identity and inheritance passed down the male line. Gotra membership often decided whom a person could marry.

A person's duties depended not only on varṇa but also on stage of life, or āśhrama. The ideal life had four stages, each with its own dharma (Fig. 5.11). The thinking was that someone who lived each stage fully (learning, then raising a family, then stepping back, then letting go) would be fulfilled in every way, and society would stay balanced. Rituals marked the way, above all the ṣhoḍaśha saṁskāras, sixteen rites of passage that run from before birth to after death.

Life also had four aims, the puruṣhārthas. Earning money is fine, so long as it is done honestly and without harming others. In the same way, artha (wealth) and kāma (desire) are worthy goals when they are guided by dharma and serve the welfare of society. Of the four aims, dharma and mokṣha were thought to give life its direction.

5.5.4 Role of women

According to tradition, some hymns of the Ṛigveda were composed by women seers, among them Apālā, Viśhvavārā, Ghoṣhā and Lopāmudrā. Texts of the Vedic period also show women studying, sometimes performing rituals with men, joining chariot races and attending gatherings such as the sabhā. Women, it seems, were respected and active in public life. Goddesses such as Uṣha, the dawn, and Aditi, the mother of the gods, held honoured places in Vedic religion.

Respect for women appears in later texts too. A well-known half-verse of the Manusmṛiti says that the gods delight where women are honoured:

Its second half adds that where women are not honoured, every sacred rite bears no fruit. Later centuries were often harder for women: as social and political conditions changed, many lost the freedoms seen in the early texts. Even so, households, farms, workshops and temples depended on their work.

One queen shows how much power a royal woman could hold. Prabhāvatī Gupta, daughter of the Gupta emperor Chandragupta II, ruled the Vākāṭaka kingdom as regent for her young sons. She even gave away land by grants issued under her own name. Plays and poems of the same Gupta–Vākāṭaka age (about the 4th to 6th centuries CE) portray women as well educated and accomplished in the arts. And from the centuries after the Mauryas, many votive inscriptions name women as donors.

Sangam poems show women at the heart of the southern economy: fishing and making salt on the coast, spinning, tending cattle, selling garlands, and in the paddy fields planting, weeding, husking and winnowing. Women poets were celebrated, such as Avvaiyar and Vennikuyattiyar, a potter by trade. Women bards and dancers, like their male fellows, carried songs and stories across the land and helped shape its culture. Much later, Chola inscriptions record royal women such as Sembiyan Mahādevī, who built and supported temples and religious institutions.

5.5.5 Religious life and the emergence of Bhakti

Vedic religion had no strict ladder of gods: different hymns praise different deities as the greatest. People worshipped them through prayers and yajñas, making offerings, most often into the sacred fire. Each deity stood for a natural force: Sūrya for the sun, Agni for fire, Indra for rain and storms, Pṛithvī for the earth and Uṣha for the dawn. Some of these old practices live on in festivals. During Chhath, families offer prayers to the setting and the rising sun, and Makar Sankranti marks the sun's entry into a new zodiac sign. People whose lives hung on the monsoon and the sun had good reason to treat them with awe. In the Vedic outlook, rivers, fire and dawn were to be honoured and cared for, not merely used, an attitude that speaks to us in an age of climate change.

Imagine worship that needs no priest, no costly fire ritual and no knowledge of Sanskrit: only love for one's god, sung in one's own language. That is the heart of Bhakti, loving devotion to a chosen deity, open to everyone whatever their social group or gender. It grew as worship in the Vedic tradition came to focus on personal gods and goddesses, Viṣhṇu, Śhiva and Śhakti among them. Its roots reach back to texts such as the Mahābhārata. But Bhakti became an organised, widespread movement in the Tamil region from about the 6th century CE, through the Āḻvārs and Nāyanmārs.

Twelve Āḻvārs sang of Viṣhṇu and sixty-three Nāyanmārs sang of Śhiva. Their hymns, in Tamil, form a huge treasury of devotional poetry and are counted among the great achievements of the age. Part 2 of your textbook returns to the Bhakti tradition.

5.5.6 The quest for knowledge

What did a good education produce? Not just a skilled person, but a good one. Teachers tried to build inner qualities: truthfulness, humility, patience, self-control, regular habits, a pure mind (sattvaśhuddhi), a sense that life and nature are one, and respect for all beings. Pupils were taught to live by dharma, which meant doing their duty by parents, teachers and the gods, because society was thought to rest on the character of its members.

Education was practical too. Besides the Vedas, pupils studied mathematics, astronomy, medicine and the sciences, as well as grammar, logic, philosophy and ethics. Many were trained in music, dance, painting, physical exercise and martial skills such as archery. Yoga, meditation and service to the teacher were part of the daily routine, so a pupil left with habits for living as well as knowledge for working.

The bond between teacher and pupil, the guru-śhiṣhya paramparā, was held sacred. A teacher, called guru or āchārya, was honoured as the one who leads a pupil out of ignorance into knowledge, as a lamp leads one out of the dark. The word gurukula means the teacher's family, and that is what it was. Pupils lived in the teacher's home, shared its meals and helped with its work, while the teacher cared for them like a parent. Days ran on a strict routine, and self-control, obedience and devotion were expected. Illustrations of a gurukula usually show pupils seated around their teacher in an open courtyard, with a simple hut and trees nearby.

Long before 1000 CE, great centres of study had appeared across the subcontinent, and some drew students from China and other distant lands. Some of the best known are listed below. Others included Odantapurī, Jagaddalā, Sompura, Ahichchhatra, Ennayiram, Saloṭgī, Thrissur and Śhāradā Pīṭha, and Anurādhapura in present-day Sri Lanka.

Dynasties came and went, but books outlived them. Indian writers produced works on almost every subject, from philosophy and grammar to medicine, mathematics, astronomy, building, farming and even cooking, and these traditions were handed down for centuries.

5.6 Economy

5.6.1 Agriculture and land revenue

What paid for palaces, armies and temples? Mostly, farming. Walk through a Mauryan village and you would pass three kinds of land: fields divided into family holdings, common pastures where everyone's cattle grazed, and groves of trees on the outskirts. Beyond lay forest. The state was keen to turn forest into farmland, since more fields meant more tax, but it also placed some forests under legal protection. Officials kept a close watch on all of this economic activity.

How much did a farmer pay? Usually one-sixth of what the land produced. Not all land was equal, so officials graded it: Kauṭilya's list runs from sown and cultivated fields to fallow or waste land, high dry ground and groves. Crops varied from region to region: wheat, pulses and many kinds of rice; oilseeds such as mustard and linseed; sugarcane and saffron; and fruit and vegetables.

After the Mauryas, farming still fed both the villages and the treasury. The Buddhist text Milindapañho, traditionally linked with the monk Nāgasena, lists eight stages of farm work, from preparing and weeding the field to harvesting and winnowing the crop. As farming spread in the Deccan, its black soil, well suited to cotton, probably encouraged more cotton growing. The standard Sanskrit word-book, the Amarakoṣha, has a special section on forests, crops, plants and manure.

Sangam poems paint the south as fertile and full of produce. They describe the Chera country as rich in jackfruit, pepper and turmeric, and they speak of fields of ragi and sugarcane.

5.6.2 Irrigation

Farming depended on water, so rulers took reservoirs, canals and dams seriously. Remember the Junagadh rock? Rudradāman's inscription on it tells the history of the Sudarśhana lake near Girnar, in Saurāṣhṭra (the Kathiawar region of Gujarat). The lake was first made by damming streams in the time of Chandragupta Maurya, by his provincial governor Puṣhyagupta. So the Mauryan state was actively building irrigation works. Later rulers kept repairing such works, because farming was one of their biggest sources of revenue.

5.6.3 Trade: trade routes and ports

Merchants need safe roads, honest weights and fair markets, and a strong state can provide all three. The Arthaśhāstra treats trade as a major economic activity. It notes that Magadha's merchants sent cloth, precious stones, pearls and coral, metals and minerals to regions across north, central and south India. Salt, a daily necessity, was produced under strict state control. Officials were expected to guard the trade routes, punish anyone who adulterated goods and protect buyers from cheating.

Trade within the subcontinent, and beyond it, goes back to Harappan times. By around the 6th century BCE, two great land routes had taken shape. The Uttarāpatha, the northern road, crossed the Ganga plain from the northwest towards the Bay of Bengal. The Dakṣhiṇāpatha, the southern road, ran from the Ganga valley towards the Deccan. Later dynasties maintained and extended both. The routes carried goods, people and ideas between regions, and they linked inland cities with the ports, joining land trade to sea trade (Fig. 5.13).

Ports gave India its window on the sea. Harappan traders had already sailed to Mesopotamia from ports on the western coast, by way of the Persian Gulf. Later, new ports grew busy with Indian and foreign merchants. Among them were Muziris on the Kerala coast, Kāveripaṭṭinam (Puhar) at the mouth of the Kaveri, Arikameḍu near present-day Puducherry and Masulipaṭnam on the Andhra coast. Ships hugged the coasts or crossed the open Indian Ocean. By the early centuries CE, trade with the Roman world was booming, both by sea and overland through Central Asia. Part 2 of your textbook has a whole chapter on these links, 'India and the World – 1'.

5.6.4 Guilds

Today, doctors or chartered accountants have professional bodies that set standards for their members. Early India had something similar for craftspeople and traders: the guild, or śhreṇī, an association of people who followed the same craft or trade, such as weavers, potters, ivory carvers or merchants. Guilds became especially important after the rise of the mahājanapadas around the 6th century BCE, the period when metal coins, beginning with silver punch-marked coins, came into use. The Jātaka stories mention eighteen kinds of guilds, a sign of how well established they were.

A guild did several jobs. It checked that goods were well made and frequently set prices, protecting both makers and buyers. It ran its own court to discipline members who broke professional rules. And it acted as a bank, lender and trustee, looking after money for others.

Cloth was one of early India's great industries. Weavers worked in silk, cotton, wool and linen using many techniques, and Mathurā, Kāśhī and Kāmarūpa in the northeast were famous for their fabrics. With plentiful raw materials and skilled, enterprising artisans, crafts kept growing through the centuries before the Guptas, laying a base for later prosperity. Guilds of silk weavers, like the one at Mandsaur, show how organised the industry was, and texts and inscriptions mention many kinds of merchants carrying the goods.

Looking back

From the clans of the Ṛigveda to the village committees of the Cholas, this chapter has followed nearly two thousand years. Political units grew from kin groups to empires and then to strong regional kingdoms, and ways of governing grew more elaborate. Yet much carried on through all the changes of dynasty. The idea of India as one land, ideals of dharma and fair rule, devotion sung in Indian languages, festivals honouring the sun, and a habit of local self-government all have roots in these centuries.