India

  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

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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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

  5 Gloria Maurya: C320–200 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. 1: The ‘Slave’ Dynasty, 1206–90

  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.