Gem In The Lotus , livre ebook

ABRAHAM ERALY
GEM IN THE LOTUS
The Seeding of Indian Civilisation

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Chapter One: The Genesis
1. The Rose-apple Land
2. Enigma of the Indus Valley
3. Priest-kings and Merchant Princes
4. Gods of the Valley
5. Rigor Mortis
Chapter Two: Vedic India
1. Indra s Legions
2. The Vedic Corpus
3. The Domestication of Aryans
4. The War-begotten King
5. Colour and Caste
6. Chant am I, verse thou
7. Unto Us a Happy Mind
8. Across the Void a Dividing Line
9. Gods of the Mountain
Chapter Three: The Age of Ferment
1. Twilight of the Gods
2. Neyti! Neyti!
3. Rebels and Prophets
4. The Ford-maker
Chapter Four: Gem in the Lotus
1. A Saviour is Born
2. The Middle Path
3. The Fire Sermon
4. The Journey s End
5. Monkey and the Pitch-trap
6. Ehi Bhikkhu!
Chapter Five: The First Empire
1. The Patricides
2. A Greek Interlude
3. Live Short, Live Much
4. Kautilya s Revenge
Chapter Six: The Forgotten Emperor
1. The Wicked Prince
2. All men are my children
3. Beloved of the Gods
4. Asoka s End-life Crisis
Chapter Seven: The Clockwork State
1. All for the King
2. The Leviathan
3. Mauryan State Capitalism
4. The Great Tax Heist
5. Kautilyan Commandments
6. Enemy and the Enemy of the Enemy
Chapter Eight: The Never-Never Land
1. Greek Fables
2. Women, Sophists and Cannibals
3. Mlecchas and Sages
Incidental Data
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS GEM IN THE LOTUS
Abraham Eraly was born in Kerala and was educated there and in Chennai. He has taught Indian history at colleges in India and the United States, and edited a fortnightly current affairs magazine for a few years. He lives in Chennai and is currently working on another volume of Indian history.
His first book, The Last Spring: The Lives and Times of the Great Mughals , was published in Viking in 1997.
Why does the wind not cease? Why does the mind not rest? Why do the waters, seeking truth, Never ever cease?
-Atharva-veda
Take up thy bow, the Upanishad, a mighty weapon, Fit in thine arrow sharpened by devotion, stretch it on thought allied with resoluteness- this is the target, friend, the Imperishable. Pierce it!
-Mundaka Upanishad
Chapter One

The Genesis
The Rose-apple Land
I N THE BEGINNING THERE was no India. All the landmass of the earth then lay huddled together in protocontinents in the lap of the idling primeval sea. Around 170 million years ago this cluster of continents began to break up and drift apart, because of the movements of the crustal plates jacketing the semi-molten interior of the earth, a geological process called plate tectonics. In the process, some 100 million years ago, a huge and roughly triangular chunk of land broke off from the eastern flank of Africa above Madagascar, and, pivoting slightly anticlockwise, began a millennially slow, 4000-odd-kilometre-long slide north-north-eastward across the ancient Tethys Sea, bearing a stark, crystalline massif like a granite sail. Eventually, after about a forty-million-year-long ocean journey, it docked into the soft underbelly of the sprawling Asian landmass, to become the land that would be known many aeons later as India.
The underthrust of that impact, sluggish but relentless, penetrating through the sedimentary flesh of the Asian belly, upheaved, in the course of several million years, rocks from the depths of the sea and the land, and reared the Himalayas, the youngest, largest and highest mountain range on earth. At the same time, as the land heaved and rose in a sort of earth wave, it left, along the entire length of the mountains, an immense marshy trough, which slowly sank under the sea. Then, as the snows and glaciers that covered the Himalayas melted, great rivers with hundreds of tributaries, bringing millions of tons of silt daily, descended from the mountains into the lagoon, gradually, over millions of years, filling it with detritus and alluvium, and building up, layer by layer, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, a gift of the Himalayas.
All this happened in very recent geological times, long, long after the formation of the earth some 4.6 billion years ago, and it all happened in a wink of the cosmic time, though over many millions of earth years. It was only during the Pleistocene Epoch, between a million and ten thousand years ago, that the present broad physical features of India became finally established. Even then the geodynamic forces involved were not entirely exhausted. Kashmir, once a vast lake, has since turned into a garden valley. Many centuries later, the forestland off Bombay subsided into the sea, and as recently as 1819, an extensive tract of land in Gujarat, including the fort of Sindree, slid under the sea in an earthquake. It was presumably in some such cataclysm that the ancient and renowned port city of Poompuhar on the Coromandel Coast slumped into the sea, probably around the sixth century AD . Calamitous earthquakes still occasionally convulse northern India, as the Indian plate continues to push and grate against Asia. The Himalayas are still rising.
T HE HIMALAYAS ARE estimated to be currently growing at the rate of about six millimetres a year-rising seven millimetres and eroding one millimetre-and are believed to have risen about 1.4 kilometres in the last 1.5 million years. The mountains stretch 2,400 kilometres east-west like a massive, jagged rampart along the northern rim of the subcontinent, their north-south width varying from about 200 to about 400 kilometres, and covering a total area of nearly 600,000 square kilometres. As many as thirty of its peaks rise to well over 7,600 metres, with Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world, measuring 8,848 metres. The Himalayas are the abode of snow, as their name indicates, and have the most extensive snowfields and glaciers outside the polar region, of over 45,000 square kilometres.
The bulk of the Himalayas however lies below the snow line, in three distinct earth-swells, each uplifted in widely different periods. The first to form, around sixty million years ago, was the snow-topped Great Himalayas (average elevation: 6,000 metres), then the Lesser Himalayas (maximum height: 4,600 metres), and finally, about seven million years ago, the Outer Himalayas (maximum height: 1,500 metres). At their far ends, the mountains abruptly fold southward and stretch towards the sea, thus sealing off India effectively from the rest of Asia. Mountains also run along the entire coastline of India, and this gives the subcontinent a sequestered appearance, which is reinforced by the wide seas bordering peninsular India. Only in the north-west do the mountains dip in a few places to yield land passages into India- the Khyber Pass near Peshawar, a thirty-two-kilometre-long serpentine defile, and far to the south of it, near Quetta, the Bolan Pass, and still further south, the Gomal Pass. There is also a corridor into India from Iran along the Makran coast, but this route, through countless treacherous sand-hills and mangrove swamps flanked by bald, gaunt mountains, is so forbidding that it is almost impassable, though it was used by Alexander the Great on his retreat from India in 325 BC , and was frequented by hardy Arab traders in the Middle Ages.
The land thus enclosed by the mountains and the seas is so vast and of such great geo-biological diversity that it is usually described as a subcontinent. From Kashmir in the far north to Kanyakumari (Cape Comorin) at the southern tip, India stretches some 3,200 kilometres, and it has a width of about 2,900 kilometres from the Hindu Kush in the north-west to the Assam mountains in the north-east, a total area of about 4.2 million square kilometres in the five nations-Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh-into which the subcontinent is now divided.
These political divisions are however mere accidents of history, and have no physical basis whatsoever. Geographically, India falls into three broad regions-the mountains of the north, the peninsular plateau in the south, and the Indo-Gangetic Plain in between. Of these, the northern mountain range was the crucial determinant in moulding life in India, defining and guarding its frontiers, regulating its climate and thus texturing the disposition of its people-as Curtius Rufus, a Roman chronicler of the first century AD , wisely comments, The character of the people is here [in India], as elsewhere, formed by the position of their country and its climate. The Himalayas also provided a spectacular celestial playground for the multitudinous gods and goddesses of India, an ideal setting for its luxuriant mythical lore.
At the foot of the great mountains lies the Indo-Gangetic Plain. This tract has been the main theatre of historical action in India, even though it makes up only a small part (about 18 per cent) of the land area of the subcontinent. A narrow ribbon of land, the maximum width of the Indo-Gangetic Plain is only about 320 kilometres, but it is 2,400 kilometres long, and has an area of nearly 800,000 square kilometres. It is one of the largest, deepest, and most fertile stretches of alluvium in the world, its depth varying from about 1,300 metres to over 1,800 metres. It took millions of years for the plain to fill up and dry out, and it was only around six thousand years ago that the area finally became suitable for human habitation. But its soil, rich with the wash of the mountains, is splendidly congenial for agriculture, and it was here that the great civilisations, religions and empires of India flourished.
The whole of this plain was once lush with vegetation, but in early historical times the scene changed somewhat, when its south-western region gradually turned into a desert (the Great Indian Desert) and acquired a distinctive life-cycle of its own. The monsoon that annually rejuvenates much of India generally passes over the dese