[Excerpted from Surjit Mansingh, "Historical Setting", in India: A Country Study. Richard F. Nyrop, ed. Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army, 1985. Pp. 3-14]
More than in any other society, the concept of linear historical time appears meaningless as successive phases of Indian civilization are all present on the contemporary platter. The multiple faces of India are not a new phenomlenon. They both molded and were produced by some five millennia of known history. From ancient times to the present day, therefore, people have made their own discoveries of India. The proverbial story of six blind men describing an elephant is, appropriately, of Indian origin.
If diversity is the most conspicuous feature of India, ineffable strands of unity are nonetheless unmistakable. They give it a continuity of culture comparable only to China in its long time span and persistence of traits as well as in its spatial dimension. Taking its name originally from the Indus River, the Indian subcontinent, also known as South Asia and now occupied by several independent countries, was subject in the past to mosaics of kingdoms and empires with fluid political boundaries. Attempting a historical sketch of India is akin to attempting one of Europe from Crete of the Minoan age to Norway with its offshore oil rigs of the 1980s. Moreover problems of conceptualization, periodization, and interpretation are greater because terms carrying precise connotations in the European context are not always useful when applied to India. For example, terms such as feudalism, private property rights, and even nationalism are often used differently in contemporary South Asian historiography than in conventional British or American works. Similarly, periodization into ancient, medieval, and modern, with simple descriptions of Hindu, Muslim, and British attached also tend to be misleading. Contemporary Indian histories increasingly use the time periods of Harappa (ca. 3000-1500 B.C.), ancient (560 B. C.-A.D. 650), early medieval (650-1210), Mughal (1526-1707), modern (1707-1947), and postindependence.
The lay of the land has shaped civilizations through settlement patterns and the movements of people and goods. What geographer O . H . Spate calls the "intelligible isolate" of the Indian subcontinent contains distinct regions within itself, but it also interacted regularly with regions outside the subcontinent. Of special significance was the attraction exerted by the fertile IndoGangetic Plain on the peoples inhabiting Central Asia and West Asia. Over the millennia, numerous migrants came and stayed. Coastal and Peninsula India south of the Vindhya Mountains (or Vindhya Range) established early maritime contact with lands both east and west, as legend and the chronicles of Rome and China testify. Within the subcontinent, hills, heavy forests, or deserts separated fertile zones from each other and thus slowed the process of cultural diffusion and political unification. Five major core regions are geopolitically and culturally defined as the northwest, the north central, the northeast, the western peninsula, and the southern peninsula. Connecting areas were also distinct and important. Within each core, however, similar processes appear to have been at work in extending cultivation, collecting revenue, solidifying and legitimizing social organization, and adopting the philosophical and moral values of a recognizable elite. Thus, the several "Little Traditions" of India all came within the "Great Tradition" of Indian civilization.
Certain patterns recur over time in the political relationships established by the cores among themselves and also between each core and its own peripheral region. The urge to create supraregional or Pan-India units surfaced again and again. Scholar Joseph E. Schwartzberg enumerates approximately 100 dynasties or political powers that played important roles in Indian history between 560 B. C. and independence. Nine of these, including the British, succeeded in controlling most of the subcontinent. Seven of these powers were based in the Indo-Gangetic Plain, indicating the geopolitical add cultural significance of that region. Success in terms of longevity and extent of domain depended not only on military prowess, economic base, administrative talent, and control over Grade or communications lines but also on the nature of the relationships established with the hierarchies of local chieftains. The best among these powers gained acceptability and legitimacy by a judicious use of superior force combined with a tolerance of different subsystems. Problems of integrating the many into one centralized whole recurred; they continue to beset the federal structure of the Indian union in the mid-1980s. India's "unity in diversity" is a generally accepted attitude of mind; it does not lend itself to easy political institutionalization .
Among the most important and controversial questions that engage contemporary scholars are those bearing upon India's economic status and national identity. For example, Chat caused the poverty that stigmatized India at the time of independence and has not yet been overcome? Simplistic generalizations about traditional psyches or foreign exploitation have given way to detailed investigations into the impact of socioeconomic and political institutions on productivity, both in colonial and in precolonial times. Another pressing question relates to the connection between social, linguistic, religious, and political identity in South Asia. The different answers to that question offered by the contemporary states of South Asia illustrate that relationships have not been constant, they alter with circumstance. Historically, almost all Indian regimes exhibited an extraordinarily high level of tolerance for cultural and religious diversities among rulers and administrators as well as the common people. Perhaps they could do so because social status was ascriptive, land plentiful, and political power the concern only of the few. In the twentieth century, initially under British rule but subsequently as well, civic harmony has been less easy to sustain. Competition for scarce resources, including governmental appointments, combined with mass participation in politics and frequent demagoguery, have stimulated vigorous assertions of religious or linguistic identity as routes to political power. The partition of India in 1947 after serious riots between Muslims and Hindus was the most violent, but not the sole, episode in this phenomenon of communalism, which advances sectarian advantage at the cost of the whole.
The leaders of India's independence movement sought to ameliorate poverty and submerge differences by tangible means, not by teleological argument. Mahatma Gandhi's discipline ofthe spinning wheel symbolized his belief in simplicity and selfreliance as the firmest base of prosperity. His insistence on nonviolence of thought and deed in the pursuit of national freedom was not only an ethical injunction but also a recognition that discrete groups could best act together in common adherence to a high moral principle. India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the drafters of the Constitution adopted in 1950 initiated a unique experiment in world history. In an agricultural, largely illiterate, and overpopulated country, they introduced a system of parliamentary democracy based on universal adult suffrage, with religious freedom, individual liberty, and social equality guaranteed by law. Sights were set for social and economic transformation by consent, not coercion. Although the opposite pulls of modernization and traditionalism have taken their toll on idealism and although the democratic, secular system upheld by the rule of law has been subjected to almost unbearable pressures, as of early 1985 the ideal had not been relinquished.
The Antecedents
The earliest traces of human activity in India go back to the second interglacial period, between 400,000 and 200,000 B.C. The stone implements and cave paintings of hunting groups have been discovered in several parts of the subcontinent. Evidence of settled agriculture, permanent village sites, and wheel-turned pottery dating from the fourth millennium B. C. has been found in the northwest. From these early beginnings an urban culture of remarkable sophistication, uniformity, and continuity emerged in the Indus Valley and stretched well beyond to the south and east. The remains of the two major cities of the civilization, Mohenjo-Daro in the lower Indus and Harappa on the Ravi River, were accidentally discovered in 1921-22. Excavations at both sites and subsequent extensive archaeological work in India and Pakistan at about 70 other smaller sites provide a picture of what is now called Harappan culture. Radiocarbon dating of remains gives it a time span of about 2700 to 1500 B.C.
Harappan culture was essentially a city culture sustained by surplus agricultural produce and extensive commerce, which included trade with Sumer and Mesopotamia. Copper and bronze were in use, but not iron. The cities were built on almost identical plans of well laid-out streets, elaborate drainage systems, public baths, differentiated residential areas, flat-roofed brick houses, and fortified administrative-cum-religious centers enclosing meeting halls and- granaries. Weights and measures were standardized. Distinctive engraved stamp seals were used, perhaps to identify property. Cotton was spun, woven, and dyed for clothing by the Harappan people as by their successors. Wheat, rice, and other food crops were cultivated and a variety of animals domesticated. A centralized administration has been inferred from the uniformity revealed, but it remains uncertain whether authority lay with a priestly or a commercial oligarchy.
The most exciting, yet frustrating, of all the Harappan artifacts discovered are the small, exquisite steatite seals found in profusion at Mohenjo-Daro. Engraved with realistic portraits of animals and, less often, men or gods, the seals also carry short inscriptions in a unique pictographic script. As ofthe mid-1980s this script had not been deciphered despite the efforts of philologists from all parts of the world and the use of computers. Debates center on whether the script is proto-Dravidian or protoSanskrit, which would shed light on the originators of Indian civilization.
Implicit in the philological debate are other unanswered questions. Who were the Harappan people? How and why did Harappan culture end so abruptly in the two main cities? What replaced it? Analyses of the bones found interred at Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa indicate that people of more than one ethnic strain inhabited those cities. The basic elements of the Indian population appear to have been set very early. A theory of racial dichotomy between the Harappan people and their successors is no longer considered credible.
Until recently, conventional wisdom decreed that the Harappan culture was destroyed by invaders from Central Asia and West Asia. This is now doubted. Only in Mohenjo-Daro is there evidence of a violent end to settlement. The more likely causes for the abandonment of the cities were such ecological changes as repeated flooding, soil salinity, and desertification. The next recrudescence of urban centers in India took place about 1,000 years later and in an entirely different region, the middle Ganges Valley. The so-called invasions were probably migrations of pastoral people from across the mountain ranges who arrived in ever increasing numbers during the second millennium B.C. They are known as Arya, or Aryan, people, from the language they used. Max Muller and other philologists of the nineteenth century discovered that the language used in the earliest Indian scriptures --or Vedas-- was Indo-European and was close to the Avesta in Iran and early Greek and Latin. The existence of Harappan culture predating these migrations was not suspected in the nineteenth century, and early Indian or Hindu civilization was credited to these Aryans.
As more rigorous research has been done on archaeological and literary sources of history, the image of a sharp break between Harappan and succeeding cultures seems overdrawn. Historian H. D. Sankaia points out that the geographical region described in the early hymns contained in the Rig-Veda could easily be that covered by Harappan culture. Vedic Sanskrit is alone among the Indo-European languages to contain retroflexed sounds, typical of Dravidian languages. Religious and social practices inferred from artifacts of Harappan culture are mentioned in the later Vedas and their commentaries. These included ritual bathing, phallus cults, regard for ascetics, sanctity of the pipal tree, and differentiated residential areas for different social classes. The historian's task is made doubly difficult by the absence of any archaeological records, to date, for the period 1500 to 600 B.C. and the impossibility of exactly dating oral compositions ascribed by convention to that period.
Although the notion of an Aryan race has been effectively debunked, the evolution and spread of Aryan culture through India is a matter of record. The record consists of four compendiums of hymns, prayers, and liturgy known as the Vedas, commentaries on them known as the Brahmanas and Upanishads, and traditional histories, or Puranas, which include two long epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata . Because of the unbroken oral tradition, maintained with singular purity despite some interpolations and overlays at various times, this record remains part of the living tradition of Hindu India. It shows a pastoral, pantheistic tribal people following hereditary kings or chieftains, waging wars with each other or with peoples encountered in their wanderings, and becoming a settled, agricultural people having consolidated territories and specialized occupations. Their familiarity with ironware, their use of horsedrawn chariots in warfare, and their knowledge of astronomy and mathematics gave them a technological superiority that undoubtedly made their language and social customs attractive to those they encountered. (Similar historical processes occurred in West Asia and in Greece at comparable periods.) As they settled, they adapted to the cultures that had preceded them. Cultural diffusion, therefore, was not unidirectional. The civilization that emerged in India by the end of this period came to be known as Hindu---from the Indus and India---or Brahmanic, from tte social system it created.
Probably the most distinctive aspect of Hindu civilization was the organization of society and human life around the principle of varna-ashrama-dharma. Voluminous literature exists discussing the meaning of these three terms, which are central to an understanding of Indian culture but almost impossible to translate easily into English. The most common translations read varnaÑclass or supercategory of castes, i.e., Brahman, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Sudra; ashramaÑ stages of life determining status, goals, duties, and obligations; and dharmaÑrighteousness, duty, and sacred law. According to this theory or principle, the achievement of spiritual salvation for an individual, as well as the harmony and stability of society, lay in the pursuit of righteousness by all members of the community but in diverse ways appropriate to their ages and stations in life.
The caste system has excited much investigation as well as condemnation in the modern period. At its core lie concepts of hierarchy and social separation that offend notions of equality and fraternity. Many abuses crept into the system, notably the mistreatment of those groups defined as being without caste. Nevertheless, the caste system was functional and has survived in India, even among non-Hindus, for thousands of years. It has enabled the larger society to accommodate a great variety of discrete groups without losing cultural cohesiveness and has permitted functional mobility to these groups without jeopardizing the constancy of theory. History and anthropology show the workings of the caste system to be considerably more flexible than its codification implied.
Early Empires and New Religious Movements
The literature of the sixth century B.C. describes 16 major kingdoms or tribal republics in North India that stretched from present-day Afghanistan to Bangladesh. Vast forests had been cleared by fire and had given way to agricultural land tilled with plows drawn by bullocks. Many towns had come into existence as centers of trade, industry, and luxurious living. The hold of a king on his throne, no matter how it was gained, usually was legitimized by priests through elaborate ritual sacrifices to the Vedic gods. The popular horse sacrifice spectacularly endorsed the claim of the king to his domains and dependencies. Over time, hereditary kingship tended to replace tribal councils in most states, and although there were many non-Kshatriya ruling dynasties, kings and Brahmans worked together. They found ways of appropriating revenue, often through efficient administration or the use of Sudra labor in clearing and tilling lands. The consolidation of states led also to a hardening of the caste system.
Out of the intellectual and social ferment of the sixth century B.C. grew two major reform movements, Jainism and Buddhism. Both were rooted in the philosophical soil of Hinduism and retained a belief in a cycle of birth and life, caused by karma, until an individual soul is liberated from the cycle by union with the universal. But Jainism and Buddhism offered the common man paths to liberation other than the sacrificial rituals enjoined by the Brahmans. Each stressed ethical behavior, especially the practice of nonviolence, or ahimsa. The influence of these teachings on Mahatma Gandhi in the modern age is unmistakable.
The historical scene of the fourth century B. C. and after is illuminated by evidence from many sources, not least by Buddhist chronicles and Greek accounts. Alexander the Great continued marching eastward after his defeat of the Archaemenid Empire. He crossed the Indus in 326 B. C., sailed downstream, and then returned to Babylon, where he died before consolidating his military victories. The Hellenistic kingdoms established by his generals in Bactria and Sogdiana became links between Indic and Greek cultures. Coins and sculptures, philosophy and art, all testify to the fruitfulness of those links for the entire region.
The political picture of North India was simplified by the expansion of Magadha, a kingdom on the middle Ganges River, to a vast empire covering three-quarters of the subcontinent from Kashmir to Mysore, Afghanistan to Bangladesh, in the reign of Asoka (273-232 B.C.). Magadha benefited from its location in an alluvial plain that was close to rich iron deposits and at the center of major trade routes. The military skill and administrative acumen of successive rulers converted those assets into pillars of a centralized empire.
Chandragupta, who founded the Mauryan Dynasty, had his capital at Pataliputra, near present-day Patna in Bihar. His administration was described in the Arthasastra, a treatise on government and economics ascribed to his chief Brahman adviser, Kautilya, who is sometimes described as the intellectual precursor of Niccolo Machiavelli. The Mauryan state supervised and taxed cultivation, irrigation, mining, crafts, textiles, and trade. A large standing army was maintained at royal expense, as was a well-developed espionage system. Administrative officers were assisted by large staffs; cash salaries were specified. Provinces, districts, and villages were governed by a hierarchy of offficials, mostly drawn from the local notables but under the supervision of central governors and inspectors . Cities and towns also had their own officials responsible for cleanliness, fire protection, the welfare of foreigners, the registration of births and deaths, and the collection of taxes. The systems of land revenue adopted by later centralized empires, including the Mughal, harked back to the Mauryan model.
Military expansion was called to a halt by Asoka, grandson of Chandragupta, once he had subdued the powerful kingdom of Kalinga in the southeast. Thereafter, Asoka expounded a new theory of social responsibility, or dhamma, as the basis for his empire. Dhamma owed much to Buddhism, which the emperor embraced as his personal religion and which he encouraged through his patronage of the monastic orders and his designation of Buddhist monks as missionaries-cum-ambassadors to feudatories and neighboring states. Asoka's political philosophy and laws were epitomized in his edicts, which were inscribed on pillars and rock surfaces located at the nodal points and outer reaches of his empire. The edicts spelled out moral principles of humanitarianism in conduct, including nonviolence and the tolerance of differences, to which all people could and should subscribe. They also proclaimed the emperor's decision to renounce force and to rule his domains through compassion and dhamma.
Asoka's intentions were noble; they were also realistic in a heterodox empire where fanaticisms could be fatal. But he provided no institutions capable of carrying on a centralized administration. Recruitment of officials was not placed on a meritocratic or examination system, as in China. Loyalty was focused on the emperor's person and was quickly supplanted after his death. Strains on the treasury were heavy, and currency became debased in the later Mauryan times. Within 100 years of his death, Asoka's empire had dwindled back to Magadha.
The political map of the subcontinent again became a mosaic of kingdoms with fluctuating boundaries. Yet the same centuries bridging the change of millennium saw enormous growth and syncreticism in intellectual, artistic, and economic life. Organizations of trade guilds, merchant asking houses, and caste tribunals gained privilege, autonomy, and wealth. Undoubtedly, they provided the social stability and institutional continuity that allowed cultural and economic blossoming to take place despite political fragmentation. Moreover, during these centuries interaction with other parts of the world was high and trade correspondingly lucrative. The Hindu social system was flexible enough in practice to accommodate within itself both new immigrants and older tribes without a change of theory.
The most important kingdoms and dynasties of the period 200 B. C . to A. D. 300 embodied these qualities. Without enumerating them, mention must be made of the Indo-Greeks of the northwest, especially for their contributions to numismatics. They were followed by the Sakas, who established themselves in western India as well and may have been the progenitors of the Rajputs. Another Central Asian tribe took hold in the Peshawar area and founded the Kushan Dynasty. At its height the Kushan Empire extended from the Oxus (present-day Amu Darya River) to the Ganges, from Khorasan to Benares (Varanasi). It was a crucible of trade between the Indian, Iranian, Chinese, and Roman empires and controlled the famous Silk RoadÑ reopened by Pakistan and China in the 1970s. Kushan rulers were patrons of Buddhism, Gandharan art, and Sanskrit literature. They initiated a new Saka era in A. D. 78, and their calendar was officially adopted by India after independence in 1947.
An indigenous power rose in the Deccan (present-day Andhra Pradesh) and ousted the Sakas from western and central India. This Satavahana Dynasty called itself Brahman, and its rulers upheld the varna-ashrama-dharma of the Hindu scriptures. They also extended patronage to Buddhists, and the famous rock temples and stupas of Ellora, Amravati, and Nagarajunakinda are Satavahana legacies.
South of the Deccan and the Krishna River, Peninsula India formed another macroregion in which three Tamil-speaking kingdoms jostled with each other . Tamil is a Dravidian language that is comparable in age and complexity to Sanskrit. The Chola, Chera, and Pandya dynasties are referred to in Greek and Asokan sources as lying outside Mauryan control. Nevertheless, they adopted the principles of Brahmanic supremacy as well as Vedic rites and received Asoka's monk-ambassadors. The South Indian equivalent of the Ganges as a nodal core of civilization was the Cauvery Basin. Some of the social customs bespoke a matrilineal origin, and the ranking of castes was, and is, different from North Indian ranking. For example, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas seldom appear, and the large body of Sudra castes was divided into left-handed and right-handed sects. The agricultural economy of the south depended on irrigation based on small-scale tanks and wells that were locally controlled. The gulf between Sudra labor and landowning Brahman overlords probably emerged early and contributed to the violence of anti-Brahman feeling in contemporary South India.
From about 50 B. C. to A. D. 100 South India experienced a great literary and artistic flowering, which in Tamil literature is referred to as the Sangam period. The polity was stable and decentralized. Regular concourses of scholars and Doets were held at Madurai under royal patronage. Texts were compiled. The cultural importance of Madurai, epitomized in the Meenakshi Temple, came early.
[Excerpted from Pakistan: A Country Study. Peter Blood, ed. Washington, D.C.: Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, 1994.]
EARLY CIVILIZATIONS
From the earliest times, the Indus River valley region has been both a transmitter of cultures and a receptacle of different ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups. Indus Valley civilization (known also as Harappan culture) appeared around 2500 B.C. along the Indus River valley in Punjab and Sindh. This civilization, which had a writing system, urban centers, and a diversified social and economic system, was discovered in the 1920s at its two most important sites: Mohenjo-daro, in Sindh near Sukkur, and Harappa, in Punjab south of Lahore. A number of other lesser sites stretching from the Himalayan foothills in Indian Punjab to Gujarat east of the Indus River and to Balochistan to the west have also been discovered and studied. How closely these places were connected to Mohenjo-daro and Harappa is not clearly known, but evidence indicates that there was some link and that the people inhabiting these places were probably related.
An abundance of artifacts have been found at Harappa--so much so, that the name of that city has been equated with the Indus Valley civilization (Harappan culture) it represents. Yet the site was damaged in the latter part of the nineteenth century when engineers constructing the Lahore-Multan railroad used brick from the ancient city for ballast. Fortunately, the site at Mohenjo-daro has been less disturbed in modern times and shows a well-planned and well-constructed city of brick.
Indus Valley civilization was essentially a city culture sustained by surplus agricultural produce and extensive commerce, which included trade with Sumer in southern Mesopotamia in what is today modern Iraq. Copper and bronze were in use, but not iron. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were cities built on similar plans of well-laid-out streets, elaborate drainage systems, public baths, differentiated residential areas, flat-roofed brick houses and fortified administrative and religious centers enclosing meeting halls and granaries. Weights and measures were standardized. Distinctive engraved stamp seals were used, perhaps to identify property. Cotton was spun, woven, and dyed for clothing. Wheat, rice, and other food crops were cultivated, and a variety of animals were domesticated. Wheel-made pottery--some of it adorned with animal and geometric motifs--has been found in profusion at all the major Indus sites. A centralized administration has been inferred from the cultural uniformity revealed, but it remains uncertain whether authority lay with a priestly or a commercial oligarchy.
By far the most exquisite but most obscure artifacts unearthed to date are the small, square steatite seals engraved with human or animal motifs. Large numbers of the seals have been found at Mohenjo-daro, many bearing pictographic inscriptions generally thought to be a kind of script. Despite the efforts of philologists from all parts of the world, however, and despite the use of computers, the script remains undeciphered, and it is unknown if it is proto-Dravidian or proto-Sanskrit. Nevertheless, extensive research on the Indus Valley sites, which has led to speculations on both the archaeological and the linguistic contributions of the pre--Aryan population to Hinduism's subsequent development, has offered new insights into the cultural heritage of the Dravidian population still dominant in southern India. Artifacts with motifs relating to asceticism and fertility rites suggest that these concepts entered Hinduism from the earlier civilization. Although historians agree that the civilization ceased abruptly, at least in Mohenjo-daro and Harappa there is disagreement on the possible causes for its end. Invaders from central and western Asia are considered by some historians to have been "destroyers" of Indus Valley civilization, but this view is open to reinterpretation. More plausible explanations are recurrent floods caused by tectonic earth movement, soil salinity, and desertification.
Until the entry of the Europeans by sea in the late fifteenth century, and with the exception of the Arab conquests of Muhammad bin Qasim in the early eighth century, the route taken by peoples who migrated to India has been through the mountain passes, most notably the Khyber Pass, in northwestern Pakistan. Although unrecorded migrations may have taken place earlier, it is certain that migrations increased in the second millennium B.C. The records of these people--who spoke an Indo-European language--are literary, not archaeological, and were preserved in the Vedas, collections of orally transmitted hymns. In the greatest of these, the "Rig Veda," the Aryan speakers appear as a tribally organized, pastoral, and pantheistic people. The later Vedas and other Sanskritic sources, such as the Puranas (literally, "old writings"--an encyclopedic collection of Hindu legends, myths, and genealogy), indicate an eastward movement from the Indus Valley into the Ganges Valley (called Ganga in Asia) and southward at least as far as the Vindhya Range, in central India. A social and political system evolved in which the Aryans dominated, but various indigenous peoples and ideas were accommodated and absorbed. The caste system that remained characteristic of Hinduism also evolved. One theory is that the three highest castes--Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and Vaishyas--were composed of Aryans, while a lower caste--the Sudras--came from the indigenous peoples.
By the sixth century B.C., knowledge of Indian history becomes more focused because of the available Buddhist and Jain sources of a later period. Northern India was populated by a number of small princely states that rose and fell in the sixth century B.C. In this milieu, a phenomenon arose that affected the history of the region for several centuries--Buddhism. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, the "Enlightened One" (ca. 563-483 B.C.), was born in the Ganges Valley. His teachings were spread in all directions by monks, missionaries, and merchants. The Buddha's teachings proved enormously popular when considered against the more obscure and highly complicated rituals and philosophy of Vedic Hinduism. The original doctrines of the Buddha also constituted a protest against the inequities of the caste system, attracting large numbers of followers.
At about the same time, the semi-independent kingdom of Gandhara, roughly located in northern Pakistan and centered in the region of Peshawar, stood between the expanding kingdoms of the Ganges Valley to the east and the Achaemenid Empire of Persia to the west. Gandhara probably came under the influence of Persia during the reign of Cyrus the Great (559-530 B.C.). The Persian Empire fell to Alexander the Great in 330 B.C., and he continued his march eastward through Afghanistan and into India. Alexander defeated Porus, the Gandharan ruler of Taxila, in 326 B.C. and marched on to the Ravi River before turning back. The return march through Sindh and Balochistan ended with Alexander's death at Babylon in 323 B.C.
Greek rule did not survive in northwestern India, although a school of art known as Indo-Greek developed and influenced art as far as Central Asia. The region of Gandhara was conquered by Chandragupta (r. ca. 321-ca. 297 B.C.), the founder of the Mauryan Empire, the first universal state of northern India, with its capital at present-day Patna in Bihar. His grandson, Ashoka (r. ca. 274-ca. 236 B.C.), became a Buddhist. Taxila became a leading center of Buddhist learning. Successors to Alexander at times controlled the northwestern of region present-day Pakistan and even Punjab after Maurya power waned in the region.
The northern regions of Pakistan came under the rule of the Sakas, who originated in Central Asia in the second century B.C. They were soon driven eastward by Pahlavas (Parthians related to the Scythians), who in turn were displaced by the Kushans (also known as the Yueh-Chih in Chinese chronicles).
The Kushans had earlier moved into territory in the northern part of present-day Afghanistan and had taken control of Bactria. Kanishka, the greatest of the Kushan rulers (r. ca. A.D. 120-60), extended his empire from Patna in the east to Bukhara in the west and from the Pamirs in the north to central India, with the capital at Peshawar (then Purushapura). Kushan territories were eventually overrun by the Huns in the north and taken over by the Guptas in the east and the Sassanians of Persia in the west.
[Excerpted from Bangladesh: A Country Study. James Heitzman and Robert Worden, eds. Washington, DC: Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress, 1988]
For most of its history, the area known as Bangladesh was a political backwater--an observer rather than a participant in the great political and military events of the Indian subcontinent. Historians believe that Bengal, the area comprising present-day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, was settled in about 1000 B.C. by Dravidian-speaking peoples who were later known as the Bang. Their homeland bore various titles that reflected earlier tribal names, such as Vanga, Banga, Bangala, Bangal, and Bengal.
The first great indigenous empire to spread over most of present-day India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh was the Mauryan Empire (ca. 320-180 B.C.), whose most famous ruler was Asoka (ca. 273-232 B.C.). Although the empire was well administered and politically integrated, little is known of any reciprocal benefits between it and eastern Bengal. The western part of Bengal, however, achieved some importance during the Mauryan period because vessels sailed from its ports to Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. During the time of the Mauryan Empire, Buddhism came to Bengal, and it was from there that Asoka's son, Mahinda, carried the message of the Enlightened One to Sri Lanka. After the decline of the Mauryan Empire the eastern portion of Bengal became the kingdom of Samatata; although politically independent, it was a tributary state of the Indian Gupta Empire (A.D. ca. 319-ca. 540).