$Unique_ID{COW01658}
$Pretitle{221}
$Title{India
Chapter 1B.   The Classical Age}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Surjit Mansingh}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{india
century
temples
chola
muslim
new
north
south
hindu
islam}
$Date{1985}
$Log{}
Country:     India
Book:        India, A Country Study
Author:      Surjit Mansingh
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1985

Chapter 1B.   The Classical Age

     The classical age refers to the two centuries after about A.D. 320 when
North India was reunified under the Gupta Dynasty. Writers of the early
twentieth century looked on this period as some kind of utopia and fitted the
reign of Harsha-vardhana of Kanauj (A.D. 606-47) in the same mold. More
realistic assessments have been made in recent decades, and attention has
shifted to the plentiful source materials of the post-Gupta period. If not
utopian, the Gupta age was certainly a golden one, in which Hindu culture and
polity matured and prosperity was widespread. When displacement occurred at
the core, peripheral regions perpetuated the classical Hindu model, especially
in South India.

     The rise and expansion of the Gupta Dynasty from their home base in
Magadha was similar to that of the Mauryas. The victorious campaigns of
Samudragupta from Kashmir to the Deccan, which are commemorated on an Asokan
pillar at Allahabad, and the matrimonial alliances of his son, Chandragupta
II, show that the kings and local chieftains of the entire subcontinent were
either uprooted, made tributary, or won to friendly compliance by the Gupta
emperors, who assumed exalted imperial titles. Their direct control, however,
was confined to the Ganges Valley, and their relationships with other kings
and chieftains had a feudal cast. The Gupta style of administration was less
centralized than the Mauryan and was carried out through provincial, district,
subdivisional, and village officials rather than by centrally appointed
personnel.

     It is evident from excavations and from the contemporary literature that
the standard of living in Gupta India was high for most people. The Chinese
pilgrim Fa-Hsien, who visited India between A.D. 399 and 414, remarked on the
prosperity of the people, the smoothness of administration, and the leniency
of punishment compared with China. Another Chinese pilgrim, Hsuan-Tsang, who
traveled in the area in the seventh century, made similar comments, but he
also reported on the existence of landless labor and the practice of
untouchability.

     The concentration of formal education was on grammar, rhetoric and
composition, logic and metaphysics, medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.
Aryabhata's expositions on astronomy in A.D. 499 give calculations of the
solar year and the shape and movement of astral bodies with an accuracy
anticipating modern science. Astronomy and its unscientific but popular
cousin, astrology, were based on an active study of mathematics. The numerals
and decimal system routinely used in classical India were borrowed by the
Arabs and so passed on to the European world, where they supplanted the Roman
system.

     Lexicons of the Sanskrit language introduced by Panini and Patanjali in
the first century of the Christian Era continued. The great literary genius of
Gupta times, however, was Kalidasa. His dramas also throw light on emerging
social practices. For example, there was a difference between aristocratic
males, women, and servants, not only in behavior and speech patterns but also
in actual language. The former spoke Sanskrit, the language of the elite. The
latter two categories spoke Prakrits, the vernacular of the common people.
Prakrits were less rigid and developed rich regional varieties that grew into
the many different languages of North India. Kalidasa and other religious
writers of the period indicate that the status of women was being lowered.
Early marriage for girls and perpetual celibacy for widows was advocated.
Sanction was given to the voluntary immolation of a widow as a pious act; the
first record of the practice is a pillar inscription of 510. Women who opted
out of family life by becoming courtesans, performing in theaters, or joining
Buddhist nunneries enjoyed a larger measure of freedom than their married
sisters.

     The last of the imperial Guptas was Skandagupta (455-67), grandson of
Chandragupta II. Skandagupta was preoccupied with warding off the predatory
Huns on the northwest borders of the subcontinent. Subsequent Hun invasions
shattered the unity of North India, which was only briefly restored by
Harsha-vardhana of Kanauj. The Huns were gradually absorbed by the same
process of legitimization and Hinduization as the Sakas had been, and their
descendants gave rise to the Rajputs. The classical patterns of civilization
realized under the Guptas were sustained by their successors in the middle
Ganges Valley and in the kingdoms that emerged from the breakup of the Gupta
Empire. Thus the decline and fall of the Gupta Empire coincided with
considerable progress and prosperity in the outlying regions. South India,
particularly, was in ascendance.

     South India had its own territorial and interdynastic conflicts, some of
which had significance for a wider area. For example, the Chalukyas of the
western Deccan played an important connecting role between south and north for
more than two centuries. Their main rivals for supremacy in the strategic and
prosperous area of the Krishna-Tungabhadra doab were the Pallavas of Kanchi
(near present-day Madras). Both the Chalukyas and the Pallavas were orthodox
in their performance of Vedic sacrifices and their support of Brahmans. Both
dynasties left innumerable and enduring architectural monuments in beautifully
carved stone temples. Perhaps the most accessible monuments dating to the
seventh century stand on the sandy shore of Mahaballipuram, near Madras.

     The Pallavas maintained the maritime traditions of their Pandya
predecessors and enjoyed close trading and cultural relations with Southeast
Asia. The art, architecture, literature, and social customs of the kingdoms
of Kamboja and Champa (present-day Indochina), Pegu and Moulmein (Burma), and
Srivijaya (Malaysia and Indonesia) show the strong influence of the Sanskrit'
language, Brahman teachers, and Buddhist beliefs. Angkor Wat in Kampuchea and
Borobudur in Indonesia immortalize Hindu-Buddhist mythology and the skill of
stone craftsmen. The nature of the relationship between India and what some
European scholars deemed "Greater India" has not been precisely determined.
Colonization, in the modern sense of that term, seems unlikely. The peoples of
Southeast Asia appear to have been attracted to specific aspects of Indian
civilization and to have borrowed heavily from it, but they did so in
accordance with their own cultural and social needs.

     A more assertive outward thrust was made by the Chola Dynasty, which
overthrew the Pallavas in the ninth century and proceeded to overrun most of
Peninsula India. Chola rulers Rajaraja (985-1014) and Rajendra I (1018-44)
also invaded and annexed parts of Sri Lanka and Maldives. They sent several
naval expeditions against the Srivijaya Empire, which controlled the sea route
to China. Chola trade with China is well documented, although it was
characteristically referred to in Chinese chronicles as "tribute." The Chola
navy was the strongest fleet in the region for some time, and the Bay of
Bengal became a Chola lake, lauded by Tamil bards. The Chola armies were
large, usually consisting of one wing each of elephants, horse cavalry, and
infantry. They fought incessantly on the Peninsula, sacking, plundering, and
massacring where they conquered. Thereafter, Chola ascendancy was maintained
less by force than by a system of legitimizing local chieftains in their
domains in return for recognition of Chola ritual sovereignty.

     The Chola Empire flourished through the thirteenth century. The rich
Cauvery Basin formed its core. The rest of the empire was divided into
semiautonomous provinces and districts. These were connected by royal roads
and watered by well-designed irrigation systems. Taxes were high, amounting
to one-third of the produce, but appear to have been spent mostly within the
area taxed instead of being siphoned off to a central treasury. Officials were
usually paid with grants of land carrying revenue, not in cash.

     The center of Chola social and economic life was the temple. Large
temples, such as those at Tanjore and Srirangam, took many years to build
and enjoyed huge annual incomes from land, commerce, and the offerings of
devotees. Temples were run then, as today, as multipurpose institutions. They
provided schooling, employment, and assembly halls. They acted as moneylenders
to the cultivators and often financed commercial enterprises abroad. Temples
maintained large male and female staffs. Devadasis (female servants of the
deity) were originally venerated as dedicated dancers of the Bharata Natyam,
akin to the vestal virgins of Greece or Rome. But the system was abused, and
in many temples devadasis were reduced to prostitution. In Chola and
post-Chola times, a distinctive style of temple architecture evolved. This was
characterized by a series of stories built above the shrine of the chief
deity, a pillared hall placed in front of the main sanctum, and an enclosed
courtyard in which the complex stood. Later, the sculptured tiers constructed
over the gateways, called gopuram, came to dominate the entire structure.
The stone decoration of temples became more and more elaborate as their size
and functions increased, until they came to resemble palaces housed in
miniature cities. Chola sculptures, in bronze and in stone, are among the
artistic masterpieces of the world. The image of the dancing Siva, Nataraja,
is world famous.

     Sanskrit was the language of theology and learning in South India, as it
was in North India. At the same time, a flourishing popular literature was
growing in the Dravidian languages, often borrowing Sanskrit themes and
vocabulary. The classic Tamil Ramayana of Kamban was composed in the twelfth
century. Devotional hymns composed in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and
Kannada-the four Dravidian languages of South India-gained wide circulation as
the bhakti movement filtered northward. By the early medieval period an
all-India cultural synthesis had taken place, notwithstanding political
fragmentation.

The Coming of Islam and the Delhi Sultanate

     Islam is a revealed religion propagated by the Prophet Muhammad in the
early seventh century (see Islam, ch. 3). Islam gave the Arab tribes unity and
zeal for moral purpose in a burst of military expansion. By the end of the
eighth century the Arabs had extended their sway westward into North Africa
and Spain and eastward into Iran and Central Asia. An Arab expedition entered
Sind and Baluchistan (in present-day Pakistan) in 711 and gained a potential
foothold, but this had slight effect elsewhere on the subcontinent. Arab
traders, who had long been familiar on the west coast, were now supplemented
by Muslim teachers and saints known as Sufis, whose influence was to grow over
the centuries. Only at the end of the tenth century did Muslim forces enter
northwest India and find a base for the thirteenth-century conquest of Delhi
and the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

     Coming into India over a period of 500 years in different guises and at
different places, therefore, Islam had a varied impact. This depended as
much on local conditions as on the character of its bearers. It is not
surprising then that no uniform or simple answer can be given to the question
most often posed in the twentieth century about Islam in India, i.e., were
Muslims Indian or alien? On the one hand, Islam gave the Central Asian and
Afghan tribes a faith radically different from the beliefs of the
Hindu-Buddhist world and thus prevented them from being assimilated, as had
all previous invaders or immigrants. Indeed, members of the Muslim aristocracy
underlined their foreign lineage. On the other hand, they quickly became part
of a typically Indian checkerboard where religious identity was only one
factor in the politico-military game. The new ruling class was sustained in
India by Indians, both Muslim and Hindu. The majority of the Muslim
population-which was never more than a fraction of the total-consisted of
converts from Hinduism and Buddhism and their descendants. A cultural
synthesis working in both directions was clearly visible by the fourteenth
century and flowered in the Mughal Empire. During the thousand years
dominated by the Rajputs, Turks, Afghans, and Mughals, there was no concept
of India as a single political entity. Earlier patterns of interregional and
supraregional ambition and interaction with Central Asian neighbors continued
to prevail.

     The death of Harsha-vardhana in 647 ended the age of imperial unity in
North India. Many dynasties jostled for status and territory. Most of them
were Rajputs, whose legendary origins, heroism, and chivalry gave rise to a
romantic body of literature and folklore. Rajput propensities for warfare led
to the construction of impressive fortresses. Rajputs, men and women alike,
treated war as a grand pageant or a seasonal sport. Death on the battlefield
was the highest honor for a warrior; women preferred immolation by fire to
dishonor or capture. Rajput rulers paid scant attention to commerce, which
declined, or to agriculture. They were maintained by a quasi-feudal system of
distributing agricultural produce that increased the number of beneficiaries
at the expense of the peasant-cultivator. Neither the Rajputs nor their
Brahman advisers were interested in the world beyond the circle of their
dynastic rivalries. Al Biruni, a brilliant Arab visitor of the eleventh
century, summed up his impressions thus: "The Indians believe that there is no
country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion
like theirs, no science like theirs."

     Cultural introversion was united with geopolitical and strategic
unawareness. The Rajputs failed to comprehend the revolutionary significance
of Islamic advances that were slowly but steadily pushing eastward.
Ultimately, a small chieftain in the Punjab was left alone to face a new and
formidable power based in Ghazni (in contemporary Afghanistan) without benefit
of allies. Mahmud of Ghazni (979-1030) was lured by the proverbial wealth of
India to lead a series of destructive raids against Hindu temples. Having
replenished his treasury, he campaigned in Central Asia with equal brilliance,
but he turned again to India for gold, slaves, and builders. Mahmud's attacks
on the temples of Mathura, Thanaswar, Kanauj, and the renowned Somnath fused
iconoclasm with greed and left a permanent imprint of terror on the Hindu
psyche. Although a patron of learning, he was remembered only as a symbol of
the unclean barbarian (mlechcha). Historically, Ghazni's conquest of the
Punjab provided a base for the more serious efforts of Muhammad of Ghor two
centuries later. The Rajput rulers meanwhile appeared to have learned nothing.
Their military tactics were unchanged, and they succumbed to the swift
horsemanship of the Afghans and Turks.

     A new Muslim sultanate was established at Delhi by Iltutmish (1206-36).
Delhi commanded a strategic spur in the North Indian plains. The urge to
conquer outward from Delhi was strong, and within 100 years the sultanate had
extended its sway east to Bengal and south to the Deccan. It was subject to
continued pressure from the northwest, however, as well as from displaced
rulers and independent-minded nobles.

     The sultanate period was one of continuous flux. There were five
dynasties: Slave (1206-90); Khalji (1290-1320); Tughlaq (1320-1413); Sayyid
(1414-51); and Lodi (1451-1526). Each gained the throne by violence. The
territories controlled by the sultans expanded and contracted. The sultans of
Delhi based their laws on the Quran and sharia (Islamic law) and demanded
payment of a special protection tax from their non-Muslim subjects, but they
did not attempt to change or abolish Hindu law or to interfere with customary
social practices. The centers of their rule were urban; military camps and
trading posts provided the nuclei for towns.

     The rural countryside saw little of the new rulers save in military
campaigns, but the peasants were required to sustain yet another set of
revenue collectors. One sultan made an attempt to systematize and unify the
land tax as well as urban taxes and to institute a centralized bureaucracy
over his domains, but his effort was abortive. Agriculture in North India had
improved as a result of new irrigation methods-including what came to be known
as the Persian wheel-and a few canals were constructed. Prolonged political
instability and the brutalization of the peasantry were not conducive to
prosperity, however. The depletion of the land became a conspicuous feature of
nineteenth-century India. In partial compensation, perhaps, the sultanate
period saw an impetus given to trade and industry by the free-spending habits
of the new aristocracy and their links with the larger Islamic world. Native
artisans skilled in metal work and stonework, as well as textiles, took to the
new patronage with alacrity. Entire jatis (see Glossary) of craftsmen
sometimes converted to Islam in the process of being employed in state
factories. Coins from this period are plentiful and indicate a
remonetarization of the economy.

     One historic achievement of the sultanate was to protect the Indian
subcontinent from the devastations of the Mongols. Through the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries the western marches of the sultanate held firm against
the progeny of Genghiz Khan. The sack of Delhi in 1398 by Timur (Tamerlane)
provided the one bitter taste of what was suffered in large parts of Asia and
Eastern Europe. The Mongols, for their part, provided an indirect service to
the subcontinent by cutting off the flow of Central Asian and Afghan
freebooters. Thereafter, an increasing number of the nobility were of Indian
birth. This facilitated a cultural renaissance-a cross-fertilization of
Rajput and Muslim arts. The results are visible today in architecture, as at
the Quwwat-ul-Islam Mosque in Delhi; in Hindustani classical music, both vocal
and instrumental, as performed in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; in
language, as Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, and Bengali literature testify; and in
painting, as the introduction of paper and illuminated manuscripts from Persia
transformed Rajput and Jain depictions.

     Popular religions were also influenced by the uncompromising monotheism,
the simple rituals, the devout faith, and the social equality of Islam. Bhakti
cults originating with the Tamil saints gained followers in the north. Sufi
pirs, or teachers, merged into the prevailing pattern of itinerant holy men.
Certain individual Sufis, such as Nizamuddin Auliya, who tried to perform the
service of conscience to the crown, continued to be venerated in the twentieth
century. A number of casteless sects arose, notably those named after Kabir
and Nanak Dev. If not self-consciously syncretists, both men expressed a
profound cultural trend when they asserted that God is One, irrespective of
whether He is addressed as Allah by Muslims or Ram by Hindus.

     Generally speaking, however, Islamic ideology was posited as being in
irreconcilable conflict with Brahmanic thought. The evangelical and intolerant
attitudes of the ulama led them to advocate far more harshness in dealing with
feudatories, merchants, and cultivators-who were usually Hindu-than the sultan
might find politically expedient. No political science evolved to enable a
sultan simultaneously to obey Quranic injunctions, to be equally just to all
his subjects, and to administer a settled population efficiently. He was bound
to antagonize one or another section of those on whose loyalty his rule
depended. Equally important, no system of peaceful succession or
legitimization of force evolved. Every strong man was a potential ruler or
rebel. By the early sixteenth century, North India was once again a congeries
of kingdoms, ruled by Turks, Afghans, and Rajputs. The Muslim ruling class
looked down on its infidel subjects, and the old Hindu ruling class despised
the new conquerors as barbarians.

     A similarly multifaceted interaction between new and old, Muslim and
Hindu, took place in South India. Ambitious sultans of Delhi waged war in the
Deccan and briefly established superiority. In 1347 a military governor broke
away to create the Bahmani kingdom, which subsequently devolved into five
states that had mixed Turkish and Indian Muslim ruling classes. They initiated
a process of cultural synthesis visible today in the city of Hyderabad. (The
state of Hyderabad was the residual successor of the Bahmani kingdom and
continued to exist as a princely state in subordinate alliance with the
British until 1948, when it was annexed by India.) Cultural flowering in the
medieval period was expressed in vigorous schools of Deccani architecture and
painting. The military and revenue-collecting institutions of the Bahmani
kingdom were similar to those of the sultanate. Efforts to gain more booty or
territory led to constant disputes with the powerful Vijayanagar Empire to the
south over control of the fertile Doab between the Krishna and Tungabhadra
rivers.

     Vijayanagar was founded in northern Karnataka by two Andhra princes in
1336. They rapidly expanded their domains southward to include Madurai and
westward to include the port of Goa. They were unable to control the whole of
the east coast or the extreme southwest coast, both of which were dotted with
Hindu and Muslim principalities. The Vijayanagar Empire encouraged trade. Its
capacity to wage war depended on a constant supply of horses imported from
abroad and the maintenance of internal roads and communications. Its merchant
guilds enjoyed a wide sphere of operation and counterbalanced the power of
landowners and Brahmans in court politics. Among the most enterprising of the
merchant castes were the Chettis, whose operations throughout South India and
Southeast Asia carried forward a tradition from Chola times that is noticeable
today. But India's commerce and shipping eventually passed largely into the
hands of foreigners, and special facilities for foreign traders were provided
by the emperor. Arabs and Portuguese jostled for influence and control of
Indian ports, and in 1510 Goa passed into Portuguese hands.

     The rulers of Vijayanagar were also great temple builders. Scholars
estimate that over 2,000 temples dedicated to a variety of deities were
constructed in Peninsula India between 1300 and 1700. The greatest among them
was the Sri Venkateshwara Temple at Tirupati, which in the mid-1980s continued
its wide-ranging activities. Temples received shares of revenue from villages
as well as gifts of money and kind. Temples invested their funds in irrigation
works, trade, and even in foreign enterprises. They became major landowning
and land-managing institutions and were partially responsible for the
considerable extension of cultivation in new lands that took place. Socially
and intellectually, however, the temples were a conservative force. They
sponsored no debate with the vital new religion, Islam. Nor were temples the
initiators of the bhakti movement, which attracted adherents all over India.
It was not the South Indian temples but the seven sacred sites of Hindu
pilgrimage that served to diffuse common beliefs and common life-styles
throughout the subcontinent (see Ceremonial Observances, ch. 3).

     Less by design than by circumstance, the Vijayanagar Empire became a
bridge between south and north, old and new, Hindu and Muslim. Its methods of
recruiting armies, administering districts, and collecting revenues through
sets of intermediaries were similar to those of the Bahmani kingdoms and the
sultanate. That is, they all had institutions of a feudal nature supporting
garrison states. Military rivalry between the Vijayanagar and Bahmani states
long absorbed their energies. When the five Muslim kingdoms united to defeat
Vijayanagar at the decisive Battle of Talikota in 1565, the Peninsula was
opened to the new power of the north-the Mughals.