This lecture was a part of the

Just before me, Professor Supriya Varma––my teacher at JNU who taught us archaeology––delivered a lecture. In archaeology we study material remains. As we have been discussing social media and the popular reception of history over the last couple of days, we may also notice that in the public perception of history, the difference between history and archaeology is often confused. This is a technical, academic question which Professor Varma has already raised—do we see archaeology as just a source of history or as a separate discipline? There is a third position as well. In some places, archaeology is treated as a branch of anthropology.

In the public perception of history, there is this idea that archaeology is something scientific. This lends it more credibility. That’s why historical interest often translates to a layman’s interest in archaeology, and the layman’s archaeological interest is always about what is the oldest. Push back the dates - as if being older adds some kind of value. I don’t understand this particular kind of value. We know that Mesopotamia and Egypt were two of the oldest urban civilizations in human history. What advantage is it giving Iraq or Egypt in their practical life? I have no idea.

What I do is completely different from that kind of research because I mainly deal with texts. And history, for a long time, was understood to be a textual discipline—a study of written material. That’s the reason for the older division between history and prehistory—that the historical period in common parlance is the period when written or literary records are available. Even if the records were in oral form earlier and written down later, that becomes a debated issue. If there is literature but not written records, is it historical or proto-historical? That is the question we have about the Vedic period.

How do we handle texts? Archaeology studies material culture. It can take you that far and it is a different kind of study. I agree with Professor Varma that it’s a separate discipline with its own separate questions and orientations, though the only thing people are obsessed with is dates that emerge from archaeological research. Archaeology can be one of the many tools in understanding a historical process, but that cannot be established solely on the basis of archaeological records. We know about the material culture of the Harappan people from archaeology, but can anybody tell us about any historical event that took place in the long period from 3200 BC to 1400 BC—roughly the entire range of Harappan civilization? Nobody will be able to. Without some kind of literary record, the historical narrative cannot be created. But there are problems with the literary records and that is the problem we are dealing with—the question of what is myth and what is history.

Let me start with a story from an ancient Indian text. A Buddhist text called the Majjhima Nikaya tells us this story about a bandit called Angulimala. He was called Angulimala because he was a very violent bandit who would cut off the fingers of the victims he would kill and he made a garland out of those fingers which he would wear. One day, the Buddha was going through the forest where Angulimala lived. Angulimala saw him and started chasing after the Buddha to rob and kill him. And so, the Buddha also began to run. Angulimala ran after him. The Buddha outran Angulimala and after a point Angulimala understood that he could not catch up. He was tired. So, he stopped and asked the Buddha to also stop. The Buddha replied, ‘I have stopped Angulimala. Now you stop.’ Angulimala was confused. He asked, ‘While walking…you say, “I have stopped.” But when I have stopped you say “I haven’t...”How have you stopped? How haven’t I?’ The Buddha replied, ‘I have stopped, Angulimala, once and for all, having cast off violence toward all living beings. You, though, are unrestrained towards beings (meaning that he has not yet stopped being violent). That’s how I have stopped and you haven’t.’¹

That is the story. Now, is this a myth? The Buddha is a historical personality. The Majjhima Nikaya is a very old text. It is one of the texts mentioned in the Ashokan inscriptions as a prescription for the Buddhist monks to study. So, by the third century BCE, when Ashoka ruled, it was in written form. That is not very distant from the Buddha’s time. Then, was Angulimala a real person? He might or might not be. There is a strong possibility he could be. There were people from diverse backgrounds coming to the Buddhist sangha. So, these are not imaginary people about whom the story is being told. At least the Buddha is not a completely imaginary person.

Is it a historical account? Did anybody see and record this conversation taking place between the Buddha and Angulimala? That is unlikely. I am not saying impossible—it might have been an oral tradition i.e. if Angulimala were a real person, he might have told it to someone, or the Buddha himself could have narrated the event. But that cannot be confirmed. This is not a historical account as we understand the term ‘history’, but that does not mean that we can totally discard this narrative from the realm of history. The story conveys something—not an authentic event but the idea of the Buddha’s teaching, That is the goal of the text, Majjhima Nikaya. It is not a history book, but a religious text. The story conveys what the Buddha means by the idea of nirvana— stopping the pursuit of material desires. That is the core of the Buddha’s teaching. Buddhism later got divided into many sects. On most points these sects differ from one another. But this idea of nirvana is one of the core ideas which all the sects agree upon. This story reflects the idea of that teaching by the metaphor it uses—of running and stopping. So, it represents a historical reality even if not a historical event—that the Buddha was trying to preach these core ideas in the time of the second urbanization, when urban centres were coming up, material pursuits seemed even more important and class division among people was increasing.

We have to understand that when we read ancient Indian history, we have literary sources from a very early period of time. We know that the Vedas are considered the oldest literary creation in any Indo-European language, going back to the second millennium BCE. Before that, there is also the issue of Harappan writing and a belief that the day the Harappan script is deciphered, we are going to access a huge amount of historical information. Unfortunately, we won’t. The Harappan writings are very small. In most cases, the average length is five characters. Even if they are deciphered, the most they could convey would be some idea about how the administration worked. Maybe what the currency system was like, if there was one. Probably, we would get the names and identities of the administrative and trade authorities and some idea about which goods were being stamped and all such things. The proper practice of writing starts in early India only from the Mauryan period (c. 321-184 BCE). Tamil Brahmi may predate it but again there is no long writing in Tamil Brahmi. Thus, before the reign of Mauryan emperor Ashoka (c. 269-232 BCE) we don’t have deciphered written records. There are two undated Mauryan inscriptions from Mahasthan and Sohgaura, which may or may not predate Ashoka.

However, literature existed in the Indian subcontinent from long before the Mauryan period. This literature came out of oral traditions. There is a misunderstanding about oral tradition as there is about archaeology. Archaeology is often construed as relevant only for the ‘deeper’ past. Another misconception we have is that oral traditions are deemed to only exist in preliterate societies. Oral traditions continue to exist in the Indian subcontinent. They are very powerful even now.

Recently, we lost one of the greatest historians and teachers our city (Kolkata) had—Professor Rajat Kanta Ray. He taught at Presidency College in various capacities for three decades as a regular employee and then lectured as Professor Emeritus till the time of his death. For a long time one ritual Professor Ray used to do with every new batch that would come to Presidency College, was to take them around the campus and tell them the history of the campus through anecdotes about the staircase where Subhash Chandra Bose was accused of accosting Professor Oaten and was punished for that, the laboratory where J.C. Bose had worked, the famous teachers of the English Department and History Department, whose photographs adorned the staffroom walls, and so on. This was a kind of oral tradition. He didn’t write anything about it and, of course, he spoke about real historical events and personalities. But did he say exactly the same things every time he told the stories? It cannot be so. So, an oral tradition is a performative tradition and its performance changes every time. Then, how can literary texts grown out of oral traditions make sense to the discipline of history for which definite chronological locations are essential?

The modern discipline of history as it is taught in schools, colleges and universities, is a practice that came to India in the colonial period. Nowadays, we are hearing a lot about decolonization of knowledge. I’ll ask all of you to consider: What is decolonization? What is being claimed as decolonization? Is it decolonization of knowledge or is it re-colonizing and bringing back colonial notions, undermining the actual decolonization of historical knowledge that had happened over the last six or seven decades after the independence of India?

There is no doubt that the institutional discipline of history as we see it today started its journey in India in the colonial period. Many of the historians who wrote the history of India in the colonial period were not professional historians. Many of them were colonial administrators. It was colonial administrative responsibilities which ignited in them the historical curiosity about India. These people were coming from a faraway country and were now in a position to rule over a vast country with huge cultural diversity. They needed to know the country.

Initially, colonial administrators thought that there would be some history books on India, which they would read to prepare themselves to rule. Then they found out that there was nothing of that sort—at least for the ancient period. For the medieval period, there were some sources which H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson brought out in eight volumes called The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (1867-1877). Translations of major historical works on the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal period were gradually brought out. But, for the ancient period there was nothing like that. That led colonial administrators and scholars to search for the history of ancient India.

Though all of us agree on the need for decolonization of knowledge—and I’ll come to the reason why—that doesn’t mean that everything colonial scholars did was wrong or bad. Indian history as we read it today would not be possible without colonial historians. They were instrumental in bringing out a huge number of source materials including textual and epigraphic sources. In the case of epigraphy, they were responsible for deciphering the ancient scripts like Brahmi and Kharoshti. In the case of textual sources, they rediscovered them, prepared critical editions, translated and published them, bringing the sources into the public domain. However, history is not only about revealing new sources, but also about analysis and interpretation. That is where colonial ideologies were instrumental. How were they making use of these sources? There is no need to generalize that all colonial scholars were doing exactly the same thing. Of course, when we speak of schools in historiography, there are some general trends and arguments and there would be exceptions to these. The general trends in this case had something to do with colonial ideology.

One of the most lasting legacies of the colonial ideology is our constant obsession with the question of ‘Aryan identity’. That is not one of the main themes I am going to address in this discussion but I have to say a few things about it. What is this Aryan identity? In late eighteenth century, a colonial scholar named William Jones was learning Sanskrit to learn about ancient India, and he discovered that Sanskrit had many linguistic similarities with Greek and Latin—classical languages he already knew. From this observation came this large structural idea that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, as well as Old Persian, Gothic, Celtic, many such languages share a common origin. They come from the same language family named the Indo-European language family because the successor languages spread mostly in India and Europe.

When we say the word ‘Aryan’, we often think of a ‘race’. Jones was not speaking of race. He was speaking of language. Language does not necessarily have anything to do with race. English as language is spoken by diverse ethnic communities. Various ethnic communities living in the same area can share a language, and the same ethnic community spread in diverse places can speak many languages. Linguistic identity and ethnic identity are not necessarily connected, though they may overlap. But all theories are products of their time. Jones got this idea in the late eighteenth century and from the early nineteenth century ‘race’ as an idea became extremely popular throughout Europe. The theory of race came from science, not from humanities but it gave rise to a discipline that we know as racial anthropology. The colonial administrators were trying to understand the subject population. They were also trying to classify them. The way we classify plants and animals in zoology or botany, racial anthropology classified the human population of the world into various races, with their separate physical features, behaviours and cultures, creating a hierarchy. To them, the white Caucasian race was the topmost, the black Africans were at the bottom and everyone else was in between. Who were these white Caucasian people? What was their ancient civilization? They are the inheritors of the Graeco-Roman civilization i.e. the people who spoke Greek and Latin. Jones’ theory proposed that ancient Indians spoke a language which shares a common origin with Greek and Latin. Language began to be conflated with race. So, colonial scholars began to conclude that there is a common thread between the ancestors of Vedic Indians and those who established the Greek and Roman civilizations. How does the colonial knowledge system make use of that? I shall return to this point.

The discipline of history, as we know it now, is an occidental discipline. It emerged in Europe in a particular cultural context. The emergence of ‘modernity’ in Europe, as we understand it, started with the Renaissance. And Renaissance by its very name, means regenerating a past, namely the Graeco-Roman past. So, the antiquarian interest was already there. Through diverse cultural movements from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, new academic disciplines were born, history being a very important one of them, systematizing the study of the past in a certain way through a particular methodology. These disciplines are parts of the ‘modern’ knowledge system. What is the distinction between the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’ in the European context? There are many distinctions but, in terms of the knowledge system, the transition from medieval to modern meant secularization of knowledge in academic institutions and disciplines. In medieval Europe, knowledge was controlled by the church and consequently how you interpret the world depended on the biblical interpretation. All of you know about the story of Galileo and his confrontations with the church. Very funnily, the position the church was upholding was not a position of Christian creation—it came from Graeco-Roman scholars like Aristotle and Ptolemy. The church had internalized that Graeco-Roman cosmology and was defending it. But what happened during the Scientific Revolution starting with Copernicus’s advocacy of a heliocentric solar system and down to Isaac Newton—who formulated the laws all of us study in school that show that one can explain how the world functions through certain mathematical formula was that it was established that we do not need any divine interpretation to explain scientific phenomena. That is the secularization of knowledge. And then with the use of the new scientific knowledge, many technological innovations happened, leading to what is known as the Industrial Revolution. This gave the Europeans superior technology and a superior military apparatus with which they could subjugate a huge number of much older civilizations in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

As a result of that an epistemic change occurred—in the medieval period, religious knowledge was the ultimate knowledge and in the modern period, scientific knowledge became the ultimate knowledge. So, for something to be sanctified as knowledge, it had to be scientific.

Here is a problem: history could not be scientific. With the advent of modernity, there was a tendency of showcasing history as a science. The philosophy guiding the pursuit of scientific knowledge, positivism, believed that if something was not scientific, it was not knowledge. All of you read a definition of science in your textbooks, and that definition focuses on ideas of observation, experimentation and inference to make a conclusion. So, to acquire scientific knowledge, you observe whatever you want to study, you conduct experiments, and based on that you come to a conclusion. That conclusion is objective and universal. So, the result of a scientific experiment will not be different on the basis of who conducted the experiment, where it was conducted, or what the person’s ideological belief was. Can history be like that? It cannot. Why? Because the methodology of observation and experimentation is impossible in history. History was believed to be the study of the past. What is the past? Something that has already happened. You cannot travel back to observe what had happened earlier. You cannot bring it to your laboratory and conduct experiment. And as a result, you cannot give a universal conclusion. If history was not scientific enough, then was history valid knowledge?

There were positivist historians like Leopold von Ranke and many others who tried to make history scientific. Ranke argued that even if we cannot experiment with history or give universal conclusions, we can observe. We can do something akin to scientific observation, that is accumulating facts. History is a study of the past through sources—you go to the archives, read the sources and accumulate as much information as possible. The more information you acquire, the better you know the past. And the information is there in the sources. Hence, it is objective. It has nothing to do with who you are. Your job is to go to the archive, read the sources and collect the data. This was his idea of history.

This idea of history has been very strongly challenged now. I am not going into all the details as to why, but one commonsensical thing is that gathering data from sources does not make it objective. Sources are also created by someone. They were human beings with their own ideas, their own ideologies, their own patronage and audiences. Secondly, no historian goes and reads all the sources. You frame your research interest and your research question, depending on your location. You select which materials you want to use. No historian reproduces all the data you get in your sources. You select which data you are going to use. You arrange that in a narrative.

There is the other extreme—those who would say that history is just a narrative like story-telling. I am not advocating for that position. There is a similarity between history-writing and story-telling, but there are differences as well. Though positivist methodology has been critiqued, it has not been discarded altogether. The idea of history being source-based comes from positivism and it is key to historical writing even now, but not to story-telling. This kind of history-writing is a modern phenomenon, not only ‘western’ phenomenon.

Was there then no history-writing in the pre-modern period? There are texts from that time that follow a similar methodology, though not the exact same. The very word ‘history’ comes from the name of a text composed by an ancient Greek scholar called Herodotus—Historiai (Histories). He wrote the history of the Persian Wars (490-479 BCE). There is a belief that Herodotus followed a methodology more or less similar to what we call history, and some scholars called him ‘The Father of History’. Others would dispute that Herodotus was not historical enough. He believed in stories and myths and legends. A younger contemporary of Herodotus, named Thucydides wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BCE). Thucydides himself was a participant in the war. He saw the events—some of them first-hand. He collected material first-hand. He spoke to eyewitnesses, saw the official documents. He is thus often called ‘the father of scientific history’. So, the Graeco-Roman tradition was credited with having a tradition of history-writing. Other pre-modern civilizations might have had similar traditions like the tarikh tradition in the Islamic world or the strong tradition of historical writing in pre-modern China.

But there is no text like that in ancient India. That is a problem. That problem was very appealing to the colonial scholars. Why? If we go back to the question of Aryan identity which created a connection between the Sanskritic and Graeco-Roman cultures, we may remember that it was very useful for a particular kind of colonial theory that the ancestors of Indian Hindus and that of the Britishers are racially the same. European history was usually divided into three periods: classical, medieval and modern. Classical is the Graeco-Roman civilization, the high point of European culture. ‘Barbarian invasions’ ended the Western Roman Empire in fifth century CE. The medieval period is a Dark Age ruled by these barbarian people. Then modernity comes through the Renaissance, regenerating the Graeco-Roman knowledge system. Similarly, ancient India was a glorious civilization according to some colonial scholars, mainly those known as the Orientalists. Ancient India was seen as an ‘Aryan’ civilization—a label created from the Vedic Sanskrit arya or ancient Iranian airiia and applied as a racial marker for the ancestors of the Caucasians. Aryans were the harbingers of culture and civilization everywhere. Like classical European civilization, ancient Indian civilization was brought to an end by ‘barbarian invasions’ by the Muslims who are not Aryans because they are Arab people and Arabic is a Semitic language, not an Indo-European language. Language and race are confused. The Englishmen as speakers of another Indo-European language and successors of the Renaissance modernity, came to India to restore India to glory. The Orientalists valourized ancient Indian civilization. The other colonial group, the Utilitarian, would not valourize either ancient or medieval India. The poster boy of utilitarian historiography in colonial India was James Mill whose textbooks everyone read. He followed the tripartite periodization of European history and applied it to India, without calling the periods classical, medieval and modern. He called them: Hindu Age, Muslim Age and British Age. Why such terminology? Was everyone Hindu in ancient India? There was no religion called ‘Hinduism’ then! But even if I loosely take the term to signify all kinds of Brahmanical Vedic and Puranic traditions, did everyone follow that? Were there not Buddhists and Jains and others in ancient India? Definitely everyone was not a Muslim in medieval India. The Muslims were not even the majority, even in medieval India. So, what do Hindu Age and Muslim Age mean? Mill meant the religion of the rulers. Yet, even that is historically wrong—not all rulers in ancient India were ‘Hindus’, as there were Buddhists and Jains as well; not all rulers in medieval India were Muslims, as there were entities like the Vijaynagar kingdom, the Rajputs, the Sikhs and the Marathas. This was just a perception about those periods.

Why was the religion of the ruler considered important? Even if it was important, why was the modern age not the Christian Age but the British age? It was because the British saw themselves as modern, secular people; premodern Indians were utterly religious people. That has something common with Orientalist ideology—both were very useful for the colonial policy of ‘divide and rule’—Indian Hindus and British share a common cultural origin, Muslims are invaders and outsiders who have come from outside. So, what is the trick in this theory? It makes you believe that the fellow Muslim who has lived as a neighbour to you for 700 years is an outsider. And the Englishman who has come here on a job, who will retire and go back to England, is your ally. The very idea of insider and outsider was reversed.

This reversal was necessary. The Hindus and Muslims of India had already joined together in a big revolt in 1857. This revolt did not consider Muslims as outsiders. They saw the Mughal Empire, even in its most decadent condition, as the symbol of Indian identity and unity. Colonial interest feared this unity and pursued the policy of ‘divide and rule’ by giving rise to the ‘two-nation theory’ which showed Hindus and Muslims as two different racial nationalities whose interests were conflicting. By 1947, the ‘two-nation theory’ was so integrated in the Indian psyche that it led to the Partition.

Over the last decade or so, South Asians are vehemently going back to the Two-Nation Theory. I am not talking about India only. Pakistan has always believed in the Two-Nation Theory because the country was founded on the basis of it. However, independent India chose to be a secular country by rejecting the colonial ‘two-nation theory’ based on religious essentialism. When Bangladesh was formed out of Pakistan, on the basis of language, within 25 years of the creation of Pakistan on the basis of religion, the grave misconceptions of the theory were apparent. Unfortunately, the Two-Nation Theory is resurfacing in both India and Bangladesh. Thus, we must remember that it is a colonial theory; not a nationalist one, although the people espousing it—describing Muslims as invaders from outside and valourizing a religious periodization of ancient, ergo glorious India and medieval, ergo dark ages of India—pose themselves to be nationalist and ‘de-colonial’.

It was good for the colonial interest to describe the Hindus and Muslims of India as very religious people. It meant that the rulers were also religious, and would rule according to their religious texts. The British were the secular ones and that’s why British rule was claimed to be better for India. The utilitarian theory—the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people—could be ensured by the British because they were secular. If the British left, either Hindus or Muslims would rule and the other religion would be oppressed. That was the anxiety of the 1940s, leading to the Partition, showing that the British successfully sold the idea.

However, the Hindus were also described as Aryans were not they then as glorious as the Europeans? Why should not the British trust them to rule? Because, these Aryans, in colonial theory, were not like Graeco-Roman Aryans after all. The Graeco-Romans were worldly people. They knew how to rule. They created republics among other things. Ancient Indians were Aryans who were more spiritually oriented otherworldly people always thinking about liberation from this world. If you read F. Max Mueller’s India, What Can It Teach Us? (1882), you would see the argument that the Europeans ought to learn spirituality from India. But Indians were not materialistically oriented, a quality which might be interpreted to consider the Indians unfit to rule themselves.² Colonial historians also argued that it was because of this lack of interest in the material world that ancient Indians did not keep records and wrote no ‘history’. That is what A. A. Macdonell writes in the introduction of his A History of Sanskrit Literature (1900)—ancient India wrote no history because it never made any.³ He meant that here was nothing of significance in ancient India.

All colonial scholars did not have so strong an opinion. Many of them thought there were important events in ancient India. E. J. Rapson, the editor of the first volume of The Cambridge History of India (1922), wrote that there were many events of significance but added:

'In all the large and varied literatures of the Brahmans, Jains and Buddhists, there is not to be found a single work which can be compared to the Histories in which Herodotus recounts the struggle between the Greeks and the Persians or to the Annals in which Livy traces the growth and progress of Roman power.'⁴

Notice the interesting framing of the sentence. Rapson is not talking about all ancient Indian literature, but literature of the Brahmins, Buddhists and Jains. Religious identity always marks the Indian in colonial writings and in the recent attempt to bring the colonial interpretation back. In the decades between them, we tried to outgrow that. Colonial writing produced a very powerful idea of ancient India as one that was not a historically conscious civilization because it produced no historical text.

Nationalist historians––who were participants in reform/nationalist movements influenced by nationalist ideology––sought to challenge many colonial assertions. For example, the assertion that ancient Indians were totally materialistic. One key discovery that helped challenge this was by one librarian in Mysore called R. Shamasastry who discovered a text in 1905-6 that happened to be Kautilya’s Arthashastra. When this was published, historians could look at an ancient Indian text beyond the religious texts—such as Dharmashastras, the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads—which the colonial scholars translated, to a text of high quality on the subject of statecraft.

There were scholars like H.C. Raychaudhuri, a lecturer on European history at Calcutta University, who showed that the political history of ancient India could be written in the same manner as the political history of Europe. He wrote the classic called Political History of Ancient India (1923). Yet, the first line of the book read––‘No Thucydides or Tacitus has left for posterity a genuine history of Ancient India.’⁵ This is one colonial position that even the nationalists mostly accepted. Even one of the staunchest of nationalist historians, R.C. Majumdar, took to this position. After independence, he was asked to write an article for a volume edited by C. H. Philips called Historians of India, Pakistan and, Ceylon (1961), on ancient Indian historical consciousness. Here, Majumdar says that we must admit that before the Rajatarangini of Kalhana––a twelfth-century chronicle of Kashmir––there is no writing in ancient India, which we can call ‘history’ as we understand the term.⁶

Even when decolonization of knowledge began, post-colonial scholars, revisionist scholars and others would also more or less accept this position and then try to explain why ancient Indians were not historically conscious. There can be many examples but I’ll just mention one of the most notable post-colonial scholars, Ashis Nandy, who wrote a famous article called ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’. In this article, Nandy claimed that history is a western discipline. It came with a colonial knowledge system and colonial knowledge systems made history the only valid explanation of the past. So, in ahistorical societies, there are other ways of looking at the past which may not give you facts but can give you a moral certitude. Now, these have lost their value. That’s why Hindutva and other ideologies are on the rise ––they are trying to claim the territory of history, which has become the only valid narrative of the past.⁷ The problem with this argument by Nandy is that in the process of decolonizing, it also admits the colonial position that apart from western societies, all societies are ahistorical.

That was a problem even in the classical Marxist understanding of Indian history. We know that Karl Marx wrote a number of journalistic articles on India. The historical analysis Marx and Friedrich Engels had produced was based on the mode of production––with the change of mode of production, a new kind of society comes up; they spoke of stages of society: slave society, feudal society and capitalist society. Where did Marx and Engels get ideas about such societies? From European history––slave society referred to the Graeco-Roman society, feudal society referred to medieval European society and capitalist society was descriptive of the society in which Marx and Engels were working. But when more knowledge about non-European civilizations was becoming widely available––particularly about Asian and African cultures––this model did not fit entirely. Yet, that was not seen as a flaw in the model’s ability to be universally applicable. Rather, Marx spoke about the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’. History is primarily a study of change and examines how society changes. According to Marx, these Asiatic societies are so backward economically that everything is owned by state. Rulers change but the social structure doesn’t change. So, the historical movement i.e. the process of change has not yet begun.⁸ This is more or less akin to the colonial position of ancient India being a changeless, static Hindu civilization.

The Indian Marxist historians––they are called Marxists primarily because of methodology––pointed out that colonial historiography was dominated by religious and political history. Nationalists challenged them, but within the colonial framework––if colonial historians made a statement, nationalists would follow the same framework to prove them wrong. Colonial historians claimed that ancient India only had despotic kingship, while ancient Graeco-Romans had democratic republics. So, K.P. Jayaswal would show that there were non-monarchical gana sanghas in ancient India, which he would call republics. If Vincent Smith called the great conqueror Samudra Gupta ‘the Napoleon of India’, R.C. Majumdar would not question why a 4th century personality would be compared to Napoleon who was born nearly 1500 years later. Rather, Majumdar would painstakingly show that Samudra Gupta was a greater conqueror than Napoleon. He left his empire for his successor, Napoleon could not.⁹

Indian Marxist historians like D.D. Kosambi and R.S. Sharma were borrowing certain things from Marxist analysis of history––focusing on socio-economic processes and the study of social change––but they differed from Marx’s own understanding of Indian history. Kosambi or Sharma did not believe that ancient India was a changeless civilization. Rather, they showed that technological evolutions––for example, the coming of iron technology—brought state formation and urbanization. They challenged the periodization also. The labels of Hindu Age, Muslim Age, and British age were discarded by nationalist historians themselves. They started using ancient, medieval, and modern instead. But only the labels changed––ancient was only up to twelfth century, that is before Islamic conquest; medieval was the ‘Muslim period’ of the Sultanate and the Mughals. There are exceptions like Raychaudhuri who stopped his Political History of Ancient India with the fall of the Guptas. But most textbooks followed this periodization. But Sharma, a Marxist historian, when writing his famous book Indian Feudalism c.300–1200 (1965) challenges that. He tries to show that from the time of the Gupta Empire changes similar to feudalism in Western Europe occur in the subcontinent. So, this period between circa 300 to 1200 CE has different features socially, economically, and politically, from the period prior.¹⁰ Many Marxist historians would not consider the Gupta period (c. 300-600 CE) feudal, but would Identify a new period between circa 600 and 1200-1300 CE, markedly different from its preceding period. Just because European history has three periods, Indian history needs not also have three periods.

These formulations had their criticisms also and that gave rise to big debates. We were referring to the Iron Age debate earlier.¹¹ The Feudalism debate is an even bigger debate. Many criticized the attempt to understand early Indian history in terms of a feature characteristic of medieval Europe. There are differences between European feudalism and the situation in post-Gupta India––there was no institutional serfdom or feudal contract in India. One of the biggest critics of this model, B. D. Chattopadhyaya, would not accept the feudalism model’s claim that there was de-urbanization in the period. Rather, he would say it was the period of the ‘third urbanization’. He would not say that feudalism meant the states became weakened because they were no longer big empires but pointed to the existence of regional, integrative states. This wa new kind of state. The most famous book by Chattopadhyaya on this subject is titled The Making of Early Medieval India (2012), where he uses the term ‘early medieval’ to denote the period concerned.¹² This goes to show that even Sharma’s critics accepted that this was a different period––the ‘feudalism’ label might or might not be accepted but the early medieval emerged as a new period of Indian history. Thus, the Indian Marxist historians were looking beyond the colonial framework, raising new questions, inspiring new debates. Yet, even they did not challenge the idea of the lack of historical consciousness in ancient India.

Then, did ancient Indians not have any historical consciousness? Colonial scholars argued that they indeed did not and the nationalists accepted it. Post-colonial scholars were also apologetic about a lack of historical consciousness. Even the Marxist historical tradition did not focus on this question. However, there are exceptions to these trends. Among colonial scholars, F.E. Pargiter thought that ancient Indians might have possessed a notion of historical tradition. In two of his books—Ancient Indian Historical Traditions (1922)¹³ and The Purana Text of the Dynasties of the Kali Age (1913)¹⁴ ––Pargiter noticed the term itihasa-purana in many ancient texts right from the Atharva Veda. Itihasa-purana was an ancient, bardic tradition and like the Vedic tradition, it was also an oral tradition but not necessarily a religious tradition. It was a tradition of bards. These bards were mostly patronized by kshatriya rulers, not by brahmanas, hence, this was a more historically oriented tradition. Pargiter thought that other scholars did not find any history in ancient India because they looked at religious sources––religious leaders might not be interested in history, rulers usually are. So, one had to look at the itihasa-purana tradition for historical consciousness.

Among the extant texts only the Mahabharata is called an itihasa, while there are many texts Identifying as Puranas. Based on these texts, Pargiter created certain genealogies for ancient Indian dynasties. But when more epigraphic and numismatic sources were discovered and published, Pargiter’s genealogy collapsed. Why did this happen? Because Pargiter failed to distinguish between the oral tradition called itihasa-purana and the texts we now have as Puranas. The extant Puranas were texts written down by brahmanas, not by kshatriyas or bards. They were texts of various new religious sects, and were composed in the Gupta and post-Gupta period. So Pargiter ended up prioritizing one set of religious texts over another. The Vedic and early Buddhist texts were at least composed and textualized closer in time to the age they were describing than the Puranas. But without a doubt, this quest for alternative historical traditions in early India was started by Pargiter.

Among the nationalist historians, U. N. Ghoshal was the first to go beyond the problems in Pargiter’s methodology. Ghoshal enquired whether it Is necessary that a religious tradition would have no historical consciousness. Can a religious tradition not be historically conscious? Is there a clear distinction between them? He pointed out that there were elements of historical consciousness in certain sections of Vedic and Buddhist tradition, while the very existence of the itihasa-purana tradition indicates that there was some kind of historical consciousness in ancient India—gradually this consciousness was manifested beyond scriptures, in literary works based on the lives of historical figures— such as Bana’s Harshacharita— and eventually in chronicles like the Rajatarangini.15 But again, Ghoshal did not give a theoretical formulation to the questions he was raising. He only pointed to certain traditions which might have shown historical consciousness.

The person who expounded a theory of historical consciousness in early India, supported by her examination of primary sources and critical of earlier, especially colonial, scholarship that rejected the notion of historical consciousness altogether, is Romila Thapar. In her The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India (2013), Thapar asks about how we understand if a society is historically conscious or not. Do we only see whether they have written history in a particular manner? After all, the tradition we are calling history is a modern discipline. One is then imposing that on the past and searching for similar methodologies. How can that be used to judge a pre-modern civilization? Even the methodology of history is not singular as we were discussing earlier––modern positivists wrote history in one manner, Herodotus in another, Thucydides in yet another and the ancient Chinese in another manner altogether. So why would we judge a culture’s historical consciousness by a yardstick of history-writing determined by the modern discipline of history?

Thapar suggested an alternative way that we ask three questions about a tradition to see whether it is historically conscious or not:

1) Did that society consider its past important and worth recording?

2) Was this recording chronological or was there a sense of chronology in the way it records the past? Because only then causality can be established. (Stories that begun with, ‘Once upon a time…’ would not qualify as historical traditions of the past).

3) How was this tradition presented? Was the tradition meant to convey something to its contemporary society?16 (In other words, is there a dialogue of some kind between the past and the present, which is a major characteristic of history as well?)

These three features can help us to understand whether a society was historically conscious and if there were traditions reflecting these three features.

Thapar argued that there were numerous traditions like that in early India. Are these traditions history? Not necessarily. But they are historically conscious traditions. Thapar calls them ‘historical traditions’. She shows that initially the historical consciousness was in an ‘embedded’ form––they need to be prised out but are very much present in the scope of early texts, usually religious texts. The entire contents of what we understand as ‘religiousliterature’ may not be entirely about otherworldly things and even the religious context in such a text may have a historical orientation. Thapar calls this ‘embedded history.’ The consciousness about the past is embedded in religious texts; they are not creating separate texts only to narrate the past but within religious texts, there are sections that do impart a sense of the past. What are such historical traditions? The Vedic tradition; the itihasa-purana tradition (which did not start as a religious tradition but gradually got Brahmanized); and the Shramanic tradition or tradition of heterodox renunciatory sect among whom the Buddhists and Jains have their own separate traditions.

Gradually, embedded history becomes externalized. When court culture is established––in Gupta and post-Gupta India particularly––there were court poets who were consciously creating traditions about the past. This manifests in royal inscriptions. Earlier inscriptions, like the inscriptions of Ashoka, are royal edicts; they have nothing to do with the past. But later, big Sanskrit inscriptions would have a genealogical section at the start, narrating the origins about the royal family and how they came to power, describing the previous rulers, then listing the achievements of the present ruler. This is one form of externalized history that concerns a dynasty. Sometimes there are texts about only one person––historical biographies or charita literature––like the Harshacharita of Banabhatta (seventh century CE), the Vikramankadevacharita of Bilhana (eleventh century CE), and the Ramacharita of Sandhyakaranandin (twelfth century CE) being the three most important examples. And there are vamshavalis––regional chronicles of different dynasties that ruled a particular region.

If we look at the externalized histories, we must ask why these traditions were necessary? These are definitely about historical figures. These dynasties existed, these rulers existed, but these texts are not ‘history’ per se. It is because history’s orientation is different. Let us take charita literature for example. Why did Harshavardhana, Vikramaditya VI of the Chalukya dynasty and Ramapala of the Pala dynasty need the three charita texts mentioned above to be written about themselves? Why many other kings did not have this need? There are very interesting similarities among these three kings. None of them were the eldest sons of their fathers. They would not be the king by law of primogeniture. All of their elder brothers died in very mysterious circumstances. So, there could have been questions about their succession or their supposed roles in either dethroning or killing their brothers. In Bana’s Harshacharita, for example, why was Harsha the right person to rule and not his elder brother Rajyavardhana? Bana himself gives four contradictory opinions about this issue in the text. So, Banabhatta seems to be a person hell-bent on proving that Harsha is the rightful successor who had nothing to do with the murder of Rajyavardhana, and justifies in the process Harsha’s occupation of the throne of Kanauj which was being ruled by his brother-In-law Grahavarman before he was killed by the king of Malava.

This tradition has its precursor in historical drama. In the Gupta period, the dramatist Vishakhadatta wrote the play Devichandraguptam justifying why Chandragupta II killed his elder brother Ramagupta and married his widow. He claims that Ramagupta was an incompetent ruler––he was gifting his wife to the Shaka invader. We don’t know whether it is true or not. We have no account from Ramagupta’s side. Is it a historical fact that Ramagupta was like that or is it an exaggeration by Chandragupta II’s courtier to fortify his king’s claim to the throne? In Harshacharita, Banabhatta puts the blame on Shashanka, the ruler of Bengal, as the one who got Rajyavardhana assassinated. But that is only the position taken by Harsha’s court poet. We don’t know whether Shashanka had anything to do with it. We don’t know whether Harsha was suspected of his elder brother’s killing or not. So, even externalized history is methodologically different from history. The framing of the narratives does not follow the method of history-writing. These are the poet’s imagination and representation used to portray the past in a manner desired by the court.

The case with regional chronicles is similar. Regional chronicles are composed usually in the regions which were in the margins for a long time. When there was state formation in these regions, they wanted a place in the pan-subcontinental Sanskritic literary culture. So, Chamba in Himachal would have a vamshavali and so would Kashmir. So Kalhana’s Rajatarangini is not a historical text that dropped out of the sky. If there were no tradition of historical writing, how come a ‘historical’ text is suddenly written in the twelfth century? Some scholars would argue that Kashmir is near Central Asia and China and China and the Islamic world had historical traditions. But did Kalhana know Chinese or Arabic or Persian that he would be influenced by that tradition? That seems not the case. What Thapar shows is that Kalhana is part of the vamshavali tradition. Kalhana’s text is a culmination of this long history of historical traditions. Kalhana’s method matches that of historical writing––he used inscriptions and court records for about the last 300 years before his time—but both Thapar and Kumkum Roy17 show that the early part of Rajatarangini is a retelling of the itihasa-purana tradition, mostly based on the local Purana of Kashmir––the Nilamata Purana. Then there are stories about real historical figures alongside imaginary stories from embedded history–– stories about Ashoka or the Huna king Mihirakula, for example, but often they were taken from Buddhist or Puranic sources. Then, of course, since Kalhana’s father was a court official, Kalhana was very meticulous about the last three centuries he perused through, as he had access to solid primary sources. But the mythical traditions about earlier times are mixed up with the more historically grounded account of the later times. Hence, while discussing early Indian historical traditions, we cannot escape the myths which form much of the embedded history traditions, and seeps into externalized history as well.

Let us go back to the embedded history traditions, then. It is easier to understand why externalized history is historically conscious –– those texts are about historical people and historical events, written by court poets familiar with the history. But why would the Vedic tradition, the itihasa-purana tradition, and the Buddhist and Jain traditions be historical conscious? I’m not going talk much about the Jain tradition because that is very much integrated with the externalized history tradition. Jain texts were composed much later in the early medieval period. Jain authors like Hemachandra and Merutunga were also members of the Chaulukya court of Gujarat and they must have been influenced by the tradition of courtly literature.

If we look at the Brahmanical and Buddhist literature, what is happening there? The Vedas are not expected to be historical. They are scriptures; they are considered apaurusheya, not creations of human beings; they are supposed to be a universal message. Why would history matter there? However, even if Vedas are considered apaurusheya, the Vedic tradition remembers or at least claims to remember the poet of each and every Rigvedic hymn––the anukramani, a supplementary text, makes a list of them. There is an explanation that these were the poets of the hymns, but these hymns are not their own creations; they received divine visions and narrated that in their language. So, they are seers, rishis, and not merely kavis. The oldest parts of the Rig Veda is arranged in family books on the basis of the identity of these poets, according to who belonged to which family. These poets had their patrons, too. Apart from the praises of the gods––which is what the Rig Veda (c. 1400-1000 BCE) is about––there are the dana-stuti hymns, where poets are praising the gifts given by the patrons. These are real poets praising real patrons but that does not mean all the descriptions are real. These are praises, not historical accounts, and exaggerations and literary embellishments would have coloured the real achievements of the chiefs being praised.

We get to know about important historical events of the Rigvedic period from the dana-stuti hymns. That’s how we know that a tribe called Bharatas defeated a confederacy of ten other tribes in a battle called the dasharajna, the battle of ten kings. This battle was about patronage. The former priest of the Bharata chief Sudas, Vishvamitra, was infuriated because he got dismissed and Vasishtha was appointed as a new priest. Vasishtha was not from a known priestly family. He was an immigrant––probably from Iran. Vishvamitra and Vasishtha were contemporaries of Sudas and both composed hymns regarding Sudas’s achievements. So, we may presume this battle to be historical. But sometimes the amounts of gifts mentioned in these gift-giving hymns are so huge that they cannot be real. Why is it that? If a poet sang to a chief how his grandfather was a famous person because he had gifted so much, it was not only about the grandfather, it was also about the audience, especially the grandson. It would tell him that if his grandfather gave so much, he too should give something. The past being useful to the present does not necessarily mean that the account is factually correct. Then there are gathas, narash amsis, akhyanas in later Vedic literature (c. 1000-600 BCE). These are strictly religious literature. But, as I said, religion can also have a sense of the past.

When a particular Vedic ritual was taking place, someone might ask about the point of performing that ritual. Then the text would tell a story about some kings or notable figures of the past who had performed the concerned ritual and obtained the desired result. This is historical consciousness. Did all these kings exist? Some of them must have, otherwise this tradition would make no sense to the audience.

On the other hand, he Buddhist tradition grew as an alternative to the Vedic-Brahamanical tradition. Buddhist tradition needed even more to be historically oriented because it was a religion stemming from the teachings of a historical founder and not based on claims of timeless divine revelation. I began with the story of Angulimala. Why was it written? Was it a ‘real’ account? We learnt that the story conveys ideas integral to Buddhist thought through metaphor. In that time period, Buddhist monks asking for patronage had to constantly explain what their religion was––who was the Buddha and what did he preach? Such stories must have certainly helped put forth these ideas. Later, there were biographies of the Buddha, too. But can these be plainly accepted as ‘historical’ accounts? Let us examine the case of Ashvaghosha’s Buddhacharita, arguably the most famous biography of the Buddha. Ashvaghosha (c. first/second century CE) lived more than half a millennium after the historical Buddha. In his account, the Buddha is born a prince. Was the Buddha really a prince? The Buddha was a Shakya and the Shakyas were a gana-sangha, not a monarchy. The historical Buddha was not a prince and the older Pali texts are clear about that. Ashvaghosha definitely knew that. Why does the Buddha become a prince in Ashvaghosha’s Buddhacharita? Because his intended audience are the kings. He was trying to make a new sect of Buddhism, the Mahayana, attractive to the various monarchies in power in the period after the massive Mauryan empire collapsed. Tradition associates him with the patronage of one such king, the Kushana emperor Kanishka I. So being of royal origin makes the character of the Buddha more appealing to the monarchies. And in later biographies like the Mahavastu and the Lalitavistara, both belonging possibly to the Gupta period, more attention is paid to explain why the Buddha came from the most prestigious royal family. He was not any random prince. This takes precedence over even what the Buddha actually did. So that is how these Buddhist biographies were being formulated.

An even more prominent example of how the Buddhist biographies operated can be discussed through the example of one of the most well-known historical figures of early India, Ashoka. Anirudh Kanisetti’s lecture in this workshop mentioned that textbooks from the 1950s would focus more on figures like Ashoka and Akbar.

One reason for that is that they were considered precursors of ‘secular statecraft’. Otherwise, why would Ashoka’s chakra and stambha be chosen as our national symbols? But another reason for that is also to be found in the availability of sources. We cannot have so much discussion on Chandragupta Maurya, who was also an important ruler, because the archive to study his reign is limited compared to the archive Ashoka left us. Ashoka, in his edicts, recorded his official policy throughout his empire. So, the Ashoka we know historically comes down to us directly from his inscriptions.

These inscriptions were deciphered only in 1837. Didn’t people remember Ashoka before that? They did through stories. And we still hear those stories coming from the Buddhist texts like the Ashokavadana––that there was once a brutal king called Chandashoka (Ashoka the Violent), who turned into Dharmashoka (Ashoka the Righteous) by the ministrations of a Buddhist monk called Moggaliputta Tissa in Theravada tradition or Upagupta in Mahayana tradition. When Ashoka’s inscriptions were discovered and deciphered, we learnt that his change of heart was because of the casualties of a war at Kalinga. Yet, no Buddhist text speaks of this. Just like Ashoka’s edicts never speak of any Buddhist monk coming and bringing about his change of heart. This disparity of sources reveals intriguing variances. In the Ashokavadana, Ashoka killed all his brothers. In his inscriptions, Ashoka instructs his officials to take care of the family and household of his brothers and sisters. Ashoka is a real figure, but is the Ashoka of Ashokavadana real? The Ashokavadana is the Buddhist perception of Ashoka––how they wanted to remember Ashoka centuries after he lived, how they would like Ashoka to be, rather than what Ashoka himself was. Why did Buddhists choose Ashoka? Because Ashoka was a great patron of Buddhism. This can be understood by further probing the nature of avadana literature. Avadana means contribution and in this context refers to the people who made great contributions to Buddhism. These are historically conscious historical traditions, but not authentic history.

The last tradition I would like to speak about––the most important of the embedded history traditions––is the itihasa-purana. The Sanskrit word itihasa is now used as a translation for history in multiple Indian languages but itihasa and history are not the same. Itihasa-purana is often used conjointly but itihasa and purana are also not the same. Sanskrit definitions of itihasa would say that itihasa is a comprehensive account of the past, about all quarters of life—dharma (social norms), artha (power and wealth), kama (pleasure) and moksha (spiritual liberation). At the same time the definition of itihasa also specifies upadeshasamanvitam––there has to be a lesson to be learned from itihasa.18 That is why the Mahabharata claims to be an itihasa text par excellence. Even if the Mahabharata is an itihasa text, how do we make sense of it historically? Our general perception would conflate the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as epics and view them together. Early Indian sources would often not conflate them. The Ramayana is considered the adi-kavya— the first creative literature, the result of poet Valmiki’s spontaneous emotional expression triggered by a moment of grief, based on a received tradition he had earlier heard. The Mahabharata claims to be itihasa.

Itihasa is a bardic oral tradition. Bardic oral traditions do not come down to us directly; we have to decipher them from the text we have before us. How do we distinguish between the text and the tradition that existed? Some scholars argued that we separate the layers. They tried to separate older verses from the newer but nobody succeeded because the written text is a much later product than the oral tradition. Others would say that we simply need not search for historicity in the Mahabharata. We can take the finished text as a synthetic whole and perform a literary and hermeneutical analysis of the Mahabharata. That is well and good but that is not the task of historians.

The other way is using the historical method to identify the bardic tradition, a method which Thapar and Sharma and others tried,19 and which I too have tried in my own work.20 This method makes us corroborate the information of the Mahabharata with other sources— compare the context of the various episodes with the social, political, economic, religious data coming from other sources whose chronological setting is known. This allows us to point out that there are two distinct kinds of material in the Mahabharata. One is the central narrative about the Kuru-Panchalas which clearly reflects a pre-monetary economy, a pre-literate society and the clan polities of the later Vedic period––they go for cattle raids; their administration comprises their brothers and uncles and friends; there is no paid bureaucracy; no monetary payment; no reference of writing. And then there are didactic sections and mythological stories in the Mahabharata which are not connected to this central narrative directly. The only connection is the one who is telling the story and the one who is listening are Mahabharata characters. Otherwise, stories like that of Nala and Damayanti, or Savitri and Satyavan or the discourse Bhishma gives to Yudhishthira in the ‘Shantiparvan’ can exist as independent texts. These are loosely added to the Mahabharata, and these mostly reflect a state society, monetization, standing army, bureaucracy, taxation. State society was there for a long time, but we can date this change because these sections are also Vaishnavized––Krishna becomes identified with Vishnu and all characters are either divine or demonic incarnations. So, these sections developed definitely after the emergence of Puranic Vaishnavism in the post-Maurya and Gupta period.

How to make sense of this kind of historical tradition, which grew over centuries, and housed both historical information and myths? Calling it just a myth will not be the fairest of treatment because this is different from myth. This is not only true for the Mahabharata. If we look at the Puranas, they sometimes have a section called the vamshanucharita which tells you stories of royal genealogies, starting with mythical stories about seven Manus, god-sent rulers ruling over huge cosmological epochs, going through the descendants of the seventh Manu—encapsulated in two broad kshatriya lineages known as the Suryavamsha (Solar Dynasty) and Chandravamsha (Lunar Dynasty), and coming down to the historical dynasties like the Mauryas, Satavahanas (who are called the Andhras) and Guptas. We cannot call the entire section mythical. It’s a different perception of the past which is not necessarily factually authentic. Its goal is different––to impart lessons.

The Mahabharata is considered a text of change––when the Dvapara ends and Kali begins in the Puranic notion of time. Kali is the present age. Thus, in a way the Mahabharata claims to be the story of some epochal change, when the past ends and the present begins. The central narrative has a context of the later Vedic period. This was the time when the nomadic people of Rigvedic tribes were settling down to form janapadas, sedentary agricultural societies. Territorial proto-states were taking shape along with hereditary kingship and society was being organized in the fourfold hereditary varna order. The Mahabharata as an itihasa text was commenting on these changes. The bards had a particular kind of commentary about that period which is reflected in the older sections of the text, but when the brahmanas were dealing with the text, certain commentaries of the bards made them very uncomfortable. To illustrate, here is an example: the king who wins the war in the central narrative was Yudhishthira. He was a kshatriya and throughout the text he says that varna based on birth was inconsequential. He refuses to fight just because he is born a kshatriya and considers violence is evil. So, there is a king called Dharmaraja, the epitome of righteousness, in the text who does not conform to the varna ideology! Furthermore, at the end of the battle, after winning, he says that the massive death and destruction make him detest the kingdom and motivate him to renounce everything.

We discussed how the post-Mauryan and Gupta periods were when the Mahabharata was Brahmanized. However, think about the predicament of the post-Mauryan brahmanas. Throughout the Mauryan period the heterodox religions got most of the patronage. In fact, that had forced the brahmanas to revise the Brahmanical system, accept folk beliefs, include popular deities and lead the transition from Vedic to Puranic systems. Yudhishthira’s desire of renunciation after winning a war that involved much bloodshed was similar to the message Ashoka had already inscribed throughout his empire. That must be very uncomfortable. So, the Shantiparvan discourse had to be inserted in the text. Why does Yudhishthira have to be the interlocutor in the Shantiparvan? Because Yudhishthira, despite being Dharmaraja, does not know rajadharma––a term emerging in the post-Mauryan period and present in the Manusmriti. Rajadharma was an ideal of Brahmanical kingship, based on the varna orthodoxy, which Bhishma teaches Yudhishthira. Itihasa instructs and gives a lesson. But the lesson intended by the bards of the later Vedic period and the lessons intended by the brahmanas of the post-Mauryan and Gupta periods were different. So, the story would also be different. The oral tradition would change with every performance, while even the written text bears the impact of at least two distinct layers of creation.

The Mahabharata itself knows about this nature of oral traditions, and speaks of four tellings in its growth, beginning with the bardic group called sutas who acted both as performers and as charioteers and companions of kings. The suta Samjaya describes the great war at Kurukshetra to Dhritarashtra. The poet Vyasa composes the itihasa around it and teaches it orally to his disciples. Another bardic performance under Kuru patronage happens in Kuru king Janamejaya’s sacrifice, the narrator being Vaishampayana, a disciple of Vyasa. But the final oral narration is commissioned by the brahmanas of the Shaunaka Bhargava family, performed by another professional suta, Ugrashravas. We do not know if all these figures are historical; some like Janamejaya and Vaishampayana are very well-known later Vedic figures while Ugrashravas might be an imaginary character. But the important thing is how the text remembers the process of transmission of a bardic text created under kshatriya patronage to eventually brahmanas who would, as custodians of literacy, would write down and codify the text, creating and including their own narratives in the process. These narratives— both older and newer— would often be mythical, intended to impart some lesson, yet those myths— when properly studied— may also tell us a lot about the historical scenario they were born of, the historical situation they were responding to, and the historical memory of the past they wanted to create for themselves.

QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION

Audience Member 1: That was a brilliant session. My question to you is: do we have any information on A. L. Basham’s take on the historical consciousness of Indians?

Audience Member 2: As a language teacher, I would like to ask how this extensive knowledge of the past finds relevance in today’s context. How does historical consciousness matter in our present circumstances? We are often taught that knowledge of history should serve as a foundation for an enlightened and progressive present and future. How would you connect historical knowledge to the present situation in a way that resonates with students like those in the audience today?

Kanad Sinha: To answer the first question, A. L. Basham did not directly comment on ancient Indian historical consciousness. However, he remains important in another way. Earlier I briefly mentioned different schools of historiography—colonial, nationalist and Marxist. There is also another approach to early Indian history. One of the prominent historians of early India, Hermann Kulke, coined the term ‘non-aligned historiography’ for that.

What does this mean? Colonial, nationalist and Marxist historiography are all influenced by modern ideologies—colonialism, nationalism or Marxism. This raises a question: why should we interpret ancient India through the lens of modern ideologies? One alternative is to examine the past within its own cultural context instead of imposing a particular ideological framework.

Colonial and nationalist historiography tended to privilege political and religious history. Later, Marxist historians emphasized social and economic factors. Eventually, by the 1990s, there was something called the cultural turn. However, long before this cultural turn, Basham was already focusing on the cultural interpretation of early Indian history. His works—such as The Wonder That Was India (Vol. 1) and A Cultural History of India—attempt to understand early Indian ideologies and cultural life. Basham also studied the Ajivikas, one of the least explored religious communities of ancient India, who had till then received little historical attention because their belief system did not survive till the modern period, unlike the Buddhists and Jains. However, in early India, they were as important a heterodox group as the Buddhists and Jains were. So, Basham studied their history. These examples show his cultural approach to history. However, Basham did not directly work on the concept of historical consciousness.

For the second question—about the relevance of history in the present—I think that is precisely why we study history. If history were merely the study of the past, it would be fair to ask why it matters. For example, knowing that Ashoka ruled between 269 and 232 BCE may not directly affect our daily lives. But history is not simply about memorizing facts of the past.

History is a dialogue between the past and the present. One foot of history always stands in the present. Consider contemporary narratives claiming that certain communities, such as Muslims, are outsiders or invaders. Where do such ideas originate? Some people claim that these narratives are part of decolonization. But are they really decolonization, or are they ideas inherited from colonial frameworks?

If someone who has lived beside me for generations is suddenly labelled an outsider, we must ask how such a perception arose. Some might argue that historical records show Muslims arriving from outside India. But if we go further back, modern DNA studies demonstrate that the concept of race lacks biological basis. All humans belong to the same subspecies—homo sapiens sapiens—and our species originated in Africa. In that sense, everyone is a migrant unless they are East Africans.

Take the common narrative that the Mughals were outsiders. It is true that Babur came from outside India. But what about Aurangzeb? He was born and raised in India, as were his father and grandparents. Akbar himself was born in India in the 1540s and Aurangzeb became emperor more than a century later. By that time, the Mughal family had lived in India for generations. Sometimes people use slogans such as ‘Babur ki aulaad.’ Yet even if someone today were a direct descendant of the Mughals, they could claim that their family had lived in India since at least the 1540s. How many of us can say where our ancestors lived at that time? Most of us cannot. Understanding history helps us critically examine such claims.

Similarly, we often confront issues like caste. A student might hear different opinions within their own family. One relative may insist on maintaining traditional distinctions—such as not eating food prepared by certain people—while another may reject such ideas and advocate equality. A student may then wonder: what truly is our tradition?

To understand such conflicting claims, we need knowledge of the past. Historical knowledge may not always be perfectly accurate and interpretations often differ. Nevertheless, we must ask where particular ideas come from and why they are being asserted. History is relevant for the same reason any academic discipline is relevant: it teaches us to question the world around us. The present—the now—is therefore central to the study of history.

Audience Member 3: Greetings, sir. That was a good speech. Variations or mistranslations in literary texts—especially religious texts—often attract scrutiny and controversy. For instance, Buddha is sometimes described as the ninth incarnation of Vishnu in the Puranas. How do historians deal with such variations or mistranslations?

KS: Why would we call that a mistranslation? The Puranas indeed describe Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu. But what exactly is mistranslated there?

AM 3: I didn’t mean that specific example. I was referring more generally to mistranslations—for example, in some interpretations of the Quran or Hadith, where certain Arabic words may be translated differently.

KS: Mistranslations can occur in any field. When they happen, scholars simply correct them in later translations. If the same translator does not revise it, another scholar may produce a better translation. This is not unique to religious texts.

For example, the Allahabad Pillar Inscription of Samudra Gupta was initially published as the Allahabad Posthumous Inscription in the three volume Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum. The translator J. F. Fleet believed that it was composed after the king’s death because a verse stated that Samudragupta’s fame had reached heaven. He interpreted the phrase literally. Later, scholars realized that this was a common poetic expression in Sanskrit literature. A person’s fame reaching heaven does not imply that the person is dead. Additional evidence also confirmed that the inscription was composed during Samudragupta’s lifetime. Thus, mistranslations were corrected over time.

The example of Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu illustrates how different traditions reinterpret the past. Buddhist texts narrate the life of the Buddha in one way, while the Puranas reinterpret him within a Vaishnava framework. The Puranic story is quite different from Buddhist biographies. In Buddhist biographies––older stories acknowledging the gana-sangha origins of the Buddha and later ones ascribing princely origins––there was unity in what the Buddha preached. The Buddha was clearly an important figure and the Puranas, claiming to tell a story of the past, could not leave him out.

Before I describe how the Puranas describe the Buddha, it is useful to mention that millenarianism as an ideology that came from Semitic religions became popular in India after contact with the Jewish trading world and the arrival of Saint Thomas in India. Both Judaism and Christianity prophesy the coming of a prophet for liberation. Similar approaches are taken by Mahayana Buddhism where the Bodhisattva, Maitreya, would liberate the people. In the Vaishnava Puranas, the Kali Yuga is described as the most unstable age but it cannot be brought to its end by any odd tragedy or strife –– the world has to be completely adharmic for the millenarian incarnation of Vishnu, Kalki, to appear and kill the adharmic ones and restore the pristine time, Satya Yuga. In some Puranic narratives, Vishnu incarnates as the Buddha to mislead people away from the Vedic religion so that the world descends further into Kali Yuga, hastening its end and the eventual arrival of Kalki. In this interpretation, the Buddha being considered an incarnation does not necessarily express reverence for Buddhism. Instead, it represents a reinterpretation of the Buddha within a different theological framework. This also explains why, although there are temples dedicated to other avatars of Vishnu—such as Narasimha or Varaha—temples dedicated to the Buddha avatara are usually not heard of.

Audience Member 4: Sir, how do historians reconcile mythological narratives from texts like Mahabharata with factual historical analysis to keep the lines between reality and myths from getting blurred?

Audience Member 5: The Ramayana has a character known as Hanuman. He has a specific set of skills––he can fly or increase his size. Is it a myth or is that real? Might he be extraterrestrial? Does that Ramayana then attest to that?

KS: I could not discuss the Mahabharata in detail in my lecture, but I did mention how even historians cannot always ascertain factuality. The Mahabharata is an itihasa text, but it is not a history text. Its intention is not to give a factual account of the past. Its intent is to narrate a comprehensive account of a time, a time of change. It is comprehensive in the sense that it will speak about dharma, artha, kama, moksha –– that is the definition of itihasa. And the Mahabharata is very proud to proclaim itself the best itihasa. It claims in a verse that all that is there to know about dharma, artha, kama, and moksha may be found in it; what is not in the Mahabharata is nowhere else.

How do historians make use of such a text? The Mahabharata mentions four performances of the same story. Are the performances the same? They are not. Because every audience will have its own preferences and own choice of questions. In the third narration, Janamejaya is a Kuru king holding a sacrifice where Vaishampayana tells him about his ancestors. This is different from the fourth narration of Ugrashravas to the brahmanas in the Naimisha forest. Ugrashravas is a professional suta who heard about this big twelve-year-long sacrifice where he could perform this story he had collected. Upon reaching the forest, the leader of the sacrifice, called Kulapati Shaunaka, is very happy to see Ugrashravas and recognizes him as the son of Romaharshana, a famous bard he knows. He invites him to tell a story and so Ugrashravas does.

But why would those brahmanas be interested in the story of the battles of kings? Shaunaka asked Ugrashravas to tell them the story of their ancestors, the Bhargavas. Now what would Ugrashravas do? As a professional storyteller, he has a collection of stories of every kind. He starts telling stories about the Bhargavas through eight chapters culminating in a superhero called Jamadagnya Rama who is popularly known as Parashurama (The Mahabharata doesn’t use the name Parashuram) and who kills off the evil kshatriyas of the world 21 times. With so much killing, there would be a lot of blood––five pools were created out of that blood. And with that blood, Parashurama honoured his ancestors. An interested listener would then ask where those five pools of blood were. And Ugrashravas would readily tell how that was in a place called Samantapanchaka which is now called Kurukshetra which witnessed a great war, and then he would get into the story he intended to tell.

This is not something that ends with Ugrashravas. If you go to Kurukshetra now, there isa light and sound show with guides telling you, 'This is Kurukshetra. Do you know what happened here?' And they would narrate a story about a particular spot. Something might have happened in Kurukshetra. It is an ancient site. At the time when janapada formation was happening in the Kuru kingdom, it is highly likely that a war took place there but that does not mean it necessarily took place on that very plot of land the guide would show. Irrespective of whether the Kurukshetra war was historical or not, there is no way for determining that in a particular spot Arjuna felled Bhishma. Yet, the guide would tell you so. After all, the guide’s narrative is also a performance, an oral tradition, historically conscious, but not history.

So that is also true of these stories. They contain mythical and supernatural elements. But what is the Mahabharata actually doing? It reflects a period when hereditary kingship was becoming established. Hereditary kingship means that the eldest son of the eldest son succeeds to the throne. This principle is known as the law of primogeniture, very different from Vedic society where any man could become the rajan or the chief. At a broader social level, another transformation was occurring: the consolidation of the varna system. The question then arose—should a person’s social role be determined by birth according to varna, or by ability and choice? In the Rig Veda, we find examples of people from the same family performing different occupations—one might be a poet, another a cultivator, another a physician. But in the later social order, the varna system demanded that individuals follow the duties assigned to their varna. This is the larger question the Mahabharata explores.

According to primogeniture, Duryodhana should be the rightful king. His father Dhritarashtra was the eldest son of the royal line. Whether he (Dhritarashtra) was blind or not should not matter; he was still the eldest. Duryodhana, being his eldest son, would therefore inherit the throne. Under this logic, bloodline alone determines succession. But there is another candidate: Yudhishthira, often called Dharmaraja, the more righteous and capable figure. Yet his birth itself is complicated. When we read the Mahabharata closely, we find that Yudhishthira is described as the son of Dharma and Kunti, rather than the biological son of Pandu. This raises the question: who should become king—the abler person, Dharmaraja, who does not believe in varna, or Duryodhana who strictly follows the kshatriya code of not letting an inch of his territory go without a fight?

The Mahabharata does not portray Duryodhana simply as a villain. In many respects, he is depicted as an ideal kshatriya. He is among the first of the warriors to reach heaven because he fulfils the kshatriya duty and dies on the battlefield. And what is kshatriyadharma? The duty of a kshatriya is to fight. From Duryodhana’s perspective, the Pandavas are asking for a share of the kingdom without fighting for it. He argues that a kshatriya who avoids battle brings dishonour. This is particularly shameful because the Pandavas were his cousins, As he implies, even if he grants them the kingdom without a fight, how will they defend it if they are unwilling to fight? Therefore, he refuses to give them even an inch of land without war. This is a perfectly valid position––a position most Dharmashastra writers would prefer. There may or may not have been a real person called Duryodhana or Yudhishthira; what is important is what they represent. The contest between primogeniture and ability is real and historical.

The same question appears in the broader social context of the Mahabharata. Consider Ekalavya––he is a nishada, a tribal hunter, and wishes to become an archer. Although the nishadas were known for archery, he desires formal training under a brahmana guru. His fate in the story—first a refusal by the teacher and later being tricked into crippling himself by the same teacher when he threatened to surpass his princely students—reflects the tensions surrounding social hierarchy and access to knowledge. Or consider Vidura––a brother of Dhritarashtra and Pandu. If Dhritarashtra is disqualified because of blindness and Pandu suffers from ill health, Vidura is arguably the most capable and righteous of the three. Yet he cannot become king because he is the son of a dasi. Similarly, Dronacharya and Kripacharya are born as brahmanas, but they choose the profession of warriors. What then is their true dharma? The dilemma also appears in the story of Ashvatthama, the son of Drona. Should he avenge his father like a kshatriya, or follow the peaceful vocation of a brahmana?

Perhaps the most famous example is Karna. His story embodies both conflicts—primogeniture versus ability and birth versus merit. By birth, Karna is the elder brother of Yudhishthira. If his true identity were known, Yudhishthira would have no claim to the throne. Moreover, as a close friend of Karna, Duryodhana might not have objected to his rule. But Karna’s identity remains hidden. He is raised as the adopted son of a suta. This identity itself is significant. Sutas were traditionally bards and storytellers, the very people who preserved and transmitted the Mahabharata tradition. Figures such as Sanjaya and Ugrashravas belong to this group. Sutas were associated with charioteering and narration, not with warriorhood. Their role was to celebrate the deeds of warriors, not to fight themselves.

Suddenly before the war, Karna’s secret is revealed. He is invited to fight for the Pandavas. Duryodhana was banking on Karna for his victory. If Karna changed his allegiance, Duryodhana might not go for the war and Yudhishthira would renounce the throne to Karna. So, Karna could become the king and Karna could be accepted as a kshatriya, the status he always wanted. This is what Aditya Adarkar calls, ‘Karna’s choice’²¹––Karna could have both the throne and kshatriya-hood but only by virtue of his birth.

Should he have taken the privilege of his birth? Karna refuses. He declares that although Kunti may be his biological mother, it is his suta parents who raised him and fulfilled the duties of parenthood. He therefore owes them loyalty. He also feels bound by his friendship and obligation to Duryodhana, who trusted and supported him.

Did this conversation between Kunti and Karna actually take place? Did they truly exist? We do not have definitive answers. What we do know is that this tradition emerged from somewhere. Some Kuru kings mentioned in the epic—such as Shantanu, Vichitravirya, Dhritarashtra, Parikshit and Janamejaya—are known to Vedic texts as well. It is therefore possible that certain historical figures existed and that stories gradually developed around them. These stories may not be literal historical accounts, even if some of the individuals mentioned were real. Instead, they reflect perceptions of these figures and the values they represent.

This phenomenon is not unique to the Mahabharata. For example, Buddhist biographies of the Buddha are not necessarily factual records of his life. Rather, they convey what the Buddha represented for later Buddhist communities. Similarly, Buddhist biographies of Ashoka portray the kind of ruler the Buddhists hoped Ashoka would be. In contrast, Ashoka’s own inscriptions show how he understood himself. In them, Ashoka claims to have sent envoys to five Greek kingdoms and suggests that they adopted his new policy called dhamma. We often read this in textbooks and conclude that Ashoka spread Buddhism widely through diplomatic missions.

However, Greek sources mention several Mauryan rulers. They refer to Chandragupta Maurya as Sandracottus and even mention his son Bindusara Amitraghata as Amitrochates. Yet there is no Greek account that mentions Ashoka, despite the fact that Ashoka issued inscriptions in Greek in some regions. This raises questions about how influential his message actually was in the Greek-speaking world.

So, if you separate these sources into mythical and historical, even what your historical sources are saying may not necessarily be the concrete factual account which is unchallengeable. It is always open to interpretation. What we need to understand in history is this: always ask questions. Always question the narrative, ask what the source of the narrative is and then question the source also. That way you will get a clearer understanding of the past. Never a final understanding of the past.

I will respond to the Ramayana question now. The Indian tradition views the Ramayana as kavya, not itihasa. Some later commentators called Ramayana itihasa as well but the Ramayana itself does not claim to be itihasa. Kavya means that the Ramayana is a work of creative literature. There is one commonality between the Mahabharata and the Ramayana that is undeniable––that both originated from bardic traditions. Like the Mahabharata it was Brahmanized and Vaishnavized later because these were the two most popular literary creations of the time. But it was understood to be a story. We don’t know whether Valmiki himself composed the first four sargas of the Balakanda or a later poet inserted a commentary on who Valmiki was and what the Ramayana is. The commentary in a nutshell is this: Valmiki wanted to know about an ideal man who had sixteen qualities. So, Valmiki asks this of Narada. Why Narada? Narada is a symbolic figure who is a wandering sage. He roams around everywhere, so he has all the information. That way he is also representative of some kind of bardic group who are wanderers collecting information and performing. Narada also performs, sings with his veena. So, this is a conversation between one bard and another––one is a more stationary bard, the other is a wanderer.

Valmiki asks Narada to tell him about a man who possesses all the sixteen qualities. Narada replies that so many qualities would not be found in even a god. But people tell him about one such person called Rama born in the Ikshvaku lineage. The Sanskrit verse is: ikshvakuvamshaprabhavo ramo nama janaih shrutah. The last bit, janaih shrutah, translates to ‘people say that’. So, the poet of the Ramayana acknowledges that it is not an original story he is creating. This is a story that was prevalent among the people.

Valmiki then asks Narada who this Rama was and Narada gives a brief outline of the Ramayana story. Still Valmiki had no intention of composing the Ramayana––he wanted to know about an ideal man. He learned about Rama from Narada and was satisfied. However, one day, he went to take a bath in the river Tamasa. There he saw a pair of the cranes called krauncha in Sanskrit. They were making love when a hunter killed one of them––the male of the pair––and the female started wailing bitterly. This breaks Valmiki’s heart and he angrily curses the hunter. He realizes that his curse flows in a metrical manner; it follows a Sanskrit metre called anushtubh. So, he realizes he has poetic potential. It very much matches the definition of poetry given by Wordsworth––spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Hence, Valmiki is considered the first poet because his poetry is not like Vedas––this is not scripture to praise gods or a divine vision; this is not like the Mahabharata where there is a formal setting where someone is officially commissioned to narrate their family history. This is just spontaneous expression of emotion. That is what makes Ramayana a kavya.

There are three things to be noted here: First, Narada tells Valmiki that so many qualities are not found even among gods but there was a man who might possess them. Rama, thus, is not a god in the early stage of the Valmiki Ramayana. Second, it is not an original story. It is an oral tradition which was already prevalent during Valmiki’s time. And third, it is a poetic creation about love and separation. Even after listening to Narada about an ideal man Valmiki was not inspired to compose poetry. It is the unfair separation between a couple of cranes, which Valmiki considers wrong. He has to right the wrong. He curses the nishada hunter. So, in his story Ravana becomes the person who brings an unfair separation by abducting Sita, and Valmiki has to restore the order by reuniting the separated couple.

However, the Brahmanization of the Ramayana brings in a seventh book, the Uttarakanda, which ends in the separation of Rama and Sita––very much contradictory to what the introduction of the book says. If Valmiki saw this, he might have had to curse himself. But this is not my interpretation. This perspective comes from another later poet of Rama’s story, called Bhavabhuti (c. eighth century CE). Bhavabhuti composed a play called Uttararamacharita where he restores order. He makes Valmiki a character in his composition and brings in all the major Ramayana characters. Valmiki with his disciples make a stage performance of the Uttarakanda before it is finally published. As this idea for the Ramayana’s ending is staged, Rama and his court are watching the play. Seeing that in the play Sita would leave Rama forever, Rama faints. Lakshmana gets very agitated and approaches Valmiki to ask if this was his intended ending for which they had to toiled so much! And Valmiki readily accepts that this was not supposed to be the ending. Something wrong has happened there. The Ramayana must end in the union of Rama and Sita.

So, I gave you one example. Thousands of such examples can be given because the Ramayana is only the name of Valmiki’s Sanskrit poem but the ramakatha––the story of Rama which originated in an oral tradition— is told in multiple languages in multiple forms in many ways. The Ramayana is neither a historical story nor similar to the Mahabharata. The Mahabharata has a real historical context where it is situated. But the Ramayana is different. Why does Narada say that the story of the Ramayana is widely known among the people? Because it follows one of the most common folktale structures in South Asia. You will find many such stories where a king has several queens. One queen, usually the favourite, conspires against the son of another queen. As a result, the prince is exiled to the forest along with a few loyal companions. In the forest he is often helped by non-human creatures—usually birds or animals. Eventually he reaches an unknown land inhabited by demons, where a captive princess is being held. He rescues the princess, returns home and becomes king. Except for the Uttarakanda, that basic structure describes the Ramayana. What makes the Ramayana extraordinary is the poetic genius of Valmiki, who transformed a common folktale into one of the great works of world literature. That is his literary brilliance. However, this transformation has little to do with historical writing. At least Valmiki himself never claims that his work is history.

Interestingly, many later poets of the ramakatha tradition criticized Valmiki for this. For instance, the Jain author Vimalasuri (c. 3rd century CE), who wrote the Paumachariyam, argued that there might once have been a historical story of Rama, but that Valmiki turned it into a poetic narrative. Vimalasuri questions the plausibility of Valmiki’s account: how could a great king be defeated by monkeys? How could someone sleep for six months, or possess ten heads? According to Vimalasuri, an ignorant poet had distorted the original story and he, therefore, set out to narrate the ‘real’ history of Rama. In his version, however, the narrative becomes thoroughly Jain. Rama appears as a non-violent Jain hero who refuses to kill Ravana; instead, Lakshmana kills Ravana and suffers the karmic consequences, even going to hell for that act. Thus, Vimalasuri attempts to historicize the Ramayana, but what he produces is still a sectarian reinterpretation rather than a historical account.

Audience Member 6: Sir, I have two questions. Both concern figures who lie in a grey area and illustrate how history and mythology are often misinterpreted.

My first question is about Pushyamitra Shunga, whom many people respectfully refer to as Pandit Pushyamitra Shunga. Some later Brahmanical texts portray him as someone who saved India from Indo-Greek invasions and as a defender of dharma. On the other hand, certain Buddhist texts from the same period depict him as the killer of Brihadratha and as someone who persecuted Buddhists in order to ensure the triumph of Hinduism over them in what they describe as a kind of ‘cold war.’

My second question concerns the interpretation of the character of Vasusena, better known as Karna. His story is often presented as a tragic one and he is frequently portrayed as someone resisting the hierarchical social order of his time. However, in the Mahabharata translation associated with the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute—which is widely considered one of the most authoritative editions today—Karna appears as a more complex, morally ambiguous figure. For instance, he is described as having been trained by Dronacharya, which places him in a more nuanced position rather than the idealized portrayal that emerged in some nineteenth-century interpretations.

So, my question is: what leads to such misinterpretations? What are their implications and is there even a need to challenge them?

KS: To answer your question on Pushyamitra Shunga, the interpretations you mentioned largely come from colonial-era historiography. These narratives were written about two hundred years ago, when history was frequently interpreted through a religious lens. As a result, Pushyamitra was portrayed either as a champion of Brahmanism or as a persecutor of Buddhists.

Later historians approached the issue more cautiously. For example, if you are interested in the political history of ancient India, you should read H. C. Raychaudhuri. Although he was a nationalist historian, you will not find such simplified descriptions in his work.

The idea that Pushyamitra ‘defended India’ from the Indo-Greeks is difficult to sustain historically. Pushyamitra’s primary achievement was founding the Shunga dynasty. In fact, the Indo-Greek kingdoms lasted longer than the Shungas and ruled over different regions of the subcontinent. At that time there was no unified political entity called India ruled by a single king. Various powers controlled different territories—the Shungas, the Indo-Greeks, the Satavahanas and others—and they frequently fought among themselves.

For instance, the ruler of Kalinga, Kharavela, claims in his inscriptions that he fought both the Satavahanas and the Indo-Greeks. None of these conflicts can reasonably be described as attempts to ‘liberate India.’ That concept did not exist in that historical context.

Pushyamitra was indeed a Brahmana and a patron of Brahmanical religion. We know that he performed the Ashvamedha sacrifice. During the Mauryan period, Buddhists had enjoyed significant state patronage, which seems to have declined during the Shunga period. As a result, Buddhist texts portray Pushyamitra unfavourably.

But did he actually destroy Buddhism, as some sources claim? The archaeological evidence suggests otherwise. Two of the most important early Buddhist sites—Sanchi and Bharhut in present-day Madhya Pradesh—date largely to the post-Mauryan period and were located within Shunga territory. Although there is some evidence of minor damage at Sanchi, there is no indication of large-scale destruction of Buddhist shrines. On the contrary, both sites flourished. Inscriptions from Sanchi record donations from hundreds of individuals during the period when the Shungas ruled the region.

Lastly, to answer your question on the character of Karna, the misunderstanding you have comes from the lack of an idea about the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute’s edition; what they brought out is not a translation of the Mahabharata, it is called the Critical Edition of the Mahabharata. What is a Critical Edition? The Mahabharata is such a popular literature. It is also a very ancient text. Scholars usually date its writing between fifth century BCE to fifth century CE. As I argued, the oral tradition goes further back to the later Vedic period. But even if you take the date of termination, fifth century CE, the manuscripts of the Mahabharata which have survived cannot be from the fifth century CE. Palm leaf or birch leaf manuscripts usually don’t survive that long. Most surviving manuscripts of the Mahabharata date from the sixteenth century or later, with a few from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.

These manuscripts were copied and recopied many times in different regions and scripts. During the colonial period, printed editions of the Mahabharata appeared from Calcutta, Bombay and Kumbakonam in South India. Scholars soon noticed that these versions differed significantly. This led to the realization that the text had accumulated many regional interpolations over time. The scholars at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI) therefore collected manuscripts from across the subcontinent and compared them verse by verse. Their goal was to remove clearly regional additions and reconstruct a version of the text that was as close as possible to the earliest recoverable form.

In doing so, they found that several popular stories were later interpolations. For example, the story of Ganesha acting as Vyasa’s scribe does not belong to the earliest layers of the text. The Mahabharata itself contains no references to writing and the story likely originated in later Maharashtrian traditions influenced by Ganapati worship.

Similarly, the well-known story in which Krishna miraculously provides Draupadi with an endless sari during the dice-game episode does not appear in the earliest textual layers. In the core narrative, it is said that Draupadi’s dharma saved her. Some manuscripts from Bengal included the miraculous intervention, likely reflecting Gaudiya Vaishnava devotional beliefs, where it seemed unacceptable that a devotee like Draupadi would be left unaided by Krishna. However, the Critical Edition shows that this episode is not part of the earliest form of the text. Instead, the narrative emphasizes Draupadi’s own moral and intellectual challenge to the assembly, which saved her honour.

Likewise, the episode in which Draupadi rejects Karna because he is a suta-putra appears to be a later interpolation in some manuscripts. The aim of the Critical Edition was not to portray Karna in a particular light. The character remains as the text presents him. As I mentioned earlier, Karna represents a conflict of identities. His character is necessarily complex because he is caught between two worlds—his social upbringing and his unknown birth. His decision to support Duryodhana becomes understandable in that context, since Duryodhana valued his ability rather than judging him by his supposed birth. His tragedy, stemming from his social marginalization, led to romanticized portraiture of the character from a very early period, and interpolations such as the story of Draupadi’s rejection of his candidature in her svayamvara heightened the pathos of such portraiture. However, Karna is a morally ambiguous character in the text when such interpolations are left out, a character torn between his social status and abilities, sometime performing acts of great magnanimity and charity, while sometimes stooping as low as provoking the Kauravas to strip Draupadi in the open court. Perhaps this grey-ness of the character makes his ultimate choice even more special from the poetic point of view.

---

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1 Thanissaro Bhikkhu, ‘Angulimala Sutta: About Angulimala’, Access to Insight (BCBS Edition, November 30, 2013.

2 F. Max Muller, India: What Can It Teach Us? (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1883).

3 A.A. Macdonell, History of Sanskrit Literature (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1990 reprint), p. 11.

4 E. J. Rapson (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 57.

5 See H.C. Raychaudhuri, Political History of Ancient India, new edition with a commentary by B.N. Mukherjee (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 1.

6 R.C. Majumdar, ‘Ideas of History in Sanskrit Literature’ in C.H. Philips (ed.), Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon (London: Oxford University Press, 1961) p. 13.

7 Ashis Nandy, ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’ History and Theory 34(2) (May 1995): 44–66.

8 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx on India, ed. Iqbal Husain (Delhi: Tulika, 2011).

9 R.C. Majumdar, Ancient India (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987 reprint), pp. 231-233.

10 R.S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1965).

11 For an overview of the debate, see B.P. Sahu (ed.), Iron and Social Change in Early India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005).

12 See Brajadulal Chattopadhyaya, The Making of Early Medieval India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012 reprint).

13 F. E. Pargiter, Ancient Indian Historical Traditions (London: Oxford University Press, 1922).

14 F. E. Pargiter, The Purana Text of the Dynasties of the Kali Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1913).

15 U.N. Ghoshal, Studies in Indian History and Culture (Calcutta: Orient Longman, 1957), 1-242.

16 Romila Thapar, The Past Before Us: Historical Traditions of Early North India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2013), pp. 3-4.

17 Ibid., pp. 596-625; Kumkum Roy, ‘The Making of a Mandala: Fuzzy Frontiers of Kalhana’s Kashmir’, in The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power: Explorations in Early Indian History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 343–357.

18 See Taranatha Tarkavachaspati, Vacaspatyam, Vol. I (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Surbharati, 1990) p. 924.

19 Romila Thapar, ‘The Historian and the Epic’ in Cultural Pasts (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 613-629; Thapar (2013), pp. 146-207; R. S. Sharma, Material Culture and Social Formations in Ancient India (Delhi: McMillan, 1983), pp.135-152.

20 Kanad Sinha, From Dasarajña to Kurukshetra: Making of a Historical Tradition (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021).

21 Aditya Adarkar, ‘Karna’s Choice: Courage and Character in the Face of an Ethical Dilemma’ in T. S. Rukmani (ed.), The Mahabharata: Whatever Is Not Here Is Nowhere Else (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2005), pp. 117-130.