The Culture and Civilisation of Ancient India in HIstorical Outline by D D Kosambi

Author:D D Kosambi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 1965-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXState and Religion in Greater Magadha

DOI: 10.4324/9781003321385-6

6.1. Completion of the Magadhan Conquest

THE fifth and fourth centuries B.C. are known to Indian archaeologists as the high age of NBP, the northern black polished ware. This describes an excellent grade of pottery first made as trade ceramics (presumably for wine and oils) about the sixth century; it went out of fashion a century or two before the beginning of the Christian era. No literature, records, or clearly dated inscriptions of these two centuries survive, but a firm historical date is supplied for the first time by Alexander’s invasion of the Panjāb in 327 B.C. The raid, which left no lasting effects upon Indian life, culture, or history, also provides an indispensable frame of reference through reports of the Indian scene as it appeared to the Greeks. It has always to be remembered that India was an exotic, even a fantastic land to Greek observers, as to most foreigners. There were extraordinary and incredible beasts like the elephant which could nevertheless be tamed. Wool grew on trees (cotton). Indian reeds were gigantic (bamboos), and the country produced a white crystal that tasted sweeter than honey—sugar. Rivers of fabulous size (even when compared to the Nile), swift current, unexplored length, and unplumbable depths impressed those who lived by what Indians would call rivulets. The land miraculously yielded two or three bumper crops a year with minimum toil, where Greeks broke their backs to reap one harvest out of stony hillsides. It was baffling to see the Indians manage so well with no chattel slavery, an institution without which the noblest Greek philosophers such as Plato could not even imagine a viable city-state. The ultimate contrast with the chicanery and endless litigation of Greek civic life was the remarkable Indian ability to honour in full an agreement concluded by mere word of mouth, in the absence of any written, signed, and witnessed contract; says Arrian, ‘But indeed, no Indian is ever known to lie’! All this has to be allowed for in the interpretation of the record, particularly when a philosopher like Diodorus Siculus, looking for examples from which to construct an ideal society, misinterprets the words of a Greek traveller. Normally sceptical Greeks could believe almost anything of India.

The region to the west of the Indus had been the twentieth satrapy of the Persian Empire since its conquest by Darius I about 518 B.C. It seems to have been the most profitable of Achaemenid provinces. According to Herodotos, the annual tribute in gold dust was 360 talents, say close to nine tons—an astounding treasure washed out of river sands on the upper Indus and placer-mined on the highlands of Tibet or Kaśmir. The wool and superb woollen cloth of the satrapy and its adjoining regions were famous even in India. Some local contingents fought in Xerxes’s army, so that the Greeks knew of India long before Alexander. The principal trade city of the province was Pushkarāvati, modern Chārsaddā, Peukelaotis to the Greeks. The

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