IS INDIA A HOMOGENEOUS NATION...

...or is it still a land of many thousand tribes and cultures?

The huge network of railways and highways built over the past two centuries now connect almost all parts of India and persuade many to believe that India is one big homogeneous nation with only a few variations in languages, religions, races and customs. The ardent champions of Indian nationalism want everyone to believe that India is a country with one single cultural, linguistic, social and even religious identity. Though India has some dozen religions, and hundreds of religious sub cults within Hinduism itself, many Indian philosophers tried to promote the idea of a common golden thread of religious philosophy connecting all Indian cultures when they proposed the theory of “Unity in Diversity.”

Diana Eck’s book `India- a sacred geography’ details the impact of the nearly a hundred million pilgrims who travel every year to hundreds of holy places from the Himalayas to remote areas throughout India. There are Yatras (pilgrimages) to hundreds of Dhams (holy seats), Tirthas (river fords) and Melas (congregations) including many Sufi shrines. Many million Indians therefore have a physical experience of India’s varied geography and this huge mingling of numerous ethnic people speaking different languages share many religious ideas even if they often worship different gods. All these contribute to a uniquely colorful and generally very tolerant Indian identity.

Geography shapes history and India has for many centuries been a gigantic patchwork of numerous small fertile areas separated from each other by mountains, rivers and thick tiger infested forests that were distinct from each other like a thousand islands. In ancient Sanskrit texts they were sixteen Mahājanapadas or "great realms" that were the big oligarchic republics that had existed from the sixth to fourth centuries BC. Ancient Buddhist literature makes frequent references to these sixteen great republics. For every Mahajanapada there were numerous smaller Janapadas.These sixteen Mahajanapadas were:

Vriji (Assam),

Chedi (Nepal),

Anga (roughly the present day Bengal),

Koshala (East UP),

Magadha (Bihar),

Kashi (Varanasi),

Malla (Allahabad),

Vatsa (west UP),

Panchala (east Punjab),

Kuru (west Punjab),

Matsya West Rajasthan),

Surasena (south east Rajasthan),

Avanti (Madhya Pradesh near Ujjain),

Gandhara (north west Punjab near Taxila),

Kambhoja (Kabul)

Assaka, a Deccan area south east of Hyderabad.

Assaka was the only kingdom south of the Vindhya Mountains that suggests that most of south India was still unknown to the composers of the ancient texts. Many other kingdoms must have also flourished in ancient India unknown to the Vedic or Buddhist scribes of this early period.

The texts of the Mahabharat, Ramayana and many other Hindu and Buddhist texts describe how each little tribal kingdom was separated from others by thick forests, rivers and hills. Each of these gradually developed their own cultures with distinctive dialects, objects of worship and customs. As in tribal societies in other lands they had strong family bonds that kept them united and their tribal councils would attend to disputes and injustices. The punishment for any individual who defied tribal customs was to banish them from the tribe cutting off their identities making it very difficult to survive among other tribes that would usually not accept them, feed them or allow them to marry their girls. At later times when Brahminism dominated their religious and social life most of these tribes were grouped into a number of castes that too used excommunication as one of the main methods of making their members conform to their rules.

Anthropologists have considerable evidence to show that all human beings evolved from ape like hominids like Australopithecus who once inhabited the Olduvai Gorge in the Rift Valley of southern Africa about three million years ago. They probably moved on to south east Asia and many centuries later crossed over the ice bridges to populate Australia and America during the last Ice Age. Science can also trace human evolution from the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in studies of populations from all over the world. According to SIL International’s “Ethnologue report for Language Isolate 2007” India has more than two thousand ethnic groups. The Anthropological Survey of India estimates that India has 4,635 communities. The DNA of aboriginal tribes of the Andaman Islands is similar to the Australian aborigines.

The DNA of different Indian races show that all the main ancient ethnic groups like the descendents of Proto-Austroloids continue to inhabit most areas of south and central India, Negroids the south west, Mongoloid tribes the north east and Dravidians the south east areas. Dravidians probably originally came from west Asia and were later pushed south by a series of Caucasoid people like the Aryas, Greeks, Kushans, Parthians, Sakas, Jats and others who migrated from the steppes of central Asia. Later the Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Afghans, Chinese and European races all added to India’s brimming melting pot.

Many people wrongly consider Negroid, Australoid, or Mongoloid ethnic characteristics as being inferior to the Caucasoid types but few people know that any such inferiority is only through cultural evolution and not from any intellectual limitations. The Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian people are mostly mongoloid but have evolved distinctly different racial identities. The Innuits or Eskimos are of the same basic mongoloid racial stock but have suffered cultural degradation for hundreds of generations making them so focused on survival in an extremely difficult environment that their cultural horizons were naturally constrained. Other tribal people like the aboriginals of Australia, Andamans and the Bushmen of the Kalahari have been similarly affected.

People of any ethnic background can be as successful as any other. Children even from the most impoverished low caste families have often been very successful when given the opportunities of good education and social support. The success of Europeans and Americans during the past four hundred years and the impact of Hollywood movies made Caucasian features admired. Barak Obama, as president of USA, has single-handedly done more to demolish the idea of `White Supremacy’ than any other person or scientific discovery.

The Nazi myth of an Aryan super race was as much a fiction as the Aryan myth of Brahmin belief. The spurious idea of keeping pure Aryan blood from becoming contaminated by the blood of inferior races was to cause millions of deaths and unbelievable suffering. The refrence to Varna or skin colour in the Rig-veda was to cause great social injury for millions of people in India over the centuries. The division into four social classes only appears in two sklokas of the late Rigvedic Purusha Sukta  (RV 10.90. 11-12), which has the Brahman, Rajanya (not Kshatriya), Vaishya and Shudra classes emerging from the mouth, arms, thighs and feet of the primordial giant, Purusha. In the post-Vedic period, this division is elaborated in the Dharmashastra literature and later in the Puranas and other texts.

As the early tribes gradually settled into a number of different game rich forests a huge number of local customs dialects, religions and traditions evolved independently isolated from others till some of them began to merge through conquests or trade. According to anthropological studies each tribal area would usually jealously guard its resources of food and game from greedy neighbors. As each tribe had their own deities and many of their deities continued to be worshipped even after their followers shifted part of their allegiance to the gods of the bigger tribes that ruled over them turn by turn. Conquered tribes accepted the gods of bigger tribes but the idea of an all powerful supreme god was to come much later. 

Ancient India must have therefore once been a patchwork of thousands of local customs and languages. The existence of 22 official languages and 1,635 dialects (according to the 2011 census) confirm India’s gigantic linguistic diversity that is a reflection of India’s huge diversity in ethnic, religious or other traditions as well. Ethnologue, a comprehensive reference work cataloging all of the world’s known living languages, states that India has 454 living languages of which 447 are indigenous. The continuing vestiges of these early tribal roots are also evident from the many thousands of `gotras’, or lineages, that are part of India’s complicated caste system. Gotras were the lineages descended from a single ancient ancestor.

The Brahmins alone have the following main gotras: Agasthya, Ahabhunasa, Abnavana, Aliman, Angad, Angirasa, Akshinthala, Atreya, Atri, Badarayana,Barai, Bayan, Bachhasa, Bhalki, Bhargava, Bhaskar, Charora, Chaurasia, Chivukula, Chayavana, Dammiwal, Dadhichi, Dalabhya, Dhananjay, Dhanvantari, Galav, Gautam, Ghanara, Harita,  Haritash/ Haritsa, Jaabaali, Jaimini, Jamdagni, Kankar, Kankariya, Kanva, Kapila, Kapinjala, Kapisa, Karkata, Kashyapa, Kashav, Katyayana, Kaundilya, Kaudinya, Kaundrus, Kaushal, Kaushik, Kaushish, Krishnatrey, Kutsa, Kush, Lohitsya, Mandavya, Marichi, Markandeya, Maudgalya, Mudgal, Monash, Nagaich, Nanda, Paalavalli, Parashara, Pathak, Purugutsa, Ramanuja, Rikhi, Sakti, Salankayana, Sanatana, Sandilya, Sadanwalia, Sangar, Sankriti, Savarna, Shandilya, Shaunaka, Shiva, Shopauran Nagarwal, Soral, Srivatsa, Suryadhwaja, Tiwari, Upadyyay, Upamanyu, Upreti, Vadula, Vartantu, Vashishta, Vaishwanar, Vatashva, Vatsayan, Vishvamitra, Kamsi, Yaska, Vats and Vijaychan.

Brahmins account for only 5.6% of India’s population and there are many more lineages connected to Kshatriyas, Vaishyas as well as other castes that the Brahmins do not even wish to acknowledge.

After the forests were cleared for cultivation many tribes were assimilated into larger kingdoms people began to add the customs of the dominant rulers to their old ones. The tribes in every land had no standing armies though able bodied men would respond to attack by taking up clubs, spears and bows to indulge in the age old tribal pastime of mounting raids to steal cattle, women and treasures from their neighbors. They were however powerless against trained armies. The armies of the kingdoms that succeeded small tribes thrived on wars because soldiers had an insaitiable hunger for conquest and military glory.

Holding new territories was however difficult so most conquering rulers, in every country, would usually find it convenient reinstate the defeated rulers on their own thrones to be their vassals though they would be required to send tributes to their new sovereigns. Kautalya’s Arthashastra, written in the third century BC, details a complex political science for the management of these `Samantas’ or vassal kingdoms. Their priests provided a convenient ideology affirming divine sanction for this and other elaborate ceremonies like the royal coronation ceremony of Rajsuya Yagna as are recorded in numerous documents and land grants.

Tribal people readily accepted the new deities though they continued to worship their own ones. There was little conflict between their old ones and any new deity that claimed to offer them the boons of food or prosperity. After the 1st century AD a number of evangelical Aryan heroes came out of north India and passionately promoted their Vedic religion as they moved from north India to other areas. Local rulers were easily seduced by the many beautiful Brahmin rituals of royal consecration but they were not successful in eradicating the deep rooted earlier tribal beliefs so many local gods and goddesses continued to be revered along with the new Vedic deities. Over time the Brahmin priests had to accept many local customs. Today the unifying impact of mass media, television and cinema is creating a new homogenized monoculture and many local religious customs and practices are fading out along with many of their dialects and customs. 

Most of the debates and controversies concerning Hinduism today are fueled by a large number of predominantly Brahminised Hindus who want to promote Hinduism as a mono-culture and religion and dismiss the huge mass of local traditions as being irrelevant deviations to the themes that they so ardently believe in. Many believe that there is little to Hinduism outside the Vedas and no history except the fragments of history found in the voluminous Sanskrit texts. They believe that ancient India had a pristine pure ethnic and religious culture that was corrupted and polluted by foreign invaders. Actually these Brahmins had been quite tolerant to ethnic differences but not to the religions of Islam and Christianity that were evangelistic and intolerant.

Some Indians also claim that the boundaries of India should be extended far beyond the confines of the modern map of India to include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mynamar and several other countries. They are correct in believing that `Indian’ rulers had, at some time of the other, ruled over wider areas. They however forget that at other times these `Hindu’ empires also disappeared to become part of foreign kingdoms.

They also forget that Chandra Gupta Maurya was probably a Jain and that his grandson, the great king Ashok, had been Buddhist and that Buddhism been the most prevalent religion in most parts of India for almost a thousand years. They seldom know that the very word `Hindu’ is a foreign word given by the Persian emperor Cyrus the Great in the 6<sup>th</sup> century BC to the people of the Indus who were inhabitants of his 19<sup>th</sup> province. As the Persians could not pronounce `S’, the word Sindu became Hindu that was later made the name for a great religion.