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.

SHIVAJI – FROM MORTAL HERO TO POLITICAL ICON

Irate Shiv Sainiks had violently protested a book by James Laine called `Shivaji - Hindu King in Islamic India’ - and had it banned. The agitators were outraged that the book had dared to say that there had been some speculation suggesting that a certain Dadoji may have been Shivaji’s biological father and had vandalized the prestigious Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. It is most unlikely that the Shiv Sainiks would have read the little book though the agitation gave unexpected fame to a small scholarly work that would otherwise have faded into oblivion.

Shivaji, who was the first Hindu ruler to successfully challenge the Mughal Empire, had become an iconic love and hate figure for most Hindus and Indian Muslims. Those who do plough through the text will however find that it very objectively records the great differences between the accounts written by Hindu and Mughal sources during Shivaji’s lifetime in the 17^th century and the later glorified accounts in Maharashtra. The book extols Shivaji’s heroic feats about the killing and beheading of Afzal Khan, the daring raid on Shaista Khan’s fortified camp, the loot of Surat, Shivaji’s escape from Agra and the conquest of Simhagad etc. Shivaji’s audacious courage in daring to humble the hitherto invincible Mughals instantly made him a great Hindu hero at a time when Hindu’s had no hero role models to emulate except for those of mythology.  

The contemporary accounts however contain several inconvenient facts that do not fit in with later accounts that sought to glorify Shivaji’s life notably that Shivaji’s father Maloji loyally served as a Jagirdar of Muslim Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar and was a devotee of a Sufi saint after whom he named his two sons Shah and Sharif. His tomb at Ellora looks like a Muslim tomb.

Shivaji began his career as an Adil Shahi jagirdar of Pune and like his father and grandfather before him served, allied or opposed the Muslim rulers of Ahmadnagar, Berar, Golconda, Bijapur and Agra as and when it was expedient. Shivaji had gone to Agra in the hope of being made a Mughal Amir but rebelled when the emperor Aurangzeb did not give him the rank that he felt he deserved. Shivaji’s sons Sambhaji and Rajaram both married their daughters to Mughal nobles. Marathas fought in Muslim armies and there were many Muslims in the Maratha armies. These clearly show that Maratha opposition to the Mughals was political and not at all religious.

Shivaji was born in February 1639 at the hill fort of Shivneri, and hardly knew his father Shahji who abandoned his mother Jijabai soon after he was born. Shahji was in the service of Adil Shah of Bijapur including a long stint as governor at Bangalore. Jijabai named him Shivaji after the local goddess Shivai and not the Hindu deity Shiva as many assume. Jijabai, of the Jadhav clan, was also of a better caste than her husband who was a Bhonsle of a farming caste that is not listed among the ninety-six high caste Maratha families. Shahji sent his trusted lieutenant Dadoji Konndev Kulkarni, a Brahmin, to look after Jijabai and Shivaji. He was a warrior and swordsman and was Shivaji’s guardian, teacher and mentor.

Shivaji’s rise did not have the support of all Marathi speakers and there was no concept of a Maratha nation. His main supporters, the Mavlis, were simple hill people opposed by the aristocratic Maratha sardars like the Nimbalkars, Deshpande’s, Ghorpandes, Moreys who he had to kill before he could establish his kingdom. Shivaji however needed a high caste that the heads of other Maratha clans could respect. The local Brahmins refused to perform the rites of kingship on a non Kshatriya so he imported two Brahmins from Benares who dutifully organized a huge ceremony in June 1674. Marathi was not yet widely known as a written language and most accounts were in the state language of Persian. The early Marathi accounts were also so Persianised as to make them difficult to understand today.

Contemporary records show that Shivaji was a Shaivite and a devotee of the goddess Bhavani who like Durga and Kali needed constant blood sacrifices of buffaloes, goats and fowl. He was a follower of the non Brahmin Tukaram and records also show that he also went to the tombs of several Sufi Pirs. After Shivaji’s death the rule of his sons did not last very long and his son Sambhaji wrested the throne from Shivaji’s second wife (out of seven) named Soyarabai, regent for the ten year old Rajaram. Sambhaji had no compunctions about killing Soyarabai and several important Maratha supporters. Sambhaji however ruled for just nine years and the Maratha Empire passed into the hands of their Brahmin prime ministers who moved the capital from Raigadh, near Mahableshwar, to Satara.

Many Brahmin priests and scribes were now patronized who, while glorifying Shivaji’s memory, began to alter and Brahminise the eventful records of his life. The legends about Shivaji were now made to resemble the mythical heroes like Ram and Krishna. Parmananda’s popular Sivabharata even alludes to his conception through a visit to his mother Jijabai by the god Vishnu. 

The early accounts of Shivaji’s escape from Agra record that he dressed as a sadhu and went to Benares before quickly returning to his kingdom. In the Brahminised later accounts he reverentially travels to other the holy places like Hardwar, Prayag, Ayodhya and Gaya as well. The killing of Afzal khan was glorified as a fight between good and evil and the battle becomes a narrative of a growing Hindu identity in opposition to oppressive Islam. Afzal Khan was portrayed as the stereotyped evil Muslim who kills cows, destroys temples and disrespects Brahmins and Hindu deities. Brahmins like Mahapati and Chitnis begin to now spread the idea that Shivaji was an ardent devotee of Rama, Vishnu and Marut (Hanuman) and was a vegetarian according to a new devotional cult of Vithoba of Pandharpur.

The 19^th century was marked by the arrival of the British who installed a puppet raja at Satara in 1818 and assumed sovereign control in 1848. Grant Duff wrote his `History of the Marathas’ that portrayed Shivaji as a plunderer and freebooter. It was to stir most Maharashtrians to condemn it. They began to call Shivaji `Father of the Nation’. Shivaji’s story was now portrayed as a Hindu, and later an Indian, rebellion against foreigners whether Muslim or Christian.

Liberal British education however also resulted in an internal rebellion with some socialist writers attacking the Brahmin domination of religion and customs during the earlier century. He rejoiced in Shivaji’s low caste origins claiming that he was descended from India’s original warriors who had been suppressed turn by turn by Aryan (Brahmin), Turk and European usurpers. They claimed that all Shudra and groups labelled as low caste were really members of a great pre Aryan nobility.

Gangadhar Tilak sought to reject all British efforts to intrude into Hindu life. He started the Ganesh Chaturti festival in 1903 to compete with the Muslim Muharram processions. It was hugely successful quickly making a minor elephant headed deity Ganesh into a popular icon in every Indian home. These festivals were seen as being both anti Muslim and anti British and Tilak was twice imprisoned for sedition. The theme with many variations was then taken up by Annie Besant, Gokhle, Lajpat Rai and others and there was now a babble of voices of many writers  notably Tagore, Rajwade, Mandal and others who used the icon of Shivaji to promote their views on Indian nationalism and a Maharashtrian sub nationalism. Veer Savarkar’s book `Hindutva’ was to add a virulent note to the debate.

Many inconvenient facts were however suppressed. Few know that Shivaji had seven wives or that he had an unhappy family life. There is little evidence that he was interested in religion or was a follower of Bhakti saints nor any evidence that he was hostile to Muslims even if he had fought against many Muslim political enemies. He was clearly determined to build his own kingdom but the idea of creating a Hindu or Maratha nation does not seem to have been his mission.

Over the centuries, several hundred writers manipulated the traditions about the heroic Shivaji to illuminate their own points of view. The historic non Brahmin military hero became, turn by turn, a virtuous spiritual model according to Brahmin standards, an enemy of Islam, a ruthless freebooter according to the British, a low caste hero among socialist thinkers and then the maker of a Maharashtrian and later a pan Indian identity. Each political agenda developed their own virtual scriptures and generated heated anger against anyone who dared to blaspheme their strongly held beliefs. They wanted to believe that the story of Shivaji was immutable and unchanging and their beliefs became almost as rigid as religious dogma. But the record shows how the facts of Shivaji’s life were manipulated over time.