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The Significance of
Ancient Indian History

The study of ancient Indian history is important for several reasons. It tells us
how, when, and where people developed the earliest cultures in India, how they
began undertaking agriculture and stock raising which made life secure and
settled. It shows how the ancient Indians discovered and utilized natural
resources, and how they created the means for their livelihood. We get an idea of
how the ancient inhabitants made arrangements for food, shelter, and transport,
and learn how they took to farming, spinning, weaving, metalworking, and the
like, how they cleared forests, founded villages, cities, and eventually large
kingdoms.
People are not considered civilized unless they know how to write. The
different forms of writing prevalent in India today are all derived from the
ancient scripts. This is also true of the languages that we speak today. The
languages we use have roots in ancient times, and have developed through the
ages.

Unity in Diversity
Ancient Indian history is interesting because many races and tribes intermingled
in early India. The pre-Aryans, the Indo-Aryans, the Greeks, the Scythians, the
Hunas, the Turks, and others made India their home. Each ethnic group
contributed its mite to the evolution of the Indian social system, art and
architecture, language and literature. All these peoples and their cultural traits
commingled so inextricably that currently they can be clearly identified in their
original form.
A remarkable feature of ancient Indian culture has been the commingling of
cultural elements from the north and south, and from the east and west. The
Aryan elements are equated with the Vedic and Puranic culture of the north and
the pre-Aryan with the Dravidian and Tamil culture of the south. However, many
Munda, Dravidian and other non-Sanskritic terms occur in the Vedic texts
ascribed to 1500–500 BC. They indicate ideas, institutions, products, and
settlements associated with peninsular and non-Vedic India. Similarly, many Pali
and Sanskrit terms, signifying ideas and institutions, developed in the Gangetic
plains, appear in the earliest Tamil texts called the Sangam literature which is
roughly used for the period 300 BC–AD 600. The eastern region inhabited by the
pre-Aryan tribals made its own contribution. The people of this area spoke the
Munda or Kolarian languages. Several terms that signify the use of cotton,
navigation, digging stick, etc., in the Indo-Aryan languages have been traced to
the Munda languages by linguists. Although there are many Munda pockets in
Chhotanagpur plateau, the remnants of Munda culture in the Indo-Aryan culture
are fairly strong. Many Dravidian terms too are to be found in the Indo-Aryan
languages. It is held that changes in the phonetics and vocabulary of the Vedic
language can be explained as much on the basis of the Dravidian influence as
that of the Munda.
India has since ancient times been a land of several religions. Ancient India
saw the birth of Brahmanism or Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism, but all these
cultures and religions intermingled and interacted. Thus, though Indians speak
different languages, practise different religions, and observe different social
customs, they follow certain common styles of life. Our country shows a deep
underlying unity despite great diversity.
The ancients strove for unity. The Indian subcontinent was geographically
well defined and its geographical unity was supplemented by cultural
integration. Though there existed many states, languages, cultures, and
communities, gradually people developed territorial identity. The states or
territorial units, called janapadas, were named after different tribes. However,
the country as a whole came to be named Aryavarta after the dominant cultural
community called the Aryans. Aryavarta denoted northern and central India and
extended from the eastern to the western sea coasts. The other name by which
India was better known was Bharatavarsha or the land of the Bharatas. Bharata,
in the sense of tribe or family, figures in the Rig Veda and Mahabharata, but the
name Bharatavarsha occurs in the Mahabharata and post-Gupta Sanskrit texts.
This name was applied to one of the nine divisions of the earth, and in the post-
Gupta period it denoted India. The term Bharati or an inhabitant of India occurs
in post-Gupta texts.
Iranian inscriptions are important for the origin of the term Hindu. The term
Hindu occurs in the inscriptions of fifth–sixth centuries BC. It is derived from the
Sanskrit term Sindhu. Linguistically s becomes h in Iranian. The Iranian
inscriptions first mention Hindu as a district on the Indus. Therefore, in the
earliest stage, the term Hindu means a territorial unit. It neither indicates a
religion nor a community.
Our ancient poets, philosophers, and writers viewed the country as an integral
unit. They spoke of the land stretching from the Himalayas to the sea as the
proper domain of a single, universal monarch. The kings who tried to establish
their authority from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin and from the valley of the
Brahmputra in the east to the land beyond the Indus in the west were universally
praised. They were called Chakravartis. This form of political unity was attained
at least twice in ancient times. In the third century BC Ashoka extended his
empire over the whole of India barring the extreme south. His inscriptions are
scattered across a major part of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and even in
Afghanistan. Again, in the fourth century AD, Samudragupta carried his
victorious arms from the Ganga to the borders of the Tamil land. In the seventh
century, the Chalukya king, Pulakeshin defeated Harshavardhana who was called
the lord of the whole of north India. Despite the lack of political unity, political
formations all over India assumed more or less a single form. The idea that India
constituted one single geographical unit persisted in the minds of the conquerors
and cultural leaders. The unity of India was also recognized by foreigners. They
first came into contact with the people living on the Sindhu or the Indus, and so
they named the entire country after this river. The word Hind or Hindu is derived
from the Sanskrit term Sindhu, and on the same basis, the country became
known as ‘India’ which is very close to the Greek term for it. India came to be
called ‘Hind’ in the Persian and Arabic languages. In post-Kushan times, the
Iranian rulers conquered the Sindh area and named it Hindustan.
We find continuing efforts to establish linguistic and cultural unity in India.
In the third century BC Prakrit served as the lingua franca across the major part
of India. Ashoka’s inscriptions were inscribed in the Prakrit language mainly in
Brahmi script. Later, Sanskrit acquired the same position and served as the state
language in the remotest parts of India. This process was conspicuous during the
Gupta period in the fourth century. Although India witnessed the rise of
numerous small states during the post-Gupta period, the official documents were
written in Sanskrit.
 Another notable fact is that the ancient epics, the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata, were studied with the same zeal and devotion in the land of the
Tamils as in the intellectual circles of Banaras and Taxila. Originally composed
in Sanskrit, various versions of these epics were produced in different local
languages. However, whatever the form in which Indian cultural values and
ideas were expressed, the substance remained largely the same throughout India.
Indian history is especially worthy of our attention because of a peculiar type
of social system which developed in India. In north India, the varna/caste system
developed which eventually spread throughout the country, and influenced even
the Christians and the Muslims. Even converts to Christianity and Islam
continued to follow some of their old caste practices of Hinduism.

The Relevance of the Past to the Present

The study of India’s past assumes special significance in the context of the
problems we currently face. Some people clamour for the restoration of ancient
culture and civilization, and a substantial number are sentimentally swayed by
what they consider to be the past glories of India. This is different from a
concern for the preservation of ancient heritage in art and architecture. What
they really want to bring back is the old pattern of society and culture. This
demands a clear and correct understanding of the past. There is no doubt that
Indians of old made remarkable progress in a variety of fields, but these
advances alone cannot enable us to compete with the achievements of modern
science and technology. We cannot ignore the fact that ancient Indian society
was marked by gross social injustice. The lower orders, particularly the shudras
and untouchables, were encumbered with disabilities which are shocking to the
modern mind. Similarly, law and custom discriminate against women in favour
of men. The restoration of the old way of life will naturally revive and
strengthen all these inequities. The success of the ancients in surmounting the
difficulties presented by nature and human factors can build our hope and
confidence in the future but any attempt to bring back the past will mean a
perpetuation of the social inequity that afflicted India. All this makes it essential
for us to understand what the past means.
We have many survivals of ancient, medieval, and later times persisting in the
present. The old norms, values, social customs, and ritualistic practices are so
deeply ingrained in the minds of the people that they cannot easily themselves
get rid of them. Unfortunately, these survivals inhibit the development of the
individual and the country, and were deliberately fostered in colonial times. India
cannot develop rapidly unless such vestiges of the past are eradicated from its
society. The caste system and sectarianism hinder the democratic integration and
development of India. Caste barriers and prejudices do not allow even educated
individuals to appreciate the dignity of manual labour and hamper our
unification for a common cause. Though women have been enfranchised, their
age-old social subordination prevents them from playing their due role in
society, and this is true too of the lower orders of society. Studying the ancient
past helps us to deeply examine the roots of these prejudices and discover the
causes that sustain the caste system, subordinate women, and promote narrow
religious sectarianism. The study of ancient Indian history is, therefore, relevant
not only to those who want to understand the true nature of the past but also to
those who seek to understand the nature of the obstacles that hamper India’s
progress as a nation.

Chronology
1500–500 BC Dravidian and non-Sanskritic terms found in Vedic
texts.
300 BC–AD 600 Sangam literature.
3 C BC Prakrit as the lingua franca.
AD 4 C onwards Sanskrit as the state language.