The Histories of India and its Dharma Traditions – an Overview

The earliest sources of the Indic historical record do not reveal much about the individual societies of the almost 4,400 ancient tribes and people groups that populated the Indosphere. For as much as is postulated from the archaeological sites such as the ancient Bhimbetka caves (c. 500,000 years before the present), Attirampakkam (c. 385,000 YBP), or the comparatively recent Indus Valley Civilization (c. 9,000 YBP), the details about societies that survive are precious little compared to the information from the Ārya cultures (a grouping of 172 multiethnic tribes). This is because the Āryas, though not leaving much archaeological evidence, left vast bodies of poetic compositions datable to at least the second millennium BCE.

The term ‘ārya’, for example, first appears in the Ṛgveda, the oldest surviving Vedic composition (c.1800 BCE). Ārya was a term of self-designation and marker of a particular culture and worldview. The measure of an Ārya was simply whether one’s traditions and customs adhered to one of the Ārya worldviews. Vedic Āryas, those Āryas who practiced a spiritual tradition that was collated in the compositions known as the Vedas, did not set out to exterminate Dravidians or any of the other 4,400 ancient tribes and people groups they interacted with. Indeed, Dravidian-speaking tribes became part of Ārya societies by approximately 1500-600 BCE. The most common word used by people of different ethnicities and traditions in ancient India to refer to people as a collective was Ārya, problematizing the colonial connection of the word Ārya with any one specific ‘race’.

Contemporary western understandings of the ancient world are most informed by Ancient Greek perspectives (from ~500 BCE), which in turn were informed primarily by Indo-Iranians (who followed the other major Ārya tradition, Zoroastrianism) when it came to knowledge about Ancient Indians. The ancient Greeks called the Sindhu River the Indus, and Persians called it Hindu. The Indo-Iranians and Ancient Greeks, unable or uninterested in describing the diversity and history of the peoples living beyond the Sindhu River, simply treated all of them as if they were one monolithic people. This is where we get the terms “India” and “Hindu.” People known as Hindus today, however, originally identified themselves through their family, clan, tribe, and regional or pan-regional spiritual tradition.

A vyakti (/individual) was usually part of a parivāra, which consists of an immediate family and multigenerational blood relations. A parivāra was usually part of a kula (clan), an extended family or clan with shared ancestry and kinship, whether genetic or otherwise, including relations through marriage. Subclans are often named for any significant individual and their children, or smaller clans that ally with larger clans through treaty or partnership. Many parivāras and/or kulas, when they shared some kind of distinguishing social features, might form a jāti (tribe). The shared distinguishing features of a jāti might include any combination of commonly accepted origin stories, histories, worldviews, teachings, customs, spiritual traditions, language or dialects, trade or guild affiliation, occupation, profession, etc. While initially a tribe would have many internal variations due to it being composed from many clans, over time a tribe would trend towards synthesizing a more streamlined set of distinguishing features, while still making provisions for any dearly held clan traits to be accommodated. Many kulas and/or jātis would ally through treaty or marriage and form a jana, a clan/tribal confederation, usually with a commonly elected leader and a council made up of the leaders of the other clans. The geographical territory of a jana was called a janapada.

There were originally sixty-four major janapadas in ancient India (c. 1100-600 BCE), in addition to three great Tamil dynasties (the Cheras, Choḷas, and Paṇḍyas). These were mainly formed around cities and connecting trade routes. Thousands of other settlements belonged to tribes that did not join the more expansive confederations.

As janas grew and further governance was required, an elder of each family would form an assembly (samiti). These assemblies selected a leader (rājña) who had a sabhā, a small group of advisors consisting of purohitas, or chaplains and experts, and the senāni, guards. When a group of janas allied through treaty or marriage, their combined janapada territories were called a mahājanapada or tribal nation. There were sixteen mahājanapadas in ancient India (c. 600-400 BCE), each of them containing one or more urbanized areas serving as economic and administrative centers, and numerous villages or forest settlements wherein resided both Āryas (originally referring to 172 multiethnic tribes, a few of which formed confederations that led to influential janapadas and then the mahājanapadas) and those tribes and confederations choosing to remain independent from Ārya societies.

As trade between societies increased, those that developed into prosperous cities (nagara) required administration. This led to oligarchic republics (gaṇasaṅgha) like the Vṛji and Malla republics. If based around a major city with a trading network, occasionally several mahājanapadas would ally through treaty or marriage and form a sāmrājya, a nation state or empire. Otherwise, if needs were met with limited trade or if a kula, jatī, or jana was self-sufficient, they could opt to function independently in the rural areas, forests, or hills they inhabited, away from the urban cities that were founded mainly on coastal lowlands or on the banks of navigable rivers. If these independent clans, tribes or their respective confederations were situated near or on trade routes or infrastructure such as ports, they would negotiate relationships with their more powerful neighbors. Otherwise the janapadas/mahājanapadas and other kingdoms respected those independent people groups’ decision to enter into trade agreements, or maintain total autonomy. This structure lent itself to a broad, pluralistic society with great diversity within larger unified groups of people. It is also the reason for the survival (until West Asian and European colonial times) of distinct clan and tribe confederations which were later classified as and designated Backward or Criminal Castes and Tribes by the British Imperial administrators.

Sadly, we do not know much about many of the earliest individual groups because of the lack of surviving archaeological evidence. The humid climate was not ideal for the survival of ancient artifacts that would reveal more about the various peoples. There has also been a lack of interest and investment from researchers and scholars in investigating the surviving oral cultures and many are declining and becoming extinct due to westernized education and financial systems.