Macrohistoric Case for India's Civilizational Primacy, Part 2

Our examination of civilizational trajectory so far summarizes to this:

Modern homo sapiens, once they had eliminated all competing human species, were left to deal with competing tribes of same competence/ability/motivation. In broad, our history on this emerges violent and genocidal. But surely humans across the planet attempted peaceful solutions- ones that recognised both shared interests and differing paradigms. The Indian civilization contains vivid records of this.

But a deeper problem is of control and authority- for who is to enforce any and all agreements made in the previous stage? We have extant examples through the West, China and Islam. To the West the answer is democracy, and Indians too live under this solution. But anyone honestly observing trends in democratic countries can conclude that it is the system itself that’s failing- not the threat of “fascists” like Trump or Modi. China has a solution, yes- but it involves the death of individual autonomy- a faustian bargain so steep that our morality insists it cannot be imposed. The Islamic solution, when examined to detail, is no solution at all. On this problem, the Indian experience is now to be visited.

It is good to be reminded here that Paurāṇika tradition remembers Mahābali as a generous and benevolent king. In fact, his rival Mantradruma Indra contended with a general decay in Āditya culture (and a curse from ṛṣi Durvasa to boot). The preserved tradition of Indian civilization is trying to tell us something here. It tells of Bali’s ancestry, so we know of his distant patriarchal uncle, the brutish and destructive Hiraṇyākṣa. His own patriarch, Hiraṇyakaśipu, evidences the early schisms between conflicting belief systems- a fundamental problem we will get to. The death of his genealogical grandfather, legendary Prahlāda, in ordinary battle tells us something about the material manifestations of even Mahāviṣṇu’s beatitude. Bali may be born to a line of ‘rulers,’ but he is made to submit to a higher order of duty and responsibility.

His guru, Śukrācārya, teaches him to be benevolent and indiscriminate. He cannot be rapacious like Hiraṇyākṣa, nor bigoted like Hiraṇyakaśipu. Appropriately enough, he worships both Devī and Mahāviṣṇu, and conducts himself with generosity. This shows to us that by his era, a deeper consciousness had arisen on the ‘responsibilities’ of a ruler. Also crucial is the fact that Bali is informed in this by his guru, and one of Dharma’s most ancient known ṛṣis- Śukrācārya, a Bhārgava.

But of course, few among us would truly have a problem with dictatorship if it were benevolent, and further- if the son of the benevolent dictator were not a tyrant. Indian civilization remembers this problem. Some time after the era of Mahābali, still in the 6th manvantara, the ruler turns tyrannical- Veṇa. Complacent and arrogant, he bans the study of Vedas and rituals of all kinds (the reference to Vedas here is retroactive, and does not mean that the Ṛgveda existed then). He commands his subjects to pray only to him, and denies ancient tribes like the Ādityas the use of soma. In other words, he acts in contradiction to how a ruler ought to conduct himself. The distraught citizenry appeals to the ṛṣis to intervene, and under the latter’s leadership a rebellion foments. In the coup that follows, Veṇa is deposed and a boy named Pṛthu is established on the throne. The Purāṇas describe that Pṛthu is formed from Veṇa’s thigh, and list him as the latter’s son.

There is a memory of civilizational trajectory in this story.

For one, it reiterates that solving the first fundamental problem of multiple tribes is only the beginning of a journey. The second, a problem of leadership, even if solved momentarily needs to be rooted to something deeper if the solution is to be sustained. And so the replacement to the incumbent, Pṛthu, arrives to his position not through divine right or ordained birth. Two aspects are important here. For one, Pṛthu is fashioned from Veṇa’s thighs by the ṛṣis- indicating that he was selected by a group of elders. Second, the ṛṣis are moved to do this by the appeal of common people- indicating the salience of citizens’ will. This is why Pṛthu emerges from the thigh- the same part of Puruṣa’s body from which emerge the Vaiśyas. Veṇa is remembered by tradition as an example of the dangers to embedding leadership and/or power in one source. It tells us that even the supreme ruler must submit to a core duty, one enshrined not in the personality but the position. This is not the Western coalition between ‘priestly’ and ‘royal’ classes (or Church and King), and neither is it the Islamic derivation from a higher order/bloodline.

Yes, the ruling authority must submit to a higher order. But the order is one emergent from below, and thus placed as the ideal. At its focus is the society, the larger population, and their many needs. The Purāṇas tell us that before Pṛthu there was no organized agriculture, no large towns and no markets. This is to be expected, for the Neolithic trajectory begun by the Samudra Manthana needed further development. The ocean churning represents the emergence of animal domestication and proto-metallurgy, but Pṛthu’s era represents the arrival of true civilization- the kind seen at Mehrgarh, Bhirrana and Rakhigarhi by 6000 BC.

Also notable is the rare title afforded to Pṛthu, making him the first of that name- cakravartin. The Purāṇas, for all their chronologies of thousands of years, for all the genealogies they give from various Manus, and for all the kings and rulers listed of dozens of tribes, list only sixteen cakravartins- or civilization movers. This tells us that even as notions may form around how one ought to rule or lead, not all live up to the ideals. Veṇa was by no means the last ‘evil’ ruler in Indian memory, and in the 7th manvantara we are met with names such as Kārtavīrya- a ruthless conqueror who violated all rules of war and conquest.

When we look at modern democracy, we want to believe that we have found the perfect working solution. We think of the primitive eras of the past- when kings ordained divine rights to rule, and their sons inherited it from them. We think that those in the past were ruled against their will, exploited to the hilt, and possessed none of the fierce desire for autonomy that we of the modern era do. Now, one need not give too large a list of political dynasties in USA and India- the world’s largest democracies- to make the point on children inheriting the right to rule from their parents even today. In reality, our hyperfocus on the ‘process’ of selecting leadership has blinded us to the ‘qualities’ required of it. And on this count, we need look no further than an Indian hero par-excellence, a veritable maryādā puruṣottam. As culturally embedded as the Rāmāyaṇa is in our civilizational consciousness, it is but a small part of Rāma’s full tale. In fact it ends where the imperial journey begins- at Rāma’s coronation. It thus tells us little about the man that tradition remembers as a cakravartin.

Rāma’s imperial record comes to us from the Purāṇas, where at the end of long reign he advises Lakṣmaṇa on the qualities of a king. We may replace king with ‘democratically elected government’ here, but the requisite qualities hold salience nonetheless. Rāma advises-

• A king should acquire wealth only by rightful means, develop it, guard it, and give it to the deserving.
• He should possess humility in statesmanship, knowledge of the scriptures and control of his senses.
• He must contain fortitude, dexterity, proficiency, reticence, energy, eloquence, generosity, endurance, amity, truthfulness, good conduct and self-control.
• He must denounce lust, anger, greed, delight, pride and arrogance.
• He should abstain from causing injury to living beings, be courteous in speech and show compassion to all.
• A poor man in anger can kill the king, so a king must be doubly sure to keep the least privileged in his kingdom happy.
• He should guard to his best ability the seven parts of a kingdom- king, ministry, territory, fortress, treasury, army and allies.
• Ministers should be native to the country and at least a few spies should be from foreign lands.
• The kingdom itself should have good crops and plenty of water, sacred sites, wildlife and water courses independent of rains.

The sermon runs long, listing not only the kinds of kingdoms but the kinds of allies, enemies, treaties and war. When to conduct what treaty, and when to conduct war. How to motivate an armed force, and when to negotiate peace with the enemy. And now we can bring in the great running thread through the entire civilizational journey so far.

DHARMA. IT IS THE BHĀRATĪYA ETHOS.

It is the endeavor to conduct life and society in harmony with ṛta- the eternal order of reality. It is a naturalist civilization’s character. It is the means, formulated over countless generations, to navigate the absurd life. To deal with the fundamental problems faced by individual and collective- both. And thus when the ocean was churned, when the ancient tribes attempted truce under the spiritual preceptorship of Śukra and Bṛhaspati, what they finally churned out was Dharma. It was the means to prevent mṛta, or the unbecoming/crumbling of ṛta. They called it a-mṛta. Through amṛta they learnt to share. To co-exist. To assimilate each other’s cultural practices and find deeper synthesis. They learnt how to conduct themselves- whether as a ruler, a teacher, a tradesman or a workman. They had embarked upon a dhārmika path. But these were still the tribal times, and the focus was on the collective. The jana, not the jīva. Not yet at least. But jīvas deviating from the jana dharma highlighted the problem- dharma needs to be maintained, and in the sense of collective-security and well-being it even needs to be imposed. So it is doubly problematic if those charged with doing this stray themselves.

But if the dharma-vṛkṣa is strong, if the leaves and branches are well-rooted, then it is jīvas who bring us back to dharma. We call them cakravartins and avatāras. Through them we learnt that dharma needs to be embodied in the jīva too. By the time of Rāma, he- the rājā himself- would expound on rāja dharma- the code to appraise him against.

Thus develops a mesh network of ideas, synthesized over many millennia, layers built atop layers into a fractal maṇḍala, and decentralized among the collective. It is called Dharma. It is the Bhāratīya Ethos. But more problems await the civilizational trajectory.

3: The Fundamental Problem of Conflicting Ethos

Petty religions, ever anxious and insecure, their pettiness always causing internal rifts, do not rise above the level of us-vs.-them. They remain grappling with the fundamental problem of multiple tribes, their solutions no more sophisticated than wiping out those that are not “us.” But viewed from the level of civilizational trajectory, once multiple tribes have united under a common ethos, they must then face the ethos of other tribal collectives. It is easy to call this a problem of conflicting religions, but in reality it is the problem of conflicting dharmas- or rather of dharma vs. adharma.

Indian civilizational memory of course has grappled with this problem many times over. It began with Hiraṇyakaśipu, who could not accept the dharma of his son and resorted to adharma to impose his will. It happened again with Veṇa, who grew vain and oppressed his people. But these were individual jīvas straying from dharma, and even the great Deva – Asura rivalry was not one of conflicting ethos. It is relatively convenient when dharma is stable, and there are the odd deviations from it now and then. It is vastly more complicated when the other side plays with a different dharma, or rather without dharma at all.

By the 7th manvantara, our ancestors were well on the path to being an advanced civilization of their time. They developed writing, planned architecture, advanced geometry and mathematics, organized large-scale agriculture, Bronze Age metallurgy, hydraulic engineering, long-distance trade and more. It was a significant level-up on civilizational trajectory, having formulated resolutions for the above-listed fundamental problems. But as populations increased, as the people diversified and as the mesh network developed more and more stray ends, the spread of dharma diluted- and emerged those who did not play by it.

We could take the case of the Haihayas, an ancient Indian collective descended from Yadu, himself one of the 5 sons of Yayāti. We will come to the other branches shortly, but for now it must be noticed that the Haihayas are remembered unambiguously as adhārmika people. When they waged war, they spared neither women nor children. When they attacked cities they did not just drive out the incumbent rulers, they razed the cities to the ground and displaced their inhabitants. They showed no regard to the keepers of dharma, wantonly burning entire forests to destroy the āśramas within them. So great was their power and spread that one among them, Kārtavīrya Arjuna, is remembered as a samrāṭ- a clear acknowledgment of his conquest. But crucially, he is not called a cakravartin. He may have conquered civilization, but he was not a mover of it. He did not turn the wheel of time forward, rather he set it back.

With the Haihayas, Indian civilization learnt a new lesson. In resolving the first fundamental problem, it learnt the value of tolerance, acceptance, co-existence and pluralism- such that even today it stands as the best example of these values. But the Haihayas forced it to understand the problem with tolerating intolerance. It is all well and good to consider the whole world one family, but when dharma itself is in danger a different strategy must be adopted. It is a lesson we would be made to learn again and again. And again.

Enter Sagara. Enter Pratardana. Enter Marutta. Enter the realization that dharma must be protected, sometimes by violent, aggressive and assertive means.

When Sagara Aikṣvāku sets out to reclaim land and region for his people, he takes on many enemies. The stories of his treatment to non-Haihaya enemies is exemplar of the Indian resolution to problem 1. He does not harm innocents, women or children. He does not destroy cities or property. He wages dhārmika war on the warriors among his enemies, and once they are defeated he accepts his guru’s counsel to exile them- not decimate them. He was battling different tribes here, but not people with a different ethos. This is why even those defeated people turned to Vasiṣṭha, and he endorsed their plea for mercy to Sagara.

With the Haihayas it is a different story. He grinds their cities to dust, he spares not a single Haihaya, and he ends their entire line. There is no rope here, no negotiation, no guru’s counsel for peace and no exile. There is, despite how distasteful the word may appear, only extermination. And we should be clear- this wasn’t Sagara’s project alone. This is what Pratardana did when he reclaimed Kāśi for his people, and what Marutta did when he drove the Haihayas back and re-established the janapada of Vaiśālī. This is what the Indian civilization did, for it understood that the fundamental problem of conflicting ethos requires firm solutions. We remember this firm solution as the story of Rāma Jamadāgneya, who wipes the kṣatriyas (Haihayas) from the face of this earth twenty-one times over.

Of all the lessons our civilization has learnt in its past, this is the one it has arguably forgotten the most. The only extant civilizations of the world today are those who have unapologetically defended their ethos, and continue to do so. Those that woke up to the danger too late, as dodo birds, now survive in museums or as tour-guides to the sacred spaces of their ancestors- parroting propaganda about their own history. Such is to be our fate, and in places already is, if we do not relearn past lessons.

And just to prove that the Indian solution to this problem is not simply wiping out those that do not play by the same rules as us, we turn to the other sons of Yayāti, or rather the branches descended from them. These too developed conflicting ethos, even as they drew from the same ancestral well and civilizational trajectory. Both the Pūrus and Ānavas considered fire to be sacred, and both mythologized ancestral names of the past, as both inherited the legacy of Śukra and Bṛhaspati, of Daityas and Ādityas. But while the Pūrus threw everything into the fire, including the dead, considering it to be a great purifier, the Ānavas considered fire itself to be of ultimate purity and refused to throw anything into it- including the dead.

This is not one tribe against another, or one religion against another. These were conflicting ethos, and add to this the Druhyus, Yadus, Turvaśas, Ālinas, Pākthas, Bhalānas, Ajas, Śighras, Dasas and more. Inheriting a leveled-up civilization, headed to the high days of Mature Harappan by 2500 BC, they held ownership over the accumulated wealth of Samudra Manthana and Pṛthu, of the many Manus, of Mehrgarh, Bhirrana, Rakhigarhi, Lahuradewa and more. Some among them were belligerent like the Haihayas, destroying canals and disturbing the irrigation of established cities- as chronicled in the dāśarājña of the Ṛgveda. Others paid no respect to the property and wealth of others, such that cattle-raiding was an ever-present concern. We see from the many campaigns of Divodāsa Atithigva, and the several battles of Sudās Paijavana, that this would have reduced to a state of incessant us-vs.-them, of multiple tribes always in conflict. We would have deprecated on the civilizational trajectory. Enter the Vasiṣṭhas, perhaps commencing with Maitrāvaruṇi. To quote Findlay, Vasiṣṭha’s Indra-Varuṇa hymns have an

“embedded message of transcending all thoughts of bigotry, suggesting a realistic approach of mutual coordination and harmony between two rival religious ideas by abandoning disputed ideas from each and finding the complementary spiritual core in both.”

Authored by Amritanshu Pandey.

Published by Brhat.