The Vedic Age

After the Harappan cities declined, a new chapter opened in northern India: the Vedic Age, named after the Vedas, the oldest texts of the subcontinent. From these hymns, and from the graves of the same period, we learn how a pastoral people lived and worshipped. We also see how they slowly built the social order, including the early caste system, that would shape India for millennia.

The Vedas are the oldest surviving texts of India. They were composed in old Sanskrit and passed down by memory for generations before being written. There are four:

• The Rigveda: the oldest, a collection of hymns to the gods.
• The Samaveda: hymns set to melody.
• The Yajurveda: formulas for rituals and sacrifices.
• The Atharvaveda: spells and charms for everyday life.

The Rigveda is the chief source for the Early Vedic period. The other three belong to the Later Vedic period. Among the rivers it praises, the Sindhu (Indus) is the one most frequently mentioned in early Vedic literature. The value of these texts is recognised worldwide: in 2007, the manuscripts of the Rigveda were inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.

Early Vedic religion centred on the worship of nature. The chief deities personified natural forces: Agni was fire, Indra brought rain and thunder, and Varuna watched over the waters and the order of the world. Worship took the form of yajnas, fire sacrifices performed with the chanting of hymns. There was no image worship, there were no temples, and the idea of bhakti (personal devotion to a god) had not yet appeared. These features belong to much later religion.

Two ideas anchored Vedic thought:

• Dharma: the conception of obligations, the discharge of one's duties to oneself and to others.
• Rita: the fundamental moral and cosmic order that governs the functioning of the universe. Varuna was regarded as its guardian.

The Later Vedic period also produced the Upanishads, philosophical texts that look behind ritual to ask about the soul, the self and ultimate reality. They teach through parables and dialogues rather than plain instruction. The most famous dialogue appears in the Kathopanishad, where the boy Nachiketa questions Yama, the god of death, about the soul and immortality. The Upanishads were composed much earlier than the Puranas, the collections of myths and genealogies that belong to a far later age.

The language of the Vedas, old Sanskrit, belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the wider Indo-European family of languages. This family links Sanskrit to ancient Persian, Greek and Latin. Shared words for family, animals and gods show that the speakers of these languages were once connected. Movements of people across long distances carried languages with them, and India was both a destination and a starting point for such migrations.

One striking later example of migration out of India is the Romani people, popularly called the gypsies of Europe. Linguistic and genetic studies trace their original home to north-western India. From there they migrated westward about a thousand years ago, and their language still preserves many Indo-Aryan words. Their case shows how the study of language can recover the history of a people who left no written records of their own.

The word Hindu did not begin as the name of a religion. It comes from Sindhu, the old name of the Indus river. Foreigners who approached India from the west named the land and its people after this river.

The Arabs were the first to use the word Hindu to refer to the people of Hind, that is, the people living beyond the Sindhu. From Arabic and Persian writings the term passed into common use. Only much later did Hindu come to describe a religious community. The Greeks made a similar change of sound and called the river Indos, which gave Europe the words India and Indus.

Early Vedic society was pastoral and tribal. The people, who called themselves Aryas, kept herds of cattle, which were their main form of wealth. Many words and even wars were about cattle.

They lived in tribes called janas. Each tribe was led by a chief called the rajan, who was a war leader rather than an all-powerful king. He was advised and kept in check by tribal assemblies called the sabha and the samiti. There was no regular tax and no large territory. Power rested on the support of the people and on success in cattle raids.

Kinship held this tribal world together, and its vocabulary is precise:

• Kula: the family, the basic unit of society.
• Vamsa: the lineage, the line of descent a family traced.
• Gotra: the clan, a wider group claiming a common ancestor.
• Kosa: not a kinship term at all. It means the treasury, and belongs to statecraft.

Women had a place in sacred learning. Some women, called Brahmavadinis, composed hymns of the Rigveda. Lopamudra is the standard example. In the Later Vedic period, Gargi appears as a philosopher who debated the deepest questions of the self in open assembly.

The Rigvedic people differed sharply from the earlier people of the Indus Valley:

• Warfare: the Rigvedic Aryans used the coat of mail and the helmet in battle. No such evidence comes from the Indus Valley.
• Metals: the Rigvedic Aryans knew gold, silver and copper, but not iron. The Indus people did not know iron either. Iron belongs to a later age.
• The horse: the Rigvedic Aryans had domesticated the horse, which was central to their life and warfare. There is no clear evidence of the horse in the Indus Valley.

It was in the Later Vedic period that society became more clearly divided. People came to be grouped into four varnas:

• Brahmanas: priests and teachers.
• Kshatriyas: rulers and warriors.
• Vaishyas: farmers, herders and traders.
• Shudras: those who served the other three.

At first this division may have been flexible. Over time it hardened into birth-based castes. The Brahmanas claimed the highest position and the Shudras the lowest. Groups outside the four varnas were pushed to the margins.

Beyond the texts, we learn about this age from burials. In many parts of the subcontinent, people of this period marked their graves with large stones called megaliths.

The objects buried with the dead (the grave goods) tell us a great deal. Some graves held only a few simple pots, while others held weapons, gold and many vessels. This difference shows that society was becoming unequal. Some people were richer and more important than others. These burials also reveal beliefs about death and the growth of social differences.

The Vedas were preserved by memory long before they were written down. When writing did appear in India, several scripts came into use. Knowing their direction and region is a frequent point of testing.

• Brahmi: the parent script of most later Indian scripts, written from left to right. The inscriptions of Ashoka, the Mauryan emperor, were mostly in Brahmi.
• Kharoshthi: used in the north-western regions of ancient India, written from right to left. Its direction reflects the influence of the Aramaic script of West Asia.
• Sharada: a later script of the Kashmir region, written from left to right.
• Nandinagari: a southern variant of the Nagari script, also written from left to right.

The exceptional one is Kharoshthi. Every other major Indian script runs from left to right.

India was never sealed off from the wider world. Goods, words and people moved between the subcontinent and West Asia, Greece and Rome. In Sanskrit texts the Greeks, and later other westerners, were called Yavanas, a word derived from Ionia, a Greek region of Asia Minor.

The most famous Indian export to the Greco-Roman world was black pepper. Sanskrit texts call it Yavanapriya, literally "beloved of the Yavanas", because Greek and Roman buyers prized it so highly and paid for it in gold. Other exports included fine muslin cloth, ivory and spices. These exchanges show that foreign contact and trade flourished alongside the inland changes of the Vedic and later periods.