History Summarized: Ancient India

[0:00]Ancient Indian history feels like the halfway point between a fairy tale and a Lovecraft story. On the one hand, you have fables of princes going out into the wild to seek enlightenment and guilt-ridden emperors swearing off of conquest to become legendary peacemakers. But there are also entire cosmologies simply spoken into existence, and a bronze age civilization about a millennium ahead of the rest of the world that just fades into nothingness. And the rest of Indian history is like this, too. It's so large and diverse, but almost like a jigsaw puzzle, every piece still fits together into one cohesive whole. And we can see the outlines of this big picture of India back in the earliest sparks of civilization. So, to wind back the clock and see where India got its start, let's do some history. This video is brought to you by Audible. More on that later. Our earliest evidence of Indian civilization is a string of settlements along the Indus River Valley in the two and 3000s BC. And as far as Bronze Age civilizations go, the Indus Valley is by far the ratest. The flood plane was easy to cultivate and build on, so the society that sprung up was startlingly well urbanized. In the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, excavated by the British in the 18- and 1900s, we found standardized building bricks, streets laid out on a grid system to catch the breeze and cool down the city, with built-in sewage systems and massive public baths. Centuries before the pyramids of Giza, India had urban planning that wouldn't be beat until the Greeks and Romans some 2,000 years later. And the construction quality seems to show that the people of the Indus Valley had been refining this system for a while. As the rest of the Bronze Age civilizations were blowing money on temples and palaces, the Indus Valley had long since made great public works and figured out zoning laws. And they weren't an insular civilization either. Their trade networks with Mesopotamia were so speedy that they could import fish from the Arabian Sea. Plus, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa aren't exactly neighbors, so the parallels between them imply a kind of overarching government, but we're clueless as to what. Partially because we can't decipher their writing. And the craziest part is that we've hardly found any weapons anywhere. As far as we can tell, they were totally peaceful. But that's the Bronze Age for you. Everything feels confusing, a temporal, and kind of Lovecraftian, and it all goes poof just as weirdly as it first appears. So at some point between the 17 and 1500s, the Indus Valley civilization slowly disappeared for reasons that we can really only guess at. The two most likely options are that the soil eventually lost its nutrients and stopped yielding crops after a millennium or so, or that an earthquake altered the course of the river and dried up several tributaries. Whatever the case, it seems that the people of the Indus Valley ventured further into the peninsula and eventually settled in the far south. So the valley's ruins lay hidden until British grave robbers rolled up in the 1800s and used the stones as ballast for a railway project. Stay classy, Britain. But our story continues in the centuries after the Indus Valley Civilization with the slow migration of the Indo-Aryans from Central Asia. Quick aside, that label's become kind of controversial in the past century for reasons that are wholly unrelated to Indian history, so I'll be using that term for its intended historical meaning. Instead of prolific builders, the Aryans were storytellers, and they're often known as the Vedic peoples after their holy scriptures called the Vedas. These were a series of stories including everything from big cosmology down to aspects of their own daily life. And they were all retold as hymns, being memorized and perfected to the very syllables. These divine hymns form much of the basis of Hinduism both as a religion and more broadly as a foundation of ancient Indian culture. Historically, Hinduism is quite unique because of its continuity from ancient origins to widespread modern practice. That's cool, but also extremely nuanced and complex, so I'm going to move right along to the next core aspect of Indo-Aryan culture, the caste system. Great. When the Aryans came across the native Adivasi people, they maintained political stability via a strict social hierarchy, with the Aryans at the top and everybody else below them. A story we've seen many times on this channel. But as the Aryans and the Adivasi mixed over the centuries, the system later stratified by profession rather than by ethnic group. At the top were the Brahmin priests, then the Kshatriya lords and warriors, the Vaishya merchants and farmers, the Shudra laborers, and the subcaste untouchables who were fully ostracized by society. The big Yikes here is that a social hierarchy based on class rather than race is malleable to whomever is in charge. So the caste system has survived the rise and fall of empires to systematically oppress the Indian people for basically 3,000 years. So just keep that in the back of your minds for the entirety of Indian history and let's swiftly move along. As the Vedic tradition grew and evolved in the first millennium BC, a new wave of philosophical thinking cropped up via a series of texts called the Upanishads. Its name comes from the Sanskrit for sitting down near, as a student would sit by their mentor while receiving divine knowledge through a discussion of philosophy. Similar to the analects of Confucius or the Dao De Jing, the Upanishads are presented as a series of brief teachings. The early ones appear along the four Vedas, but many Upanishads were composed and added later. So, whereas the Vedas form the basis of Indian religion and mythology, the Upanishads are the core of Indian philosophy. It's here that we get the first mentions of topics from the cycle of reincarnation, to our duties as people, and the consequences of our actions, as well as our sense of self within the greater totality of the universe. It's a lot of terms, I know, but the Upanishads are as broad as they are dense, and there is a lot to unpack there. The big mind melt at the end is that our localized self, Atman, is really made up of the same stuff as the big cosmic everything of Brahman. And when we realize that we're all the same, our Atman returns to Brahman like a drop of water returning to an ocean. Poof. Aside from the big metaphysics, there's so much to learn from the Upanishads and philosophers from across time have lavished praise for both their sincerity of tone and their depth of wisdom. So let's see, theology, philosophy. Aha, we've also got to talk about the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Much like the Iliad and the Odyssey, these two big Indian epics blend fact and myth in a way that isn't historical, but is indicative of the world as the ancients envisioned it. It's a neat switch of perspectives. The truth here isn't in facts and dates of the wars being recorded, but rather the divine elements of the stories help firm the human philosophical truths at the core of both of these epics. Now, that said, if some long books are doorstops, then the Mahabharata is the entire door. It's the story of a great succession crisis and the subsequent war sometime around the 14th century BC. And it is just loaded with deities front to back. But the most famous section of the story, the Bhagavad Gita, narrows in on the internal struggle of the hero Arjuna to do his duty even when it's difficult. None of us will fight alongside literal gods in a giant succession crisis. I mean, well, you know, probably, but all of us will struggle to do the right thing, likely a lot of times. I, for instance, know that it's irresponsible to monopolize this channel for Roman history memes, but that doesn't mean that I'm not tempted. I'm getting off topic. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are clearly some of humanity's most influential literature. Between the epics, the Upanishads and the Vedas, it's evident just how much of Indian culture derives from these core texts. I'll be fully honest, when I started researching this, I really did think that I was making a history video, but now here I am realizing I've just made a giant book report. Hmm. Oh, well, you take the sources you can get. And unfortunately, what we have in an overflowing font of ancient literature, we lack in most other forms of historical documentation for a good several centuries. But the picture gets a lot clearer once we hit the 600s through 300s BC. As we have archaeological and written evidence for a loose collection of independent states and kingdoms across Northeast India. Researchers have found large cities and dense fortifications, as well as new forms of poetry and metallurgy, and the development of Brahmi writing. Among these 16 Mahajanapadas, as they're snappily known, and as I'm sure I've horribly mispronounced, there seems to have been some intense competition as well as interstate trade. Still not a whole lot to go on, but if it's anything like the other clusters of small independent states that we've seen in history, whether it's the Greeks and the Italians or the Maya and the Chinese warring states, it was probably pretty cool. What we do have from this political climate is a famous story of one Indian prince named Siddhartha Gautama. For his entire life, this prince was kept secluded in a palace by his parents, knowing nothing but luxury, health, and joy. But one day, he asked to leave his palace and go see the outside world and was horrified to see people who were sick, gross, and worse, dying. So he flipped out over the sudden and devastating realization of humanity's suffering and of his own impending mortality, and he camped out in the middle of the woods for a month, refusing to leave until he either died or figured out a way to end all human suffering. Luckily for him, he actually got the desired outcome and achieved the enlightened state of Nirvana. Prince Siddhartha, now called Buddha, realized that the ideal life was the middle path between extravagance and asceticism, where all outward suffering could be conquered solely through a complete mastery of the self. And just like that, bada bing, bada eightfold path, we've got a shiny new religion. But before we wrap this story up, we've got to talk about some wars. After Alexander, the far from home failed to push past the Indus River and decided to call it quits and go home, an exiled Kshatriya named Chandragupta took advantage of the kerfuffle and conquered across northern India to found the Mauryan Empire, India's first large, properly centralized state. The new Empire established diplomatic ties with Hellenistic Greece as well as China and built up considerable infrastructure within the Empire itself. Chandragupta was by all accounts a solid ruler, keeping a hands-off approach for his two decades in power and letting his people be. He died fasting in the woods, his son was pretty meh and there was an interregnum afterwards, but then his grandson Ashoka was one of the coolest cats in history. Ascending to the throne in 273 BC, he conquered eastward to the coast of Kalinga, and the result was an absolute bloodbath with hundreds of thousands dead on both sides. When he heard the news, he felt really, really bad about it, so he issued a full apology throughout his empire and abandoned warfare entirely to become a Buddhist. He then worked to build trade relations and improve the lives of his people, he was super tolerant of other faiths, and he wrote extensively about his own journey to inner peace through Buddhism. That has got to be the single biggest heel face turn in history. His life seems almost surreal, but there it is, a conqueror who felt remorse and changed his ways. Unfortunately, his successors were far less able than him, and soon pockets of the Empire slipped away, before the assassination of Emperor Brihadratha extinguished the Mauryan Empire for good in 180 BC. And that's ancient India, from the Indus River Valley to Ashoka the Great. What I find most amazing is the massive catalog of literature that took shape at such an early stage. It's an incredibly strong foundation that's at once diverse and cohesive and so exquisitely preserved after nearly 3,000 years. And speaking of 3,000 years, the next chapter of Indian history is going to have to be a story for another video, because if I seriously tried to summarize that all at once, I may actually burst. We here at OSP love a good story, and if you want to listen to them at home or on the go, there's no better way than with today's sponsor, Audible. With a collection of audiobooks that would make even the library of Alexandria blush, Audible is the place to go for stories that you can take with you anywhere. And you can tailor it to your own needs by adjusting the narration speed and even saving your own bookmarks. Audible members get a credit for any audiobook, completely free every month, as well as additional discounts in the store. As I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of great Indian literature to check out, but I've got to recommend that you listen to this reading of the Bhagavad Gita. It's by far the most accessible work from the ancient Indian canon, and the philosophy on display here is really something special. Absolutely worth a listen. And Audible is offering all of you a 30-day trial and one free audiobook along with two free Audible Originals to get you started if you sign up with our link on audible.com/overlysarcastic or text "overlysarcastic" to 500-500. If you do, you'll be supporting the channel and getting a good audiobook in the process. Again, to start listening, head to audible.com/overlysarcastic. Thanks so much for watching. This video was fun because I got to play around with the format and talk more about philosophy and religion than I usually do when I'm discussing the pure history itself. But if you want to hear me talk more about the cultural context in future videos, please leave a comment below and let me know. And an extra special thank you to everybody who supports the channel on Patreon. It's your generosity and enthusiasm that keeps this whole operation running. And if you want more OSP, be sure to check out the amazing community on our official Discord server. Link is down in the description. So, a huge thanks again, and I'll see you all in the next video.