Class 6 Social Science Chapter 7: India's Cultural Roots

A tree with many roots

Indian culture is several millenniums old, and the chapter opens with a useful picture for it. Think of an ancient tree. It has many roots, and those roots feed one common trunk. From the trunk grow many branches: art, literature, science, medicine, the art of governance, martial arts and more. The branches look different from one another. The trunk they share is what makes them one tree.

Schools of thought

Among those branches are what the chapter calls schools of thought. The phrase means a group of thinkers, or of spiritual seekers, who hold similar ideas about human life and the world. Hundreds of them arose in India over time. Some of the roots reach back as far as the Harappan civilisation you met in the last chapter.

What the word Veda means

Veda comes from the Sanskrit word vid, which means knowledge. The same root gives us vidyā. So the name itself tells you what these texts were thought to be. Four carry the name: Ṛig, Yajur, Sāma and Atharva. No Indian text is older, and few anywhere in the world are.

What is actually in them

The Vedas consist of thousands of hymns. A hymn here means a prayer in the form of a poem or a song. These were recited aloud, not written down. They were composed in the Sapta Sindhava region, the land of seven rivers that you met in an earlier chapter. Dating them is hard, and experts have proposed anything from the 5th to the 2nd millennium BCE.

Carried by memory

Take the widest of those date ranges and something astonishing follows. For somewhere between 100 and 200 generations, these texts were held in human memory. They were passed on by voice, through rigorous training, with hardly any alteration at all. No copy, no manuscript, no library: just teachers and students, one after another, for thousands of years.

Recognised by the world

That is why UNESCO placed Vedic chanting on its list in 2008, naming it a masterpiece of humanity's intangible and oral heritage. UNESCO is the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which works through education, science and culture to open conversation among peoples and nations. What it recognised was not only the texts but the method of carrying them.

Who composed them

The hymns were composed by rishis and rishikas. A rishi is a male seer or sage; a rishika is a female one. Both are named in the tradition, which is worth noticing. They composed in Sanskrit, in an early form of it, and they addressed their hymns, in poetical form, to many deities.

Many deities, and ṛitam

Indra and Agni are named among the deities, with Varuṇa, Mitra, Sarasvatī and Uṣhas, and a good many besides. Together with the seers, these deities were held to sustain ṛitam. Ṛitam means truth and order, holding both within our lives and across the universe, which was seen as one harmonious system. Order was something to be kept up, not merely observed.

One reality, many names

So did the early rishis and rishikas believe in many separate gods? The texts say otherwise. To them those gods and goddesses were one, and not separate beings at all. A famous hymn puts it directly: ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti. The Existent, meaning the supreme reality, is a single thing, to which sages attach many names.

Truth, and a call for unity

Some values stand out in this worldview, and Truth comes first. It was often used as another name for God itself. The closing mantras of the Ṛig Veda ask for something else as well. Let people come together and speak together. Let their minds be common and their thoughts agree. Let their purpose and their heart be united.

Vedic society: the janas

Now to how people actually lived. Early Vedic society was organised in janas, meaning clans, which were large groups of people. Over thirty are named in the Ṛig Veda alone. Among the names are the Bharatas, the Purus, the Kurus, the Yadus and the Turvaśhas. Every clan belonged to its own part of the Subcontinent's northwest.

How they were governed

Here the evidence thins out. Not much is known about how the janas governed themselves. The Vedas give only a few clues, and those come through single words. There is rājā, meaning a king or ruler. There are sabhā and samiti, each of them a word for a gathering, or an assembly. A ruler, then, but also assemblies.

The work people did

The Vedic texts are more generous about trades. Named there are the one who farms and the one who weaves, the potter, the builder, the carpenter, the healer, the dancer, the barber and the priest. A healer is someone who treats illness by traditional means. The list is a reminder that these texts come out of an ordinary working society.

Rituals, and the Upanishads

Vedic culture also developed many rituals, called yajña, directed to various deities for individual or collective wellbeing. Daily ones were mostly prayers and offerings to Agni, the deity of fire, and over time they grew more and more complex. Then a group of texts called the Upanishads built on Vedic concepts and added new ones. Two of these are rebirth, which is to be born over and over, and karma, what we do and what it brings.

Brahman and ātman

One school of thought, generally known as Vedanta, took a striking position. Everything — human life, nature, the universe — is a single divine essence, brahman, sometimes just tat, meaning that. Two mantras state it simply: aham brahmāsmi, I am brahman, and tat tvam asi, You are That. The Upanishads also gave us ātman, the Self, which resides in every being and is ultimately one with brahman.

Everything is connected

Follow that idea through and a conclusion arrives: everything in the world hangs together and leans on everything else. One prayer in common use puts it directly: sarve bhavantu sukhinah, may all creatures be happy. It asks next that none of them know disease or sorrow. Early in the 1st millennium BCE more schools grew out of the Vedas, Yoga among them, and together these became the foundations of what we call Hinduism today.

Scenario:

The wise king Janaka offers a prize to whoever wins a debate on philosophy, and scholars gather at his court. Yājñavalkya, a renowned rishi, defeats one challenger after another. Then Gārgī, a rishika, begins to question him. She asks about the nature of the world, and works steadily towards the nature of brahman itself. At that point Yājñavalkya tells her to stop asking further questions. Gārgī does not leave it there. Later she resumes her questioning, and this time Yājñavalkya answers, explaining that brahman is what allows the world, its seasons and its rivers to exist at all. The story is told in the Bṛihadāraṇyaka Upaniṣhad.

Analysis:

Two things in this story are worth separating. The first is the teaching: brahman is what makes the world and everything in it possible, which is the central Upanishadic idea. The second is how the teaching arrives. It is not announced; it is drawn out by persistent questioning, and the questioner is a woman in a court full of scholars. Your book says that many Upanishadic stories show the importance of asking questions, and that those questions come from men, women and children alike. Gārgī's decision to resume after being told to stop is the hinge of the whole account.

Activity:

Work in pairs. One of you states a claim about something you both know well; the other asks questions about it until the first has to explain rather than assert. Then write down what the questioner had to do to get past the first answer.

The Vedas were not written down for a very long time. They were held in memory through rigorous training and passed on by voice alone.

Experts do not agree on when the Ṛig Veda was composed. Proposed dates run from the 5th millennium BCE all the way to the 2nd.

UNESCO placed Vedic chanting on its list in 2008, naming it a masterpiece of humanity's intangible and oral heritage.

The four Vedas — Rig, Yajur, Sāma, Atharva — R-Y-S-A — Four letters, four texts, and the Ṛig Veda is the most ancient of them. Keep the order and you will not lose one when you are asked to list them.

Brahman and ātman — The essence everywhere, and the same essence within — Brahman is the one essence in everything. Ātman is that essence as it resides in a single being. The two mantras say it plainly: I am brahman, and You are That.

Schools that set the Vedas aside

The last topic followed the schools of thought that grew out of the Vedas. Others took a different road. The authority of the Vedas they set aside altogether, putting systems of their own in its place. Buddhism is one of these. It arose at much the same time as Jainism, which the next topic takes up.

A prince born at Lumbini

Roughly two and a half thousand years back, a prince was born at Lumbini, a place that lies in Nepal today. His name was Siddhārtha Gautama. He grew up in a palace, living a protected life. Almost everything that later mattered about him began with his leaving that protection behind.

The trouble with the date

When exactly was he born? Scholars disagree, and widely, depending on which sources they use. In an earlier chapter we settled on 560 BCE as an approximate year. It is worth noticing that this does not change the story at all. The events matter; the precise year does not.

Four sights in one day

When he was 29 he asked for a chariot and rode out through the city. That day changed his life. He met, for the first time in it, a man bent with age, a man in sickness, and a corpse being carried. He met a fourth figure too, an ascetic, someone following a rigorous discipline to reach a higher consciousness, and this one seemed happy and at ease.

Leaving the palace

Put those four sights together and a question follows. Three showed suffering that nobody escapes. The fourth showed a person who seemed untroubled by it. After that day, Siddhārtha made up his mind to leave palace life behind. He left behind his wife and his son, which was not a small thing to do.

The search

He went on foot, living as an ascetic. He fell in with other ascetics, and with scholars. Through all of it he was searching for one thing: what it is that makes people suffer at the root. Not a way to avoid suffering, and not a comfort for it, but the cause underneath it.

Under the pipal tree

The search ended at Bodh Gaya, which is in Bihar today. There he sat in meditation beneath a pipal tree, day after day. At the end of it he attained enlightenment. The word means that he saw clearly what he had been searching for, and the answer had two parts.

What he realised

The first part is avidyā, which means ignorance. The second is attachment, being tied to a person or a thing by feeling or by long habit. These two, he realised, are the source of human suffering. He did not stop at naming them either. He conceived a method for removing both causes.

The name Buddha

From this point he became known as the Buddha. That is a description rather than a name. It means the enlightened one, or the awakened one. Keeping this in mind helps: the title records what happened at Bodh Gaya, in the same way that Harappan records where the first excavation happened.

Ahimsa, and what it really means

The Buddha began teaching what he had realised, and ahimsa is among the best known of those teachings. It is generally translated as nonviolence. The original sense is narrower and sharper than that. Ahimsa means non-hurting, or non-injuring. The difference matters: it asks you not to harm, not merely to avoid fighting.

Inner discipline, not outer ritual

He pressed just as hard for a genuine discipline within, and one of his sayings makes the point plainly. Bathing in sacred rivers does not make a person pure, however many people do it. The pure person is the one in whom truth and dharma live. To master yourself, he said, counts for more than beating a thousand men in the field a thousand times over.

The Sangha

Teaching alone does not carry a school of thought very far. So the Buddha set up the Sangha. Its members were bhikṣhus, that is monks, and in time bhikṣhuṇīs, that is nuns. A monk gives up the usual life of the world for religious or spiritual pursuits, and takes vows, which are commitments to strict rules. The Sangha's members practised his teachings and spread them.

How far it reached

The result was extraordinary. His influence on India was enormous, and on the whole of Asia as well. It is still perceptible today, which is a fair test of any set of ideas. A stone panel some 1,800 years old, showing the Buddha teaching, is one small piece of the evidence.

The Jātaka tales

How do you teach values to people who cannot read? With stories. The Jātaka tales tell of the Buddha's former births, and they express Buddhist values in simple terms. Indian children and their elders have enjoyed them for generations. One of the best known concerns a monkey-king, and it is worth following closely.

Scenario:

A class reads that some schools of thought set the authority of the Vedas aside and built their own systems. Imran asks whether that made them enemies of the older tradition. Their teacher asks the class what the new schools actually did. They asked their own questions and gave their own answers, and they taught openly alongside the others. The class looks at where Siddhārtha Gautama was born, at Lumbini, in what is Nepal today, about two and a half thousand years ago. Nita sees that disagreement here produced more schools rather than fewer, because the argument was carried on in public.

Analysis:

Setting an authority aside is not the same as attacking it. The period produced several systems at once, which is what an open argument tends to do.

Activity:

Write two questions you would ask a teacher you disagreed with. Say what a good answer would have to do.

Title:

Where is Buddhism today?

What You Notice:

The shaded area is far larger than most people expect, and almost none of it is where the teaching began. The last step is the interesting one: the distance was covered on foot, by monks and nuns who gave up ordinary life to practise and spread what the Buddha taught.

Buddhism set the authority of the Vedas aside. It is one of several schools of thought that developed systems of their own.

The word Buddha is not a name but a description. It means the enlightened, or awakened, one.

Scholars have reached widely different conclusions about the year of the Buddha's birth, depending on which sources they use.

The two sources of suffering — Not knowing, and not letting go — Avidyā is ignorance, meaning not knowing. Attachment is the bond of sentiment or habit, meaning not letting go. The Buddha named both, and set out a method to remove them.

Three places to remember — Born at Lumbini, awakened at Bodh Gaya — Lumbini is in Nepal today and Bodh Gaya in Bihar. Between them lie the palace he left and the years he spent searching on foot.

Roots said to be much older

Jainism is another important school of thought, and it became widespread at the same time as Buddhism. Its own roots, however, are said to be much more ancient than that. So the two are neighbours in time without being twins. Both stood outside the authority of the Vedas, and both built systems of their own.

Prince Vardhamāna

The pattern of his early life will look familiar. Prince Vardhamāna, like Siddhārtha Gautama before him, came of a royal house. He was born early in the 6th century BCE, close to Vaiśhālī, a city that stands in Bihar today. Two princes, born into comfort, in roughly the same part of the world.

Twelve years of discipline

When he was 30 he made up his mind to leave home. He went to look for spiritual knowledge, and held to an ascetic discipline in order to find it. This took a long time. Twelve years on, he reached what the tradition calls infinite knowledge, or supreme wisdom. Only then did he begin to teach.

Mahāvīra, the great hero

He became known as Mahāvīra, which means great hero. Like Buddha, this is a description rather than a birth name. And like Buddha, it records what he was held to have achieved. The word chosen is worth noticing: a hero, for a man whose victory was won by discipline rather than by arms.

What the word Jain means

Jain, or jaina, is built on jina, which means a conqueror. Again the military word is being turned around. No territory is conquered, and no enemy. It refers to the conquest of ignorance and of attachments, so as to reach enlightenment. The enemy named here is inside a person.

Three teachings

Jain teachings include three ideas in particular: ahimsa, anekāntavāda and aparigraha. These are not Jainism's alone. Buddhism holds much the same ideas, and so does the Vedantic school of thought. That is why the chapter calls them central to Indian culture rather than to any one system.

Ahimsa, in Mahāvīra's words

You met ahimsa in the last topic as non-hurting. Mahāvīra states it at length, and the length is the point. No living, breathing, feeling creature, he said, is to be killed, handled violently, abused, tormented, or driven from where it lives. Five kinds of harm are ruled out, and only the first involves killing.

Anekāntavāda

The second teaching, read literally, says: not merely a single side, nor a single point of view. The claim behind it is this: truth shows more than one face, and no lone statement sets the whole of it down. Think about what that asks of a person in an argument. If no one statement holds the whole truth, then the person disagreeing with you may hold part of it.

Aparigraha

The third means non-possession. It advises a loosened hold on material things, and keeping only what life genuinely requires. Notice that it does not simply say give everything away. It sets a test instead: is this truly necessary? That question can be asked by anybody, whatever they own.

Everything depends on everything

Jainism presses hard on one further point: every creature is bound up with every other. The range is deliberately wide: from human beings down to invisible organisms. Each sustains the others, and none of them could last alone. Those who study the natural world have borne this out time after time. That is a striking thing to say of an ancient teaching.

Ahimsa in thought as well as act

For Buddhists and Jains alike, ahimsa reaches past the striking of a person or an animal. Violence held in the mind counts as well. Ill feelings towards anyone count. If we observe ourselves carefully we may catch such thoughts at work, and train ourselves to turn them round. Sometimes they are even directed at ourselves.

Monks, nuns and rock-cut caves

In both systems, monks, and sometimes nuns, set out across the land carrying the teaching. Some created new monasteries in faraway places. Others led ascetic lives in caves cut into the rock. Archaeology has found many traces of those monasteries. Sometimes it has even found the names of monks who once lived in those caves, and the stone beds they slept on.

Three traditions, one hillside

Ellora's caves, in Maharashtra, were cut across the four centuries from the 6th CE onwards. Some of them are Hindu. Others are Buddhist, and others Jain. They sit on the same hillside, cut from the same rock, across the same centuries. That single fact tells you something about how these systems lived alongside one another.

Why not call them religions?

English usually files Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism under the heading of religion. This chapter avoids that word, preferring schools of thought and belief systems. The reason is that each has many aspects: philosophical, spiritual, religious, ethical, social, and more. The word religion, most scholars now agree, draws too narrow a line around anything in Indian civilisation.

Diversity, and the shared trunk

Other schools existed too. The Chārvāka school, Lokāyata by its other name, held that nothing exists beyond the material world, from which it followed that death ends everything. It never gained much popularity and disappeared with time. It is mentioned to show the wide diversity of belief systems, and that people were free to choose. For all their differences, the Vedic, Buddhist and Jain schools carried dharma, karma and rebirth, and looked for a way past suffering and ignorance. That is the trunk of the tree.

Scenario:

Rohineya was an extraordinarily skilled burglar who had evaded every attempt to catch him. On his way into a city he passed a place where Mahāvīra was preaching, and accidentally overheard a few sentences of the sermon. It spoke of breaking free from an ordinary life lived in ignorance. Inside the city he was spotted and taken. He gave out that he was nothing but a farmer. A minister then worked up an ingenious scheme to make him admit who he really was. But Rohineya, with those overheard words still in his head, saw the scheme for what it was and turned it aside. Afterwards, feeling remorseful, he went to Mahāvīra himself, owned up to his crimes, gave back the treasures he had taken and begged pardon.

Analysis:

The story turns twice, and both turns matter. The first is that a few accidental sentences are enough to save him from the minister's trap, which is the chapter's point about right thinking: what you hold in your mind decides what you are able to see coming. The second turn is the surprising one. Having escaped, he had no practical reason to confess anything. He confessed anyway, returned what he had stolen, and asked forgiveness. That is right action, and it cost him everything the first turn had saved. He became a monk, recognised the illusion he had been living in, and turned to higher knowledge. Your book draws out a third lesson as well: everyone should have a second chance.

Activity:

Write the minister's report to the king in six sentences, describing the plan, why it failed, and what happened afterwards. Then underline the one sentence he would find hardest to explain.

Jainism became widespread at the same time as Buddhism, but it is held to reach back far further than that.

Archaeologists have found the names of monks who lived in rock-cut caves, and the stone beds they slept on.

At Ellora in Maharashtra, caves cut across the four centuries from the 6th CE onwards include Hindu, Buddhist and Jain ones side by side.

The three Jain teachings — Do not hurt, do not claim the whole truth, do not hoard — Ahimsa is do not hurt. Anekāntavāda is do not claim your view is the whole truth. Aparigraha is do not hoard. Three rules, each about restraint.

Two princes, two searches — Siddhārtha left at 29, Vardhamāna at 30 — Both were born into royal families, both left home, both searched, and both took a new name afterwards. Buddha means the awakened one; Mahāvīra means great hero.

Roots that left no texts

The roots we have followed so far are well documented in texts. India has also had rich oral traditions, and these are roots too. An oral tradition is teaching or practice handed down through the doing of it, with nothing set down in writing. Notice that the Vedas were carried this way as well. Being oral does not make a tradition small or late.

Folk and tribal

Two kinds of oral tradition matter here. Folk traditions are those transmitted by common people. Tribal traditions are those transmitted by tribes. They sit alongside the Vedic, Buddhist and Jain roots rather than beneath them. The chapter closes by insisting that they belong among India's cultural roots just as firmly.

What is a tribe?

This social entity has been defined in many ways. Anthropologists today usually settle on something like this. A tribe is families or clans who hold a tradition of descent from one source, along with a culture and a language. They live closely together under a chief, and own no property privately. Each of those four parts carries weight.

Ancient India had no such word

Here is something worth pausing over. There was no word for tribe in ancient India at all. What we now call tribes were simply janas, the same word you met for the Vedic clans. What marked them out was where they made their home — forest country, or hill country — and not any difference of kind.

What the Constitution says

The modern words came later. Our Constitution says tribes and tribal communities in English. In Hindi it says janjāti. So the vocabulary we use today is recent, even though the communities it names are not.

How many, and how many people

The official figures are larger than most people expect. The count for 2011 gives 705 tribes, present in most of the States. Their population came to about 104 million people. To see what that number means, set it beside two whole countries: it outnumbers everyone living in Australia and the United Kingdom added together.

A judgment that was abandoned

Anthropologists of the 19th century, studying tribes, would often call them primitive, or rank them below civilised people. That description did not survive closer study. As scholars looked harder at tribal communities and found their cultures both rich and intricate, those slanted verdicts were largely given up. It is a useful reminder that a confident expert can still be wrong.

Exchange in both directions

Between the folk and tribal side and the leading schools of thought, contact has never once broken off. The important word is constant, and the second important thing is the direction. Deities, ideas, legends and rites have passed back and forth between them, and in both directions. Not borrowed by one side from the other, but traded.

Jagannath, and the mother-goddess

Take examples going one way first. According to tradition, Jagannath, worshipped at Puri in Odisha, was originally a tribal deity. Much the same is told of the mother-goddess in her various forms, honoured the country over. These are not minor figures at the edges of Indian worship; they are among its best known.

Tribes with their own epics

Now the other direction. Hindu deities were taken up by some tribes a very long time ago. A number of them keep versions of the two great epics that are their own. This is not a local curiosity either. Scholars have recorded it right across the country, from the northeastern States down as far as Tamil Nadu.

Why the exchange was so natural

How could such interaction go on for so long, and so easily? The answer is that folk, tribal and Hindu belief systems hold many similar concepts to begin with. Where two systems already agree on a great deal, an idea can cross from one to the other without anybody having to argue it through.

Nature regarded as sacred

Here is the clearest of those shared concepts. All three hold parts of the natural world sacred: hills and rivers, trees and plants, animals, and certain stones as well. The reason given is the same in each case. There is consciousness behind all of them. The deities a tribe honours are commonly many, and commonly tied to those same natural things.

The Todas and their peaks

The Toda of the Nilgiris, in Tamil Nadu, show what this looks like in practice. For them, more than thirty summits along that range are where a god or a goddess dwells. So sacred are those summits that a Toda will not so much as point a finger at one. A rule about a gesture tells you how real the belief is.

Many deities, and one supreme being

Despite this multiplicity of deities, and here the pattern matches Hinduism again, many tribal groups hold to a higher divinity, a supreme being above the rest. Donyipolo, in whom Sun and Moon are joined, is honoured by a number of Arunachal Pradesh tribes, and in time was raised to the rank of supreme god. The god Khandoba plays this role in parts of central India.

Singbonga, and a sociologist's verdict

Further east, Singbonga is honoured by the Munda and the Santhal, among other groups, as the supreme deity who made the world entire. Other examples abound. The sociologist André Béteille summed the situation up: castes and tribes have influenced each other since the beginning of history. That tribal traditions were influenced by Hinduism is widely accepted, and it is equally true that Hinduism was influenced by tribal ones.

Mutual enrichment

The upshot of so long an exchange is plain enough: each side came away the richer. That phrase is the point of the whole topic. Folk and tribal beliefs and practices are not a footnote to India's cultural roots. They count among those roots, alongside the traditions that left texts behind.

Scenario:

A class is asked to record a story their grandparents know. Several children report the same difficulty: nobody can tell them which book it comes from. Their teacher explains that oral traditions are handed down through the doing of them and were never written. Rohit asks how anything survives that way. The class works out the answer by trying it. They pass one short story along a row of eleven children and compare the last telling with the first. The core survives and the details move. Sana sees that an oral tradition keeps what matters most and lets the rest change, which is why it lasts without a book.

Analysis:

Eleven tellings kept the core and lost the detail. That is not a failure of memory but how a tradition carried by people works.

Activity:

Collect a story from an older relative. Tell it to two people and ask them to retell it, then note what stayed and what changed.

Title:

Find an oral tradition near you

What You Notice:

Two things usually surprise people. First, almost every family has something of this kind, even families who would say they have no traditions at all. Second, the chain of transmission is short and fragile: most people can name only two or three people back. That is what makes an oral tradition carried over a hundred generations so remarkable.

Ancient India had no word for tribe at all. Tribes were simply janas who made their home in forest country, or hill country.

The count for 2011 gives 705 tribes, present in most of the States, and about 104 million people among them.

For the Toda of the Nilgiris, more than thirty summits are where a god or a goddess dwells, and are so sacred that they avoid pointing at them.

The direction of influence — Both ways, not one way — Tribal traditions were influenced by Hinduism, which is widely accepted. Hinduism was equally influenced by tribal traditions, throughout its evolution. Remember the second half; it is the half people forget.

Three supreme beings to know — Donyipolo, Khandoba, Singbonga — Donyipolo, joining Sun and Moon, among a number of Arunachal Pradesh tribes. Khandoba in parts of central India. Singbonga among the Munda and Santhal of eastern India, who created the world.