Class 7 Social Science Chapter 4: New Beginnings: Cities and States

A country that forgot how to build cities

India built cities, stopped, and then started again a thousand years later.

That gap is the strangest thing in this chapter, and everything in it is an answer to the same question: what fell apart, and what had to be put back?

The first cities, and their end

The Harappan civilisation, also called the Indus or the Sindhu-Sarasvati, was India First Urbanisation. It came apart in the early part of the second millennium BCE, within a few centuries after 2000 BCE.

Some cities were simply left. In others people stayed on, but living as villagers again.

What they had lost

They had little choice, because the whole urban order had gone with the cities.

Gone was the administration, and the larger state behind it with a ruling class at its head. Gone were the drains, the writing, the crowded streets and the busy markets, the grand buildings both private and public, and the separate communities of specialists: weavers, potters, builders, metalsmiths and the rest.

A thousand years without a city

For a full millennium after that, urban life was absent from India. There may have been the odd town in the north, no more.

Important regional cultures carried on through those centuries. What did not carry on was the city.

Then it begins again

In the first millennium BCE a lively new phase of city-building opened in the Ganga plains, in parts of the Sindhu basin, and in the regions next to them. From there it spread across the Subcontinent.

This is India Second Urbanisation, and it has never stopped. We are still inside it.

How we know any of this

Two quite different kinds of evidence agree, which is what makes the picture trustworthy.

Archaeologists have dug those ancient centres up and confirmed they existed. And ancient writing describes them: the late Vedic texts, and the Buddhist and the Jain literatures, carry references to the new cities in quantity.

Clans with a territory

Towards the end of the second millennium BCE, the regional cultures of north India slowly reorganised themselves.

People gathered into clans, probably sharing a language and a set of customs. Each clan became attached to a territory, and that territory was a janapada, with a ruler at its head.

What the word says

The name is a Sanskrit one, and it is worth unpacking because it describes exactly what happened.

Jana means the people. Pada means the foot. A janapada is the ground the people have put their feet on, which is to say the place they have settled down in.

Trade did the joining

The janapadas grew because trade networks spread and tied them to one another.

By the eighth or seventh centuries BCE some of these early states had merged into larger units. Those bigger units were the mahajanapadas.

Sixteen, more or less

Different texts give different lists, which is normal for this period. The list that comes up most often names sixteen mahajanapadas.

Gandhara sat at the northwestern edge of them and Anga at the eastern, with Ashmaka down in central India, near the Godavari. There were probably a few more, and some smaller janapadas carried on independently.

Why so many sat in one place

Look at where they cluster and most of them are in the Ganga plains. Several reasons have been suggested.

The Ganga plains were fertile, so agriculture was growing there. Iron ore was available in the hills and mountains nearby. And the new trade networks ran through the region.

The four strongest

Four of these states stood out as the most powerful: Magadha, Kosala, Vatsa and Avanti.

Each had a capital, and matching those capitals against a map of India today is one of the more surprising exercises in this chapter.

Cities built to be defended

Most of the capitals were fairly large, and nearly all were well fortified.

Outside the walls ran a moat, a deep wide water-filled ditch, as a second line of defence. A city that expects attack puts an obstacle in front of its wall rather than relying on the wall alone.

The narrow gate

The gateways through the rampart walls were often deliberately built narrow.

That was not poor planning. A narrow gate lets guards watch and control every person and every load of goods passing in or out, which a wide one cannot.

Cities that never stopped

Here is the part worth pausing on. Most of those ancient capitals are living cities today.

They are ordinary modern places where people catch buses and go to work, and they are around 2,500 years old. The Second Urbanisation did not end; it simply became the present.

What the age really was

So the age of the janapadas and the mahajanapadas was not just a list of states on a map.

It was the period in which a country rebuilt urban life from the ground up: clans into territories, territories into states, states into cities with walls, moats and gates. The next topic asks who decided anything inside them.

Scenario:

Two students visit a dig. Under one mound the team has found elaborate drains, a planned street and seals carrying a script nobody can read. Under the second, a few kilometres away, they have found a rampart wall, a wide ditch outside it, and a gateway so narrow that two carts could not pass. The first student says both must belong to the same long tradition of Indian city-building. The second says the narrow gate shows the builders were less skilled than the drain-builders of the first mound.

Analysis:

Two urban sites, a thousand years apart, and two wrong readings of what lies between them.

Activity:

Find out whether any city near you stands on an older site, and what evidence the archaeologists used to date it.

Title:

Build the two urban orders side by side

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

Fortifications, specialists and administration appear on both sheets, but a thousand years apart and with no line joining them. What looks like one tradition is really two separate answers to the same problem.

Most of the mahajanapada capitals are ordinary working cities today, around 2,500 years old.

The Second Urbanisation never actually ended, which means we are still living inside the phase this chapter describes.

A narrow city gateway was a design choice, not a mistake: it let a guard check everything that passed.

Jana is people, pada is foot: the land they settled.

Cities, then a thousand empty years, then cities again.

Somebody has to decide

A territory with a ruler at its head raises an obvious question. When something has to be settled, who settles it?

The janapadas and mahajanapadas gave two different answers, and both are worth knowing.

The council in every janapada

Every janapada had an assembly, or council, where the business of the clan was talked over. It went by the name sabha or samiti.

Those two words are old. They turn up first in the Vedas, the most ancient texts India has, long before the janapadas themselves.

Who sat in it

We cannot be certain, but the reasonable assumption is that most members were the elders of the clan.

That matters, because it tells us the council was not a crowd. It was a small body of people whose experience the clan already trusted.

A ruler who was not meant to rule alone

The ruler was not supposed to decide by himself, and he was not supposed to decide however he liked.

A good ruler was expected to take advice: from the assembly, and from his ministers and administrators as well. The word for that expectation is counsel, and it was a duty rather than a courtesy.

The strongest claim in the chapter

Some texts go further. They say an assembly could remove a ruler who was not up to the job.

That is a striking thing to find in writing from so long ago, and it is the single most interesting sentence in this part of the chapter.

And the warning that follows it

The book then does something careful, and it is worth copying. It says the mention is significant but does not prove this was established law.

The reason given is simple: for periods this remote, the data we have is incomplete. A text can record an idea, a wish, or a one-off event, and from a distance of 2,500 years we often cannot tell which.

Scaling the idea up

When janapadas merged into mahajanapadas, the political arrangements were not thrown away. They were expanded.

The bigger states kept the same basic principles and applied them over more territory and more people.

What a monarchy looked like

Some mahajanapadas were monarchies in effect. The ruler was the final authority, with ministers and an assembly of elders behind him.

His position was hereditary, which here means the next ruler would usually be the son of the last.

The work of ruling

Such a king had a definite job, and it had four main parts.

He collected taxes, or revenue. He kept law and order. He had impressive fortifications built around his capital. And he maintained an army, either to defend the territory or to make war on a neighbour, as the situation demanded.

The powerful three

Among the most powerful of these states were Magadha, Kosala and Avanti.

Magadha lay in part of what is now Bihar, Kosala in part of today Uttar Pradesh, and Avanti in part of today Madhya Pradesh. The names on the ancient map sit on top of the modern one.

Two states that did it differently

At least two mahajanapadas worked another way altogether: Vajji, also written Vrijji, and its neighbour Malla.

There the sabha or samiti held more power. Important decisions were taken by discussion, and where discussion was not enough, by a vote.

Including the biggest decision of all

The surprising part is what the voting covered. It included the choice of the ruler himself.

So the ruler there did not inherit his place. He was selected by the assembly, which means the assembly was above him rather than beside him.

What they were called

These mahajanapadas were known as ganas or sanghas, and the names mark them out from the monarchies.

They were not monarchies at all. Since the members of the assembly chose the ruler and took the major decisions, their working can reasonably be described as democratic.

Early republics

Scholars have often called Vajji and Malla early republics.

The phrase is not a flourish. They are among the earliest systems of that kind anywhere in the world, which puts this corner of the Ganga plains in a very small group.

Two answers, one age

So the age gives us a pair. One answer: a hereditary king, advised by an assembly, holding final authority himself.

The other: an assembly holding the authority, deciding by discussion and vote, and choosing the ruler. Learning only the first makes the second look like a curiosity, when in fact the two sat side by side.

Why the pair matters

A pair is more useful than a single case, because it shows the arrangement was a choice rather than the only thing anybody could imagine.

People in the first millennium BCE could see both systems running in neighbouring states, and some of them chose the one where the assembly decided.

Scenario:

Two travellers meet on a road in the Ganga plains. One comes from a state where the ruler holds final authority. His place passed to him from his father, and an assembly of elders and a group of ministers give him advice. The other comes from a neighbouring state where the assembly itself takes the important decisions. It decides by discussion and, when discussion fails, by vote. It was the assembly that selected the ruler there. The first traveller says his neighbour has described something that cannot exist, because a state must have a king who inherits.

Analysis:

Two systems of the same century, and a traveller who cannot believe in the other one.

Activity:

Find out how the leader of your school council or local body is chosen, and whether the choice is made by one person or by a vote.

Title:

Run the same decision two ways

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The ruler method is much faster and the assembly method leaves more people satisfied. Both mahajanapada systems were real answers to a real trade-off, which is why both existed at once.

The words sabha and samiti are first found in the Vedas, so the idea of a deliberating council was already old when the janapadas appeared.

In Vajji and Malla the assembly even chose the ruler, which means he did not inherit the position at all.

Scholars count Vajji and Malla among the earliest republican systems anywhere in the world.

Monarchy: the king decides. Gana: the assembly decides.

Sabha and samiti are older than the janapadas themselves.

Cities need more than walls

A city cannot be willed into existence. Something has to feed it, something has to let it trade at a distance, somebody has to do each of its jobs, and roads have to reach it.

This topic is about those four things, and all four arrived in the same age.

Ideas on the move

The age brought new schools of thought as well, the late Vedic, the Buddhist and the Jain in particular, each with its own literature.

Those teachings travelled. Scholars, monks and nuns carried them across India, and so did ordinary people going on pilgrimage. Indian art was renewed too, and would flower fully in the age of empires.

The metal that changed farming

Urbanisation does not happen without technology. The Harappans had mastered copper and bronze; the new shift was to iron.

The techniques for extracting and shaping it were actually worked out in several regions from the early second millennium BCE. Knowing how, though, is not the same as using it everywhere.

When iron became ordinary

Several centuries passed before iron was part of ordinary life.

By the late second millennium BCE iron tools were widespread, and that is what mattered: iron tools made farming possible on a much bigger scale, and a bigger harvest is what feeds a city.

And the metal that changed war

Iron also made better weapons than bronze did, being both lighter and sharper. Swords, spears, arrows and shields all improved.

There is some evidence of fighting between neighbouring mahajanapadas, though how often or how fiercely is impossible to say. Campaigns, and sometimes alliances instead, would later give rise to kingdoms and empires.

The first coins

Trade was growing, and growing trade made something new necessary: money that could travel.

India first coins were made of silver, which is soft enough for symbols to be punched into it. They are called punch-marked coins for exactly that reason.

Whose coins were whose

Later came coins of copper, gold and other metals.

As a rule each mahajanapada issued its own coinage, but the neighbours coins circulated here too, and were traded onward. Very soon coins were moving between regions and even beyond India.

Who does what

As any society grows more complex, it organises itself into groups, by class, by occupation or by some other measure.

Think of all the work a first-millennium city needed: farming and crafts, trade, education, religion, the planning of towns, administration and governance, the arts and a great deal more.

The ideal and the usual

In an ideal arrangement, all those groups would complement one another and work in harmony.

Most of the time, though, such divisions also produce inequality. Some groups end up with more wealth, power or influence than others. Equality is something human societies have often aspired to, and very few, if any, have ever reached.

Jati

Indian society was organised in a system with two sides to it. One side was jati.

A jati was a group or community with a particular professional occupation, tied closely to how its members made a living. The skills that defined it, in farming or metallurgy or commerce or a craft, were generally handed from one generation to the next. A jati would often be divided further into sub-jatis, and each sub-jati developed customs and traditions of its own: about marriage, about rituals, about what was eaten. So the system was finer-grained than a short list of names suggests.

Varna

The other side was varna, a concept that came out of the Vedic texts. There were four.

Brahmins preserved and spread knowledge and performed rituals. Kshatriyas were to defend society and the land, and to fight if it came to that. Vaishyas were to increase society wealth through trade, business or farming. Shudras were the artisans, craftspeople, workers and servants.

Where the word caste comes from

The English word caste is not Indian at all. It comes from casta, a Portuguese word, used by Portuguese travellers in the sixteenth century CE as they tried to make sense of Indian society.

A few scholars take caste to mean varna, most take it to mean jati, and others use it for the whole varna-jati system together.

It was not fixed at first

Here is the part most often left out. Texts and inscriptions both show that early on, single people and whole communities did change occupation when circumstances required it.

A long drought or some other calamity could push a community of farmers to move to a city and take up different work. Some Brahmins turned to trade, or even to military activity.

Then it hardened

So the system gave society its structure. It put the activities of that society in order, economic ones included, and in doing so lent it a degree of stability.

In time, though, it grew rigid, and the rigidity led to inequality and to discrimination against the lower jatis and against communities excluded from the system altogether. How that happened is studied in a higher grade. Generations of scholars have worked on this system, and there is broad agreement on one point. It was significantly different in earlier periods, and notably more flexible, becoming more rigid as time went on and particularly during British rule in India.

It is also worth remembering that varna-jati, important as it has been, was never the only mechanism at work in Indian society.

The roads

In this same first millennium BCE, major routes opened up for trade, for pilgrimage, for military campaigns.

Two are mentioned again and again in the literature. The Uttarapatha joined the northwest regions to the Ganga plains and ran on to eastern India. The Dakshinapatha began at Kaushambi, near Prayagraj and then a mahajanapada capital, crossed the Vindhya hills and carried on south.

Sideways and to the sea

Many lateral roads linked these to other parts of India, and especially to the busy trading ports that lay along both the western and the eastern shore.

In the east, major cities appeared. Broad streets and imposing fortifications sat on a strict square plan at Shishupalgarh, now Sisupalgarh, a part of Bhubaneswar; it had been the capital of the Kalinga region.

The south joins in

In the southern regions, cities began appearing from about 400 BCE, though recent excavations claim signs of commercial activity earlier still.

Around the same time three kingdoms took shape: the Cheras, the Pandyas and the Cholas. Besides the archaeology, the oldest Tamil writing we have names those kingdoms, and a number of their kings with them.

One interconnected land

Trade ran profitably with the rest of India and with kingdoms and empires overseas, because the southern regions were rich in precious and semiprecious stones, gold and spices.

By about 300 or 200 BCE nearly the whole Subcontinent, the Northeast included, formed one interconnected land. Goods and culture moved between one region and the next, and often past India altogether, into parts of Central and Southeast Asia. At about that same moment the mahajanapadas ceased to exist, leaving room for what came next.

Scenario:

A merchant travels the Dakshinapatha from Kaushambi towards the south. In his bag are coins of three different states, all of soft silver with symbols punched into them. He buys iron tools in one market and gold and spices in another. At an inn a younger traveller tells him that a merchant family must always have been a merchant family, since occupation is fixed, and that the coins of another state should be worthless here. He also says the iron tools matter only because armies need weapons.

Analysis:

One journey, three claims, and a chapter that contradicts all three.

Activity:

Find out which metals the coins in your pocket are made of, and whether any coin from another country would be accepted here.

Title:

Map the four innovations onto one city

Safety:

No hazards here.

What You Notice:

The city cannot be drawn without all four: no iron means no surplus, no coins means no distant trade, no roads means no contact, and no division of work means nobody to do the jobs. The four innovations are one argument, not a list.

Iron-working was understood in India for centuries before iron tools became part of ordinary life.

Shishupalgarh, the Kalinga capital now part of Bhubaneswar, was laid out on a strict square plan with broad streets.

The most ancient Tamil literature names the Chola, Chera and Pandya kingdoms and several of their kings.

Iron feeds the city; coins let it trade at a distance.

Caste is Portuguese; varna and jati are not.