Abhijit Bhattacharyya | The politics of geography and how societies evolve
It’s time to explore the real history of geography and vice versa. In plain terms, demography and geography (or territorial expanse) create the story of human life and evolution, which tomorrow becomes history. The demography of geography creates society, economy, polity, the rise and fall of empires and their borders, as well as war and peace.
Thus, can any sensible person deny that the evolution of Homo sapiens from cave to city or nomadic and pastoral to organised contemporary agro-industrial map could only happen in a specific territory, or what we call physical geography, which is found favourable by mankind in different areas of the world? Didn’t a different demography grow in a different geography, creating a different history in the Nile, Indus and Hwang Ho river valleys?
Let’s try to explore the shape and size of India’s political map through the ages to come to grips with today’s Bharat. Though geographical India has been an indisputable reality for thousands of years, as found from the Vishnu Purana, there never ever has been a standard, static, unitary political map of India. It’s been eternally dynamic, fluctuating, oscillating and changing hands between various monarchies, kingdoms, empires and principalities which sprouted and evaporated thousands of years, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and Kutch to Kohima and beyond.
Even assuming the present Afghanistan and territory of (former) Burma as part of India’s geography, the fact remains that South Asia’s political boundaries or geography was seldom stable, staid and peaceful. Eternal political turbulence invariably created new boundaries, thereby proving that geography or territory also has its undeniable history of change.
The scholastic work Political History of Ancient India (From the Accession of Parikshit to Extinction of Gupta Dynasty), a period covering 1394 BC to 6th century AD, by Dr Hemchandra Raychaudhuri, arguably the most eminent ancient Indian historian, begins with the reign of Parikshit, whose accession, according to tradition, took place shortly after the Mahabharata war. Parikshit was the ruler of the Kuru kingdom, which extended from the river Sarasvati to the Ganga and was divided into three parts — Kurujangala, Kurus and Kurukshetra — which roughly spanned modern Sirhind in North India. “Within the kingdom flowed the rivers Drishadvati, Kansiki, Aruna and Sarasvati”. Obviously, the political map of Parikshit’s kingdom could not have had encompassed the whole of geographical Bharat.
Moving from the post-Mahabharata Parikshit rule’s political geography to the broad map of Indian history, only Asoka’s empire (273 BC-232 BC) could be considered to have had a vast expanse of land. The various rock and pillar edicts of Asoka, spread across South Asia, reveal the gargantuan scale of Maurya ruler’s empire. Shahbazgarhi (Peshawar), Mansehra (Hazara district), Kalsi (Dehradun), Girnar (Junagadh), Sopara (north of Mumbai), Dhauli (Puri district), Yerragudi (former Madras Presidency), Lauriya Araraj (Champaran district), Palkigundu (former Nizam’s territory), Sarnath (Varanasi), Allahabad, Rummindei or Lumbini (Bhagwanpur in Nepal) and Nigliva (Nepal Terai) give a fair idea of the length and breadth of the political geography of the third century BC Indian emperor.
Nevertheless, as soon as the last of the Mauryas caved in 185 BC through assassination, the biggest, longest and widest political map of India ceased to exist in no time. Thereafter, not a single ruler in the geography of India could ever build a politically defined territorial map stretching to such far-flung areas, from Afghanistan to Bengal and beyond, touch the whole of the Himalayas in the north and proceed in the diametrically opposite direction to halt at river Cauvery in the south. The story of India’s geography thus became a story of endless fluctuation of fortunes of different and diverse rulers all across terrain which, though always known as Bharat Varsha, was not necessarily a united political entity.
After the Mauryan empire, only the Gupta dynasty proved reasonably powerful to expand and consolidate its political geography. Nevertheless, its shape and size proved to be a fraction of 137-year-long rule of the Mauryas (324 BC to 187 BC). At the peak, the Gupta kings could annex or conquer mainly the Ganga-Yamuna basin, parts of
Bihar, North Bengal, a chunk of Central India, and intermittently the geography of the Upper Deccan and Gondwana. Subsequently, after a long, chaotic interregnum, which saw the rise of Qutbuddin Aibak and his successors (late 12th century to Balban 1287), Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316), the Tughlaqs (1325-1389), Lodhis (1451-1526), and the Mughals (1526-1857), the political map of geographical India continued its characteristic instability and a ceaseless war of all against all. The best or worst part of political India’s geography is that every part and direction of Hindustan saw ceaseless conflicts — in the east, south and west, with only difference being that whereas the northern wars saw the advent of horse cavalry men with enhanced mobility, the battlefields of Hindustan also bore the brunt of the advanced artillery and gun power of the Mughals, thereby tilting the balance of war against the local rulers.
Consequently, rarely did the indigenous ruling class ever win a skirmish or battle. With the advent of the Europeans, like the Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, French and British, the internal destruction and defeat continued unabated. This was because of too many quarrelling rajas, maharajas, nawabs and nizam-like rulers across vast swathes of the hinterland of Hindustan.
Therefore, even the British, despite their superior tech, manipulation, cunning, lies, deceit and deception, could not succeed in direct rule over any more than 60 per cent of India’s geography. They realised the futility of trying to deprive the 550-plus rulers of the remaining 40 per cent of territory, proving once again how difficult it is for any single entity to politically rule over the entire geography of India. It has always been a Herculean task for political India to interface with geographical India owing to a bewildering variation and variety of demography.
History thus shows that the dormant and docile demography of India’s geography has never tolerated the rule of the gun beyond a point as there has always existed, and still exist, ethnic, religious, ideological, tribal and linguistic groups with strong, subterranean nationalist and sub-national sentiments.
India’s huge variety is the country’s real asset. However, a misreading of the mind and psyche of ordinary people by the ruling class has often led to catastrophic mistakes and stupidity, resulting in avoidable bloodshed. Flexibility, rather than rigidity, makes Indians happy. A single-formula inflexibility will never be appealing as it goes against Indians’ love of liberty, liberalism and the lofty idealism of Gautama Buddha.
The writer is an advocate practising in the Supreme Court. The views expressed here are personal.
