The Revenge of Geography (35 page)

India’s advantages and disadvantages as it seeks great power status in the early twenty-first century inhere still in this geography. As the late historian Burton Stein notes, a map of India through the medieval era would have extended into parts of Central Asia and Iran, while at the same time showing only a tenuous link between the Indus valley in the northwest and peninsular India south of the Ganges.
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For just as today’s China represents a triumphant culmination of the relationship between the Inner Asian steppe-land and the floodplains of the Chinese heartland, India was for millennia heavily influenced by its higher-altitude shadow zones, which, unlike in the case of China, it has yet to dominate, so that India remains the lesser power.

The ties between subcontinental India and southeastern Afghanistan are obvious because of their contiguity, yet those between India and the Central Asian steppe-land and between India and the Iranian
plateau are equally profound. India and Iran have shared the predicament of being on the receiving end of Mongol onslaughts from Central Asia, even as the dynamism of Iranian culture, abetted by invasions since the time of the Achaemenids (sixth to fourth centuries
B.C
.), led to Persian being the official language of India until 1835.
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For India’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mughal emperors “became the embodiment of Persian culture,” notes the late historian K. M. Panikkar, “and celebrated Nauroz [Persian New Year] with traditional festivities and popularized Persian techniques in art.”
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Meanwhile, Urdu, the official language of Pakistan—the state occupying the Indian Subcontinent’s northwestern quadrant—draws heavily on Persian (as well as Arabic) and is written in a modified Arabic script.
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India, thus, is both a subcontinent and a vital extremity of the Greater Middle East. Here is where we can really understand William McNeill’s point about the mixing and melding of civilizations.

And so the key to understanding India is the realization that while as a subcontinent India makes eminent geographical sense, its natural boundaries are, nevertheless, quite weak in places. The result has been various states throughout history that do not conform to our spatial idea of India, and in fact lie astride it. In fact, the present Indian state still does not conform to the borders of the subcontinent, and that is the heart of its dilemma: for Pakistan, Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent Nepal also lie within the subcontinent, and pose significant security threats to India, robbing India of vital political energy that it would otherwise harness for power projection throughout much of Eurasia.

It is not that human settlement from early antiquity forward doesn’t adhere to subcontinental geography; rather, it is that India’s geography is itself subtle, particularly in the northwest, telling a different story than the map reveals at first glance. At first glance, the relief map shows a brown layer of mountains and tableland neatly marking off the cool wastes of middle Asia from the green tropical floor of the subcontinent along the present border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the descent from Afghanistan to the Indus
River, which runs lengthwise through the middle of Pakistan, is exceedingly gradual, so that for millennia similar cultures occupied both the high plateaus and the lowland, riverine plains, whether Harappan, Kushan, Turkic, Mughal, Indo-Persian, Indo-Islamic, or Pushtun, to name but a few. And this is to say nothing of the alkaline deserts of Makran and Baluchistan that unite Iran with the subcontinent; or the medieval sea traffic that united Arabia with India by virtue of the predictable monsoon winds. “The frontier of Al-Hind,” as South Asia scholar André Wink—echoing an Arab term—calls the whole region from eastern Iran to western India, dominated by Persianized Muslim populations, has throughout history been very much a fluid cultural organism, so that defining state borders is inherently problematic.
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The map of Harappan civilization, a complex network of centrally controlled chieftaincies in the late fourth to mid-second millennia
B.C
., is telling. According to the archaeological remains, the two major cities were Moenjodaro and Harappa, both alongside the Indus in upper Sindh; so that the Indus, rather than a border differentiating the subcontinent from Inner Asia, constituted the heart of a civilization in its own right. The outlines of the Harappan world stretched from Baluchistan northeast up to Kashmir and then southeast down almost to both Delhi and Mumbai, skirting the Thar Desert: that is, it nearly touched present-day Iran and Afghanistan, covered much of Pakistan, and extended into both northwestern and western India. It was a complex geography of settlement that adhered to landscapes capable of supporting irrigation, even as it suggested how a vast subcontinent had many natural subdivisions within it.

Aryans may have infiltrated from the Iranian plateau, and together with the subcontinent’s autochthonous inhabitants were part of a process that consolidated the political organization of the Gangetic plain in northern India around 1000
B.C
. This led to sets of monarchies between the eighth and sixth centuries
B.C
., culminating with the Nanda Empire, which in the fourth century
B.C
. stretched across northern India and the Gangetic plain from the Punjab to Bengal. In 321
B.C
., Chandragupta Maurya dethroned Dhana Nanda and
founded the Mauryan Empire, which came to envelop much of the subcontinent, except for the deep south, and thus for the first time in history encouraged the
idea
of India as a political entity conforming with the geography of South Asia. Burton Stein suggests that the merging of so many city-states and chieftaincies into a single coherent system was, in addition to the “vigorous commerce” between them, partially inspired by the threat posed by Alexander the Great, who was on the verge of conquering the Ganges River valley were it not for a mutiny of his soldiers in 326
B.C
. Another factor aiding unity was the emergence of the new, pan-subcontinental ideologies of Buddhism and Jainism that “captured the loyalty of commercial peoples,” as Stein writes.
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The Mauryan kings embraced Buddhism, and ran their empire on Greek and Roman imperial practices that had seeped across the spinal route of migration in the temperate zone from the Aegean basin and West Asia into India. Nevertheless, it required all manners of human ingenuity to hold the Mauryan Empire together. Chandragupta’s advisor might have been one Kautilya, who penned a political classic, the
Arthashastra
, or “Book of the State,” which shows how a conqueror can create an empire by exploiting the relationships between various city-states: any city-state that touches one’s own should be considered an enemy, because it will have to be subdued in the course of empire building; but a distant city-state that borders an enemy should be considered a friend. Because holding such an immense subcontinental empire together was difficult, Kautilya believed in complex alliance networks, and in benevolence toward the conquered, whose way of life should be preserved.
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The Mauryan was a decentralized empire, to say the least, with a heartland in the eastern Gangetic plain and four regional centers by the time of Chandragupta’s grandson Ashoka: Taxila in the northwest, outside the Pakistani capital of Islamabad; Ujjain on the Malwa plateau in western-central India; Suvarnagiri in the southern Indian state of Karnataka; and Kalinga along the Bay of Bengal south of Kolkata.

It was an extraordinary achievement this early in history, with only primitive means of transport and communications available, for
one empire to cover so much of the subcontinent. The Mauryans demonstrated the potential for a single state to employ geographic logic over a vast area for quite some time. Alas, the decline of the Mauryans led to the familiar invasions from the northwest, notably through the Khyber Pass: Greeks in the second century
B.C
. and Scythians in the first century
B.C
. This encouraged the redivision of the subcontinent into regional dynasties: Sunga, Pandyan, Kuninda, and so on. The Kushan Empire emerged in the first century
A.D
. in Bactria, where northern Afghanistan meets Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and its Indo-European rulers conquered territory from the Ferghana valley in the demographic heart of Central Asia to Bihar in northeastern India. The very map of the Kushana domain is mind-boggling to our modern sensibilities, overlapping as it does former Soviet Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and much of northern India’s Gangetic plain. The Kushan Empire follows river valleys on one hand, but crosses mountain ranges on the other, so that it both follows and contradicts geography. It also constitutes a signal lesson in the fact that current borders may not necessarily indicate the last word in political organization of Central and South Asia.

The Gupta Empire (
A.D
. 320–550) restored a semblance of unity over the subcontinent, governing from the Indus in the west to Bengal in the east, and from the Himalayas in the north to the Deccan plateau in the center, albeit most of the south was outside its control, even as the Gupta rulers suffered incursions from Central Asian horsemen driving down from the northwest into Rajasthan and the western Gangetic plain. Moreover, as in the way of the Mauryan, the Gupta was less a unitary state than a weak system of client states united by trade and tribute to the Ganges core. It was from the non-Gupta south that the devotional form of Hinduism spread north to the Ganges. Southern peninsular India, marked heavily by Dravidian languages, as opposed to the Sanskritic languages spoken in the north, was truly a region unto itself, separated from the north by the Deccan plateau and under the maritime influence of the Middle East and Indochina. For more than six centuries following the Gupta decline, which was hastened by the influx of Huns from Central Asia,
came a congeries of small states indicating, yet again, that India was not quite China, with the latter’s greater propensity for centralization and political unity. Indeed, the post-Gupta kingdoms, in Stein’s words, were “defined less by administration than by language, sectarian affiliations and temples.”
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From the seventh through sixteenth centuries, writes Fairgrieve, Muslim peoples successively entered India. “The Arabs, as was natural, came first by land along the coast, and by sea coasting along the shores, but they effected nothing permanent; the Turks next,” he goes on, “from a little before
A.D
. 1000 onward, over the plateau of Iran and through Afghanistan. In little over a century, largely because of disputes between Hindu rulers, the whole northern plain had acknowledged Mohammedan rule.”
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In the south, Baluchistan and Sindh were part of the same “desert girdle” that extended unto Mesopotamia.
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The Indian Subcontinent was indeed grafted to the Greater Middle East. Among the highlights: Iraqi Arabs in the early eighth century occupied parts of Sindh, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. The Turkic Mamluk warrior Mahmud of Ghazni, headquartered in eastern Afghanistan, united in his early-eleventh-century empire present-day Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India as far as Delhi, and raided Gujarat to the south on the Arabian Sea. From the thirteenth to the early sixteenth century, the so-called Delhi Sultanate featured rule over northern India and parts of the south by the Turkic Tughluq, the Afghan Lodi, and other dynasties from Central Asia.

The choice of Delhi as the capital of India for these invaders was very much a function of geography. As Fairgrieve writes, “Sind and the Indus Valley, including the Punjab … form but the antechamber to India, to which there is a comparatively narrow passage, 150 miles wide, between the Indian desert and the Himalayas. At the exit from this passage stands Delhi.”
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At Delhi’s back was the Islamic world; in front of it the Hindu world. (By this time Buddhism had virtually disappeared from India, the land of its birth, to move eastward and northeastward.) Geography has determined that the subcontinent in the northwest is less a fixed frontier than an interminable series of
gradations, beginning in Iran and Afghanistan, and ending in Delhi: again, proof of McNeill’s idea in his grand history of human civilization.

The Mughal Empire was a cultural and political expression of this fact. Few empires have boasted the artistic and religious eclecticism of the Mughals. They ruled India and parts of Central Asia vigorously from the early 1500s to 1720 (after which the empire declined rapidly). Mughal is the Arabic and Persian form of Mongol, which was applied to all foreign Muslims from the north and northwest of India. The Mughal Empire was founded by Zahir-ud-din-Muhammad Babur, a Chaghtai Turk, born in 1483 in the Fergana valley in today’s Uzbekistan, who spent his early adulthood trying to capture Tamarlane’s (Timur’s) old capital of Samarkand. After being decisively defeated by Muhammad Shaybani Khan, a descendant of Genghis Khan, Babur and his followers headed south and captured Kabul. It was from Kabul that Babur swept down with his army from the high plateau of Afghanistan into the Punjab. Thus, he was able to begin his conquest of the Indian Subcontinent. The Mughal or Timurid Empire, which took form under Akbar the Great, Babur’s grandson, had a nobility composed of Rajputs, Afghans, Arabs, Persians, Uzbeks, and Chaghtai Turks, as well as of Indian Sunnis, Shiites, and Hindus, not to mention other overlapping groups; it was an ethnic and religious world that began in southern Russia to the northwest and by the Mediterranean to the west.
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India was very much a depository of ongoing cultural and political trends in the adjoining Middle East.

Kabul and Kandahar were a natural extension of this venerable Delhi-based dynasty, yet the strongly Hindu area in southern India around present-day Bangalore—India’s high-technology capital—was much less so. Aurangzeb, the “world-seizer,” under whose rule in the late seventeenth century the Mughal Empire reached the zenith of its expansion, was an old man in his eighties still fighting Maratha insurgents in India’s south and west. He died in 1707 in his camp on the Deccan plateau, unable to subdue them. The Deccan has, in Panikkar’s words, “always formed the great middle rampart of India,” unable to be subdued by the peoples of the Gangetic valley. Moreover,
the west-to-east flow of rivers in a subcontinent oriented from north to south has, as Aurangzeb’s experience demonstrates, made it difficult for the north to govern the south until relatively late in history. Put simply: there are relatively few geographical connecting links between northern and southern India.
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In fact, it was this long-running and intractable insurgency in southern India that sapped the cohesion and morale of the northern Mughal elite. Aurangzeb’s preoccupation with the great Maratha warriors—to the exclusion of imperial problems elsewhere—made it easier for the Dutch, French, and British East India companies to gain footholds on the coast, which led eventually to British rule in India.
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