The Significance of Ancient Indian History

The study of ancient Indian history is important for several reasons. It tells us how,when, and where people developed the earliest cultures in India, how they began undertaking agriculture and stock raising which made life natural resources, and how they created the means of means for their livelihood. We get an idea of how the ancient inhabitants made arrangements for food, shelter, and transport, and learn how they took to farming, spinning, weaving, metalworking, and the like, how they cleared forests, founded villages, cities, and eventually large kingdoms.

      People are not considered civilized unless they know how to write. The different forms of writing prevalent in India today are all derived from the ancient scripts. This is also true of the languages that we speak today. The languages we use have roots in ancient times, and have developed through the ages.

Unity in Diversity 

Ancient Indian history is increasing because many races and tribes intermingled in early india. The pre-Aryans, the Indo-Aryans, the Greek, the Scythians, the Hunas, the turks, and other made India their home. Each ethnic group contributed its mite to the evolution of the Indian social system, art and arcitecture, language and literature. All these peoples and their cultural traits commingled so inextricably that currently they can be clearly identified in their original form.

  

   A remarkable feature of ancient Indian culture has been the commingling of cultural elements from the northe and south, and from the east and west. The Aryan elements are equated with the Vedic and puranic culture of the north and the pre-Aryan with the Dravidian and Tamil culture of the south. However, many Munda, Dravidian and other non-Sanskritic terms occur in the Vedic texts ascribed to 1500–500 BC. They indicate ideas, institutions, product, and settlements associated with peninsular and non-Vedic India. Similarly, many Pali and Sanskrit terms, signifying ideas and texts called the Sangam literature which is roughly used for the period 300 BC- AD 600. The eastern region inhabited by the pre-Aryan tribals made its own contribution. The people of this area spoke the Munda or Kolarian languages. Several terms that justify the use of cotton, navigation, digging stick, etc., in the Indo-Aryan languages have been traced to the Munda languages by linguists. Although there are many Munda pockets in Chhotanagpur plateau, the remnants of Munda culture in the Indo-Aryan culture are fairly strong. Many Dravidian terms too are to be found in the Indo-Aryans languages. It is held that changes in the phonetics and vocabulary of the Vedic language can be explained as much on the basis of the Dravidian influence as that of the Munda.

   

      India has since ancient times been a land of several religious. Ancient India saw the birth of Brahmanism or Hinduism, Jainism, and Bhuddhism, but all these cultures and religious intermingled and interacted. Thus, though Indians speaks different languages, practise different religious, and observe different social customs, they follow certain common styles of life. Our country shows a deep underlying unity despite great diversity.

     The ancients strove for unity. The Indian subcontinent was geographically well defined and its geographical unity was supplemented by cultural integration. Though there existed many states, languages, cultures, and communities, gradually people developed territorial identity. The states or territorial units, called janapadas, were named after different tribes. However, the country as a whole came to be named Aryavarta after the dominant cultural community called the Aryans. Aryavarta denoted northern and central India and extended from the eastern to the western sea costs. The other name by which India is was better known was Bharatavarsha or the land of the Bharatas. Bharata, in the sense of tribe or family, figures in the Rig Veda and Mahabharata, but the name Bharatavarsha occurs in the Mahabharata and post-Gupta Sanskrit texts. This name was applied to one of the nine divisions of the earth, and in the post-Gupta period it denoted India. The term Bharati or an inhabitant of India occurs in post-Gupta texts.

    

      Iranian incriptions are important for the origin of term Hindu. The term Hindu occurs in the inscriptions of fifth-sixth centuries BC. It is derived from the Sanskrit term Sindu. Linguistically S becomes H in Iranian. The Iranian inscriptions first mention Hindu as a district on the Indus. Therefore, in the earliest stage, the term Hindu means a territorial unit. It neither indicates a religion nor a community.

   

        Our ancient poets, philosophers, and writers viewed the country as an integral unit. They spoke of the land stretching from the Himalayas to the sea as a proper domain of a single, universal monarch. The kings who tried to establish their authority from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin and from the valley of the Brahmputra in the east to the land beyond the Indus in the west were universally praised. They are called Chakravartis. This form of political unity was attained at least twice in ancient times. In the third century BC Ashoka extended his empire over the whole of India barring the extreme south. His inscriptions are scattered across a major part of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and even in Afganistan. Again, in the fourth century AD, Samudragupta carried his victouries arms from the Ganga to borders of the Tamil land. In the seventh century, the Chalukya king, Pulakeshin defeated Harshvardhana who was called the lord of the whole of north India. Despite the lack of political unity, political formations all over India assumed more or less a single form. The idea that India constituted one single geographical unit persisted in the minds of the conquerors and cultural leaders. The unity of India was also recognized by foreigners. They first came into contact with the people living on the Sindu or the Indus, and so they named the entire country after this river. The word Hind or Hindu is derived from the Sanskrit term Sindu, and on the same basis, the country became known as 'India' which is very close to Greek term for it. India came to be called 'Hind' in the Persian and Arabic languages. In post-Khushan times, the Iranian rulers conquered the Sindh area and named it Hindustan.

         We find continuing efforts to establish linguistic and cultural unity in India. In the third century BC Prakrit served as the lingua franca across major part of India. Ashoka’s inscriptions were inscribed in the Prakrit language mainly in Brahmi script. Later, Sanskrit acquired the same position and served as the state language in the remotest parts of India. This process was conspicuous during the Gupta period in the fourth century. Although India witnessed the rise of numerous small states during the post-Gupta period, the official documents were written in Sanskrit.

    Another notable fact is that thr ancient epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were studied with same zeal and devotion in the land of the Tamils as in the intellectual circles of Banaras and Taxila. Originally composed in Sanskrit, various versions of these epics were produced in different local languages. However, whatever the form in which Indian cultural values and ideas were expressed, the substance remained largely the same throughout India.

    Indian history is especially worthy of our attention because of a peculiar type of social system developed which eventually spread throughout the country, and influenced even the Christians and the Muslims. Even converts to Christianity and Islam continued to follow some of their old caste practices of Hinduism.