New philosophies

The centuries between 500 and 300BCE were ones of great change in thinking and the development of philosophy. Hellenistic thinkers in Greece were laying down systems of ethics and government. The various Aryan tribes of North India had by this time coalesced into sixteen major states, both kingdoms and republics and there was a flowering of intellectual and religious knowledge and belief. The hierarchical structures of Hinduism, already well developed since Vedic times, were being questioned by the growth of the two major philosophies of the age, Jainism and Buddhism. 

Jain temple, Sultan Batthery

The origins of Jain philosophy can be traced to Mahavira who was a contemporary of the Buddha and the last of a line of gurus. The belief in an infinite universe where gods can exist, but without one overarching deity allowed for the conventions of the Vedas to be incorporated into the philosophy as the Jains gained political power, and the concentration on the soul gave more emphasis to the actions of the individual. Monastic traditions developed by ascetic Jains allowed the beliefs to spread across the continent, aided by a period of stability and relative prosperity. For many of the succeeding centuries the influence of the Jains pervaded many areas of South India.
Over many hundreds of years the Jain temples grew to be some of the most harmonious and beautiful of all India’s great architecture. Few remain the South, but vestiges can be seen in temples now
dedicated to Shiva, in the early rock-cut temples and in the small, abandoned temples of Wyanad, the greatest and last stronghold of the Jains in the South West.

The prohibition on harming living creatures meant that occupations for followers of the Jain religion were limited; even farmers harmed small animals when they pulled crops from the ground, so a prosperous merchant group evolved in the Jain population.  Under attack from the Budddhist principles of Ashoka and the later, severe threats from the Hindu priests, Jainism eventually declined or was assimilated into new cults. The high plateau of Wayanad in the North of Kerala became one of the last strongholds in the South and there are several beautiful ruins of temples around Sulthan Battery.

The followers of the Buddha were evangelistic and sent missionaries along the trade routes as far as China. Their message was a popular one, the belief that it is not essential to suffer to achieve spiritual progress and in individual responsibility taking hold over the early Hindu caste system.  Many relics of Buddhist temples have been found in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, especially in the area round Alleppey and Trichur. Today little remains. Buddhist shrines were turned into Hindu temples as the religion declined. Controversially the huge pilgrim temple of Sabrimala has archaeological foundations which suggest that it was once a Buddhist shrine, and some of the rites associated with the annual pilgrimage speak persuasively of Buddhist practices. Ancient statues are reclaimed from tanks and ditches where they were discarded. Possibly the most famous is the black statue which sits in a very unremarkable stupa in a field on a backwater between Alleppey and

Kollam, deep into the Kuttenad region. It has lost some of its torso and one arm, its features are crumbled, but still serene and its legs are very small. The statue probably dates from the 9th Century, and sits forlornly in a very plain, concrete structure, open to the elements and half-buried in the field. It usually has offerings and incense burning near it, and is anointed with turmeric for good fortune by the local villagers. The locals believe that the statue lost its arm when it was trampled by an elephant. The stupa was donated by the Dalai Lhama.

These relics of the old faith are unsung across the South. There is another in the Krishnapuram Palace, about 40 miles South of Alleppey. This palace houses an interesting museum and the larger 10th Century statue sits in a peaceful garden. It is one of four dug out of wells and tanks in the area and relics are still coming to light. Another sits at Buddha Junction in a grubby shrine, still visited daily by a lone resident. Those with a keen eye will see other images which might, or might not, be the Buddha in shrines and temples in the area, integrated into the Hindu pantheon, lacking the necessary serenity but still relics of the long, historical journeys of faith taken by the people of South India. The life of the Buddha might have been consigned to the dustbin of history as little was heard of it for two hundred years or so, a localised sect in the kingdom of Maghada, but the West was spreading its influence Eastwards and routes were opening up by commerce and conquest.. 

The spread of civilisations: the Indus Valley

The date of the petroglyphs in Eddekal have been given as far back as 6,000 BCE, and  links have been found, through imagery, to the Harrapan civilisation in the North which flourished between 3,000 and 1500 BCE. By 3,000 BCE the nomadic populations of the North had settled into a more agricultural way of life and trade links have been discovered between the South and the civilisations which were flourishing in the Indus Valley, in modern day Pakistan. In 1974, on an ancient trade route between Iran and India, a settlement was discovered which threw the time-line of the

development of civilisation into disarray. Mehrgah was a sophisticated settlement which dated back to about 7,000 BCE and which bore no discernible links to the civilisations which had grown up in the plains of the Middle East and which were usually credited with the beginnings of settled civilisation. Agriculture was well developed, there were craftsmen making statuettes as well as pottery and bricks, metal workers and also those in the business of healing the sick. By the time it was abandoned in about 2,600 BCE other, greater societies were beginning to emerge.
The city of Harappa was first described in the West by a British Army deserter, Charles Masson in 1828. He saw the remains of brick walls, the pattern of a city. The site suffered the ravages of railway building, and in the 1850s some objects which had been dug up during the building works were sent to General  Alexander Cunningham, head of the new Archaeological Survey. Cunningham was fascinated to see a new form of writing on some seals, a language which has still not been decoded. The society which produced these artefacts was not investigated for nearly a hundred years, in the 1920s. When it was, its sophistication was astonishing.

Dancing girl, Harrapa.
National Museum, New Delhi
 http://www.nationalmuseumindia.gov.in/

There is evidence of bath houses, domestic latrines and wells, and articles which show a high level of craftsmanship including seals of a complicated design and bearing the mysterious writing. The city of Mahendro-Daro in the same area exhibits similar layout and structure, indicating that the society was widespread. Its growth and continued prosperity was a result of trade, the links for which spread far and wide, to Central Asia, Oman and Messopotamia. The culture probably spread by boat along a lost river, the Saraswati, which possibly exited in the Ran of Kutch. There is little evidence of a ruler, or ruling class, although there is an organisation demonstrated in the grid arrangement of streets, regulations governing trade and, intriguingly, fire altars built along the lines of those seen in the South.
The major, and most controversial link with the civilisations in the North is that of language. Linguistic divisions are not ethnic divisions, although similarities amongst groups inevitably emerge. The speakers of the Dravidian language in the South of India are often seen as an ethnic group, with racial characteristics which link them to other Dravidian speakers in Pakistan and elsewhere. The existence of Balui Dravidian speakers In the North makes for a strong argument that the language was one common across all of India, perhaps originating from the Caucasus, but more likely being endemic to India. The divisions of today, country and continent, obscure the vision when the development of societies are compared. There have been theories that the Dravidian speakers, who were spread right across India, were conquered and eradicated by the Aryan invaders from central Asia. This is now generally accepted as untrue; the decline of the Harrapan

Remains of Harrapa

civilisation and rise of the migrant Aryans was probably because of a period of climatic instability. There is a myth in the ancient Mittani civilisation in Anatolia of a distant civilisation which was destroyed by Agni, the god of fire. Whatever happened, there is no evidence of widespread destruction in the remains of Harrapan and Mohendra-Daro, but rather of a slow decline. The Dravidian language persists in present day Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada. Genetic studies have shown that the population of South India has close links to the Mediterranean area, but that one tribe in Kerala, the Kadar, are related only to themselves. The Cheras described Dravidian beliefs and rituals which are still practiced by these tribes today.

It is evident that there was an active population here in very early times and there are indications of where they came from. The Human Genome Project, in its aim to map the ancestry of all human beings, has found some interesting results here. The tribal communities of Kerala originated in Africa, and have few links to other, later populations. One tribe, because of their tradition of intermarriage which has persisted over thousands of years, bear no relationship to any group, other than themselves. Small tribal groups are scattered throughout Wayanad, Pallakkad and the high ranges, preserving language and traditions which go back millennia.

Their religion and culture was well-developed and widespread. In around 1500 BCE an oral tradition of mantras and recitation grew up and resulted in the composition of the Rig Vedas. These are about a thousand hymns in praise of and in supplication to the gods, battle hymns and other, narrative sections. The Vedas have been found in places as far from India as Kurdistan. Originally they were mantras based on sounds and the meaning of sound, but as time went on they grew into a lasting mythology. They describe a bronze-using society, which dates them to before 1200 BCE when the use of iron arrived in India. The Vedas persisted in oral tradition until they were written down, in about 1400 CE. There were undoubtedly changes once they were committed to writing, but the traditions were strong, and the Vedas are still those recognisable as the oldest, recorded ritual.
The language of the later, written Vedas was Sanskrit, and again, similarities between Sanskrit and Western languages were seen to support the invasion theory. Remains of chariots and horses, unknown in India until the Aryans arrived, can be found in the Indus Valley, but how they got there over the high mountains of the Hindu Kush has never been established. However it happened, through invasion or acculturalisation through trade, the dominant culture of the Indus Valley civilisation, and its language, changed before the migration Eastwards.

Paleolithic remains

   The Palaeolithic origin of India was not recognised until relatively recently, possibly because no-one had looked for it. This longest phase in the development of human history began some 600,000 years ago and lasted until about 8,000 BCE. It is characterised by the use of stone tools, from the rudimentary pebbles used for bashing at hard objects to the sophisticated and carefully made flint axes. The use of stone tools seems to have persisted in South India for longer than elsewhere and gave way to the use of iron in about 1400 BCE. Hunter-gatherer communities moved to farming and keeping livestock over a relatively short period.

Stone tools had been found in Tamil Nadu, but megalithic stones and the rock shelters had been ignored by researchers. Robert Foote, of the Geological Survey found stone axes near Madras but no systematic investigation of the ancient past was carried out. (See an article about Robert Foote here. The Hindu 2012)

A gradual appreciation of the ancient history of the area has led to a re-examination of many sites. Rock shelters display sophisticated art, and although tool finds are very rare, they do come to light now and again. The evidence for settlement between these two periods is extensive, dolmens, urn burials and rock art being found in many locations in Pallakkad, in the North of Kerala. The dolmen and megaliths are often badly looked after, but a renewed interest in history, even as far back as this, is making the study of these remains more popular and spreading the word to local populations, who take a pride in their discovered ancestry.

One of the most spectacular places to see the remains of the ancient tribes who lived here is at Edakkal.  A gradual appreciation of the ancient history of the area has led to a re-examination of many sites, Edakkal itself being excavated in 2010, many finds pointing to its occupation seven thousand years ago. The ancient is often wrapped up in the sacred in India, and legend tells that the caves were made when Lava and Kusha, the sons of Sri Rama, their tale told in the Ramayana, fired arrows in a battle, and Lord Rama killed Ravana’s sister Surpnakha in the narrow cleft in the rock to the south of the cave. This   pinpoints Edakkal as an important place in the distant past, one which is not past but contiguous with the present to many Hindus.

As well as the vast array of petroglyphs, there are inscriptions in Brahmi, a very early form of Sanskrit, indicating that Edakkal was used over many centuries.

The geological origins of Kerala

I m not progressing very fast with the book as the huge complexity of early Kerali history has all but defeated me. However, I have managed a few chapters and will put some digests here. A good place tostart seems to be the geology and origin of the continent.

The report on Kerala by the Geological Survey of India in 2005 described the nature of the country in its easiest divisions: the sandy, coastal plain; lumpy midland area, the foothills of the Western Ghats, and the high mountain range which forms the spine of India. Forty-four rivers snake their way across the midlands and the plain, often tearing the existing geography apart as they roar off the mountains carrying up to 900cm of rain water in a single season. Two of these rivers run eastwards, the rest disgorging fertile silt and sand into the Arabian Sea to the west.

The country has attracted the interest of surveyors since the beginning of the nineteenth century, mineral wealth being sought by the colonising countries. There are several commercially useful minerals in Kerala, a sparse amount of gold can be found and a sprinkling of semi-precious stones but the extraction is predominantly of sand, limestone and a little bauxite.

Most of India formed as part of the ancient continent of Pangaea, drifting north, away from Madagascar and what was later to become Africa, settling against the Eurasian plate where it pushed the Himalayas up into the mountain range we have today. In the process the wonderfully named Deccan Traps poured their volcanic magma across a huge swathe of what is now northern India and far into the southern peninsular. The Western Ghats heaved themselves up out of this commotion and layers of sedimentary rocks have accumulated limestone and sandstones in the usual Indian complication.

Looking towards the plains of Tamil Nadu

On the ground it is easy to see the geological divisions. The flat, sandy coastal strip, with its backwaters, coconut palms and paddy fields gives way to lumps, some of which are incongruous and isolated, but which soon begin to rise to the lower hillside slopes. The mountains on the Kerala side grow slowly through their spectacular foothills, but on the Tamil Nadu side there is a very steep and sheer scarp slope, almost a mile-high cliff, cut with waterfalls which pour down in the monsoon season and outcrops of bare granite.

Close to the time when the settlers from the North arrived the Vedic myths were evolving. According to the Vedas, Parusama, an avatar of Vishnu, set about slaughtering the arrogant ruling caste of Kshatrias with his axe. Repenting of this sin, he handed over all the lands he had cleared to the Brahmins and set off to the South. After meditating at Gokarna he finally reached Kanyakumari and threw his axe far to the North where it landed in the sea. It landed in the place now known as Kerala. This myth is ubiquitous and underpins much of what is understood about the geology of the land. An earnest young man in a rock overhang high in the mountains once told me that the fossils which were found in the rocks were proof that Lord Parusama had created the land from under the sea.

   Just nine degrees from the equator at its Indian Ocean tip; Kerala is hot and steamy and has a South-Western monsoon, which comes in May and June with over four metres of rain on the mountains. It is this enormous downpouring of water which has made the other geological divisions so important for agriculture. The silt brought down by the rains provides rich soil for growing three harvests a year of the local rice in the plains. The scouring out of inlets at the mouths of the river has also made sheltered harbours for an important preoccupation of the people of the country, trade.