Chapter 5 India 157ing out of the cities and maintaining water and sewage systems. What seems
most powerful, in IVC, is not monarchical authority so much as some kind of
cultural authority, the existence of a conceptual plan for human social life that
got peacefully re-created wherever people settled and formed villages and towns.
A final question remains: what brought IVC to an end? Between 2000 and
1500 B.C.E. its cities were abandoned and finally all memory of it was lost.
Numerous theories have been advanced to account for its fall; the most recent
points to a 200-year decrease in precipitation that may have led to the collapse
of IVC (Marris 2014).Brief Outline of Indian History
Scholars (or students) sometimes joke that history is “one damn thing after
another.” It sometimes seems so. Unexpected events become game changers;
then the next astonishing thing happens. Invaders, new religions, new twists on
old religions, states rise then fall, new technologies, political innovations,
droughts and plagues.... How can we think about the past without being
overwhelmed by it? All the more so when it is a stretch of three or four millen-
nia we are talking about. In this section, we attempt to provide a simple frame-
work for comprehending the last three millennia of Indian history, which we
structure into six large eras: the Vedic Age, the Mauryan-Gupta Empires, the
Medieval Period, the Indo-Islamic Period, the British Colonial Period, and the
Period of Independence. Of course, periods rarely have clear beginnings and
endings, strands of culture persist while new strands come to dominance, and
there are vague decades and centuries between periods that defy the orderly
structure of periodization. The focus here is on major configurations of Indian
society, relying heavily on clues from the early texts (e.g., the Vedas, the Upani-
shads, the epics), which are religious and philosophical, for the most part. We
reserve discussion of the broad and profound ideas coming out of them, i.e.,
the history and philosophies of Hinduism and Buddhism, for chapter 6.The Vedic Age (1500–450 B.C.E.)
For Indus Valley Civilization we have ruins but no words; for the Vedic
Age, we have words but hardly any ruins. It’s nice to have words: we can hear
the voices of ancient people talking about their world in a series of four books
composed in the earliest known forms of Sanskrit. The oldest of the four is the
Rig-Veda, formulated in the most obscure Sanskrit, probably composed
between 1500 and 1100 B.C.E. in the upper Indus region and transmitted orally
for more than a millennium. This text is the oldest known form of any Indo-
European language. But it’s a conundrum: if we could read the Indus Valley
Script, would we find it’s the same people and culture of the Vedic texts? Or is
it a new population with a new culture entering India from somewhere else?
The people of the Vedas called themselves Aryans, “noble men,” and their
language was an ancient form of Indo-European, that vast language family that