EARLY CIVILISATIONS OF THE NORTHWESTin this ceremonial list of honour? Indologists who had to provide answers
to such questions found a way out by emphasising the symbolic character
of the royal sacrifice and the magic functions of those dignitaries. But if we
take the social context of these small Vedic realms into consideration we
find that this list does, indeed, include all those advisors and servants
whose loyalty was of immediate importance to the king. His success and
even his survival depended on them. The rajasuya ceremony was most
obviously meant to highlight the personal aspect of patrimonial rule in
these little kingdoms which were conceived of as extensions of the royal
household.
The spread of the new royal ideology preceded the actual development of
territorial kingdoms. But there is a good deal of evidence in the texts for the
dissolution of tribal organisation and the emergence of a new political order.
Once again this can be traced by looking at the changing meaning of words.
Jana, which used to refer to a tribe, refers to people in general in later texts,
and the term vish, which indicated a lineage or clan in earlier times, now
referred to the subjects of a king. At the same time a new term appeared—
janata—which meant ‘a people’. The area in which such a people was settled
was called janapada. Pada originally meant ‘step’, so janapada was the
‘place of a tribe’, but it was now used to designate the territory of a people.
The new kings called their realm mahajanapada (great territory of the
people). Another instance of the change from tribal to territorial terms of
reference is the name Kurukshetra, the region to the north of Delhi where
the famous battle of the Mahabharata was fought. Its name, ‘field of the
Kurus’ was derived from the tribe which had settled there.
This process of territorialisation of tribal society was a very slow one
which took about half a millennium. The pattern of the proliferation of
petty states which was so characteristic of many periods of Indian history
was initially designed in this early phase. One reason for this proliferation
was the great number of Vedic tribes: about forty of them are mentioned
by name in the early Vedic texts and there may have been many more. A
hymn of the Rigveda shows how small these tribes must have been when it
says: ‘Not even in a mountain fort can a whole tribe defend itself if it has
challenged Indra’s strength’ (II, 34). Unlike in Western Asia the
immigrating Vedic Aryans in India did not encounter mighty enemies and
big empires which would have forced them to unite and to establish a more
effective political organisation of their own. On the other hand, the small
and very mobile tribal units were probably better suited to the enormous
task of penetrating the vast plains of northern India.
The world of the MahabharataIndia’s great epic, the Mahabharata, which contains 106,000 verses and is
perhaps the most voluminous single literary product of mankind,