3 The Early Urban Period
TheUpanis.ads
The “heterodoxies”
Jainism
Early Buddhism
Recommended readingThe time from roughly the seventh century BCEthrough the fifth was a
period when culture and the geographical center of Indian creativity was
shifting. Sometimes known as the post-Vedic period, these were centuries
when one finds the locus of culture shifting to the Gangetic basin. (The
R.g Vedahad made no mention of the Ganges, though the later Vedic
corpus does refer to the area between the upper Jumna and the Ganges.)
Agriculture had intensified; crafts were being produced; pottery of a black
polished variety was common. People were organized, not tribally, or in rural
settlements as in the earlier period, but territorially – that is, in units of land
sometimes referred to as chiefdoms. Cities were emerging in the Ganges
valley with diverse populations, with increasingly wealthy mercantile
communities and would-be rulers carving out large roles and territories for
themselves. At the same time, these cities were not yet stable economic or
political centers; changing lifestyles, political infighting and disease reduced
the viability of these urban centers.^1 Indeed, there is evidence of heavy
taxation on the peasantry and exploitation of the people by those in power.
As the S ́atapatha Bra ̄hman.a, an apparent textual product of this period, aptly
put it: “The state authority (ra ̄s..tra) feeds on the people; the state is the eater
and the people are the food.”^2
Whatever the factors, the seventh through the fifth centuries BCEwere
marked by a significant shift in the paradigms of religious life. There was
a search for alternative lifestyles, given neither to the unpleasantries of proto-
urban life nor to the grandiose expense of the sacrificial system. To be sure,