centuries. The cultural history of India is the history of struggle on multiple
levels, which eventually brought about almost total denial of its pathway.
In what follows we move from the outside in. We look first at the outer
layer of causality, the historical patterns of Indian state formation; then the
rise and fall of religions tied in different ways to political and economic
patronage; and finally the rise and fall of factional oppositions within the
intellectual attention space which shaped the contents of philosophies.Sociopolitical Bases of Religious Ascendancies
India historically is the land of weak states. India’s complicated political history
can be summarized as a series of cycles between expansion of dominant states
and fragmentation into many small warring kingdoms. Most of the time the
centralizing swings of the pendulum did not reach as far as a single hegemonic
state, but only simplified to a balance of power among a few large regional
kingdoms, which held sway for a while before disintegrating.^1 And even when
states held military control over considerable territories, they were typically
rather weak internally. Rulers had difficulty extracting revenue, and as time
went on, they became even weaker as control over the legal system and
property relations was lost to the Brahman caste.
Two underlying causes of this weakness are geographical dispersion and
geopolitical vulnerability. Early India was a frontier land of migrant agricul-
turalists, moving down from the northwest into sparsely populated jungles.
When the fertile plains of the Ganges were settled around 600 b.c.e., the
buildup of population and economy allowed military conquest states to form.
People again escaped the cage, spreading civilization to the south and east,
where coastal and trading states grew up to counterbalance the peasant-based
extractive economies of the north. Cycles were set in motion which reinforced
the weakness of Indian states. To the northwest, a corridor to distant popula-
tion zones allowed intrusion and conquest by military forces organized on the
state patterns of the Mediterranean and Middle East, from the Macedonians
in the 320s b.c.e. through the several waves of Muslim armies after 1000 c.e.
Indian states had difficulty mustering resources to match the invaders because
their control over property was weak. Increasingly the social-religious pattern
which was becoming “Hinduism” undermined state control; and state weak-
ness in turn enhanced the local power of the Brahmans.
The Rival Religions
The several phases and competing patterns of Indian religion are correlated
with these changes of the state. The early Vedic religion was the ritual organi-178 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths