The City and the Country

 Basant focuses geographically on the Malwa region in central-northern India, and this includes part of the Deccan Plateau, western Madhya Pradesh and southeastern Rajasthan.  This physical area has a distinct historic-cultural connotation as well, most notably as the homeland of the Malava Kingdom mentioned in the Mahabarata.  The primary time period focuses on the centuries leading up to and immediately following the accepted date for urban centers in this region, i.e., 6th century BCE.  This is the time of the second urban phase in the Indian Subcontinent, distinct from the urban civilization in the Indus Valley which occurred two thousand years earlier during the mid-3rd millennium BCE. 

            The author is keen to examine all aspects of the data from a contextual vantage point and thus begins in chapters 1 and 2 with a review of the study of ancient urbanism in the Subcontinent as well as the wider debates such as V.G. Childe’s markers of urban society.  Most notably in chapter 1, the author shatters the entrenched notion that the introduction of iron led to settlement in the river valleys of northern India and alone allowed for the agricultural surplus to feed the first cities.  The direct correlation between an increase in agricultural production and the adoption of iron tools is placed in a larger intellectual context by asking questions such as, how is forest track settled and ploughed?  What are various means to increase agricultural output or to feed more people?  Basant uses ethnographic and historic studies to answer these questions and concludes persuasively that “the anthropological evidence calls into question the linear, unidirectional and determining role of iron technology (15).”  But now that he has done away with the favorite interpretation, how are we to understand the emergence of urbanism in Malwa?  If the iron didn’t do it, then what did?  The remainder of the book examines different types of data and physical remnants of the past to discern some interesting issues and developments.  The fact that the agriculture-iron technology correlation is challenged head on, in the first chapter of the book, is a good indication that the author is striving to explore the complexity of the issues more fully.

Beginning in Chapter 3, Basant returns to the particular geographic setting of this study, the Malwa region.  In order to understand the how and the why of the emergence of urbanism here, chapter 4 argues that we must go back to examine the emergence of crop production and the use of various subsistence strategies (e.g., pastoral-nomadism, hunting and gathering) that enabled reliable agricultural village life.  Only from this established subsistence basis would it be possible for a concentrated, diverse population to take root and then cities to emerge.  Additionally these two chapters illustrate that the region of Malwa was a physical and cultural link between north and south India with interaction between and within regions as a key ingredient of life in ancient times.  Basant demonstrates the presence of variation in subsistence practices from the beginning of settlement in this region, and how hunter-gatherers, foragers, and agriculturalists interacted.  Thus although the archaeological record illustrates many distinct settlement types and cultural expressions, they were all “bound together by complementary differences” and through various networks of interaction.  The early agricultural communities of the Chalcolithic Period are discussed in detail from the Kayatha Culture until the Late Jorwe Phase, (that is from the late 3rd/early 2nd millennium BCE to c. 1300-700 BCE).  Basant also chronicles the waxing and waning of agricultural communities over time until agricultural village life became established and reliable, and settlement hierarchy and site specialization became visible in the archaeological record.

            Beginning with the Malwa-Jorwe Period (1400-1200 BCE) regional interaction and agricultural production are steadfast, yet there are no signs of an elite controlling vast resources of any sort nor any overall unity among the settlements.  While many contemporary archaeological sites are labeled either Malwa or Jorwe, Basant notes that they do not seem to have anything in common apart from their distinctive pottery and that there is a lack of any sort of material or cultural unity.  Yet there is evidence of more complex patterns of social organization seen in the presence of large construction projects like fortification or enclosure walls and irrigation canals.  An increase in overall population over time in the Malwa region is noted, along with technological and social changes expressed in the forms and technology of the pottery as well as house sizes.  At the close of the Malwa-Jorwe phase (the beginning of the Early Historic Period, c. 1000 BCE) there is a shift in settlement.  Some sites are deserted outright, at others there is evidence of a population decrease and cultural change while occupation continues and at other settlements there is an increase and nucleation of population, e.g. the site of Ujjain in Malwa.

The stage is set with reliable food production and significant concentrations of people, thus Chapter 5 discusses the beginning of political society during the period of 1000 to 600/500 BCE.  There is now a more focused settlement pattern with larger numbers of people concentrated in fewer locales, and these larger groups include segments that are no longer directly involved in food production.  Basant notes  “(m)ost of the characteristics associated with urbanism appear in different phases [prior to the 6th century BCE]—fortifications being the earliest and coinage and seals being the latest (146),”  and these traits appear at different sites in different times that stretch back at least a thousand years.  What changes now and builds upon all these previous developments, is the emergence of specialization.  For Basant, specialization is key, that is, segments of a population focusing solely on particular non-subsistence tasks requires and enables the establishment of new institutions and changes in the existing social and political structures.  Although circular, this argument does make sense and illustrates the extensive interwoven nature of all these issues.

Up to here in the book, the focus has been on archaeological remains such as settlement patterns, site size, ceramics and the distribution of various artifacts.  The historic texts describe the presence of many kingdoms throughout South Asia by the 6th/5th centuries BCE including Avanti in the Malwa region.  The site of Ujjain appears to have been the locus of political and economic power by this time period as well, and a large amount of contemporary interaction between regions has been documented throughout the Subcontinent especially in the economic and religious spheres. Chapters 6 and 7 in the book explore the emergence of urbanism from a different perspective, by examining the inscriptions and friezes on the monuments at Sanchi, an early Buddhist pilgrimage site in Malwa settled by Buddhist preachers in the 3rd century BCE.

            Basant turns to this site because it was built early on from donations and many of the commemorative monuments have contemporary inscriptions which offer direct testimony from the donors at the time a particular monument was erected.  From a close study of the inscriptions, it is possible to discern patterns of patronage and for the early phase at Sanchi, c. 200 BCE to 100 CE, Basant found that gifts originated from individuals or groups and there appears to have been a decentralized pattern of resource mobilization.  In the later phase (3rd and 4th centuries CE) donations are recorded from royalty including kings and polities.  The inscriptions illustrate how people choose to identify themselves and it is noteworthy that out of 733 inscriptions studied, approximately half include place names as an identifying characteristic.   Basant uses this fact to challenge another long-held belief that varna or jati was the primary means of personal identification throughout the history of Indian society.  Rather the inscriptions at Sanchi show the importance of village identity as a primary means of identification in the past.  

The monuments at Sanchi also include carved friezes in the architraves that offer a visual depiction of how the world was seen at that time, and within these pictoral representations one can see negotiations between diverse traditions with kings depicted as instruments of coercion and force, cities with fortifications and multistoried structures, villages with both round and rectangular houses, as well as the presence of forest people.  The friezes illustrate a hierarchical society with war, siege, kings and armies; while the inscriptions denote place and kinship as well as professional and religious identity.  Taken together, the friezes and inscriptions show that kingship and ‘state-building’ may have been distinct from a more grass-roots development of elites controlling resources.  For the process of urbanism and the physical emergence of cities, there was a need to develop a more hierarchical socio-political structure as well as a centralized control over resources.  This can be seen in the archaeological remains as well as the inscriptions on the commemorative monuments at Sanchi.  The inscriptions appear to push away the importance of kinship by emphasizing place, profession and status gained through donation.  Here is one of the many important strands woven within the emergence of urbanism: the role of kinship and the process of moving from a kinship-based authority system to a hierarchical authority which at Sanchi appears to have occurred as society moved from a decentralized pattern of resource mobilization to one wherein there is a centralization of resources and a clear socio-political hierarchy not necessarily based on kinship nor kingship.  As noted in the beginning of this review, previous theories focused on technical innovation as a prime mover, but Basant notes that  “[t]he replacement of the kinship system with the state does not require an expansion of our control over external nature but knowledge that can be embodied in structures of interaction among human beings (283).”  He sees in the written and pictoral records at Sanchi that “[n]ew systems of power had seized the older structures of social organization (288)” which were kinship-based, at least in the beginning.  He notes that richer families had more kinship ties, and this may have been a stepping stone to centralizing resources to a small group or class.

Chapters 8 and 9 in the book go back to the ancient texts to examine the relationship between city and countryside to show how united the two have always been.  Also these texts from 7th/6th centuries BCE to the 6/7th centuries CE describe the uniqueness of the Malwa region. 

Overall The City and the Country in Early India, a Study of Malwa is a well thought-out book and stimulating for how it challenges many existing interpretations.  In addition to those challenges discussed already, one especially stands out for its universal applicability, and that is the terms we use to describe various socio-political configurations.  Although he is clearly not satisfied with them, Basant uses chiefdom, tribe and state which can be off-putting at first.  However, as becomes clear in the narrative, these terms are used in very broad and descriptive ways, not in a narrow, evolutionary sense, and it is evident that Basant sees multiple ways of creating complex socio-political organizations.  The use of this value-laden terminology and the lack of a descriptive alternative, illustrates how inadequate our socio-political terms and schemes are. We all struggle with terminology to use in trying to describe ancient social and political entities; for example, the Chalcolithic-Bronze Age of the Indus Valley wherein currently scholars use the terms Regionalization Era, Integration Era and Localization Era to describe the rise and disappearance of the Indus Valley or Harappan Civilization as well as the interconnectedness of cultures during the 4th through 2nd millennia BCE.  Yet within each of these eras both regional identities as well as integrated cultural systems are clearly evident.

The terminology chiefdom, tribe and state, although dated, is descriptive enough to give the reader a snapshot of what may have been present at that particular time and Basant does not rely on it to make his argument.  The importance of this study transcends any interpretative baggage these terms have, and challenges the reader to see the many threads, for example, the roles of population size, interaction between and within communities and regions, the presence of a specialized workforce and products, the centralization of resources, and the pushing of the kinship structure to a new dimension, that need to be interwoven in order to create an urban entity.  It is the process that is central to this study of the emergence of urbanism in Malwa, and Basant admirably illustrates its complex and multifaceted nature.

Heidi J. Miller, National Coalition of Independent Scholars, heidiarc@hotmail.com