The Significance of Ancient Indian History ( Revision or Short Notes of Ancient History) ( Arora IAS)

CHAPTER-1

The Significance of Ancient Indian History

Revision NOTES (PRELIMS + MAINS)

IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING ANCIENT INDIAN HISTORY-

1. It tells us how, when, and where people developed the earliest cultures in India.
2. It tell us how they began undertaking agriculture and stock raising which made life secure and settled.
3. It shows how the ancient Indians discovered and utilized natural resources, and how they created the means for their livelihood.
4. We get an idea of how the ancient inhabitants made arrangements for food, shelter, and transport, and learn how they took to farming, spinning, weaving, metalworking, and the like, how they cleared forests, founded villages, cities, and eventually large kingdoms

UNITY IN DIVERSITY-

• pre-Aryans, the Indo-Aryans, the Greeks, the Scythians, the Hunas, the Turks, and others made India their home.
• Aryan elements are equated with the Vedic and Puranic culture of the north and the pre-Aryan with the Dravidian and Tamil culture of the south. Many Munda, Dravidian and other non-Sanskritic terms occur in the Vedic texts ascribed to 1500–500 BC.
• Many Pali and Sanskrit terms, signifying ideas and institutions, developed in the Gangetic plains, appear in the earliest Tamil texts called the Sangam literature which is roughly used for the period 300 BC–AD 600.
• The people of eastern region inhabited by the pre-Aryan tribals spoke the Munda or Kolarian languages. Munda pockets in Chhotanagpur plateau, the remnants of Munda culture in the Indo-Aryan culture are fairly strong. Many Dravidian terms too are to be found in the Indo-Aryan languages.
• states or territorial units, called janapadas, were named after different tribes.
• Aryavarta came to be named after the dominant cultural community called the Aryans. Aryavarta denoted northern and central India and extended from the eastern to the western sea coasts. The other name by which India was better known was Bharatavarsha or the land of the Bharatas. Bharata, in the sense of tribe or family, figures in the Rig Veda and Mahabharata, but the name Bharatavarsha occurs in the Mahabharata and post-Gupta Sanskrit texts. The term Bharati or an inhabitant of India occurs in post-Gupta texts.
• Iranian inscriptions are important for the origin of the term Hindu. The term Hindu occurs in the inscriptions of fifth–sixth centuries BC. It is derived from the Sanskrit term Sindhu. Linguistically s becomes h in Iranian. The Iranian inscriptions first mention Hindu as a district on the Indus. the term Hindu means a territorial unit.
• kings who tried to establish their authority from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin and from the valley of the Brahmputra in the east to the land beyond the Indus in the west were universally praised. They were called Chakravartis. This form of political unity was attained at least twice in ancient times. In the third century BC Ashoka extended his empire over the whole of India barring the extreme south. His inscriptions are scattered across a major part of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent, and even in Afghanistan. Again, in the fourth century AD, Samudragupta carried his victorious arms from the Ganga to the borders of the Tamil land. In the seventh century, the Chalukya king, Pulakeshin defeated Harshavardhana who was called the lord of the whole of north India.
• word Hind or Hindu is derived from the Sanskrit term Sindhu, and on the same basis, the country became known as ‘India’ which is very close to the Greek term for it. India came to be called ‘Hind’ in the Persian and Arabic languages. In post-Kushan times, the Iranian rulers conquered the Sindh area and named it Hindustan.
• In the third century BC Prakrit served as the lingua franca across the major part of India. Ashoka’s inscriptions were inscribed in the Prakrit language mainly in Brahmi script.

THE RELEVANCE OF THE PAST TO THE PRESENT

• There is no doubt that Indians of old made remarkable progress in a variety of fields, but these advances alone cannot enable us to compete with the achievements of modern science and technology. One cannot ignore the fact that ancient Indian society was marked by gross social injustice.
• India cannot develop rapidly unless such vestiges of the past are eradicated from its society. The caste system and sectarianism hinder the democratic integration and development of India.

The above notes are designed for Quick Study and Revision not for detailed study.

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