Agricultural communities
By at least 3500 bce cultivation was occurring in many parts of the subcontinent. Certain grains and fruit were being cultivated; some animals were domesticated, including cattle and fowl; pottery was an increasingly important part of the economy; and small settlements had become a part of the landscape.
There appear to have been at least three broad areas of neolithic culture - each somewhat autonomous.2 In the northeast, in the lower Ganges and in other river valleys there were settlements skilled in the use of polished stone, but where no pottery was in use; in the south, esspecially in the Southern Deccan where such settlements as Utnur and Brahmagiri have been excavated, cattle had become an important part of the economy (and the religious use of cattle may have been developing).3 Here too such grains as millet and wheat were being cultivated by 3500 bce and pottery was being made by hand. In the northwest, one finds polished stone and a type of pottery made on wheels. The culmination of the northwestern culture was to be found in the Indus Valley.
These agricultural communities seem to have resulted from indigenous development and from further migrations. It is possible that the development of agriculture and cultivation skills owed something to its women who had been food-gatherers (the collecting of wild fruits, etc. which had not needed cultivation). (It is interesting to note that to this day most of the people who work on the land are women.) Some of the settlements may have been matrilineal suggesting women had a significant role in the social and economic life of agricultural peoples, and contributed something to the religious imagery associated with agricultural production.4
This period also witnessed several migrations. Peoples sometimes referred to as Australoids (c. 2000 bce?) may have come in from Southeast Asia, perhaps first as hunters but eventually developing skills in cultivating such fruit as the banana.
A migration of megalithic peoples reached the south by about 800 bce.5 This was a culture characterized by the construction of large stones over graves: these are known as menhirs (a single large rock, placed erect) or cairns (piles of large rock). These peoples also practiced urn burial, remnants of which are found in such disparate places as the Indus Valley and the Palni Hills of South India. Irrigation was another of the skills attributed to these peoples. Yet another complex of civilizations ranging from Iran to Baluchistan, sometimes called the “Turkmenistan Circle,” may have formed something of a matrix of which the Indus Valley civilizations were a part.6It is possible that this melange of cultures emerged into what is sometimes known as the “Dravidian” culture. “Dravidian” is an umbrella term for those people who today speak some twenty-two languages, including the four major ones associated with the four southernmost states - Tamil (Tamil Nadu); Telugu (Andhra Pradesh); Kannada (Karnataka); and Malayalam (Kerala). While these languages have been strongly influenced by Sanskrit, in the early stages they may have been a congeries of oral languages used in the indigenous agricultural settlements and influenced in still unclear ways by the megalithic and Indus cultures.
Before summarizing the religious contributions of agricultural peoples, a brief word is appropriate about the Indus Valley civilizations. While this was a culture that may have had some affinities with agricultural communities to the west (that cultural complex sometimes referred to as the “Turkmenistan Circle”), it nonetheless developed into one of the most sophisticated societies of its time (c. 2500-1750 bce).7The Indus culture was a diverse set of civilizations where trade occurred with Mesopotamia and the Persian Gulf and where such entities as coral, gold, and lead were exchanged. Its people were skilled in the use of copper and bronze and had domesticated a number of animals - bison, cats, dogs, sheep, and pigs are known to have been domesticated; indeed, it is apparently here that fowl were first domesticated.
There is evidence of sophisticated systems for sewage and irrigation, granaries, and complex urban planning. Public baths have been excavated which may have been used ritually. No temples have been found to date but large public platforms were constructed, apparently for public rituals which seem to have been addressed to a goddess. The script is still undeciphered, but numerous seals have yielded a volume of interpretations. Some of the seals may have been used in domestic worship (others for commercial or artistic purposes). Seals and other artifacts suggest a variety of religious possibilities: a goddess (or goddesses) appears to have been the dominant deity and her creativity and control of nature and animals intimated. Several seals, for example, depict an inverted feminine figure, out of whose womb vegetation is growing. In other seals, a complex relationship between deity, humans, plants, and animals is suggested: the goddess appeared to control animals and nature; human and presumably human leaders emulated the goddess in controlling nature; and males sometimes seemed to be identified with animals and sometimes as controlling animals. It is possible that public sacrifices were practiced where animals were presumably substituted for humans and where both priest and priestess were thought to preside. Some kind of public pilgrimage has been hypothesized, partially because of patterns found earlier in other parts of the “Turkmenistan Circle.”8 Rituals associated with water seem probable. It is even possible (though little specific evidence surrounds it in the Indus Valley) that a practice found in Mesopotamia in the late third millennium bce of royalty’s libating an image of a deity filtered into the valley.9 In any case, a common ritual in later Indian settings is very similar to the Mesopotamian libations and became known in India as abhiseka (libations). Disposal of the dead appears to have been done differently at various stages of the civilization’s history or in different areas of the valley: these included inhumation in graves and burial in urns.10 Finally, earlier speculation that one famous seal depicted a proto-Siva in a yogic posture, suggesting that both Saivism (worship of Siva) and yoga had their roots in this culture, has been disputed by subsequent scholars, and remains, at the least, a highly controversial hypothesis.What have been the religious contributions of agricultural societies? Because no documents exist to supplement our knowledge of the early agricultural context, it is difficult to state definitively what was practiced in those communities in the first few millennia bce. But it is apparent that agricultural lifestyles and motifs have persisted through the history of Indian civilization and religion, even into the present day. It is also apparent that agricultural motifs have filtered their way into certain “classical” forms of Indian religion, especially those associated with Hinduism, in almost every period. It is worth speculating, in general terms, as to what some of the possible contributions of agricultural communities have been to the religious life of India. Here are some possibilities.
1) The land was generally understood to be feminine, the matrix and giver of life. The agricultural process may therefore have had sexual imageries (e.g., the furrow as female, the furrowing pick as male creative principle). In later sources, we have many intimations of this association between land and the female/goddess: terra-cotta female figurines that suggest fertility; an early icon was that of Lajja Gauri, a goddess squatting naked on her haunches, apparently representing the land’s creativity; there were associations in literature and mythology between landscape (especially land and rivers) and goddesses.11
2) Goddesses had at least one of their roots in agricultural settings. Goddesses, especially those in “folk” settings, even today, often represented the forces of nature, its creativity, and barrenness; its power and/or willfulness. This natural force of the goddess may have been enhanced by her social force, insofar as she would have represented the role of women in matrilineal settings.
3) Cyclicality in Indian speculation may have received impetus from agricultural settings, inasmuch as agriculture and its seasons were cyclical. Lunar chronometry (measuring time by the cycles of the moon, which appeared in classical chronometry around the fourth century bce) may have its roots in agricultural settings as well, where the moon was often perceived as feminine.
Cyclicality may also have been associated with the menstrual cycle. The term karma (the law of cause and effect) was apparently firstarticulated as a form of transmigration in the lower Gangetic basin around the sixth century bce by Yajnavalkya in the Brhadaranyaka Upanisad1 While there are intimations of cause and effect in the earlier Vedic ritual sequences, agricultural perceptions may have given further impetus to the idea.
4) Burial is still practiced by certain communities indigenous to India. It probably had its roots in agricultural imagery insofar as the body, like a seed, was placed in a grave, or eventually, in an urn, possibly to await rebirth.
5) Plants became analogous to human beings. In later Hindu ritual, fruits such as the banana or coconut, and grains such as rice, often came to be surrogates for human beings. The coconut, for example, in some later Hindu speculation, became a surrogate for the human or for the divine: the coconut became analogous to the human head - it had a hard shell that must be “broken” to get at the tender interior; there were two “false” eyes and a third eye for entry into the coconut just as with the human head; the three lines on the shell became symbols of the bonds that keep humans from being open to the divine, etc.
6) Duality may have intimations in agricultural settings. Unlike hunters whose world tended to be unitary and oriented by their hunting/living grounds, agricultural imagery tended to evoke a sense of sky that watered/ fertilized the earth. Agricultural myths of cosmogony tended to be dualistic with a male sky impregnating female earth. The Vedic Prthvl (earth) and her consort Dyaus (sky) apparently reflected this agricultural imagery. This sort of setting may be one of the sources for later dualistic cosmological speculation. Samkhya, a product of the Gangetic basin, for example, posited a dualistic cosmogony: purusa was male, sky, spirit, the knower of the field; prakrti was matter, female, earth, the field.
Cosmological speculation in India often asked the question: is the world one (monistic) or two (dualistic)? Dualistic imageries may have an agricultural basis.7) Sedentary pastoral images refer to domestication and the relationship between humans and herd. Themes of domestication abound in Hindu mythology: there are deities such as Krsna as cowherd who is also known as Govinda (lord of cattle). In the south the term for temple (koyil) is etymologically related to that of cattle-pen (ko is cattle); most Hindu deities have their vehicles (vahanas), many of them animals that have been domesticated. This pastoral imagery provides the metaphor for the role of deity over nature and the human spirit over passion.
In sum, what is sometimes called “folk” religion has some of its roots in the agricultural settings of India. The conclusion is difficult to resist: that these imageries of agriculture have influenced the way in which some forms of religion have developed on the subcontinent, not only in the later millennia bce, but also throughout history even to the present. The “classical” and the “folk” have been engaged in a dialectic, each influencing the other.