A region is considered to be civilized if its people know the art of writing, have a system for collecting taxes and maintaining order, and possess social classes and specialists for performing priestly, administrative, and producing functions.
Above all, a civilized society should be able to produce enough to support not only the actual producers consisting of artisans and peasants but also consumers who are not engaged in production.
All these elements make for civilization. But they appear in a large part of eastern India on a recognizable scale very late.
Practically no written records are found in the greater portions of eastern Madhya Pradesh, and the adjoining areas of Orissa, West Bengal, Bangladesh, and Assam till the middle of the fourth century A.D.
The period from the fourth to the seventh century is remarkable for the diffusion of an advanced rural economy, formation of state systems, and delineation of social classes in eastern Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, eastern Bengal, south-east Bengal, and Assam.
This is indicated by the distribution of a good number of inscriptions in these areas in Gupta times.
Many inscriptions dated in the Gupta era are found in these areas. They are generally in the form of land grants made by feudatory princes and others for religious purposes to Buddhists and brahmanas and also to Vaishnavite temples and Buddhist monasteries.
These beneficiaries played an important role in spreading and strengthening elements of advanced culture.
The process can be understood by attempting a region-wise survey.
Kalinga or coastal Orissa, south of the Mahanadi, leapt into importance under Asoka, but a strong state was founded in that area only in the first century B.C. Its ruler Kharavela advanced as far as Magadha.
In the first and second centuries A.D., the ports of Orissa carried on brisk trade in pearls, ivory, and muslin.
Excavations at Sisupalgarh, the site of Kalinganagari, which was the capital of Kharavela at a distance of 60 km from Bhubaneswar, have yielded several Roman objects indicating trade contacts with the Roman empire.
But the greater part of Orissa, particularly northern Orissa, neither experienced state formation nor witnessed much commercial activity.
In the fourth century Kosala and Mahakantara figure in the list of conquests made by Samudragupta. They covered parts of northern and western Orissa.
From the second half of the fourth century to the sixth century several states were formed in Orissa, and at least five of them can be clearly identified. The most important of them is the state of the Matharas, who are also called Pitribhaktas.
At the peak of their power, they dominated the area between the Mahanadi and the Krishna. Their contemporaries and neighbors were the Vasisthas, the Nalas, and the Manas.
The Vasisthas ruled on the borders of Andhra in south Kalinga, the Nalas in the forest area of Mahakantara, and the Manas in the coastal area in the north beyond the Mahanadi.
Each state developed its system of taxation, administration, and military organization. The Nalas, and probably the Manas, also evolved their system of coinage.
Each kingdom favored the brahmanas with land grants and even invited them from outside, and most kings performed Vedic sacrifices not only for spiritual merit but also for power, prestige, and legitimacy.
In this period, elements of advanced culture were not confined to the coastal belt known as Kalinga but appeared in the other parts of Orissa. The find of the Nala gold coins in the tribal Bastar area in Madhya Pradesh is significant.
It presupposes an economic system in which gold money was used in large transactions and served as a medium of payment to high functionaries.
Similarly, the Manas seemed to have issued copper coins, which implies the use of metallic money even by artisans and peasants.
The various states added to their income by forming new fiscal units in rural areas. The Matharas created a district called Mahendrabhoga in the area of the Mahendra mountains. They also ruled over a district called Dantayavagubhoga, which apparently supplied ivory and rice-gruel to its administrators and had thus been created in a backward area.
The Matharas made endowments called agraharas, which consisted of land and income from villages and were meant for supporting religious and educational activities of the brahmanas. Some agraharas had to pay taxes although elsewhere in the country they were tax-free.
The induction of the brahmanas through land grants in tribal, forest, and red soil areas brought new lands under cultivation and introduced better methods of agriculture, based on improved knowledge of weather conditions.
Formerly the year was divided into three units, each consisting of four months, and time was reckoned on the basis of three seasons. Under the Matharas, in the middle of the fifth century, began the practice of dividing the year into twelve lunar months.
This implied a detailed idea of weather conditions, which was useful for agricultural operations.
In coastal Orissa, writing was certainly known from the third century B.C., and inscriptions up to the middle of the fourth century A.D. appeared in Prakrit. But from about A.D. 350 Sanskrit began to be used.
What is more significant, charters in this language appear outside the coastal belt beyond the Mahanadi in the north. Thus the art of writing and the Sanskrit language spread over a good portion of Orissa, and some of the finest Sanskrit verses are found in the epigraphs of the period.
Sanskrit served as the link language in the region and facilitated the communication of ideas and orders between the various parts of the state.
In the Kalinga area, the use of script and Sanskrit can be traced earlier, but in the interior Orissa, they became important from the fourth century onwards.
Bengal, including the present state of West Bengal and Bangladesh, was known in the early centuries of the Christian era for its paddy, silk, sugar, and fine muslin.
Tamralipti or Tamluk in the Midnapur district of West Bengal was one of the most important ports in eastern India.
The earliest inscriptions show that the deltaic area in the lower Bengal around the junction of the Bhagirathi and the Padma, also called the Vanga country, was a developed area, though the development of settlement was confined to a limited area.
This development occurred from about the middle of the fourth century.
Early inscriptions of Bengal, unlike those of the Gupta area, mention the name of the person in whose presence they were issued. This indicates that the orders were not written by the local feudatories but by a class of professional scribes.
The title of the officials mentioned in the inscriptions indicates that law and order were maintained by local agents who could also arrest offenders.
The find of the sealings of some kings suggests that in the lower Bengal area several administrative changes took place in the third and fourth centuries A.D.
Although the political history of Bengal is not clear, from the sixth century A.D. the area between the Padma and the Bhagirathi began to be called Gauda or Gaur. Its rulers founded the Gauda kingdom.
In the same century, the areas of north Bangladesh became important under the kings of Pundravardhana.
The epigraphs of the fifth and sixth centuries indicate the existence of state systems in Bengal.
In the same period, the Brahmanical culture came to prevail in Samatata, which roughly meant the south-east portion of Bengal, covering the areas of Comilla and Noakhali.
From A.D. 525 onwards, inscriptions speak of regular land grants to brahmanas and the grant of whole villages to them. Thus both religious and secular elements of culture had reached north Bangladesh by the sixth century.
Although only one solitary image is found in north Bengal, south-east Bengal in the Comilla-Noakhali area abounds in images and inscriptions from the sixth century onwards.
The Kamarupa king Bhaskaravarman of the seventh century tells us that when his father died he ascended the throne with the permission of the lord of Gauda.
Sometime after A.D. 600 the area between the Ganga and the Brahmaputra became the land of the Vangas.
The Samatata kings of the fifth and sixth centuries issued coins, some of which have been found in the Chittagong area. The Varmans of south-east Bengal ruling in the seventh century followed the same practice.
The inscriptions found in that area show that Brahmi script and Sanskrit language were both used and that the ruling families made land grants to brahmanas for religious purposes. But these rulers did not perform the Vedic sacrifices which were so typical of kings in north India.
Many elements of Indian culture spread to Bengal at the latest by the fifth and sixth centuries.
It is held that at this stage the local people began to be converted into a peasantry producing paddy and paying taxes in kind or in cash.
The earliest state to be established in Assam was that of the Varmans. It is called the kingdom of Kamarupa, which coincided roughly with the western and central areas of Assam.
The kingdom came into existence in the fourth century A.D. under Pushyavarman, who performed several Vedic sacrifices.
In the seventh century, the Chinese pilgrim Xuan Zang found the people worshipping the Devas and following the brahmanical system.
The inscriptions of the later Varman rulers were written in Sanskrit and their kings also performed Vedic sacrifices.
Some kings bore the title of maharajadhiraja. One of them took pride in calling himself a great conqueror and claimed to have subjugated Samatata (south-east Bengal), Davaka (now in Assam), and part of Gauda (Bengal).
The spread of Aryan culture in Kamarupa was the work of the brahmanas who were given land grants, although they were asked to pay taxes.
The broad survey of eastern India indicates that though elements of civilization appeared in Bengal and Assam as early as the middle of the fourth century B.C., a full-fledged and elaborate civilization encompassing the major part of Bengal, Orissa, and Assam crystallized in these areas in the period from the fourth to the seventh century A.D.
The assimilation of these areas into Aryan society and culture created new fertile lands for agriculture, providing a sufficient basis for an improved material culture in these regions.
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