It has been suggested, with some justice, that a limes system separating steppe from sown, barbarian from cultivated, urban society, spanned Eurasia. This system of fortifications and natural barriers, however, was not impenetrable. When the societies sheltered by these walls were strong, incursions from the nomadic world beyond were repulsed or contained. When their defences proved inadequate, sedentary societies either had to tame the “barbarian” by converting him to their culture or be completely transformed themselves. Western Central Asia, an Eastern Iranian area increasingly coming under the cultural influence of neighboring, kindred Sassanid Iran before the advent of Islam and the recipient of cultural currents emanating from the Mediterranean, India and China, was one of those zones through which the steppe-dweller could enter sedentary society. Conversely, its mercantile urban centers also served as a gateway through which the cultural and material achievements of settled society could penetrate the steppe. In the period under discussion, Western Central Asia, having recently accommodated itself to the political and cultural buffetings administered to it by expanding Arab power, was about to enter into another period of intense and intimate contact with the nomadic, Turkic societies to its north and north-east. In this instance, it would serve as the transmission zone for the cultural fruits of one nomadic society to another. Its role in this process was not passive, for the Islamic culture which entered the steppe zone had been influenced and reworked by the Eastern Iranians.

The areal extent and diversity of the natural landscapes of Inner Asia impel a survey of the geographic background of this region to concentrate on the environmental characteristics which seem to contribute most to an understanding of the even greater complexities of the human use of these lands. To this end, attention will be focused initially on five general geographic features of Inner Asia: its size; the effects of distance from maritime influences on movement and climate; the problems of its rivers; geographic diversity and uniformity; and, the limited capabilities for areally extensive crop agriculture. This will be followed by a discussion of the major environmental components of the natural zones of Inner Asia.

General geographic characteristics

The Inner Asian region occupies an immense area in the interior and northerly reaches of the Eurasian land mass and encompasses a territory of more than eight million square miles or about one-seventh of the land area of the world. The east–west dimensions of this region extend some 6,000 miles, which is slightly more than twice as long as the maximum north–south axis. These distances are comparable to those traversed by only a few of the most adventurous maritime vessels in the European “Age of Discovery.” Within Inner Asia, however, the pre-eminent means of long-distance communication has been overland movement inasmuch as no region on earth is as landlocked by the absence of feasible maritime alternatives. The major movements of peoples, cultural innovations, and goods has been on Inner Asian land routes far removed from the Pacific, the ice-covered Arctic and the Indian Ocean.

The political fragmentation of China in the 10th century A.D. and most of her history under the Sung dynasty (960–1234) was coeval with the emergence of states on her borders which were founded by non-Chinese peoples but largely patterned on Chinese models. Of these peoples the Kitans and the Jurchen are of special importance because they both succeeded in extending their domination over large parts of Northern China. In this respect they were the precursors of the Mongols whose final subjugation of the entire Chinese territory in the 13th century was made possible, or at least easier, because they were no longer faced with a unified China but by a Sung China which had been severely weakened by the Kitan and Jurchen conquests on her northern border. Another factor of general historical interest is that both for the Liao state of the Kitans and the Chin state of the Jurchen we have detailed dynastic histories written in Chinese. Unlike earlier invaders who settled for a while on Chinese soil such as Hsiung-nu, Hsien-pi and other tribal groups whose history is known only through Chinese eyes, we have for the 10th to 13th centuries historical sources which provide a very full documentation on states founded by non-Chinese peoples. The multi-state system of those centuries can therefore be studied not only from the Chinese angle but also from the Kitan and Jurchen viewpoints as well. For the first time in Inner Asian history we have in that period a wealth of information on “barbarian” peoples and their history that can be paralleled with the purely Chinese (and therefore necessarily China-centred) sources.

THE SETTING

The vast northern plain of the Ganges-Jumna River system stretches from the banks of the Jumna River south-east to the edges of Bengal. To the North are the foothills and behind them the great barrier of Himalayan mountains. The southern borders of this plain are marked by another range of hills that merge into the Vindhya mountain chain, the line of demarcation between northern India and the Deccan plateau of the South. Within this geographic area evolved the Hindu-Buddhist civilization, beginning in the second millennium before Christ. After the conquest of northern India by Islamic armies, it also became the hub of Indo-Muslim civilization. This vast plain repeatedly provided the population and productivity needed to build and sustain major kingdoms and empires.

The population of the Gangetic basin reflects its history. Hindus live throughout the plains and foothills. Their society possessed a complex caste system encompassing all of the traditional varnas along with innumerable divisions of specific castes and sub-castes. Hindus predominated with 86 per cent of the population, while the largest minority were the Muslims with 13.7 per cent. The Muslim population, however, showed distinctly different characteristics from the Islamic community of Bengal. In the North-Western Provinces they accounted for 38 per cent of the urban population. More concentrated in the cities and towns of the West, Muslims encompassed over 50 per cent of the urban dwellers in the area of Rohilkhand. Bihar held an even smaller percentage of Muslims; nevertheless, it too had a significant concentration of them in its towns and cities.

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Professional missionaries, polemical tracts, and new rituals of conversion, were only three of the components of religious innovation in South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Aggressive proselytism became the norm among sects and religions with new and refurbished forms of action, ranging from public debates on the meaning of scriptural sources to the use of printing to produce books, journals, and a multitude of pamphlets. Religious conflict was implicit in the competition for converts, and explicit in assassinations and riots. Sustaining religious pursuits were new organizations fashioned from the traditions of the subcontinent and modified by British culture. South Asians constructed religious societies fully equipped with elected officials, weekly meetings, annual published reports, bank accounts, sophisticated systems of fundraising, annual meetings, executive committees, subcommittees, bye-laws, and constitutions. Religious societies founded and successfully managed a number of organizations including hospitals, schools, orphanages, and relief programmes. Conflict, competition, and institution-building emerged from, and rested on, adherents to diverse ideologies made explicit in speech and writing. For many, religion became a matter of creeds that were explained, defined, and elaborated. It was an age of definition and redefinition initiated by socio-religious movements that swept the subcontinent during the years of British colonial rule.

Before turning to a discussion of the past, it is necessary to consider the concept of ‘socio-religious movements’ as used here, and its three crucial dimensions. The term ‘socio’ implies an attempt to reorder society in the areas of social behaviour, custom, structure or control.

THE SETTING

Below the Gangetic basin and to the east of the Indus plain a series of steep hills and valleys run eastwards separating the northern subcontinent from its peninsular South. This central region of hills and jungles has impeded north-south movement, acting as a cultural and political barrier. On the western coast lies the Kathiawar peninsula and the immediate mainland attached to it. Together they comprise the region of Gujarat, which is partially isolated from the rest of the subcontinent. A narrow strip of land runs north and south connecting mainland Gujarat to the coast below it and through this coastal band passes the trade routes from the Gangetic plain. To the East are the Central Provinces containing a rich agricultural tract, Chhattisgarh, surrounded by hills, separated from the Deccan and the northern plains. The river valley and delta of the Mahanadi constitute the eastern region of this transitional belt, the area of Orissa. Bordered by hills to the North-West and South-West, Orissa is the site of a regional society created from a mixture of indigenous cultures, influenced from Bengal to the North, and the Telugu region to the South. Below this chain of hills is Maharashtra, an area composed of three geographic features: the Konkin coast, the western Ghats, an escarpment beginning at the Tapti River, and the Deccan, a dry inland plateau broken by numerous hills that extend south across the Godavari River, the linguistic border between the Deccan and the Dravidian South.

The culture and social system of Gujarat, the Central Provinces, and Orissa showed affinities with northern India. These areas had castes and subcastes representing all levels of the varna system. In Gujarat the two most powerful caste clusters were the merchants and members of the ruling elites, both Hindus and Muslims. A further feature of Gujarati society was the tight, hierarchical control maintained by elders within each caste. Gujarat was the home of a Hindu majority and small minorities of Jains, Muslims, and Parsis.

THE SETTING

The first region under consideration is Bengal and its adjoining territory of Assam in the North-East. Bengal proper is a huge delta built up by the combined river systems of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. Bengal and its environs are ringed by mountains in the North and East, by the bay to the South, the hills of Orissa and Chota Nagpur to the South-West, and Bihar to the West. Divided by numerous rivers and consisting of swampy land with abundant rainfall, Bengal was developed late in the history of South Asia and remained at the edge of Hindu-Buddhist civilization. Eastern Bengal, Assam, and the hill tracts bordering Burma marked the end of one major civilization and the beginning of the South-East Asia cultural sphere.

The incorporation of Bengal into the expanding culture of north India brought with it Sanskrit, Hinduism, and the caste structure. Brahman priests ascended to the foremost position in society, but never with the same degree of dominance as in the central Gangetic Plain or in south India. The Kshatriya (warrior) and Vaishya (merchant) castes were absent. Instead two smaller groups, the Kayasthas, a writer-clerk caste, and the Baidyas, once physicians and later landlords, marked the next levels below the Brahmans. Thus the mass of Bengalis were classed as Sudras or peasants; beneath them were the untouchables. Within this region Buddhism and, to a lesser degree, Jainism provided a longstanding challenge to Hinduism. In the surrounding hill tracts, the high civilization of the valleys and the delta faded away. Many of the tribes within the jungles and highlands had their own languages, deities, social structures, and tribal culture.

In the first decade of the thirteenth century, the Hindu-Buddhist world of Bengal was significantly altered by Islamic conquerors. The establishment of Muslim rule cut ties of political influence and economic support between Hinduism and the state. Over the centuries Islam also changed the socio-religious composition of Bengal through conversion.

THE SETTING

The last regional chapter of this volume examines an area defined partly by geography, but more extensively by culture and language. The northern border of the Dravidian South begins on the east coast at the southern edge of Orissa, runs roughly along the northern lines of the Godavari River as it flows through the central Deccan, dipping south-west to Goa. The remainder of peninsular India extends to the southernmost tip of the mainland. Little exists in the way of geographically defined sub-areas within this region except for the thin western coast that continues from Maharashtra to the Cape. The rest of the peninsula is comprised of the Deccan plateau as it is narrowed by the convergence of the Western and Eastern Ghats to just above the Cape.

Each cultural and linguistic subdivision of the South radiates out from a core and blends into the others without clearly defined borders. The areas of each of the four languages — Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam — roughly correspond to the four southern states of India: Andhra Pradesh, Tamilnadu, Karnataka, and Kerala. Tamil is the oldest of the Dravidian languages with literature from the first century before Christ. The Tamil region was a second source of high culture pre-dated only by developments on the Indus and Gangetic plains. The three other Dravidian languages are considerably younger. The literature of Kannada dates from the tenth century, Telugu from the eleventh, and Malayalam from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Each was influenced by Sanskrit and northern Brahmanical civilization, but still retained its own unique culture. A degree of unity exists between the four linguistic areas.

TRANSITIONAL MOVEMENTS WITHIN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Within nearly a century of British rule over the South Asian subcontinent, socio-religious movements reshaped much of the social, cultural, religious, and political life of this area. Three civilizations provided models for movements of dissent and protest that sought to ‘purify’ and restructure contemporary society. New associations, techniques, and forms of group consciousness came into being during these years as religious change encountered increased politicization and competing nationalism. The historic process of internal dissent and cultural adjustment was dynamic as the traditions of the past flowed into the colonial milieu, and were increasingly altered by that environment. There was no clear point of beginning or end of the transitional movements of pre-British history, as they reached forward into the colonial milieu linking that era with what went before.

Leadership of the transitional movements followed a pattern that extended back for many centuries. Professional religious practitioners, Brahmans, and the ‘ulamā accounted for the largest percentage of leaders, but they also came from merchant, peasant, untouchable and tribal segments of society. This diversity of leadership was parallelled by support from differing social groups as was illustrated by the Namdharis, who found their adherents primarily among the non-Jats, and the Nirankaris, whose members were drawn mainly from Sikh Jats. The variation in groups to which these movements appealed also followed well-established paths. Islamic movements, with the ‘ulamā as leaders, either attempted to reach all Muslims or focused almost exclusively on the ‘ulamā class of the religiously educated. Some movements were concentrated on a specific level of society, such as those of the Christian Nadars or Satnamis; both aimed at Hindu untouchables. Similarly, Satya Mahima Dharma flourished among the lower castes and tribals of Orissa.

THE SETTING

The twentieth century brought a number of crucial alterations to the context within which socio-religious movements functioned, succeeded, or failed. The most important of these changes was the rise to prominence of secular nationalism expressed by the Indian National Congress. Nationalist fervour peaked four times before 1947: first in the years 1905–7, then during the three Gandhian campaigns of 1919–22, 1930–4, and 1942. This wave-like pattern was contrasted by periods of severe religious conflict that emerged in a counter-design following the nationalist peaks. Both waves, nationalist and communalist, produced political action, but with conflicting goals and opposing organizations.

A third pattern of modifications arose from the constitutional reforms. The most significant came in 1909 when separate electorates were granted to the Muslims of British India. This method of reserving seats in the regional and central legislative bodies was basic to the concept of religion as a community, that is, a collection of individuals defined through their adherence to a particular set of doctrines. The concept of religion as a community grew from the introduction of a decennial census in 1871. The census defined religious communities, counted them, and examined their characteristics as social and economic units. The granting of separate electorates linked religion, the census reports, political power, and political patronage. The later constitutional reforms of 1919 and 1935 extended the number of religious and social groups who were given a share of political power. In turn, these ‘reforms’ stimulated and reinforced a new form of political institution.

THE SETTING

The Punjab encompasses the land west of the Sutlej to the Indus River, and from the Himalayan foothills south to the confluence of the Panjnad and Indus Rivers. North of the Punjab are the foothills and the Himalayan mountains that include the Kashmir valley. To the West lies the edge of the Iranian plateau with its sharp hills, tribal groups, and key passes. To the South of eastern Punjab is Rajasthan with its dry, hilly topography that merges to the East with the great Indian desert. Beyond Rajasthan, at the lower end of the Indus River, is Sind, a semi-desert land at the edge of South Asia.

The Hindu-Buddhist cultures of the North-West extend back in time to the third millennium BC and were the first to be incorporated into the Islamic world, Sind in AD 712, and the Punjab by the end of the twelfth century. Majorities of Muslims lived in Sind, western Punjab, and Kashmir. Hindus remained the majority in eastern Punjab, Rajasthan, and the Punjab hills. The religious structure of this region was given a new dimension when Guru Nanak founded Sikhism (see p. 13). In 1799, under the leadership of Ranjit Singh, they established a Sikh kingdom that ruled Punjab and Kashmir.

In 1803 British victories brought them to Delhi and the eastern border of the Sikh kingdom, as the lands between the Sutlej and Jumna Rivers came under British control. After 1818 the princes of Rajasthan accepted British supremacy, and in 1843 Sind was annexed to the Bombay Presidency. The two Anglo-Sikh wars led to the acquisition of the Jullundur Doab in 1846, and of the entire Sikh kingdom in 1849. The British Empire expanded to its geographic limits with a fluctuating border in the trans-Indus territory. This vast surge of the British political sphere, the last such expansion in South Asia, was followed by a much slower uneven growth of the cultural milieu.

The sources used in this study were diverse and scattered through a variety of forms: monographs, articles in edited volumes, scholarly journals, unpublished manuscripts, dissertations, encyclopaedias, and government documents that included census reports, district gazetteers, and various reports. This diversity grew partly from the attempt to place socio-religious movements in their historic context, and partly from the fragmented nature of scholarly writing on religious subjects. Individuals who write about religion do so from various points of perspective, as scholars of diverse disciplines, as members of particular movements, ?.s casual observers, and ardent missionaries. Consequently, the literature varies in its sophistication, biases, factual reliability, styles of writing, and in technical issues such as the transliterations of non-English words.

Of all the literature utilized here, the one volume that proved the most comprehensive and that entailed the most similar aims to my own was J. N. Farquhar's Modern Religious Movements in India (New York, 1919). This study viewed religious movements from a sympathetic Christian perspective that judged all groups in terms of whether or not they appeared to be moving towards English Protestant Christianity, or away from it.

The Augustan period includes two major critics, Horace and Dionysius, both important in themselves but also in part conveniently complementary and typical. Horace is both poet and critic, a Roman deeply conscious of Rome's literary debt to Greece, yet also a champion of new Roman poetry. The historian and rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus is also practitioner as well as critic, but he is primarily concerned with prose, especially oratory, though poetry has an important place in his most original work, On Composition. A Greek, he too is conscious of the Greek past, yet within a framework of Classicism in his assertion of canons of past greatness he displays a confident optimism about the present. But though living in Rome by 30 BC and in some works addressing Romans, he shows no interest in Roman literature; quite exceptionally in the preface to On Ancient Orators he refers to the influence of good Roman taste on the victory of Greek Atticism over Asianism.

Dionysius is here entirely typical of Greek lack of interest in Roman literature. By the late Republic and Augustan period Rome was a magnet to Greek men of letters as a centre of power and patronage; almost every Augustan Greek writer was in Rome for a substantial part of his life, and Greek works were often dedicated to Roman patrons. But Greek literary criticism expounds Greek theory and literature, and the basic relationship is of Greece instructing Rome, sometimes explicitly so, for example when Dionysius dedicates On Composition to the young Metilius Rufus, promises him the gift of a second work on diction so that he will be better instructed, and refers to their daily instruction together (Comp. 1, 20, 26).

Philip of Macedon defeated the Greek city states at the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC. Though they retained some control of their internal affairs, their political importance largely comes to an end. Between 336 and 323 his son, Alexander the Great, extended the Macedonian empire beyond anything the world had seen through Asia Minor, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and into the Middle East, and with it the Greek language, education, literature, and religion. Under Alexander's successors, the political, commercial, and cultural centres within fifty years became Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, Pergamum in Asia Minor, and other eastern cities, though Athens remained the home of the philosophical schools established there in the fourth century: the Academy of Plato (which evolved into a school of scepticism); the Peripatetic School, founded by Aristotle; the Stoa of Zeno and his successors; and the Garden of the Epicureans. The emergence of the Hellenistic monarchies had an effect on literary life in that the focus of writers' attention was often drawn to the royal courts. The institution of patronage, important for early Greek poets but largely forgotten in Classical Athens, re-emerged and with it an impulse to flattery. A famous example is Callimachus' elegy on the apotheosis of the ‘Lock of Berenice’, Queen of Egypt, the ancestor of Pope's ‘Rape of the Lock’. For the history of criticism, the most striking developments are the establishment of the great Museum and Library at Alexandria, which became a centre for textual criticism and exegesis of texts based on literary, historical, biographical, and linguistic scholarship, and the phenomenon of Alexandrianism in poetic composition, which combined learning with artistic craftsmanship, often favouring the shorter poetic genres such as elegy, hymns, epigrams, and idylls.