Thank you for enabling me to participate in this panel

discussion. I thought I would use this occasion to draw

attention to a relatively slim book that appeared a couple of
years ago, and that deals with the central concerns of the
conference. This is The Concept of Bharatavarsha and other
essays, authored by one of the pioneering historians
associated with the CHS, BD Chattopadhyaya, or Brajada
as he is commonly known amongst friends, colleagues,
admirers and students. Also, most of us abbreviated his
rather long name into BDC, so I will use all of these as I go
along.
An anthology of papers presented over the last decade and
more, they present us with extremely perceptive insights on
historicizing the concept of space, challenging us to
question received wisdom almost relentlessly. While
students of ancient India have been reading and engaging
with this important work, it is perhaps less well known in
the wider world of history students, where ancient history
tends to be marginalized unless and until it becomes
‘controversial’.
Consisting of eight essays with shared, and sometimes
overlapping concerns, the essays draw on an intensive and
extensive engagement with textual and inscriptional
material. The texts handled range from the Vedas to the
kavyas, all treated with remarkable ease, to yield insights
that remind us constantly of the need to contextualize
concepts instead of freezing them into neat definitions.
The very first essay on the concept of Bharatavarsha, for
instance, poses the problem of our unquestioned
acceptance of the equation between a geographical space,
present territorial boundaries, and a sense that these are
changeless, urging us to revisit the concept historically
rather than take it as a given.
Brajada begins with a historiographical survey of the
debates and discussions on the theme, taking us through
the well known, frequently reiterated idea of fundamental
unity, suggesting instead that this was an identity that
developed and emerged in the colonial and post-colonial
context. Thus, he compels us to question rather than
assume that India and Bharatavarsha are synonymous.

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But, perhaps more significant, he steps back from this
contemporary scenario to provide a discussion on the
contexts in which the term was used in ancient India to
establish how complex and diverse these were.
I will illustrate these briefly. Brajada begins his survey from
the Rgveda, where the Bharatas, amongst others, are
referred to as a jana. Note that in this text, which can be
placed in the second millennium BCE and is located in the
northwest of the subcontinent, there is no notion of the
subcontinent as a whole. From this, the discussion moves
on to the janapadas, places where people settled down.
Brajada points out how these are often located, in the later
Vedic texts, in terms of direction or dis, from which we get
the word desa. He also draws attention to alternative terms
for the subcontinent, including Jambudvipa, the island
where the jamun tree grows, used, for instance, in the
Asokan inscriptions of the third century BCE, and later as
part of the vocabulary of the Puranas. As interesting, he
reminds us of the possible first century BCE / or first
century CE king of parts of present-day Odisha, Kharavela,
known from his famous Hathigumpha Inscription, which
almost all students of history encounter at some point or
other of their lives. Kharavela claimed victory over several
contemporaries, including the Satavahanas, the rulers of
the south, and an unnamed ruler of Bharatavarsha. Clearly,
within this framework, the term was not synonymous with
the subcontinent.
BDC goes on to demonstrate that in the Puranas, where we
find some of the earliest references to Bharatavarsha that
may correspond with the subcontinent, as in the Visnu
Purana, it is defined as the varsa or land which lies to the
north of the ocean and to the south of the snowy mountain,
is called Bharata. He also shows that the term for the
people, the Bharatas, more often than not meant a special
lineage rather than the entire population. In other contexts,
what defines the population of the central land of Bharata is
the varna-jati order—we are told that
On the east of Bharata dwell the Kiratas (forest
dwellers, hunters)…on the west Yavanas (a term used
for peoples from West Asia); in the centre reside

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 Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaisyas and Sudras, occupied
in their respective duties of sacrifice, arms, trade and
service.
In other words, Bharatavarsa emerges as a socio-spatial
category of a very distinct kind.
As I mentioned earlier, BDC also notes that from the later
Vedic texts onwards, janapadas tend to be defined in terms
of directions or disa. Desa are separated by mountains and
rivers, but these are fluid rather than fixed frontiers.
From this, he moves on, in the essay titled Space, history
and cultural process, to unpack the diversities within these
seemingly bounded units of the janapada or the desa. Thus,
within the janapada we may encounter the aranya, or
wilderness, the grama or the village, and different urban
fomations that go by names such as the nigama, nagara,
mahanagara. As significant, he invites us to visualize
regions as interlocking rather than located in a hierarchy,
and opens up the possibility of shifting centres, in other
words, arguing for an inbuilt dynamism that challenges
static formations.
There are other essays that discuss the complex
relationship between the forest and the state. BDC suggests
that this was a relationship of tension—the forest was
valued for providing resources, but was also perceived as a
threat to the state. In this context he draws our attention to
one of the most famous Asokan inscriptions where, even
after expressing his remorse at the violence caused by
warfare, he reiterates a threat to the atavis, the forest
people, presumably in case they prove recalcitrant.
He next takes us through three episodes of the Ramayana,
and ties them together for us, demonstrating how a
particular understanding of kingship extends from the royal
capital to the distant forest. These are the killing of Valin by
Rama. Valin, the monkey king, pleads:
Virtuous people cannot wear my skin, my fur and
bones are forbidden, and my flesh cannot be eaten by
people like you who observe the law (dharma).
This is summarily dismissed by Rama on the grounds that:

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 The earth with its mountains, woods and forests
belongs to the Iksvakus, as does the right of punishing
and rewarding its beasts, birds and men.
BDC argues that this logic of raja dharma justifies not only
the killing of Valin, but the testing of Sita’s chastity in
Lanka, and the killing of Sambuka in Ayodhya. In other
words, he reminds us that spaces are socially constituted
and acquire meaning through political processes.
In the early medieval context, the understanding of which
we owe considerably to BDC, he argues for a more complex
relationship between the forest and the state, where state
formation in forested regions acquires distinctive
characteristics.
One of the other things that BDC does is to firmly shut the
door against easy, simplistic formulations. One of the most
challenging essays in the anthology centres around the
figure of Naraka, claimed as a founding figure by ruling
lineages in Assam. BDC unpacks the ways in which this
single figure is divinized, demonized and humanized within
the sectarian traditions of Vaisnavism, Saivism and
Saktism. The complexities that he confronts us with prevent
any reduction of the discussion into an easy checklist of
features that may be distinctive of regional identities.
There are a couple of other themes that Brajada develops
that I think are of wider interest. One is his discussion on
samajas and utsavas, popular festivals, which he contrasts
with the more solemn and rigidly structured Vedic yajnas or
sacrifices. He points out that the former provided temporal
and spatial contexts for role reversal. No wonder kings such
as Asoka viewed them with suspicion, a suspicion that is
reiterated in texts such as the Arthasastra and by
renunciatory traditions such as Buddhism. BDC goes on to
point out that early medieval Sanskrit literary traditions
accommodate these festival within representations of
kingship. So, while there is a certain ambivalence, there is
also a shift from the attitude of outright hostility.

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This focus on the accommodation and negotiation runs
through the last two essays of the anthology, where BDC
dislodges the comfortable and comforting formulation of
unity in diversity. He points out that there is nothing that is
automatic or inevitable about accommodation, and that
differences are marked out in a variety of ways, as for
instance through language and speech, which mark
differences both within regions as well as between them.
The brahmanical anxieties about samkara or mixing become
significant in this socio-cultural context. Also, he suggests
that Asoka’s attempts to enforce cohesion over diverse
socio-economic spaces through a common dhamma, though
well intentioned, probably met with little success. He moves
on to the contemporary scenario and shares his
contemplation:
It remains to be seen, after sustained efforts at
bureaucratic homogenization from the colonial
imperial history onwards, what shape Indian
multiculturalism—that is, cultures interpenetrating
each other—takes in the age of globalized
commercialism.
As important, he reminds us of the antiquity and complexity
of socio-spatial differentiation. Sanskrit texts function with
ease with binary categories such as Arya-mleccha,
Janapada-aranya, and the Margi-desa.
Brajada recalls for us the long and tangled histories of
sectarian conflicts, reminding us that Asoka’s much-cited
12th Major Rock Edict makes a plea for harmony and co-
existence in a situation where such conflicts were probably
the norm rather than the exception in the third century
BCE. BDC then draws attention to an 11th century play, the
Prabodhacandrodaya, attributed to Krsna Misra.
Here, the playwright refers to his opponents as Bauddha,
Carvakas, Digambaras, Saivas, Pasupatas and Kapalikas–
all of whom are defeated by the Vaisnavas. What is perhaps
more interesting for the present discussion is that the
Bauddhas are banished to Sindhu, Gandhara, Parasika,
Magadha, Hima, Vanga and Kalinga, the Digambaras and
Kapalikas to the land of the Malavas and Abhiras, and the
Saivas and Pasupatas to Turuska desa. This provides a

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fascinating and revealing glimpse of the complex and
conflictual ways in which spaces were envisaged.
I will end by quoting BDC’s concluding remarks, as well as
the dedication with which he begins his book. First, the
concluding remarks:
In my ode to diversity, which I fear may turn into an
elegy sooner than later, I simply plead for the survival
of diverse culture spaces in a world which is fast
becoming a victim of global homogenization…the
evidence that I have cited above from our ancient texts
of cultural differences, tensions, and even of conflicts
was evidence of dynamic interactions in a
heterogeneous society. Keeping the heritage of that
glorious, if contentious, heterogeneity in mind, let us
hope that today we do not deliberately consign that
country—our many Indias—to the blackhole of robotic
uniformity in the name of integration and unity.
The dedication is as follows:
For my old comrades, colleagues and students
At the
Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi,
For whatever it is worth
A timely reminder of the significance of the space that we
occupy and of the responsibility that we have, individually
and collectively, of creating and preserving this space for
debate, dialogue, and discussion.

Kumkum Roy
April 2019

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