CHAPTER TWO QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS.pdf

chapter 2 Jungle, fields, cities and states For hundreds of thousands of years, the fertile Bengal delta was covered 1. Briefly discuss the by dense rainforests and wetland...

chapter 2 Jungle, fields, cities and states For hundreds of thousands of years, the fertile Bengal delta was covered 1. Briefly discuss the by dense rainforests and wetlands, an environment of high biodiversity. pre-historic Much of it survived well into historical times. In the last few centuries, Bengal. however, what had been one of the richest wildlife areas of the world went into sharp decline. Many species of plants and animals disappeared from Bangladesh – among the larger animals: rhinoceros, wild buffalo, ban- teng, gaur, nilgai, various species of deer, wolf, marsh crocodile, pink- headed duck and peafowl. Others, such as elephant, tiger and leopard, became very rare (see box ‘Spotting a shishu’). The decline of the Bengalian rainforest was directly related to the success of one of its denizens: man. Human beings have been roaming the forests and rivers of Bangladesh, making use of their rich resources, from very early times. However, few early remains have been found, and experts do not agree on when humans first made their appearance. According to some, they entered the region from the north-east, crossing the mountains from China some 60,000 years ago. Others suggest, however, that a discrete regional culture developed in Bengal well before 100,000 bce.1 The basis for any claims about prehistoric humans in Bengal is slim. On the one hand, there is the environment of the floodplains with their frequent inundations and a humid tropical climate, both particularly unkind to material remains of human settlement not made of the stur- diest material. Since stone does not occur naturally in the Bengal delta, early humans are likely to have relied on materials such as wood, bamboo and mud that have not survived. On the other hand, the prehistoric record of Bangladesh is also limited because archaeologists of South Asia have long treated the region with indifference, training their sights on other parts of the Indian subcontinent. And those archaeologists who did work on the Bengal delta were, until recently, mainly interested in more recent times. 11 12 A History of Bangladesh Spotting a shishu If you are lucky you may have a rare encounter in Bangladesh. As your boat glides through the muddy water of one of the country’s myriad rivers, a slick body suddenly shoots up from the depths, breaking the water for a moment. You will just have time to notice a narrow snout, a curved grey back and a broad tail – and it is gone again below the murky surface. Congratulations: you have met your first shishu. What is a shishu? It is a freshwater dolphin that is indigenous in the Ganges and Brahmaputra river systems. The creature is known officially as the Ganges River dolphin (Platanista gangetica gangetica; Plate 2.1) and in Bangladesh as shishu or shushuk (śiśu; śuśuk). A powerful swimmer up to 2.5 metres in length, it eats fish and shrimps. It forages by swimming on one side, its flipper trailing the river bed and its long snout stirring the muddy bottom. Shishu have very poor eyesight. They navigate by emitting sounds and mapping their environment by the echoes that travel back through the water. Dolphins used to be abundant. In 1781 a famous biologist of Bengal, William Roxburgh, reported that they ‘are found in great numbers in the Ganges [and] seem to delight most in the slow moving labyrinth of rivers and creeks which intersect the delta of that river to the south and east of Calcutta’. Over the years, their numbers have dwindled. Today there may be several thousands left (including those found in India and Nepal) and their survival Plate 2.1. An early portrait of the shishu.  Jungle, fields, cities and states 13 is now threatened. Dams and embankments separate breeding populations and impede seasonal migration. Dredging and river development degrade their habitat and water pollution shortens their lives. Many shishu drown when they get entangled in fishing nets – being mammals they need to come to the water surface to breathe air. Protection methods are only slowly being put in place. The prehistoric discoveries that have been made so far are almost exclusively from higher terrain surrounding the floodplains. Today the eastern hills of Bangladesh and the western plateaux (now in West Bengal, India) give the best clues to the early inhabitants of the region. Here stone, pebbles and petrified wood (fossilwood) were available. Fossilwood industries producing hand axes, blades and scrapers have been found in Lalmai, a small range of hills in Comilla district, Sitakund (Chittagong district) and Chaklapunji (Sylhet district). Archaeologists have linked these with similar tools from West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa (India) and the Irrawaddy delta (Burma). The makers of these early tools may have survived by hunting animals and gathering plants. In Jaintiapur in north- eastern Bangladesh huge stones (menhirs and dolmens) were erected, some of them thought to be prehistoric; such stones have been found in larger numbers in the adjoining hills of India.2 Cultivation of plants and domestication of animals occurred well before 2. Outline 1,500 bce. The earliest evidence of settled agricultural communities comes some of the common from West Bengal. Here sites have yielded stone and bone tools, pottery vocabularies with geometric designs, iron agricultural implements, domesticated rice associated with food habit and the bones of domesticated animals such as goats, cattle and buffaloes. of the people On the basis of these findings it seems likely that the subsistence base for of Bengal? people living on the poorer plateau soils was a combination of agriculture, animal husbandry and hunting, but that those living on the more fertile alluvial soils of the delta depended heavily on agriculture and fishing. In this zone a crucial shift occurred when agriculture evolved from shifting cultivation to irrigated rice cultivation on permanent fields. This type of agriculture became so productive that populations expanded, settlements grew and various crafts flourished. Ever since, rice has shaped the history of Bangladesh. The assured production of irrigated rice became the founda- tion for all societies and states in the delta down to the present. Producing rice became the inhabitants’ main occupation and rice was their staple food. The miracle of sustained rice cultivation over millennia is perhaps the greatest feat of Bangladesh history. 14 A History of Bangladesh Ka rat oy a Paharpur Br Jaintiapur ah ma Lakhnauti pu (Gaur) Mahasthan tra (Pundra) na Chaklapunji gh Ganges Me Wari-Bateshwar Mainamati Lalmai Chandra- Sitakund ketugarh Tamra- lipti 0 km 100 Bay of Bengal Map 2.1. Ancient sites. River courses are approximate. Note that the main channels of the Ganges and Brahmaputra differ from their current channels. Originally a swamp plant, rice is extremely well suited to the ecology of Bangladesh, where it is known as dhan (dhān ¼ paddy) when on the field or unhusked, chaul (cāul or cāl) when husked and bhat (bhāt) when boiled. There are many different words to describe rice in other forms: parboiled, flattened, ground or puffed. Generations of cultivators selected and adapted rice to suit their needs, especially with regard to resistance to disease, growing season and taste. In this way, they developed thousands of varieties (cultivars) to suit a multitude of local agro-ecological conditions.3 In the deltaic environment special cultivars  Jungle, fields, cities and states 15 were developed for different levels of flooding. Perhaps the most unusual is ‘floating rice’ (jalidhān), grown on low-lying land. With the onset of flooding these plants elongate with astonishing rapidity till their stems reach a length of 5–6 metres. This allows them to survive by floating in very deep water. Early on a pattern of land use developed in which the highest delta lands were reserved for homesteads and orchards (mango, jackfruit, coconut and betel nut). Slightly lower grounds were used to grow rice seedlings and vegetables, and middling and low lands took rice. On middling lands there were usually two rice crops: spring rice (āuś, March to August), followed by autumn rice (āman, June to December). On low lands with annual flooding the main crop was autumn rice followed by winter rice (boro, February to April). The countryside became dotted with clumps of homesteads built around man-made ponds (pukur) that were used for drinking-water, washing and fish-breeding. Over time, cropping patterns would change as new crops arrived from other parts of the world (such as potatoes, tomatoes, chillies and tobacco from the Americas) and as some crops became commercially important (indigo, sugarcane, jute). the emergence of urban life The success of rice-based deltaic agriculture provided the basis for sed- 3. Discuss the entary lifestyles, which, by about the fifth century bce, led to urban emergence of Urban life with centres, long-distance maritime trade and Bengal’s first sizeable states. At proper Wari-Bateshwar (Narsingdi) in eastern Bangladesh archaeologists have evidences. begun to excavate an important port city that traded with south-east Asia and the Roman world. So far they have discovered a fortified citadel, silver punch-marked coins, many iron and pottery artefacts and a road made of potsherds and crushed bricks. These discoveries indicate that Wari-Bateshwar was a major administrative centre on the banks of the Brahmaputra river (which has since moved far away) and that it boasted iron-smelting as well as semi-precious-stone bead industries. There is abundant evidence here of the use of clay, a locally available material. In an environment with very little stone, walls were made of clay or bricks and the art of pottery was important.4 Artists and artisans in Bangladesh have used clay ever since to express their imagination, most significantly in the form of terracotta (burnt clay).5 It is the terracotta work of early artists that provides us with the liveliest information about everyday life in Bangladesh down the ages (Plate 2.2). 16 A History of Bangladesh Plate 2.2. Harvesting. Fragment of a terracotta plaque, Chandraketugarh, c. first century b c e.6 By the third century bce complex urban centres were well established in the Bengal floodplains, for example Tamralipti (now Tamluk) in the south-west, Mahasthan in the north and Mainamati in the east. The earliest written record in Bangladesh is an inscription on a piece of stone that was discovered at Mahasthan in the district of Bogra. It shows that this city (then known as Pudanagala or Pundranagara) was an important urban centre when the Maurya empire dominated North India. It has been suggested that Mahasthan may have been a provincial capital of that empire. The inscription is in Prakrit, a language from which the Bengali language would develop in the tenth century ce, and it appears to be an order to fill up a storehouse with rice, oil, trees and coins against any  Jungle, fields, cities and states 17 Plate 2.3. The Mahasthan Brahmi Inscription, third century b c e. emergency caused by water, fire or a devastation of the crops by parrots. The text is in the Brahmi script and hence this important discovery is known as the Mahasthan Brahmi Inscription (See Plate 2.3). Mahasthan (or Mahasthangarh) was inhabited before this period and has been continuously inhabited ever since. So far eighteen building levels have been discovered in this large site enclosed by 6-metre-high rampart walls. Early terracotta plaques demonstrate the use of clay as a sophisticated expression of urban culture. The best known are magnificent plaques from an area in the south-western delta that archaeologists refer to as Chandraketugarh, now just across Bangladesh’s western border with India (plate 2.4).7 These plaques show deities and power holders, copu- lating couples, scenes of nature and impressions of everyday life. Who were the inhabitants of these early villages and towns of the Bengal 4. What delta? The various communities of cultivators, fishing and craft persons, linguistic history of religious specialists, traders and rulers certainly were not Bengalis in the Bangladesh modern sense. Place-names in Bangladesh, as well as words in various reveals about dialects of the Bengali language, suggest that most people spoke languages the life of Bengal? belonging to entirely different language families: Tibeto-Burman, Austro- Asiatic and Dravidian.8 Languages of the Indo-European family (to which Bengali belongs) began to spread only from about the fourth century bce, possibly as languages of rule. Speakers of these languages referred to the languages they encountered in Bengal as ‘vile’ (āsura).9 In modern Bengali 18 A History of Bangladesh Plate 2.4. ‘Royal family.’ Terracotta plaque, Chandraketugarh, c. first century b c e. many common words relating to water, land, nature, agriculture, fishing and settlement are thought to derive from these earlier languages, for instance low land (bil), high land (d āṅgā), open land (kholā), mud-made _ (kā˜cā), waterhole (d obā), homestead (bhit ā), village (pat t i), plough (lāṅgal, _ _ __ hāl), fishing net (jāl) and forest (jaṅgal). Today these older language families are still represented in Bangladesh but in terms of numbers of speakers they have been dwarfed by Bengali. Among the Tibeto-Burman languages are Khasi, Garo (Abeng), Koch, Arakanese (Rahkain), Mru and Marma; among the Austro-Asiatic languages are Santal, Munda and Malo; the Dravidian languages are represented by Kurukh (Oraon).  Jungle, fields, cities and states 19 The linguistic history of Bangladesh explains why archaeologists have long avoided the prehistoric period. Our understanding of South Asian archaeology is intimately related to the extensive early literature in Indo- European languages, notably Sanskrit and Prakrit. Writers in these lan- guages were from more western parts of the Ganges valley and they had little knowledge of the area now covered by Bangladesh. In the most ancient epics the Bengal delta appears as a distant land of barbarians, beyond the pale of Sanskritic culture, and anyone returning from there had to undergo expiatory rites. Over time writers in Sanskrit revised their opinion somewhat. As their centres of cultural production shifted east- wards from the upper to the middle Ganges delta, they became more knowledgeable about western Bengal, which they still saw as inhabited by rude peoples but nevertheless an important area for conquest, plunder and tribute. Eastern Bengal would remain largely unknown to them for much longer. Getting to know this region was a slow process. By the seventh century – perhaps a thousand years after they had reached the western edge of the delta – they described Sylhet in eastern Bengal as ‘outside the pale of human habitation, where there is no distinction between natural and artificial, infested with wild animals and poisonous reptiles, and covered with forest out-growths’.10 In fact, Sanskritic 5. Briefly learning may not have begun to spread widely in Bengal till towards the discuss about the influence end of the eleventh century.11 of Sanskrit on To Sanskrit writers, Bengal was not a clearly defined region. They had Bangla a range of designations for areas and groups in what we now know as Language. Bengal, and these vary between texts. Today scholars are often not quite sure where these areas and groups were located. Rarh (Rārha) is a term for a region in western Bengal and Pundra (Pund ra), Varendri ˙ (Varendri) ˙ _ and Gaur (Gaura) for regions in northern Bengal. Vanga (Vaṅga) is thought to have ˙been located in central Bengal and Samatata (Samatat a) _ and Harikela (Harikela) in eastern Bengal. Sanskrit texts also speak of Pundra, Vanga and Rarh as peoples who occupied areas now probably in Bangladesh.12 The rich literature in Sanskrit has focused scholarly attention on the regions that were best known to writers in that language. Bengal was clearly not one of these regions, and since there are no written records of Bengal before the arrival of speakers of Indo-European languages, archaeologists of early South Asia have tended to neglect Bengal. Archaeologists of Bengal, on the other hand, have often been motivated by a desire to show that Bengal was not an uncivilised place. For this reason they have concentrated on monumental relics of proven ‘high culture’ at later times. 20 A History of Bangladesh But to understand early Bangladesh we need more than the ‘Sanskritic gaze’ or a self-congratulatory search for past glory. From the fifth century bce, when Sanskritic culture first reached the Bengal delta from the west, Bangladesh has been a frontier zone where Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic worldviews met, clashed and intermingled. This interaction has been the very stuff of Bangladesh history, and to tell the story from only one side of the divide is to diminish it. The frontier was cultural as much as it was territorial, influencing the identities of communities and individuals all over the Bengal delta. Since Sanskritic culture first made itself felt here, it moved slowly eastwards during the first millennium ce, being altered in the process by numerous non-Sanskritic elements. And the frontier never disappeared. Even today the clash between Sanskritic and non-Sanskritic can be observed in Bangladesh’s culture, and even territorially in eastern Bangladesh. New approaches to archaeology can be very important in filling in this picture of Bangladesh as a meeting ground of Sanskritic and non- Sanskritic worldviews over millennia. Fortunately, these new approaches are now being introduced in Bangladesh for the first time. Scientific excavations with detailed attention to archaeological strata and to everyday life in the early Bengal delta are already showing that there is still a world to discover here.13 the rise and fall of states The Bengal delta’s productive agriculture made it possible for socially 6. Discuss stratified and economically diversified societies to develop from early briefly about the rise and times. As we have seen, the archaeological record indicates that urban fall of Gaur. centres came up as early as the fifth century bce. During the following How it indicates the centuries large towns would develop along major rivers rather than on the rise and fall of exposed sea coast. The fortunes of these towns were linked to the whims cities in of the deltaic rivers: whenever a river moved course and the port silted up, Bengal? the town would decline. An early victim was Tamralipti, one of India’s largest ports and possibly ‘the chief trade emporium of the wide area between China and Alexandria’ (Map 2.1).14 Famous for a thousand years, its fortunes reversed in the eighth century ce as the delta expanded southwards and its port silted up. Today it is a land-bound district town known as Tamluk. The case of Lakhnauti-Gaur also demonstrates the vicissitudes of riverside urbanisation. It is not known when this busy port in the north- western delta at the junction of three channels of the Ganges was  Jungle, fields, cities and states 21 established but it clearly went through many cycles of development and decay (Map 2.1). In the twelfth century ce it was the capital of the Sena dynasty and the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battutah visited it 150 years later. In the fifteenth century it was one of the largest cities of South Asia. In 1521 a Portuguese visitor found that the streets were broad and straight and yet so thronged with traffic and people that it was difficult to move. The houses were one-storyed and had courtyards and gardens. Many had walls and floors covered with ornamental blue and gold tiles that may have been Chinese imports. The city is thought to have had a population of 200,000 (although one estimate at the time put it at 1.2 million). Like all riverside cities in the history of Bangladesh, Gaur felt the power of the river to give prosperity or to take it away. During its heyday (early 1200s to 1575), Gaur was settled and abandoned several times, depending on the Ganges moving westwards and back again. When the river moved away, it was not only an economic disaster (even though feeder canals were made, ships could no longer reach the port), but also a health disaster, as swamps formed and malaria and other fevers broke out. In 1575 a severe epidemic sounded the death-knell for Gaur: the river had moved away once more and this time a combination of political instability and problems in trade with South-east Asia sealed its fate. Today, the river flows about fifteen kilometres from Gaur’s ruins, which stretch over an area thirty by six kilometres and include monumental gates, fortifications, palaces, mosques, bridges, causeways, canals, loading platforms and underground sewers (Plate 2.5).15 Part of the ruins lie in Bangladesh and part across the border in India. The rise and fall of Gaur was just one episode in the delta’s long history of flexible urbanisation. Like the rivers and the villages of deltaic Bengal, centres of urban power and commerce have always been remarkably mobile and so have their inhabitants and the trade routes they served. The same holds for the political organisations and states ruling the delta. The early history of state formation in the Bengal delta can be described 7. The early history of state as a continual emergence and decline of local and regional polities that only formation in occasionally became integrated into large realms. It is often unclear how the Bengal firm such integration was, how it affected local power holders and what it delta can be described meant for the population at large. Many scholars suggest that the Maurya as a continual (c. 324–187 bce) and Gupta (c. 320–570 ce) spheres of influence covered emergence most of the delta. The evidence is fragmentary, however, and it would and decline of local and appear that the western delta (now West Bengal (India) and western regional Bangladesh) was more often part of large states than the eastern delta. This polities that only pattern of states in the Indian heartland extending their influence eastwards occasionally became integrated into large realms. Explain. 22 A History of Bangladesh Plate 2.5. Ruins of the northern gateway to the fort of Gaur, constructed around 1425 c e. was only occasionally reversed when a regional state in Bengal expanded to the west. This may have happened in the seventh century ce, when Sasanka, the ruler of the north Bengal state of Gaur (Gauda), ventured into north India, and the Pala rulers repeated it with more success in the eighth and ninth centuries. The eastern delta and the southern region of Chittagong saw a succession of local states and episodic integration into states whose centres of power lay in Tripura, to the east, and Arakan, to the south. Most of the time, however, Bengal polities appear to have been rela- tively small and transient, a situation that an early source aptly describes as ‘fish-eat-fish’ (mātsyanyāyam). In such periods of political fragmenta- tion, ‘every Ksatriya, grandee, Brahman and merchant was a king in his own house... and there was no king ruling over the country.’16 The actual power of the rulers over the agricultural population is difficult to assess. According to Sheena Panja, the impressive monuments that rulers such as the Pala dynasty constructed in the floodplains were actually signs of weakness. These towering brick constructions (for example Paharpur, c. 800 ce, see Plate 2.6) were attempts to inscribe the  Jungle, fields, cities and states 23 Plate 2.6. The ruins of Paharpur in north-western Bangladesh. permanence of their authority in the shifting landscape of the floodplain, but the local population, whose lives were attuned to impermanence, probably set little store by them.17 Fragmented though the archaeological record for the Bengal delta is, it shows a pattern that runs through the entire history of the region: the delta’s socio-economic and political development rarely conformed to an all-South-Asia or even a north-Indian model. Although there were all kinds of economic and political links between the delta and surrounding areas, the region followed its own course, and attempts to integrate it into larger political entities were often unsuccessful.