Outsiders Meddling in India

[Daeres]

Is it possible for a foreign force to manipulate the realities/social differences between the Castes of India as they existed around 200BC to their advantage? In the same way that the Near Eastern Empires actively courted social elites in various cultures/states.

If this has known to have occured in India at other times near to this period, or the Caste system in India was not in a state that would have allowed such manipulation, then please enlighten me.

 

[Flocculencio]

Is it possible for a foreign force to manipulate the realities/social differences between the Castes of India as they existed around 200BC to their advantage? In the same way that the Near Eastern Empires actively courted social elites in various cultures/states.

If this has known to have occured in India at other times near to this period, or the Caste system in India was not in a state that would have allowed such manipulation, then please enlighten me.

The trouble is that the Caste system isn't a hard and fast thing- it was always quite fluid and different castes had different levels of influence in different regions (e.g. in South India there were hardly any brahmins historically).

The neat four level caste system Westerners tend to know about is actually a rather artificial construct bearing little resemblance to reality on the ground.

Furthermore, if you're talking about 200 BC, this is a period when Buddhism is at the height of it's dominance in India-we know very little about the historical status of the caste system in India but we know even less about how it functioned during the Buddhist period.

 

[Daeres]

That is all useful and interesting to me in itself, i've found that much of studying history is about learning what we have no information about!

Do we have any idea of the dynamic between the authorities in Hinduism in this period and Buddhists?

 

[The Ubbergeek]

Maybe persian influences...

That make me think, is anything like the early caste system(s) was in (very) ancient Persia?

 

[Flocculencio]

That is all useful and interesting to me in itself, i've found that much of studying history is about learning what we have no information about!

Do we have any idea of the dynamic between the authorities in Hinduism in this period and Buddhists?

At this period the authorities were mostly Buddhist- this was the time period when the Mauryas were dominant and Ashoka made Buddhism the official religion.

This, of course, probably didn't really affect people on the ground- your average villager would still be going to his village shrine as he always has done. Buddhist monks would have been patronized by the wealthy and so forth.

This was the start of Buddhism's decline in India, however, and by the 1st century CE it'd mostly vanished- and interesting sidenote of history is that some of the original converts to Christianity inthe Southn Indian region of Kerala (which was one of the last areas where Buddhism lingered) may have been drawn from the dwindling number of Buddhists as even today their descendants (like me) still use some Buddhist terms in their Christian liturgy (e.g. Church Councils are called Sangha, just like Buddhist theological councils).

This is the trouble with asking generalised questions about India- the situation really varied from place to place. Western sources tend to draw on information from Bengal and the Indo-Gangetic valley simply because those were the areas with the strongest British presence. British civil servants tended to ask the local Brahmins for information and thus the four step caste system familiar to Westerners reflected a purely North-Central Indian reality filtered through a Brahminical perspective. Unfortunately British administrators then used this information as the basis for many of their policies throughout India as a whole thus resulting in the situation we have today where this notional caste system has been imposed in places where it was never a reality- e.g. in Tamil Nadu there were hardly any caste groups recognised as Brahmins and those that were often tended to be cooks rather than priestly leaders because food cooked by them was acceptable to all the other castes.

Caste is very generalised and the more important social unit tended to be the jati- sort of like a sub-caste. There could be hordes of these and intermarriage was possible to a certain extent.

If you want a well-written layman's overview of caste in India try Vishnu's Crowded Temple

 

[Daeres]

So what do you think caused the decline of Buddhism in India? The end of the Mauryan state? Resentment?

Also, I know that quite a lot of the Hellenic population in North Western India ended up either becoming full Buddhist or forming a Greco-Buddhist fusion religion, what happened to them? After the 5th Century AD or so, Greek speaking populations in India seem to have disappeared.

 

[Flocculencio]

So what do you think caused the decline of Buddhism in India? The end of the Mauryan state? Resentment?

Also, I know that quite a lot of the Hellenic population in North Western India ended up either becoming full Buddhist or forming a Greco-Buddhist fusion religion, what happened to them? After the 5th Century AD or so, Greek speaking populations in India seem to have disappeared.

Quite frankly no one's sure. The decline of the Maurya may have been one issue but they never dominated the whole of India so its not the only issue. As far as I can tell, Hinduism just managed to make a philosophical and theological adjustment that allowed it to make a comeback.

One thing about Hinduism is that its not a monolithic religion and this allows it a lot of resilience and flexibility. In the end Hinduisms strength is that it goes beyond religion- Indians of any religion are and always have been deeply affected by at least some aspects of Hindu thought.

As for the Greco-Buddhists, you have to remember that they were never really very relevant within India. From an Indian perspective they were Indianised foreigners on the very edge of Indian civilisation.

 

[Daeres]

To what part of India were they irrelevant though? From the point of view of the Dravidian speakers, certainly, but saying they were irrelevant to the whole of India is like saying that the Mongols were irrelevant to Europe; to the majority of Europe they were, but you'd hardly say that the states it did affect were just 'frontier' states, Hungary certainly wasn't.

The problem is that implying that Greek-speakers had a huge affect on the development of India is also a bit far-fetch'd and would make me sound very hellenocentric, which i'm not. But I would point out that several of the major urban centres of the Punjab region were Greco-Macedonian in both origin and population, that whilst the Greco-Bactrian state was not exactly a world Empire it had sufficient resources to exert control over a large portion of Northern India for a time to form the Indo-Greek Kingdom, and that the importance of Greek speakers in the region was enough that the Kushan Empire used Greek script.

There's other stuff to do with Greeks potentially being the reason that there are statues of the Buddha in the first place and contributing to the development of Mahayana Buddhism, but those are much more speculative and not something I would base my viewpoints on.

 

[maidros]

Is it possible for a foreign force to manipulate the realities/social differences between the Castes of India as they existed around 200BC to their advantage? In the same way that the Near Eastern Empires actively courted social elites in various cultures/states.

In 200 BC, there is very little stratified caste system. If you look at Indian history, almost every founder of a kingdom was a non-kshatriya (they became kshatriyas after becoming kings and inventing a fake lineage with some ancient kshatriya kings). Similarly, there is a lot of social mobility in early India, until around 1000AD. Social stratification began around 800-900 AD, and accentuated during the Muslim times. So - no, it is not possible for outsiders to manipulate along caste lines.

Also, Buddhism is still very prevalent at this period and IOTL Buddhism was very powerful until around 700-800 AD. Only Hindu revival around 700 AD sent Buddhism into a decline and even then, the Buddhists were the majority in Bengal (Palas), Sindh, and the north western Indian regions, apart from Kashmir. Buddhism died after the Islamic conquest, because the rich traders and kings who were funding the monasteries were replaced by Muslim ones and they had no interest in funding Buddhist monasteries.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

I wonder if the ethnic groups of india would turn to different religions in such eras and so change the portray... or more, at least. Reversing Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka's religfions, by example?

 

[CandyDragon]

in 200BC are there really any outsiders with the reach to meddle with India?

 

[The Ubbergeek]

in 200BC are there really any outsiders with the reach to meddle with India?

Only Persia and related peoples, maybe powers of Indochina, if anyone was developed enough back then..

 

[Flocculencio]

Only Persia and related peoples, maybe powers of Indochina, if anyone was developed enough back then..

Not major powers existed in Indochina at the time and Persia always had trouble projecting power into India because the Hindu Kush is a rather formidable barrier.

 

[The Ubbergeek]

Not major powers existed in Indochina at the time and Persia always had trouble projecting power into India because the Hindu Kush is a rather formidable barrier.

And way too early for Tibetans or such, and they would be limited to the north.

 

[Horizon]

e.g. in Tamil Nadu there were hardly any caste groups recognised as Brahmins and those that were often tended to be cooks rather than priestly leaders because food cooked by them was acceptable to all the other castes.

Agree with most of what you said, but this part is inaccurate

Even during the time of the cholas, the brahmins were the priestly caste, ofcourse they themselves were divided between shivas and vaishnavas and were often at odds with each other.