Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
wastes of middle Asia from the green tropical floor of the subcontinent along the present
border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the descent from Afghanistan to the Indus
River, which runs lengthwise through the middle of Pakistan, is exceedingly gradual, so
that for millennia similar cultures occupied both the high plateaus and the lowland, riverine
plains, whether Harappan, Kushan, Turkic, Mughal, Indo-Persian, Indo-Islamic, or Push-
tun, to name but a few. And this is to say nothing of the alkaline deserts of Makran and
Baluchistan that unite Iran with the subcontinent; or the medieval sea traffic that united Ar-
abia with India by virtue of the predictable monsoon winds. “The frontier of Al-Hind,” as
South Asia scholar André Wink—echoing an Arab term—calls the whole region from east-
ern Iran to western India, dominated by Persianized Muslim populations, has throughout
history been very much a fluid cultural organism, so that defining state borders is inherently
problematic.
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The map of Harappan civilization, a complex network of centrally controlled chieftain-
cies in the late fourth to mid-second millennia
B.C
., is telling. According to the archaeolo-
gical remains, the two major cities were Moenjodaro and Harappa, both alongside the In-
dus in upper Sindh; so that the Indus, rather than a border differentiating the subcontinent
from Inner Asia, constituted the heart of a civilization in its own right. The outlines of the
Harappan world stretched from Baluchistan northeast up to Kashmir and then southeast
down almost to both Delhi and Mumbai, skirting the Thar Desert: that is, it nearly touched
present-day Iran and Afghanistan, covered much of Pakistan, and extended into both north-
western and western India. It was a complex geography of settlement that adhered to land-
scapes capable of supporting irrigation, even as it suggested how a vast subcontinent had
many natural subdivisions within it.
Aryans may have infiltrated from the Iranian plateau, and together with the subcontin-
ent's autochthonous inhabitants were part of a process that consolidated the political organ-
ization of the Gangetic plain in northern India around 1000
B.C
. This led to sets of monarch-
ies between the eighth and sixth centuries
B.C
., culminating with the Nanda Empire, which
in the fourth century
B.C
. stretched across northern India and the Gangetic plain from the
Punjab to Bengal. In 321
B.C
., Chandragupta Maurya dethroned Dhana Nanda and founded
the Mauryan Empire, which came to envelop much of the subcontinent, except for the deep
south, and thus for the first time in history encouraged the
idea
of India as a political entity
conforming with the geography of South Asia. Burton Stein suggests that the merging of
so many city-states and chieftaincies into a single coherent system was, in addition to the
“vigorous commerce” between them, partially inspired by the threat posed by Alexander
the Great, who was on the verge of conquering the Ganges River valley were it not for a
mutiny of his soldiers in 326
B.C
. Another factor aiding unity was the emergence of the
new, pan-subcontinental ideologies of Buddhism and Jainism that “captured the loyalty of
commercial peoples,” as Stein writes.
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