While we make this journey in time and place, we see a gradual evolution - in the unit of family, in ownership of land, in the relationship between a man and a woman, in the rights and liberties of a woman in the society, in rituals and religion. And that is the fascinating part of this book. I really enjoyed the first half of the book, where you see the fundamental building blocks of the society as we see it right now getting established. What i mean by this is how did the man-woman relationship work six to seven thousand years back, when we were nomadic people; did we have any rituals and what did they mean; was there a concept of family then; when we did start settling down around agriculture, what did the former nomads think about this new stuck-at-one-place way of life, so on and so forth. Underneath all these, it raises that fundamental question - are we fundamentally nomadic animals force fitting ourselves into agriculture, or does agriculture give us a chance to be much more than just primal nomads, foraging one meal at a time?
This was something new for me, it was a proper TIL moment. And it gave me a lot of think abut. I look forward to reading more about this stage of mankind, and i have one book in mind - The Origin of Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels.
The second half of the book doubles down on what i can broadly call the Vedic Religion. And i am lukewarm about this part of the book. Here, we see Rahul Sankrutnayan writing a lot with a communist flavour. Some of the key hypothesis proposed are that most of the literature written during the Vedic period or later during what is considered the golden period of Sanskrit In India was essentially a propaganda by the descendants of the Indo-European migrants, who were the warrior class people, to establish themselves as high class peoples in the Indian society and to keep them there. An interesting observation is how consumption of meat and alcohol was once part and parcel of the 'priestly' class lifestyle, and how its the polar opposite now. I can see the point. And i can see how it parallels very close to the current practices of making movies (which might even be considered classics) which suit the narrative of the political party in power).
But i dont know if i want to take these observations at face value. It feels like a complete disregard of all that came from the 'ruling class' in the Vedic period and beyond. I am sure these old texts capture well some fundamental questions we have been thinking about since forever, and they offer very useful perspectives on these questions. But there's also merit in the thought that the ruling/priestly class propaganda has surely found its way into these texts. To me it makes sense to look at these historical artefacts very critically, as its important to separate the essence from the propaganda. This is a very difficult thing to do, and the best thing to enable that is to support nuance over generalisations. More importantly, we shouldn't treat these texts as absolute golden words carved in stone. There is a trend, which is on the rise again nowadays, to treat the Vedic period and beyond as the golden period of Indian history, and often the narrative is to renew that golden period again. This book is a cure for that very attractive historical nostalgia, and hopefully a motivation to read history more critically.
As a side note, one of the important takeaways from this book was to get introduced to the various tribes (which might have manifested into kingdoms) in ancient India, each of which is a great tangent to go on. Here is a map i found useful to visualise these 'tribes'.
