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Aryans & The Vedic Age
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India Travel Tourism > History
> Aryans and the Vedic Age
 sThe Aryans are said to have entered India through the
fabled Khyber pass, around 1500 BC. They intermingled with the local populace,
and assimilated themselves into the social framework. They adopted the settled
agricultural lifestyle of their predecessors, and established small agrarian
communities across the state of Punjab.
The Aryans are believed to have brought with them the horse, developed
the Sanskrit language and made significant inroads in to the religion
of the times. All three factors were to play a fundamental role in the
shaping of Indian culture. Cavalry warfare facilitated the rapid spread
of Aryan culture across North India, and allowed the emergence of large
empires.
Sanskrit is the basis and the unifying factor of the vast majority of
Indian languages. The religion, that took root during the Vedic era, with
its rich pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, and its storehouse of myths and
legends, became the foundation of the Hindu religion, arguably the single
most important common denominator of Indian culture.
The Aryans did not have a script, but they developed a rich tradition.
They composed the hymns of the four vedas, the great philosophic
poems that are at the heart of Hindu thought. As the Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath
Tagore expressed it, "The hymns are a poetic testament of a people's collective
reaction to the wonder and awe of existence....A people of vigorous and
unsophisticated imagination awakened at the very dawn of civilisation
to a sense of inexhaustible mystery that is implicit in life."
A settled lifestyle brought in its wake more complex forms of government
and social patterns. This period saw the evolution of the caste system,
and the emergence of kingdoms and republics. The events described in the
two great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are thought
to have occurred around this period. (1000 to 800 BC).
The Aryans were divided into tribes which had settled in different regions
of northwestern India. Tribal chiefmanship gradually became hereditary,
though the chief usually operated with the help of advice from either
a committee or the entire tribe. With work specialisation, the internal
division of the Aryan society developed along caste lines. Their social
framework was composed mainly of the following groups : the Brahmana
(priests), Kshatriya (warriors), Vaishya (agriculturists)
and Shudra (workers). It was, in the beginning, a division of occupations;
as such it was open and flexible. Much later, caste status and the corresponding
occupation came to depend on birth, and change from one caste or occupation
to another became far more difficult.
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