WHY THE OTHERS RULED INDIA AND WE DID NOT RULE OTHERS?

I had posed this question a month ago and the answer to that lies in biology, anthropology and geography more than history.

It all starts with putting life into four buckets – Bucket A is 4.5 billion years ago when earth came into existence. Bucket B is 1,50,000 years ago when Homo Sapiens evolved into their present form. Bucket C is 12000 years ago i.e when the Holocene Ice Age finished and what we see of present day life, species, people and races which survived and migrated to various continents. And Bucket D is 5000 years ago, i.e. what is known of recorded history through, edicts, artifacts, archaeological evidence, script, tombs etc. The attacks on nations, the concept of nation state, quest for power and supremacy by societies and nations came in much later, around 3000 years ago or so. Mind you the quest for survival is different from the quest of power. Though in some areas both power and survival intersect.

Thus, when we analyse the growth of nations and societies we must first analyse the Buckets A to C before we come to Bucket D. Buckets A and B tell us about the time, nature takes to grow, modify, alter and change things. It is phenomenally slow. 0.15 million years/4500million years = human beings have been there for just .03% of the time of earth’s existence. Or in other words, it has taken us 99.97% of the time of earth as a planet to make us what we are today. We are still animals and our brains are governed by the animal instinct. Humans have to make a really conscious effort to forget that we are no more threatened by wild animals, nature or climate to survive. We need not make instant decisions to protect us from wild animals. We are safe and sound.

Having said that, the main reason for progress of certain societies was availability of time. Because an empty mind is a devil’s workshop — the workshop experiments and innovates and those innovations, discoveries and inventions helped in progress of science, agriculture and quality of life.

Look at an Indian woman, when I say Indian woman, I talk of the majority and not the minority which reads this blog or follows the digital media. An Indian woman has no surplus time to herself. She wakes up in the morning, prepares tea, does her ablutions, gets kids ready for school, prepares a breakfast for all, sends her husband off to work. Now, she cleans the house, cleans the utensils, fills up water, washes the clothes, prepares lunch, sends that lunch for her husband to feed on, has her lunch, takes a quick nap, if possible, stitches a shirt/knits a sweater, pickles some vegetables or does household chores like ironing the clothes, makes an evening tea for all, prepares dinner, washes utensils and sleeps. Where is the free time??? So there is no time to innovate and develop. The Indian Man is no better and this has been the story for larger part of last 12000 years. In between, sporadically we created free time and we progressed. Whenever, India had a scientific temperament, focus on discoveries, inventions and promotion of new treatise, India was powerful and progressive because we generated free time to improve our lot. Whenever, we had a vacuum, we degenerated as a society.

Remember lazy commanders are the best commanders, why so? Because they have time to think out of the box, they think laterally and radically and they are the ones who will get you a disproportionate victory or defeat. Either way, they experiment and that experimentation is a first step towards evolution.

Now let us take it logically and I would work backwards from present day to build a case. Something like the strange life of Benjamin Button.

Who rules the world today? It is the US of A. Why does she rule the world? Because she has a big economy and a strong currency – US Dollar would be convertible probably even on moon. She has a strong technological base. And it has germs to wipe out and kill a nation or a group of people , some may say even the entire human race. That is all what is required for ruling others. As simple as that.

In 1945, USA demonstrated the power of Nuclear Technology possessed by it. It became the game changer and put an end to the aspirations of entire Europe which had ruled upon the world since 15^th century AD or the age of discovery. 450 years of European power and colonization undone by a “Little Boy’ and a “Fat Man”. That’s what a game changer is, in terms of domination.

Cut to India, our period of domination started with Mohammed Ghori in 1192 AD. Apart from the treachery of Jaichand, the Arab horses and cavalry of Ghori defeated Prithviraj and put the yoke of foreign rule on India. The slave dynasty maintained status quo. The next foreign rule happened with the arrival of Babur. in 1526 AD. Babar had 12,000 soldiers, Ibrahim Lodi had 100,000. Lodi had numerical superiority. Babar had artillery. Ali Quli and gun powder imported from Persia and Turkey which was alien technology for the Indians, became a game changer. Indian elephants, though battle innoculated were not used to the guns and sound of gunpowder.

How did the British rule us from 1757 AD, post Plassey. The game changer was a rifle, you could kill people from a distance at a faster rate with more accuracy, Artillery of Moghuls was an area weapon. The rifle was a point weapon. One bullet, one man. Faster the rifle could be fired, faster one could kill people. Indian kings and maharajahs had infantry or foot soldiers who fought with swords and bows and arrows.

The Westphalian model of a nation-state comes up in 1500 AD approximately the time Babar attacked India. Before that, it was societies which were evolved, went on to dominate the areas. Till then, India was comparable to the best in the world. And that was because we had technology and leadership.

Technology and leadership do not develop or evolve in vacuum. They need some people to do a specialized work and others to be able to support them or in simple terms , feed those involved in R&D or leadership. Leaders have never worked for their living, the world over. Similarly in the past, the Greeks and the Romans had the best thinkers, philosophers and leaders. Because they had a society which created a food surplus for some people to simply think, invent, experiment and develop treatises and principles for morality, ethics, life, happiness, laws for civic society etc.

Now, let us go back 4000 years ago. Indus Valley Civilization(IVC) — Indian subcontinent had everything. A food surplus, a technologically advanced people who could design cities, who had granaries (first indication of a food surplus society). They were trading with Mesopotamia across the seas, so had ship building techniques, too. Then came the Aryans or Indo Bactrians from Central Europe, a few hundred years after the Decline and End of the IVC.

How did the societies of Eurasia create a food surplus? Because they grew crops which when you sowed one seed gave 1000 grains and it did not perish immediately — it was storable for some time. That is when, those societies moved from being hunter gatherer to settlements. Hunter gatherers had a major disadvantage. The crops gathered from the jungle were perishable – Banana, Guavas, Berries etc. And the meat hunted was also to be consumed as quickly as possible. All of them start rotting without refrigeration within 96 hours. Thus, the hunter gatherer had to inevitably go for hunt/gather in a 72 hour to 96 hour cycle repetitively. There was no respite. It was survival.

Then came the discovery of certain seeds like wheat, rice, barley, corn. They happened accidentally through discovery in the wild, over centuries the plants also genetically mutated and around 12000 years ago in the area of the Fertile Crescent or the Levant, the first societies became settled and agrarian so to speak. They realized they had to just sow one seed to reap 100 of the same type. Also they were edible, nutritious and the surplus could be stored for a few months, if kept dry. This was the start point of free time. Thereafter, developed specialization in societies – some older and powerful people from experience started instructing people, they were the leaders. Some others started working on tools and societies realized that it was far better to leave one person to only improve tools and take from him and in turn feed him rather than all of the people making their own tools, sharpening them and then hunting with them. The armies, thus, are a by product of the surplus of the society in which they live. Small surplus = small army, is a simple equation to remember.

Some others, with a free time between crops discovered fire, developed a wheel, learnt about limestone and cement and mortar, some others discovered metals and used fire to convert the ore to make better weapons…… and the list carries on. Steel became another game changer. It was hard, it could be used to make weapons and agri-implements. And societies which mastered this technology became superior.

Domestication of wild animals was another major time saver for transportation and food. Societies found that rather than hunt for meat everyday, couldn’t they find a ready source of meat in their backyards?? And thus, pigs, sheep, goats, cows, horses and hen were domesticated. Dogs and cats came later. And over years their genes mutated from being wild to being docile. People of Central Asian origin tamed the horse and used it as a mode of transport. It was very fast. Thus, on a battlefield it could maneuver and a mounted soldier could kill more people than a foot soldier could in a man to man combat. Watch “Troy” to understand what I am implying. The man to man armies suddenly found horse mounted soldiers – known as cavalry, to be a disproportionate weapon, till the tanks came in the 20^th century on the battle field.

Thus, far we see that societies which had a food surplus, had better weapons, had better leadership, had more evolved societies and had technology as a result of the surplus. The technology led to better weapons and faster movement. This enabled their armies to move in quickly, kill quickly and plunder resources quickly.

The societies which domesticated and interacted more with animal species, also over time interacted more with various diseases borne by animal vectors. Therefore, they became stronger and sturdier. They could spread a disease like small pox to others and stay immune themselves. And the virus/bacteria could kill millions in a short span of time. What a method to dominate. This was not by design but by default. And the three important elements – Guns, Germs and Steel became elements of domination. Whosoever could kill more people from a distance without affecting himself became powerful. Whosoever could eat without worrying for a rainy day, became powerful. And whosoever could kill others through biology or germs without killing himself, became powerful.

Look at USA today, it has all these three elements. Capacity to kill others from remote – nuclear and weapon power. It has a surplus. It outsources low end low tech jobs for India and China to do. Its own citizens only concentrate on what Talib says – “non scalable jobs” i.e. jobs giving disproportionate income or results compared to the effort put in. They are interested in discovering or inventing a drug more than manufacturing it. Indias of the world can manufacture it at a cheaper price for them. They are interested in developing Google, Microsoft, B2 bombers and Internet. USA owns the patent, the invention or the discovery and outsources only the manufacturing. Coke and Pepsi are a very basic example. The formula is with the Americans, they make more money than the bottler.

My start point was India. So I come back to India. Till 1000 AD India had everything. In the last 1000 years, we lost the plot. We became complacent as a society because we were comfortable. The Industrial revolution of the 16^th century bypassed us. We had no guns, no artillery and did not have better technology. The chink in our armour was identified by the invaders and the Moghul artillery and gun powder was replaced by the British and French rifle in the 17^th century and thus, we could never rule anyone.

That India was a self sufficient nation added to our problems. We were riddled with a superiority complex, happy in what we had, happy in the tag of India was a peace loving nation but to our horror we realized pretty late that by instinct—we cannot undo the first three buckets of evolution — we are still governed by animal instinct and as we know the law of the jungle still applies— Only the Paranoid Survive, said Andrew Grove of Intel and I have added an addendum to it– only the Survivors Rule.