Rise of Urban Centres; Trade routes; Economic Growth

Rise of Urban Centres, Trade Routes, and Economic Growth in Early Historic India

The sixth century BCE witnessed the beginning of India’s second urbanization, as distinct urban settlements — with a recognisable urban morphology and architecture — emerged amid the villages and forests of the Gangetic plain. This was a profound break from the preceding centuries: the Harappan towns had finally disappeared by around 1500 BCE, and for roughly a thousand years thereafter, India saw no comparable urban centres. With the reappearance of towns in the middle Gangetic basin in the sixth century BCE, cities once again became centres of political control, craft production, and trade — sometimes combining all three functions at once. Understanding the preconditions, institutions, and trade networks that drove this rise of urban centres is central to the economic and social history of the Mahajanapada period, making it a key theme for UPSC History Optional aspirants.

Background: The Second Urbanization

• The foundations of this second phase of urbanization in the north (the first being the Harappan urbanization) were laid in earlier centuries through the establishment of a firm agricultural base that ensured sustained food surpluses; settlements consequently grew in population, number, and size.
• Increasing craft specialisation, trade, and the beginning of the use of money led to a higher degree of social complexity, while political leadership lent an important element of central direction and control.
• The picture of material life in north India — especially in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar — can be reconstructed from the Pali texts and the Sanskrit Sutra literature, read in combination with archaeological evidence.

Terms for Urban Settlements in the Pali Canon

• The Pali canon refers to different kinds of urban settlements, each with a distinct connotation:
  • Pura meant a town or city, often associated with fortifications.
  • Nagara referred to a fortress or town.
  • Nigama referred to a market town — midway between a gama (village) and a nagara in size and social complexity — and was frequently associated with commercial activities.
  • Rajadhani meant a capital city.
  • Nagaraka denoted a small town, while mahanagara denoted a big city; Champa, Rajagriha, Shravasti, Saketa, Kaushambi, and Varanasi were counted among the mahanagaras.
• The texts often describe the walls, gates, and watchtowers of cities, along with the hustle and bustle of urban life.

Archaeological Correlates: The NBPW Phase

• Archaeologically, the sixth century BCE marks the beginning of the Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW) phase, which also saw the beginnings of metallic money, wider use of iron implements, and the use of burnt bricks and ringwells.
• These urban centres saw a greater concentration of people than the villages, along with more alternative sources of livelihood and a greater availability of products for use.
  • The exchange centres and local markets — larger than the gramas (villages) — were known as nigama and pulabhedana; the towns themselves were called nagaras, and the larger towns, mahanagaras.
• Many towns mentioned in the Pali and Sanskrit texts — such as Kausambi, Sravasti, Ayodhya, Kapilavastu, Varanasi, Vaishali, Rajgir, Pataliputra, and Champa — have been excavated, and in each case, signs of habitation and mud structures belonging to the advent of the NBPW phase, or its middle stage, have been found.

Preconditions for Urbanization and State Formation

(1) Surplus Production

• Both state formation and urbanization depended heavily on a surplus of agricultural production. The landholdings of town-dwellers were too small for them to produce their own food, so they had to depend on the village folk for their supply.
• It was only in the sixth century BCE that the people of the Gangetic valley learnt to produce two or three crops a year, having begun wet rice cultivation, which made it possible to produce more than any other crop; they gradually began producing beyond their own requirements, and surplus production in agriculture began.
• This iron-ploughshare-based food-producing economy provided subsistence not only to direct producers but to many others besides.
  • Before large-scale settlement in the Gangetic valley, most of the area was covered with forest or marsh; clearing it for agriculture required labour, and controlling and directing such labour created the felt need for an administrative system.

Wet Paddy Cultivation and Transplantation

• Rice was the staple cereal produced in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in this period, and various types of paddy and paddy fields are described in the Pali texts.
• The term for transplantation appears in the Pali and Sanskrit texts of the period, suggesting that large-scale paddy transplantation began in the age of the Buddha; this technique of wet paddy production enormously increased the yield, with returns per acre substantially higher than those of wheat or millet under traditional agriculture.
• The repeated mention of varieties of rice and paddy fields in the early Buddhist texts indicates a decisive shift to wet rice cultivation.
• Greater food production sustained an increased population — reflected in a rise in the number of settlements in the archaeological record of this period — and created the possibility for the emergence of social groups not engaged in food production.

(2) Control of Surplus

• The production of surplus in a society had to be collected by a group, which would later distribute it; this collecting or controlling group was necessarily small, and its collection, control, and distribution of the surplus had to be acceptable to the larger society.
• In the Gangetic valley of the sixth century BCE, precisely this happened: the small group that controlled the surplus agricultural products became powerful and claimed authority and special status in society.
• At the same time, another section of the population could take up professional crafts as a livelihood, since they knew that even without producing their own rice, pulses, or vegetables, they could exchange their craft products in the market; like the farmers, however, these craftsmen also had to rely on a group that collected and distributed the craft products and organised the supply of raw materials for the industry.
• This arrangement made possible the collection of taxes and the maintenance of armies on a long-term basis, creating the conditions in which large territorial states could be formed and sustained.

(3) Emergence of Economic Centres

• Many townships grew out of economic activities, particularly the market: different villages, producing different agricultural surpluses, selected a convenient common place, brought their commodities there, and exchanged them with those of others — a system of marketing known as the barter system.
• Some of these selected market places were located on trade routes, to which goods were brought from far-off places; the process of urbanization was faster and more intense at such locations. Ujjain was the most important urban centre to grow out of this process.

(4) Rise of Territorial Politics

• Some areas that served as centres of political and administrative activity emerged as towns, as the capitals of different kingdoms soon became urban areas — for instance, Rajagriha of Magadha, Sravasti in Koshala, Kausambi in Vatsa, Champa in Anga, and Ahichchhatra in Panchala.

(5) Role of Religion

• Religion played an important role in the urbanization of the Gangetic plain. In the sixth century BCE, people had places of worship in only a few locations, which drew large gatherings of people from distant places; gradually, these religious sites saw the emergence of towns — Vaishali was one such town that grew out of religious importance.

Lack of Vedic Sacrifices in the Middle Gangetic Valley

• The Vedic sacrifices meant that most of the surplus accumulated by chiefs was gifted away while performing them. In the middle Gangetic valley, however, Vedic rituals and sacrifices did not hold the same sway as they did in the upper Gangetic valley.
• This meant that the surpluses collected by chiefs in this region were not spent away on sacrifices; the groups that grew up controlling this surplus wealth became the ruling class of the newly emergent kingdoms, and on the foundation of this wealth were born the cities of the sixth century BCE.
• Some places combined several of these characteristics — being important for administration, economy, and religion alike; Kausambi was one such urban centre.

(6) Rise of Crafts

• In the Gangetic plains, some villages formed around specialised professions — blacksmithy, pottery, carpentry, cloth-weaving, basket-weaving, and the like — growing up wherever the necessary raw materials were available.
• As these villages needed to distribute their produced goods, they became linked to major routes or markets, and were gradually transformed into towns; once a town possessed both production and distribution facilities, it became an important commercial centre.
  • Vaishali, Shravasti, Champa, Rajagriha, Kausambi, and Kashi were a few such centres, while towns like Ujjain and Taxila could send their commodities to distant places because they lay on the trade routes.
• Whatever their origin, these towns eventually turned into markets, inhabited by artisans and merchants.
  • At some places there was a marked concentration of artisans — Saddalaputta at Vaishali, for instance, had 500 potters’ shops.
  • Both artisans and merchants were organised into guilds under their respective headmen; we hear of eighteen guilds of artisans, though only the guilds of smiths, carpenters, leather-workers, and painters are specifically named.
  • Both groups lived in fixed localities within towns — we hear of a merchants’ street in Varanasi, and similarly of a street of ivory-workers — so that craft specialisation developed through both the guild system and this localisation.
  • Crafts were generally hereditary, with the son learning the family trade from the father.

(7) Role of Coins

• Another factor aiding this process was the use of coins. The terms nishka and satamana in the Vedic texts are taken to be names of coins, but actual coins found are not earlier than the sixth century BCE; it appears that in Vedic times, exchange was carried on by barter, with cattle sometimes serving as a form of currency.
• Metal coins first appear in the age of Gautama Buddha. The earliest were made largely of silver, with a few copper examples; they are called punch-marked because pieces of metal were stamped with marks such as a hill, tree, fish, bull, elephant, or crescent.
  • The coin of the highest value was the silver satamana, followed by the karshapana; the copper masas and kakani were coins of smaller denomination.
• The earliest hoards of such coins have been found in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Magadha, though some early coins have also been found at Taxila.
• The Pali texts indicate a plentiful use of money, showing that wages and prices were routinely paid in it — so universal had the use of money become that even the price of a dead mouse came to be estimated in it.

(8) Role of Iron in Changing Society

• The use of iron tools was closely linked to agriculture around 600 BCE. Where people had earlier burnt forests to clear land, iron axes now made this clearance easier, opening up more land for cultivation; the iron ploughshare, in turn, allowed farmers to plough deeper, which proved especially useful in the heavy, dry soils of the Gangetic valley.
• Iron thus played a crucial role in opening the rain-fed, forested, hard-soil tracts of the middle Ganga basin to clearance, cultivation, and settlement; agriculture made great advances thanks to the iron ploughshare and the immense fertility of the alluvial soil between Allahabad and Rajmahal.
  • A large number of iron tools and implements have been found at Ujjain, Sravasti, and Hastinapur. The smiths knew how to harden iron tools, and some tools from Rajghat (Varanasi) were made from iron ores obtained from Singhbhum and Mayurbhanj — showing that people had come to know of the richest iron mines in the country, which was bound to increase the supply of tools for crafts and agriculture.
• The use of iron thus helped expand agricultural fields, ultimately contributing to urbanization and state formation; besides agriculture, iron was also put to varied use in crafts and weapons.
• However, it would be wrong to assume that urbanization or state formation occurred wherever iron technology and agricultural surplus co-existed — some megalithic societies possessed both features yet remained pre-state and pre-urban, while other places saw the growth of urban centres and early states.
  • This shows that, besides iron, another factor was essential to this transformation: the process of collection and redistribution of surplus, which involved two steps — first, a portion of the surplus reaching the treasury as revenue, and second, the exercise of control over farmers and craftsmen to ensure a continuous supply of that revenue.
  • A new relationship was thus established, in many areas, between those who laboured in agriculture and crafts and those who controlled them; only in such areas did the sixth century BCE see the growth of urban centres and the formation of states.

Salient Features of the Second Urbanization

Geographical Extent and the Two Areas of Urbanization

• The second urbanization was concentrated mostly in northern India, in the mid-Gangetic plains. Within the wider Gangetic plain, there were two main areas of urbanization — the western (doab) area and the eastern plains — both marked by a concentration of population.
• People in this period used metals such as copper, bronze, and iron, so the society is often described as a chalcolithic one; states, as well as towns, were formed in both areas, though the two societies differed in important respects.
  • The doab and western Gangetic plain saw the growth of the Painted Grey Ware (PGW) culture (1200–400 BCE), producing pottery — particularly pots — with a grey-painted surface.
  • The eastern societies, by contrast, used pottery with a black-and-red surface, later replaced by soft, bright, and luxurious pots known as the Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW) (700–200 BCE). Archaeologically, the sixth century BCE marks the beginning of this NBP phase, characterised by a glossy, shining type of pottery.

Population and Migration

• Initially, the population of the doab region was small and settled close to the rivers; over time, it expanded, with some people moving inland to clear land for cultivation.
• In the east, people practised wet rice cultivation, which gave a higher return; under such conditions, people from the north-west — from Punjab and beyond, perhaps owing to water scarcity or a change in climate — migrated towards the fertile lands of the eastern Gangetic plains.
  • These new settlers brought technological knowledge that influenced the earlier settlers, and the two groups mingled, accelerating the process of urbanization thereafter.
• Structures excavated so far are generally unimpressive, but together with other material remains, they indicate a marked increase in population compared with the Painted Grey Ware settlements; in urban centres, there was a greater concentration of people than in villages, along with more alternative sources of livelihood and a wider availability of products.

Types of Cities and Towns

• Ancient Indian literature frequently uses the terms Pura, Durga, Nigama, and Nagara to denote cities:
  • Pura: mentioned even in early Vedic literature, where it referred to fortified settlements or temporary places of refuge or cattle pens. Later, it was often used for the residence of the king and his retinue, or for the families of the ruling group in the Gana-Sanghas; gradually, the connotation of fortification became less important, and the term came to mean simply a city.
  • Durga: the other term used for the fortified capital of a king. Fortifications protected urban centres and separated them from the surrounding rural areas, while also making it easier for the ruling classes to control the population residing within the city.
  • Nigama: frequently used in Pali literature to denote a town, probably meaning a merchant town where the sale and purchase of goods took place.
    • Some scholars believe certain Nigamas evolved out of villages specialising in pottery, carpentry, or salt-making; that Nigamas were market towns is also proved by the discovery of certain later coins bearing the legend “Nigama,” suggesting that they were minted by the Nigama itself.
    • Literary texts sometimes use the term to refer to a particular section of a city where craft specialists lived and worked.
  • Nagara: the most commonly used word for a town or city in the literature, first appearing in the Taittiriya Aranyaka (seventh–sixth century BCE). Another term, Mahanagara, also referred to cities — these centres combined the political functions of the Pura with the commercial functions of the Nigama, and were home to kings, merchants, and preachers alike.

Urban Planning

• Towns of this period were characterised by the use of urban planning, including burnt bricks, ringwells, ramparts (fortifications), and drainage systems; wooden palisades found at Patna possibly belong to the Maurya or pre-Maurya period, and some towns were also fortified.
• Towns of the Gangetic plains in the sixth century BCE shared certain common characteristics: specific places were allotted to different occupational groups, and the palace, royal court, or assembly hall was built at the centre. In the later phase of urbanization, beautiful monumental buildings were constructed as palaces.
  • Some towns gave religion greater importance and built religious institutions at their centre — Kausambi, for instance, built a Buddhist monastery there — while other towns, such as Bhirmound, had no monastery or temple at all.
  • Houses were mostly built of mud-brick and wood, which have naturally perished in the moist climate of the middle Gangetic basin; although seven-storeyed palaces are mentioned in the Pali texts, none have actually been discovered.

Use of Writing (Brahmi Script)

• This period, following the end of Harappan culture, saw the beginnings of the written tradition in ancient Indian history, with Brahmanical, Buddhist, and Jain texts referring to its conditions; writing probably began a couple of centuries before Ashoka and contributed to the growth of trade.
  • The earliest records were probably not inscribed on stone or metal, and have therefore perished.
• Writing enabled the compilation not only of laws and rituals but also of book-keeping — essential for trade, tax collection, and the maintenance of a large professional army — and the period also produced texts on sophisticated measurement, the Sulvasutras, which presuppose writing and may have aided the demarcation of fields and houses.

Rural-Urban Linkages

• The beginnings of crafts, commerce, and urbanization in the middle Gangetic basin cannot be understood without a strong rural base: non-agriculturists living in towns had to be fed by agriculturists in the villages, while artisans and traders in the towns, in turn, supplied tools, cloth, and other goods to the rural folk.
  • We hear of a village trader depositing 500 ploughs — evidently iron ploughshares — with a town merchant.
  • Iron tools such as axes, adzes, knives, razors, nails, and sickles have been discovered from the NBPW phase at Kausambi, probably meant for peasants who purchased them in cash or kind.
• The nobility living in towns collected taxes, tributes, and tithes from the rural areas.

Economic Institutions of the Second Urbanization

Emergence of Coins

• An important aspect of urbanism was the emergence of coinage. The Pali texts contain the first definite references to coins — such as kahapana, nikkha, kamsa, pada, masaka, and kakanika — and this literary evidence is corroborated by archaeological evidence of punch-marked coins, mostly of silver, found at many sites.
• The beginning of money did not mean the end of barter, but it did mark a qualitative change in economic transactions with long-term implications for trade.

Usury and Money-Lending

• The beginning of money also ushered in usury (money-lending). The Pali texts contain many references to this profession — instruments of credit, people pawning their possessions, the occasional pledging of a wife or children by debtors, and bankruptcy.
  • Debtors were, in fact, debarred from joining the Buddhist sangha until they had repaid their debts. Interestingly, this increasing range of material goods available for consumption — at least for those with the requisite resources — was paralleled by the emergence of doctrines advocating the renunciation of material possessions.

Emergence of Guilds

• The Gautama Dharmasutra mentions agriculture, trade, cattle-rearing, and lending money on interest as occupations of the Vaishyas, and states that farmers, traders, herdsmen, money-lenders, and artisans had the authority to lay down rules for their respective professions — with the king expected to make legal decisions only after consulting those with authority within these professions, suggesting an element of corporate organisation.
• Buddhist texts offer more direct evidence of the emergence of guilds: terms such as shreni, nigama, puga, vrata, and sangha are used in ancient Indian texts to denote various kinds of corporate organisation, including guilds.
  • The Vinaya Pitaka mentions the guilds (puga) of Shravasti providing a regular supply of food for monks and nuns, while the Jatakas list eighteen guilds and suggest a close association between guild heads and kings.

Items of Exchange

• Markets involved the buying and selling of a wide range of commodities: utensils and tools made of metals such as iron, copper, tin, and silver; the procurement and sale of salt; the cotton cloth of Kashi, which attracted large numbers of buyers; woollen blankets brought from the distant north-western province of Gandhara; and horses brought from Sind and Kamboja.
  • Bangles of conch shell, beautiful ornaments of gold, and combs and ornaments made of ivory and various precious stones were also in high demand among the aristocracy.
• Literary sources indicate that each item was typically sold in a separate street.

Trade Routes and Long-Distance Trade

Rise of Long-Distance Trade

• The products of crafts were carried over long distances by merchants — we repeatedly hear of 500 cartloads of goods, containing fine textile goods, ivory objects, pots, and the like.
• All the important cities of the period were situated on river banks and trade routes, connected with one another:
  • Sravasti was linked with both Kausambi and Varanasi, the latter considered a great centre of trade in the age of the Buddha.
  • The route from Sravasti passed eastward and southward through Kapilavastu and Kushinara, reaching Vaishali; traders crossed the Ganga near Patna to reach Rajgir, and also travelled by the Ganga to Champa, near modern Bhagalpur.
  • According to the Jataka stories, traders from Kosala and Magadha went via Mathura as far north as Taxila, and from Mathura also travelled southward and westward to Ujjain and the Gujarat coast.

River Ports and Inland Trade Routes

• Among the riparian ports, Sahajati (central India), Kausambi on the Yamuna, Banaras, Champa, and later Pataliputra on the Ganges, and Pattala on the Indus, deserve special mention. The great inland routes mostly radiated from Banaras and Sravasti, and the chief articles of trade included silk, embroidery, ivory, jewellery, and gold.
• The two major trans-regional routes of the period were known as the Uttarapatha and the Dakshinapatha.

Uttarapatha: The Great Northern Route

• The Uttarapatha, or great northern road, ran from eastern Afghanistan through the Gangetic plains to Bengal; the Mahabharata gives an account of this ancient roadway, referring to the Uttarapatha as linking the territories of Kirata (perhaps Magadha), Kamboja, Gandhara, and the Yavana countries.
• The route followed the river Ganges, crossed the Indo-Gangetic watershed, ran through the Punjab to Taxila (Gandhara), and continued further to Balkh (Bactria) in Central Asia; its eastern terminus was Tamraliptika (Tamluk), located at the mouth of the Ganges in west Bengal. This route grew increasingly important with the rise of maritime contacts with seaports on India’s eastern coast during Maurya rule.
• States of the Uttarapatha, such as Kamboja and Gandhara, were actively engaged in commercial exchange not only with the states of the Gangetic valley but also with Myanmar, Suvarnabhumi, south-west China, and other nations of Southeast Asia.
  • Pali literature records that merchants from the Uttarapatha nations engaged in international trade along the well-known Kamboja-Dvaravati Caravan Route, while merchants from Kamboja, Gandhara, Sovira, and Sindhu sailed from the ports of Bharukaccha (modern Bharuch) and Supparaka Pattana (modern Nalla-Sopara, near Mumbai) to trade with southern India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia; huge trade ships sailed directly from there to southern Myanmar.
    • This trade had been ongoing for hundreds of years before the Buddha, and some merchants from northern India had settled in Myanmar, in ports and towns at the mouths of the Irrawaddy, Citranga (Sittang), and Salavana (Salween) rivers — the name Irrawaddy itself is believed to derive from the river Irrawati (Ravi) of north Punjab.
  • The Uttarapatha was famous from very early times for its fine breed of horses and its horse-dealers; Buddhist and Puranic sources attest an ongoing trade in which merchants and horse-dealers from the Uttarapatha brought horses and other goods for sale down to eastern Indian centres like Savatthi (Kosala), Benares (Kashi), Pataliputra (Magadha), Pragjyotisha (Assam), and Tamraliptika (Bengal).
  • There is evidence that horse-dealers from Kamboja traded horses as far as Sri Lanka, following the west coast of India since remote antiquity; a Pali text, the Sihalavatthu (fourth century), specifically attests to a group known as the Kambojas living at Rohana in Sri Lanka.

Dakshinapatha: The Great Southern Route

• The Dakshinapatha (“great southern highway”) originated at Varanasi (Magadha), passed through Ujjaini and the Narmada valley to Pratishthana (Paithan) in the Mahajanapada of Ashmaka — a kingdom on the Godavari river in modern Maharashtra — and continued onward to the western coast of India, running in a southern direction.
• The Dakshinapatha, together with the Uttarapatha, formed one of the two great highways connecting different parts of the subcontinent since the Iron Age; while the trajectory of the northern road has remained roughly the same since pre-Mauryan times (now NH2), the southern road appears to have drifted over time.
• The crossing of these two highways made Sarnath (just outside Varanasi) a major centre of exchange for both goods and ideas in ancient India — which is why the Buddha chose to give his first sermon there. It was precisely along the Uttarapatha and Dakshinapatha routes that the philosophies of the easterners came to be disseminated.

Trade Items

• Different commodities were produced or available in different regions, and most became items of trade — the most common being iron objects such as hoes, sickles, knives, and nails.
• Salt was mined in the north-west, and horses were brought from there to the Gangetic valley alongside it; the exchange or barter system remained in use in trade throughout this period.

Urban Society: New Classes and Occupations

Rise of New Urban Classes

• Towns were inhabited by princes, priests, artisans, traders, administrators, military personnel, and other state functionaries. Among traders, there were several kinds — shopkeepers (apanika), retailers (kraya-vikrayika), and money investors (setthi-gahapati).
• With the emergence of cities also came a class of washermen, scavengers, beggars, and sweepers; the services of sweepers, and of those involved in cremating corpses, were essential to city life.
  • The growing class of beggars emerged as a result of the breakdown of kin-based society and increasing demands on produce by the rulers — as one story puts it, the king’s men looted the village by day, and robbers by night.
• The practice of prostitution, along with the professions of physician and scribe, was also prevalent in this period.

Rise of the Social Elite: Setthi and Gahapati

• Textual evidence indicates the emergence of distinct socio-economic classes, marked by significant differences in wealth, status, and control over productive resources.
• Setthi (the Pali form of sreshtin) referred to a high-level businessman associated with trade and money-lending; the Pali canon contains many references to extremely wealthy setthis living in style in cities such as Rajagriha and Varanasi.
  • The Mahavagga tells of Sona Kolivisa, the setthi-putta (son of a setthi), who was raised in such luxurious surroundings that his delicate feet bled when he took up the barefoot life of a monk — a problem the Buddha is said to have solved by allowing monks to wear shoes.
  • The setthi of the Buddhist texts was thus a prominent and influential member of the urban community, with access to and connections at the royal court.
• Gahapati (the Pali form of Grihapati) referred to a wealthy and powerful landowner. The term grihapati occurs in Vedic literature in the sense of the head of a household; while the Pali texts tend to use terms like gihi, gahattha, and ajjhavasati in this narrower sense, gahapati is used in a broader sense — denoting not only the head of a household but also a wealthy property-owner and producer of wealth, associated especially with land and agriculture.
  • Society is often described as consisting of three strata — Khattiya, Brahmana, and gahapati. According to the Anguttara Nikaya, the Khattiya aspires to power and territory, with dominion as his ideal; the Brahmana is associated with mantra and yanna (yajna), with brahmaloka as his ideal; and the gahapati is associated with kamma (work) and sippa (craft), with the completion or fruit of work as his ideal.
  • There are references to Brahmana gahapatis living in Brahmana villages, and the gahapati’s political importance is suggested by his inclusion among the seven treasures of the chakkavatti, or ideal ruler of the world.
• Setthi-gahapati referred to a person with both a rural and an urban base — one who held control over both land and business enterprise. The wealth of setthis and setthi-gahapatis can be gauged from the fact that, along with kings, they figured among the clientele of the famous physician Jivaka, reportedly paying thousands of kahapanas in medical bills.

Urban and Rural Occupations

• Early Buddhist texts mention a wide range of occupations, both rural and urban. Apart from farmers, cattle-rearers, and traders, those employed in the service industry included washermen, barbers, tailors, painters, and cooks.
• The king employed many kinds of specialists, including:
  • soldiers (yodhajivas) of various kinds — foot soldiers, archers, cavalry, elephant corps, and the chariot wing;
  • ministers (mahamachchas), governors (ratthikas), estate managers (pettanikas), the royal chamberlain (thapati), elephant trainers (hattirohas), policemen (rajabhatas), jailors (bandhanagarikas), slaves (dasas and dasis), and wage-workers (kammakaras).
• Distinctly urban occupations included the physician (vejja, bhisakka), the surgeon (sallakata), the scribe (lekha), the accountant (ganana), and the money-changer.
• Various types of entertainers are also mentioned: the actor (nata), dancer (nataka), magician (sokajjayika), acrobat (langhika), drummer (kumbhathunika), and woman fortune-teller (ikkhanika) — some of whom performed at fairs known as samajas, apart from other occasions; there are also references to the accomplished courtesan (ganika) and the ordinary prostitute (vesi).
• The Pali canon also refers to many kinds of artisans, some of whom must have lived and worked in or near cities to supply an urban clientele — including the vehicle maker (yanakara), ivory worker (dantakara), metal smith (kammara), goldsmith (suvannakara), silk weaver (kosiyakara), carpenter (palaganda), needle maker (suchikara), reed worker (nalakara), garland maker (malakara), and potter (kumbhakara).
  • Some craft specialists may have lived in their own settlements on the margins of cities; the later evidence of the Jatakas more clearly indicates the localisation of certain industries, the association of villages with specific artisan groups, and the hereditary nature of crafts — processes that must already have been underway around 600–300 BCE.

Second Urbanization versus the Harappan (First) Urbanization

• Unlike the first (Harappan) urbanization, people of the second urbanization made no conscious attempt to imitate it.
• Some citadels or tall fortresses were built at the centres of towns to monitor them, and many towns of the second urbanization emerged on the banks of rivers — even though floods could inundate such towns at any time during the rainy season, no attempt was made to protect them by erecting brick foundations or walls.
• There was also a difference in the necessities of the town-dwellers of the Gangetic plains compared with those of Harappa, which brought about further differences in character between the two urbanizations.
• The picture of the economy that emerges from a study of material remains and the Pali texts is markedly different from the rural economy of later Vedic times in western Uttar Pradesh, or from that of a few chalcolithic communities found in parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
• For the first time, we notice an advanced food-producing economy spread over the alluvial soil of the middle Gangetic basin, alongside the beginnings of an urban economy in this region — an economy that provided subsistence not only to direct producers but also to many others who were neither farmers nor artisans. This, in turn, made possible the collection of taxes and the maintenance of armies on a long-term basis, creating the conditions in which large territorial states could be formed and sustained.
• This trend of urbanization expanded further during the Mauryan and post-Mauryan period; the period between 200 BCE and 300 CE is, in fact, known as the golden age of craft, trade, coinage, money-lending, and urbanization.

Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW) Culture and the Second Urbanization

• The Northern Black Polished Ware (NBPW) culture is an urban Iron Age culture of the Indian subcontinent, lasting from 700–200 BCE. It succeeded the Black-and-Red Ware culture (of the early Iron Age, twelfth–ninth century BCE, which directly influenced both the Painted Grey Ware and NBPW cultures) and the Painted Grey Ware culture (of the early Iron Age, roughly 1200–400 BCE, itself a successor of the Black-and-Red Ware culture).
• The NBPW culture developed beginning around 700 BCE, in the late Vedic period, and peaked between 500–300 BCE, coinciding with the emergence of the sixteen Mahajanapadas in northern India and the subsequent rise of the Mauryan Empire.
• NBPW was a very glossy, shining pottery made of very fine fabric — a fine grey metallic ware with a glossy black surface. It was a hard, wheel-made ware, mainly comprising bowls and dishes, with its surface treated with an alkali flux and fired in a reducing atmosphere (which is why it is associated with the Iron Age, since iron too needed to be fired at high temperatures, much like NBPW ware). It was, in essence, a luxury style of burnished pottery used by the elite.
• NBPW is associated with the emergence of the second urbanization since the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation; this re-urbanization was accompanied by massive embankments and fortifications, significant population growth, increased social stratification, and wide-ranging trade networks.

• There are notable similarities between the NBPW culture and the much earlier Harappan culture — including ivory dice and combs, a similar system of weights, the use of mud, baked bricks, and stone in architecture, the construction of large units of public architecture, the systematic development of hydraulic features, and a similar craft industry.
  • There are, however, also important differences between the two cultures — for instance, rice, millet, and sorghum became more important in the NBP culture. The NBP culture may, in fact, reflect the first state-level organisation in the Indian subcontinent.

Important NBPW Sites

• Charsada (ancient Pushkalavati) and Taxila, in Pakistan.
• Delhi (ancient Indraprastha), Hastinapura, Mathura, Kampil/Kampilya, Ahichatra, Ayodhya, Sravasti, Kausambi, and Varanasi, in Uttar Pradesh.
• Vaishali, Rajgir, Pataliputra, and Champa, in Bihar.
• Ujjain and Vidisha, in Madhya Pradesh.
• Mahasthangarh, Chandraketugarh, Wari-Bateshwar, Bangarh, and Mangalkot — all in Bangladesh and West Bengal, India.

The Debate over the Impact of Iron Technology

Occurrence of Iron in the Archaeological Record

• Small quantities of iron occur at a few sites in early second-millennium BCE contexts; the metal became more widely prevalent around 1000–800 BCE.
• During c. 800–500 BCE, the use of iron was known in virtually all regions of the subcontinent, and by this time, most regions — including the Ganga valley — appear to have entered the Iron Age, though in certain areas this transition took place considerably later.
• The debate over the impact of iron technology on ancient Indian history has focused especially on the Ganga valley during the first millennium BCE.

Views of Scholars on the Impact of Iron

• D.D. Kosambi argued that the eastward movement of the Indo-Aryans was undertaken to reach the iron ores of south Bihar, and that a near-monopoly over these ores was responsible for the political dominance attained by the state of Magadha in early historical times.
  • Criticism: This hypothesis is considered untenable, given the very wide distribution of iron ores across the subcontinent; chemical analysis of early iron artefacts at Atranjikhera points instead to the hills between Agra and Gwalior — not Bihar — as the probable source of ores.
• R.S. Sharma highlighted the role of iron axes in clearing the forests of the Ganga valley and of iron ploughs in agricultural expansion in this area, arguing that the use of these implements generated an agricultural surplus that paved the way for the second phase of urbanization; he also viewed religions such as Buddhism as a response to the new socio-economic milieu generated by iron technology.
• A. Ghosh and Niharranjan Ray argued instead that the forests of the Ganga valley could have been cleared through burning. They pointed out that Sharma’s argument lacked support from archaeological data, that the impact of iron technology was gradual and only manifested itself in the mid-NBPW phase — by which time urbanization was already well underway — and that socio-political factors played an important role in the historical transformations of the Ganga valley during the first millennium BCE.
• Makkhan Lal described the idea of large-scale forest clearance through the iron axe, and the generation of agricultural surplus through the iron plough, as a myth. He argued that there was no significant increase in the use of iron between the PGW and NBPW levels, that iron technology was not an essential prerequisite for agricultural surplus or urbanization, that the Bihar iron ores were not tapped during this period, and that the Ganga plains remained heavily forested as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE.

A Balanced Assessment

• Technology is certainly an extremely important factor in history, but it must be considered alongside other variables. Archaeological data indicates that the beginnings of iron technology in parts of the Ganga valley can be traced to the second millennium BCE, with the earliest iron artefacts occurring in BRW or PGW contexts.
• The use of iron and its impact increased only gradually over the centuries, reflected in the growing number and range of iron objects found in the NBPW phase; while the expansion of agriculture must certainly have involved some land clearance, large tracts of land continued to remain forested.
• Massive deforestation in the Ganga valley — and in the subcontinent more generally — is, in fact, a feature of the colonial period, when the extension of the railways, population increase, and the commercialisation of agriculture led to a dramatic and unprecedented reduction in forest cover.

Iron and Urbanization in the Far South

• In the far south, the early advent of iron was not followed swiftly by socio-economic transformation. Rajan Gurukkal points out that iron ploughshares tended to be restricted to wetland areas, and argues that notwithstanding the knowledge of iron technology, the larger socio-political context of war and plunder hindered the process of agrarian growth in Tamilakam.
• The simplistic technological determinism that marked the early phase of the iron debate is, therefore, no longer tenable.

Conclusion

The second urbanization of the sixth century BCE was the product of a convergence of factors — an agricultural surplus made possible by iron tools and wet rice cultivation, the emergence of groups able to collect and redistribute this surplus, the rise of coinage, guilds, and long-distance trade along routes like the Uttarapatha and Dakshinapatha, and new urban social classes such as the setthis and gahapatis. Together, these developments transformed the Gangetic plains into the economic and political heartland of the Mahajanapadas, laying the material foundations on which large territorial states — and eventually the Mauryan Empire — could be built. For UPSC History Optional aspirants, this theme of urbanization, trade, and economic growth is best studied alongside the political history of the Mahajanapadas, since the two developments were deeply intertwined.