The Physical Foundations of Society

Detailed chapter description

The socio-cultural and economic history of Mithila, Vajji and Anga begins with landscape, but not with environmental determinism. Rivers, soils, forests, monsoon rhythms, wetlands, seismicity and routes created changing fields of possibility. They affected where settlement was easy or difficult, which crops could be sustained, how goods moved, where towns acquired strategic advantages, and why households repeatedly had to adapt to flood, erosion, drought, sedimentation and earthquake. None of those environmental conditions, however, produced a single inevitable political or cultural outcome. Human institutions mediated them. This chapter therefore treats physical geography as historical infrastructure: durable enough to shape recurring problems and opportunities, but dynamic enough to prevent the historian from treating any river course, floodplain edge or ecological boundary as timeless. Historical regions do not arrive with permanently surveyed natural borders. “Mithila,” “Videha,” “Vajji,” “Anga,” “Tirhut,” “Madhesh” and “Tarai” belong to different chronological and documentary contexts. Their spatial relationships changed with political authority, settlement, language, pilgrimage, transport and administration. Modern districts are useful for locating archaeological sites, soils and hydrological data, but they cannot simply be projected backward. The physical landscape is therefore used here as a frame for asking where movement, settlement, cultivation and exchange were possible, not as a device for drawing ancient borders from modern rivers. This distinction is especially important in the Gangetic plains because rivers themselves migrate. The Eastern Gangetic Plains are characterized by shallow, aggrading channels, frequent avulsion and extensive flooding, while river systems differ substantially in sediment load and hydrological regime (Sinha et al. 2005). A settlement described in relation to a channel two millennia ago cannot automatically be located by assuming that the channel occupied its present course. Floodplain history is, in part, a history of moving reference points.