The lineage chief, a raja of a clan, had the responsibility of organizing protection of his people and their cattle. This involved organizing the protection of the clan's herding areas.
The Aryans extended their settlements slowly in the early Vedic age. They fought the local peoples and they fought each other. They also had to protect themselves from later groups of Indo-Europeans who came after them and tried to seize their lands.
When a raja was successful in battle, he distributed the booty (the material rewards of battle) collected in ritual ceremonies where Aryan priests officiated. The priests claimed that their rituals gave success to the warrior activities. The heroic and chiefly ideal of generosity was important in the political culture of the Aryans and rajas attempted to manifest their superior geneosity by distributing cattle, horses, gold, chariots and female slaves to their followers.
The Aryans gradually entered into agricultural production, adopting agriculture along with their herding; however, clearing land for agriculture was difficult, because of the dense jungle and because they had not discovered iron. Copper and bronze implements were not effective. As they came into contact with the agriculturalists of the northwest plains and Punjab, Vedic Sanskrit began to incorporate features of indigenous languages-- elements of Proto-Dravidian (today the language group of south India) and Austro-Asiatic.
Fairly quickly Aryans began to call the people they encountered in north India dasus and dasyus and refered to them as dark-skinned. The society of the northwest and Punjab gradually became, to a certain degree, ethnically mixed. However, from the early period the Aryans recognized and accepted social heterogeneity, the existence of social differences, and they showed a tendency to institutionalize their conceptions of difference, conceptualizing groups into categories in a single hierarchical system. The first major conception of difference was distinguishing between the Arya varna and the dasa-varna. The word varna means color and probably refered to the difference in skin color between the fairer Aryans and the others. Other categories were, for example between their gods, the devas, and the dangerous powers, the asuras. Those who spoke Indo-Aryan/Indo-European were called Arya and all others were called mleccha. Mleccha as a category took on connotations of barbarian and suggested social impurity.
The Aryas eventually came to be divided, as we shall see, into brahmins (priests), kshatriyas (rulers and warriors) and vaisyas (wealthy agricultualists and merchants). They eventually adopted the term varna to describe their own groupings and called these three varnas the dvija, which means those initiated into Vedic ritual or the twice-born. The dvija became a category in which stood in contrast to a much lower status group which came to be called sudras, the impure peasants and artisans who worked for the vaisyas. The four varnas emerged fully in the late Vedic Age, though to what extent the varnas themselves developed the occupational categories of castes, groups within varnas, is not clear. Here we will trace the emergence of the four varnas.
We will see that, probably because of the nature of Aryan political adaptation to their new environment in South Asia, the clans of their tribal organization, did not dissolve in the development of a strong state administration. By the time a stronger state developed after 500 b.c., varna social organization had become widely institutionalized in north India. And the varnas themselves were made up into smaller descent groups in castes (known as jatis). Clans
did not disappear, but became one aspect of the complex caste structure which developed in north India within the general categories of varna
It was in the Punjab, in particular, that the Aryans made the transition to settled agriculture. They cultivated the semi-arid lands of this region with river irrigation. The Aryans grew barley, rice and wheat in rotation. As they gradually shifted to settled agriculture they came to value land in a new way, it gained in value. Cattle had been the most important form of wealth to the pastoral nomads, but land came to be prized as a form of wealth and its control of its use was managed through in clan organization.
With the switch to agriculture, however, social organization became more stratified and clansmen became unequal in status. During the time of the composition of the Rig Veda, clans had begun to be divided into vish (ordinary clansmen) and rajanya, ruling families of warriors. The rajas or lineage chiefs began to come for the most part from these families. Clan lands, however, were held in common by both groups, vish and rajanya. As I mentioned, there was no private ownership, but clan controlled rights of usage among their members.
The bifurcation in clan status increased, with status differences between lines descending from an older and and younger son, with higher status given to those who demonstrated leadership qualities--the ability to lead cattle, raids, to protect the clan, to establish new settlements, and to control alliances with other clans. The rajanya families were characterized as chariot-riders and warriors, while the vish were sedentary folk, producers of pastoral and agricultural items. They were the lesser status, junior lineages in clans and as such they had the obligation to give some of their product to the rajanyas and to priests and bards. They were to give the oblations--sacrificial items--which the priests offered at ritual ceremonies which the rajanya organized. The priests, which came to be known as brahmins, legitimized the superior status and authority of the rajanya at these rituals. (Brahmin is often also spelled Brahman.) They invest the chiefs with attributes of the dieties.
In the early Vedic period the clansmen placed a high value on common eating and the vish and the rajanya ate together. Later more distance developed.
With the increasing significance of agriculture and the growth of trade, power came to be based on greater control over the jana, the tribe, and its territory. The territory came to be named after a dominant rajanya lineage. The rajanyas, themselves, came to be divided into those lineages which were allowed to provide rajas and those who were not allowed to. Rajas, coming from the special lineages of ruling status, came to be known as kshatriyas, from the word for power, kshatra. Kshatriyas led in the settlement of new territories.
As the jana developed the desire to increase production in agriculture, the vish incorporated a new group into their agricultural organization, those who had fallen outside the lineage system, low-status Aryans, and the non-Aryan dasas. These people came eventually to be known as sudras. This lower status group came to include indigenous people with artisan skills. The historian Kulke have a theory to explain the emergence of the varna system: they argue that the pastoral, warrior culture Aryans did not have artisanal skills--only carpenters to mend chariots are mentioned in the early hymns. However, the newly agricultural people needed the skills
which the indigenous people, heirs of the craft traditions of the Harappan culture, could provide. Kulke argues that the Aryans did not want to relinquish their dominance, which was based on their military skills and relatively tight-knit social organization. They did not want to share their dominance with the dasus and dasyus and they kept them out by accepting them only as a low- status social category--as sudras. The latter were part of a society dominated by Aryans, but prevented from access to social and political power.