They emerged from the realm of demons. Out of these shadowy forests famed for man-eating supermen and celestial nymphs arrived the silent ones clad in the elements. Earth and ash dusted their skin. Wind swept across their bare bodies. The flame of Agni graced their saffron garments. They were said to have ventured to the ends of the earth and the innards of the spirit. Conquerors of desires and masters of mind, India’s ascetics would birth new conceptions of self, soul, and society.

He with the long loose locks (of hair) supports Agni, and moisture, heaven, and earth; He is all sky to look upon: he with long hair is called this light. The Munis, girdled with the wind, wear garments of soil hue; They, following the wind’s swift course, go where the Gods have gone before.

— Rig Veda, Hymn 10.CXXXVI.1-2

The stillness and silence of the emblematic Indian monk betray how this great spirit invigorated the subcontinent. From silent seals of the Indus to poetic praise in the Vedas, the sadhu has been a cornerstone of Indian society. But beyond their iconic mysticism that has mesmerized men for millennia, I want to focus on an unlikely link in early India. This is the end of the Upanishadic age, the culmination of the Vedic canon. And like cannon-fire against walls, the Upanishads would set off a series of intellectual revolutions that would both upend and give new life to traditions.

An Urban Jungle

Around the 6th century BCE, the soil of the Gangetic plain grew heavier. The great forests shrank and were replaced with humans, their animals, and their settlements. The wood that stood witness to the meditation of the yogis was refashioned into walls giving shape to a new phase of Bharatvarsh.

The primary cause of this explosion seems to have been rice. While the western crescent of the Indo-Gangetic plain was earlier urbanized, the eastern reaches of the Ganga remained a dark forest. Post the collapse of the Indus-Saraswati Civilization, many moved east. Considering that the eastern wetlands were perfect for yielding rice, a population explosion occurred with the eastern half of the Indo-Gangetic plain now becoming the main setting in the story of India.

Cities arose on a scale not seen since the days of Harappa, Rakhigarhi, Dholavira, and Mohenjo-Daro. Ruralism gave way to urbanism, and a profound socio-cultural change followed. Organization on a scale not seen in centuries would arise as politics, society, and economics became increasingly centralized.

Chiefs became kings. Villages became cities. Agriculture became markets. Power began to accumulate in the hands of these new great monarchs, and desire grew in their hearts. Proper states were now forming, and the city-states of the Mahajanapadas were reaching their logical conclusion—empires.

With society becoming more complex, it also became more hierarchical and, paradoxically, individualistic. Some of this was related to caste. Cities offered a social dynamism that contrasted with the rural stability that caste prospered in. Within these metropolitan cauldrons of change, kingship, asceticism, and mercantilism provided the three biggest outlets for this newborn Indian individualism. With power & arms, one became a king. With enterprise & wealth, one became a merchant. With penance & wisdom, one became an ascetic. Old village structures could not resist the tip of a King’s sword, the glint of a Merchant’s coin, or the wit of the Ascetic’s word.

These three groups played a symbiotic role with each other, with kings playing the pivot. Indian royals would centralize power, creating the need for more complex bureaucracies and governance. Naturally, this meant more interfacing with their subjects which meant more roads. Merchants and mendicants could now travel much more freely between India’s locales, ultimately gathering in cities to trade goods and gods. Just as new political institutions emerged, so did they manifest as guilds for merchants and monasteries for monks.

Sramanic Systemization

There are some who posit Sramanism as India’s Protestant Revolution (not even Reformation) against the corrupt Brahminical Varanasi Vatican. So intense is this projection that it would likely make your projector’s lightbulb explode with nuclear force. Sramanism is rather both an inheritor and parallel strand of the Dharma of the Vedas.

While we can, of course, see ascetic forerunners in the Upanishads, other texts also reveal this parentage. Panini’s 5th-century BCE Ashtadhyay references lost ascetic manuals called the Bhikshusutras, which were authored by the sages Parasharya and Karmandin. Lord Buddha would indeed later term his own monks as bhikshus who framed their lives around earlier renunciant traditions and even Brahmins. Early ascetic strands in Kapil’s Samkhya and emphasis on dukkha (suffering) also signal this linkage.

But what separates Sramanism from Vedic asceticism is the enthusiastic embrace and success of systemized asceticism. Surely, the Bhikshusutras and other texts outlined guidelines for renunciants, but Sramanism made long-lasting institutions for and by ascetics – the Sanghas. Even before these complex and systemized ascetic orders was the revolution of numbering morality. The Three Marks of Existence. Four Noble Truths. The Five Precepts. The Noble Eightfold Path. Simply the attachment of a number to philosophic codes were elegant innovations of the Indian mind. So deceptively simple but the impact of this simplicity reverberated from underneath a sacred fig tree in Bihar to across all of Asia. A template was born, which eventually culminated with the Sangha and monastic institutions, just in time for the cities that were able to house them to come into being.

Monasteries, like the cities they were in, became cultural incubators. Around 86% of the composers of sections of religious poems in the Pali Canon came from cities. The courts of kings also provided ideal stomping grounds for scholars of all shades. It is no mistake that so many universities across ancient India doubled as or were attached to monasteries. Knowledge and ideas could be cultivated and concentrated in these monasteries and universities, which would periodically send out bhikshus and students to the hinterlands, spreading cosmopolitan Indian ideas, part and parcel of Dharma.

This is a pattern. It is a rhyme of history. One that is repeating its stanza today. For India’s 2nd urbanization both gives us clues and is illuminated by the 21st-century version of it we see in motion today.

A Millennial Rhyme

The village is a land of romantic nostalgia for so many Indians. As the modern Indian state was born, India was mainly a village republic. 17.3% of India lived in urban areas by 1951. India’s independence leaders had contrasting views on the city versus the village, a constant dichotomy in Indian history. Mahatma Gandhi epitomized village nostalgia to an irrational degree, being weary of industrialization and wanting highly decentralized village governance. Meanwhile, leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar loathed the apparent cruelty and superstition of villages, rather seeing the future of India in urbanity. Lastly, Sardar Patel met these sides in the middle, aligning with his ever-pragmatic nature as he desired a balanced rural and urban development between agriculture and industry.

Today, approximately 37% of India is urbanized. By 2030, it is projected to be 40% and 50% by 2050. Like India in the age of Buddha and Mahavir, this will produce profound changes to Indian culture and society.

The first and most obvious concerns the role of caste in Indian society. India’s second urbanization saw rural caste kinship fall to urban capital creation. Instead of social life centering around caste duties, goals of production became more and more important. This is exponentially true in modernity. Already we see this manifest in voting patterns and societal trends as caste-based rhetoric, political parties, and cultural traditions become much less sticky in cities.

From here, we naturally flow to religion as much of modern-day Hindu beliefs have intimate connections with caste for many Hindus. But as caste evaporates in the heat of concrete, what will fill the vessel of belief and identity? Certainly, a type of urban religion like the Sramanism of old. Already today we see the seeds of these neo-faiths. While some focus on meditation and self-realization for hustling and bustling anglicized Indians who seek a return to their roots, others zero in on congregational devotion or bhakti. Many of these new missions mirror the monasteries of the past with a vanguard of volunteers or even monks to further their faith. Like the old orders, many of these monastic groups have strict requirements for entry, ensuring that only the educated and disciplined join instead of riff-raff simply seeking to escape bad life situations.

This presents a pickle for more traditional and rural Hinduism. But like the past, all is not lost. Rural Vedicism combined with urban Sramanism to create a composite Hinduism much more recognizable today, especially in sects such as Vaishnavism or Shaivism. Similarly, the Hinduism of traditional sects is still looked at in awe and respect by some of these newer orders who seek to imbibe disciplines and scriptural prudence, albeit with slightly different interpretations, yet still within the spirit of traditional study. And with a strongly devoted core of monks or devotees, this endeavor is indeed very feasible. Again, all this mirrors early Sramanas, who modeled much of their methods on austere Vedic Brahmins, scholars, scriptures, and ascetics. In the end, though, no one can truly say what the future of Hinduism or all religions in India is.

Identity in India is integral but today is in flux. Currently, there is an assertion of regional identities in multiple states. This, along with caste assertion, is an understandable rubber-band snap-back reaction to a rapidly mixing and centralizing India. While much of regionalist ire is towards Hindi, English is eating regional languages, excreting strange pidgin dialects in the process. Hinglish, a mix of Hindi and English, is fast becoming the lingua franca of India’s aspirant class in its metropolitan areas. Over time, more and more pressure will be exerted on India’s regionalism, with a new Indian identity emerging as castes and ethnicities mix across the thali of Indian diversity.

In 1923 there were 1,094 Hindu students enrolled in the schools of England. They marvelled at the privileges enjoyed by the lowliest citizens of Europe and America; they studied the French and American Revolutions, and read the liberal literature of reform, the radical literature of revolt; they gloated over the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Constitution; they went back to their countries as centers of infection for democratic ideas and the gospel of liberty.

-Will Durant, The Case for India

Lastly, though, is an X-factor. This aspect was not present in the past. With the advent of English so comes the ideas of the Anglosphere. India has the highest English-speaking population in the world, and it is only growing. Western ideas are and will continue to flood into India. The word of the West becomes exceptionally potent when we consider how Western ideas are the foremost proponents of individualism, a cardinal characteristic of urbanizing societies. Ironically provincial identities that frequently do battle with this centralizing Indian identity today may need to find refuge in the umbrella of a cosmopolitan Indian identity as the tsunami of global Western culture crashes across India. India’s next avatar will have some Western aspects to it; it is up to its citizens in which ways. Conversely, India may also make its own impact on the West. Indian opinions have started to trickle into the West and will soon form a fierce river to carve its own discourse in the Anglosphere.

Ultimately, as we stand at the edge of India’s next great transformation, one thing is clear: while we may recognize echoes of our past in the present, the future remains an open scroll. The ink that will fill its pages will be drawn from a mix of tradition, innovation, struggle, and aspiration. The ancient ascetics clad in elements and the urban youths of today, striving for meaning amid glass and concrete, are part of the same endless search for purpose—one that will continue to define the spirit of India, no matter how many scripts history may write.

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“Cities rise and fall with the wisdom of their rulers and the unity of their people.”

-Ferdowsi