Indian history
revisited
Rediff Special - David Frawley
http://www.rediff.com/news/1998/nov/14aryan.htm
Most people in India today have been led to believe
that the Vedic Aryans were the first invaders of the country. They have been the
image of the Aryan hordes pouring down the passes of Afghanistan on horseback,
destroying the indigenous urban Harappan culture that was Dravidian in nature.
Even Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru subscribed to this view and it remains in textbooks
in India today.
That there was no record of such an event in ancient
Indian records, north or south, was ignored. That this theory never managed to
prove itself was disregarded.
Recently, however, the Aryan invasion idea is becoming
rejected worldwide in light of new archaeological evidence that contradicts it.
However, Indian secular and Leftist thinkers like to denigrate any questioning
of the invasion theory as Hindu fundamentalist propaganda.
A recent academic paper argues that there is an
indigenous development of civilisation in India going back to at least 6000 BCE
(Mehrgarh). It proposes that the great Harappan or Indus Valley urban culture
(2600-1900 BCE), centred on the Saraswati river of Vedic fame, had much in
common with Vedic literary accounts. It states that the Harappan culture came to
an end not because of outside invaders but owing to environmental changes, most
important of which was the drying up of the Saraswati. It argues further that
the movement of populations away from the Saraswati to the Ganges, after the
Saraswati dried up (c 1900 BCE), was reflected in the literature with Vedic
Saraswati based literature giving way to Puranic texts extolling the Ganga.
Perhaps more shockingly, the paper states that the Aryan invasion theory
reflects colonialism and Eurocentrism and is quite out of date. Note the
conclusion:
"That the archaeological record and ancient oral
and literate traditions of south Asia are now converging has significant
implications for regional cultural history. A few scholars have proposed that
there is nothing in the 'literature' firmly placing the Indo-Aryans outside of
south Asia, and now the archaeological record is confirming this.
"We reject most strongly the simplistic historical
interpretations, which date back to the eighteenth century, that continue to be
imposed on south Asian culture history. These still prevailing interpretations
are significantly diminished by European ethnocentrism, colonialism, racism, and
anti-semitism. Surely, as south Asian studies approach the twenty-first century,
it is time to describe emerging data objectively rather than perpetuate
interpretations without regard to the data archaeologists have worked so hard to
reveal."
Is this the statement of a Hindutva fanatic? No, it
is by a noted Western archaeologist specialising in ancient India, James
Schaffer of Case Western University as part of his new article, 'Migration,
Philology and South Asian Archaeology', soon to appear in Aryan and
Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and History, edited by
Bronkhorst and Deshpande, University of Michigan Press.
The Aryan invasion theory, as Schaffer notes, arose
from a Eurocentric view that was hostile to an Indic basis for Western
civilisation or peoples. The discovery of close affinities between the
Indo-European languages in the eighteenth century required an explanation. By
placing the original Aryans in Europe, who later migrated to India where they
got absorbed by the indigenous population, it took away any need to connect the
ancient Europeans with India, which was not pleasing to the colonial mindset.
The theory eventually developed an anti-semetic tone. It was used to trace
Western culture not to the Jews and their Biblical accounts but to a proposed
European homeland dominated by Nordic peoples. Thus the invasion theory became
one of the pillars for Nazi historians, yet strangely the Communists in India
have become strong supporters of the theory and accuse those who question it of
being fascists!.
Archaeologist Mark Kenoyer of the University of
Wisconsin, who is in charge of the Indus Valley display that is touring American
museums, has similar views as related in an article on the 'Indus Valley:
Secrets of a Civilisation in Wisconsin Fall 1998':
"If previous scholars were wrong about the origin
of the Indus people, they also missed the boat when it came to explaining their
downfall, which they attributed to an invasion by Indo-Aryan speaking Vedic
tribes from the northwest." This theory has now been ruled out by the lack
of archaeological evidence. Instead, says Kenoyer, "it's likely that the
rivers dried up and shifted their courses, altering trade routes and undermining
the economy."
Kenoyer is also now arguing that the Indus script can
be traced to 3300 BCE, making it as old as an Sumerian records of writing.
The skeletal record confirms that same data as
archaeology as Kenneth Kennedy notes in 'Have Aryans Been Identified in the
Prehistoric Skeletal Record from South Asia' appearing in The Indo-Aryans of
South Asia (Walter de Gruyter 1995). No such Aryan skeletons have ever been
found as different from indigenous ethnic groups.
"All prehistoric human remains recovered from the
Indian subcontinent are phenotypically identifiable as south Asians. Furthermore
their biological continuity with living peoples of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka
and the border regions is well established across time and space. Assumptions
that blondism, blue-grey eyes and light skin pigmentation are physical hallmarks
of either ancient Aryans or of members of brahmin and other social groups in
modern south Asia, find their origins in the improper marriage of excerpts from
Vedic texts with nineteenth century Germanic nationalistic writings."
Most archaeologists in India like B B Lal, S P Gupta
or S R Rao have argued similar points for several years.
At a recent conference in Los Angeles in August, sponsored by the World
Association for Vedic Studies (WAVES), Lal argued convincingly the same points
in an excellent paper called the 'Myth of the Aryan Invasion: Some Reflections
on the Authorship of the Harappan Culture'. Unfortunately, Indian Leftists
called B B Lal's recent book The Oldest Civilisation in South Asia as
"academically weak and unscholarly," though he is only relating the
implications of the latest archaeology. How many of these people ever read Lal's
book or the related archaeological studies is debatable.
Yet even a Communist historian in India like Romila
Thapar, who previously endorsed the invasion theory has been forced to backtrack
and no longer emphasises it. She recently notes in a Frontline interview:
"Introducing archaeological data into historical
studies also forces historians to think along interdisciplinary lines. The
decline of the Indus cities is attributed to a range of causes, of which
ecological change is among the major ones."
The Aryan invasion theory has been used to promote
various political agendas. British, Communist, Dravidian and dalit groups have
all used it to their advantage, as have Muslim and Christian missionaries
portraying the invading Aryans as the bad guys and the invasion as the source of
all social, political and religious problems in the country. No other theory of
ancient history has been used for so much modern political and religious
mileage. That such groups are blaming Hindus for politicising the issue now that
it is turning against them is only hypocrisy.
Regardless of one's political views, the Aryan invasion
theory is falling into the dustbin of history. India as a civilisation has as
much continuity both in terms of its ethnic groups and its literary record. In
fact a new claim for India as the cradle of civilisation may be possible with
further archaeological finds. Rather than a history of invasions, there is an
indigenous development of a civilisation with distinctive features that can be
traced back to the beginnings of agriculture and cattle rearing in the region. A
great history is there that needs to be reclaimed and reinterpreted as an
integral whole. A new history of India needs to be written that recognises this
monumental heritage. A good place to start improving and Indianising the
educational system in the country would be to correct this misconception which
puts the entire history of the region on a wrong foundation.
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