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Everything
has already been said about why Sonia Gandhi holds such a fascination for India:
the fact that she belongs to the Nehru dynasty, or the eternal inferiority
complex that a part of the Indian intelligentsia seems to be holding towards the
West. This is particularly striking amongst a section of the Indian media
(Outlook, Asian Age), which always appears to look at India through a western
prism and constantly worry how the foreign press views India, how the foreign
countries - particularly the United States of America - perceive India, what the
human rights agencies say about India...
But what has never been
said is this: the white skin of Sonia may also bewitch Indians because of the
theory of the Aryan invasion, which is still taken as the foundation stone of
the history of India. According to this theory, which was actually devised in
the 18th and 19th centuries by British linguists and archaeologists, the first
inhabitants of India were good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned shepherds, called
theDravidians, who had founded what is called the Harappan, or Valley of the
Indus civilisation. They were supposedly remarkable builders, witness the city
of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistani Sind, but had no culture to speak of, no
literature, no proper script even. Then, around 1500 B.C., India is said to have
been invaded by tribes called the Aryans: white-skinned, nomadic people, who
originated somewhere in Western Russia and imposed upon the Dravidians the
hateful caste system. To the Aryans are attributed Sanskrit, the Vedic, or
Hindu, religion, India's greatest spiritual texts, the Vedas, as well as a host
of subsequent writings, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata, the Ramanaya, etc.
This was indeed a
masterly stroke on the part of the British. Thanks to the Aryan theory, they
showed on the one hand that Indian civilisation was not that ancient and that it
was posterior to the cultures which influenced the Western world - Mesopotamia,
Sumeria, or Babylon - and that whatever good things India had developed
-Sanskrit literature, or even its architecture - had been influenced by the
West. Thus, Sanskrit, instead of being the mother of all Indo-European
languages, became just a branch of their huge family. Thus the religion of
Zarathustra is said to have influenced Hinduism, and not vice versa. And on the
other hand, it divided India and pitted against each other the low caste
dark-skinned Dravidians and the high caste light-skinned Aryans, a rift which is
still enduring.
But today, this theory
is being challenged by two new discoveries, one archaeological and the other
linguistic. Firstly, in the Rig Veda, the Ganges, India's sacred river, is only
mentioned once, but the mythic Saraswati is praised fifty times. For a long
time, the Saraswati river was indeed considered a myth, until the American
satellite Landstat was able to photograph and map the bed of this magnificent
river, which was nearly 14 km wide and took its source in the Himalayas.
Archaeologist Paul-Henri Francfort, who studied the Saraswati regionat the
beginning of the Nineties, found out that the Saraswati had
"disappeared", because around 2200 B.C., an immense drought reduced
the whole region to aridity and famine. "Thus", he writes, "most
inhabitants moved away from the Saraswati to settle on the banks of the Indus
and Sutlej rivers". According to official history, the Vedas were composed
around 1500 BC, some even say 1200 BC. Yet, the Rig Veda describes India as it
was before the great drought which dried up the Saraswati, which means in effect
that the so-called Indus, or Harappan civilisation, was a continuation of the
Vedic epoch, which ended approximately when the Saraswati dried up.
Recently, the famous
Indus seals discovered on the site of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa have been
deciphered by Dr N. Rajaram, a mathematician who worked at one time for the NASA
and Dr Jha, a distinguished linguist. In the biased light of the Aryan invasion
theory, these seals were presumed to be written in a crude Harappan (read
Dravidian) script, although theyhad never been convincingly deciphered. But
Rajaram and Jha, using an ancient Vedic glossary, the Nighantu, were able to
prove that the script is of Sanskrit lineage and have so far deciphered 2000
seals. As the discovery of the Saraswati river, the decipherment of the Indus
scripts also goes to prove that the Harappan civilisation, of which the seals
are a product, belonged to the latter part of the Vedic Age and had close
connections with Vedantic works like the Sutras and the Upanishads.
Hence, it is becoming
more and more clear that there never was an Aryan invasion in India, a theory
which was imposed upon the subcontinent by its colonisers and is today kept
alive by Nehruvian historians (such as Romila Thapar), Christian missionaries
(it is thus easy to convert the downtrodden tribals and Dravidians, by telling
them that Hinduism was a religion thrust upon them by the hated
"Brahmin" invaders) and the communists (who hate anything Hindu). But
as long as India will not rewrite its history books andteach its children to be
proud of its ancient and indigenous civilisation, there will be other Sonia
Gandhis who will come and exploit India's Secret Craving For The White.
Gautier is the South
Asia correspondent of `Le Figaro', France's largest circulation newspaper, and
the author of `Rewriting Indian History'. The views expressed in this piece are
solely the author's and do not necessarily reflect those of his newspaper. His
column will appear every alternate Monday.
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