Harappan Civilization and Aryan Theories - David Frawley.pdf - Historia - Starożytność - MMarkMMark

THE HARAPPA / VEDA DISCUSSION (2002)

Michael Witzel

Harvard University

The Hindu

Open Page

Historical divide: archaeology and literature

Tuesday, Jan 22, 2002

N.S. RAJARAM

Indology grew out of attempts to interpret Indian sources from European

perspective. Its legacy is archaeology without literature for the Harappans and a

literature without archaeology for the Vedic Aryans. Any rewriting of history must

begin by bridging this unnatural gulf.

INDOLOGY, WHICH prominently includes history of the Vedic Age, is the result of a

historical accident. In 1784, Sir William Jones, an English jurist in the employ of the

British East India Company, began a study of Sanskrit to better understand the legal

and political traditions of the Indian subjects. As a classical scholar, he was struck by

the extraordinary similarities between Sanskrit and European languages, especially

Latin and Greek. He went on to observe: "... the Sanscrit language, whatever be its

antiquity, is of wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than

Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a

stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of grammar, than

could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer

could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from the same

source."

Though he was not the first European to recognise this connection — that honour

belongs probably to Filippo Sassetti, a Florentine merchant living in Goa two

centuries earlier — Jones was the first to express it in scholarly terms. With this

dramatic announcement Jones launched two new fields — Indology and comparative

linguistics, notably Indo-European linguistics. To account for this similarity, some

scholars postulated that the ancestors of Indians and Europeans must at one time

have lived in the same region and spoken the same language. They called this the

Aryan language and their common homeland the Aryan homeland. Following the Nazi

misuse of the word Aryan as a race, and the atrocities that accompanied it, the term

has fallen into disfavour. The preferred term today is Indo-European. According to

this theory, the ancestors of the Indians who used Vedic Sanskrit to compose the

Vedas and other related literature hailed from a land outside India. Their original

homeland has been placed in locations from Germany to Chinese Turkestan, that is,

everywhere except India where the Vedic language and its literature have found the

fullest expression and endured the longest.

This is the background to the famous Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) that has

dominated Indian history books for over a century. Based on various arguments, but

strongly influenced by biblical beliefs, scholars like F. Max Mueller assigned a date of

1500 BC for the Aryan invasion and 1200 BC for the composition of the Rigveda, the

oldest member of the Vedic corpus. The Bible is said to assign the date October 23,

4004 BC for the Creation and 2448 BC for the Flood. This was in the background

when he gave 1500 BC as the date of the Aryan invasion. Max Mueller himself in a

letter to the Duke of Argyle, then acting Secretary of State for India, asserted: "I

regard the account in the Genesis (of the Bible) to be simply historical." In his

defence, it must be recognised that he was by no means dogmatic about his

theories. Towards the end of his life, in response to some critics, Max Mueller wrote:

"Whether the Vedic hymns were written in 1000, 1500 or 2000 or 3000 BC, no

power on earth will ever determine."

Mismatch

What is remarkable in all this is the fact that the foundations of ancient Indian

history were being laid by scholars who were not historians but linguists. In keeping

with the political conditions of the age — the heyday of European colonialism — it

was inevitable that colonial and Christian missionary interests should have intruded

on their work. Even Max Mueller, during the first half of his career, saw it his duty to

advance the interests of Christian missionaries, though, towards the end of his life,

he became a convert to Vedanta. In addition, most of them had no scientific

background — witness their belief in the Biblical Creation Theory. There was also no

archaeology to guide them.

All these were soon to change. Beginning about 1921, Indian and British

archaeologists working under Sir John Marshall revealed the existence of the ancient

cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in the Punjab and Sindh. Further excavation

showed that they were part of a vast civilisation spread over most of North India and

even beyond. This is now famous as the Indus Valley or the Harappan civilisation.

They were flourishing in the period from c. 3100 BC to 1900 BC, or more than a

thousand years before the postulated Aryan invasion. Scholars from a wide range of

disciplines including literature, archaeology, architecture and even mathematics,

began to study the archaeological remains for clues to the identity and nature of the

civilisation.

At first sight, the discovery of the Harappan civilisation, spread over the same

geographical region as described in the Vedic literature, seemed to invalidate the

Aryan Invasion Theory. The natural conclusion seemed to be that Harappan

archaeology represented the material remains of the culture described in the Vedic

literature. But for reasons that are too complex to detail here, prominent historians

soon rejected the idea of the Vedic identity of the Harappan civilisation. They insisted

that the Harappans were a pre-Vedic (and non-Vedic) people who were defeated by

the invading Aryans and forced to migrate en masse to South India, later to be

known as Dravidians, speaking languages that are supposedly unrelated to Sanskrit.

Through this device, historians sought to preserve the Aryan Invasion Theory and

reconcile it with the existence of a much older civilisation in the Vedic heartland. In

this exercise it should be noted that a theory postulated by linguists in the previous

century prevailed over archaeological evidence.

No evidence of invasion

This soon ran into contradictions. Archaeologists found no evidence of any invasion

or warfare severe enough to account for the uprooting of such a vast civilisation. On

the other hand, the decline of the Harappan civilisation could be attributed to natural

causes — in particular, ecological degradation due to the drying up of vital river

systems and also floods. It is now known that a major contributor was a severe 300-

year drought (2200 — 1900 BC) that struck in an immense belt from the Aegean to

China. Recent research has shown that the rainfall in some areas diminished by as

much as 20 per cent. The Harappan was one of several ancient civilisations to feel

the impact of this ecological catastrophe; others similarly affected were Ancient

Egypt and Mesopotamia to the west and China to the east.

The theory of Harappans as Dravidians has also proved to be far from satisfactory.

The Harappans, who were supposed to be the original Dravidian speakers, were a

literate people. There are some four thousand examples of their writing from sites

like Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Lothal, Kalibangan and others, as well as dozens in

West Asia. Yet, the earliest examples of South Indian (or Dravidian) writing use a

version of the Brahmi script, which originated in North India. This leaves us in the

extraordinary situation where the migrating Harappans took their language but not

the script that they had themselves invented. And they waited more than a thousand

years to begin their writing, borrowing from a North Indian script for the purpose.

In the light of all this, the situation regarding the primary sources of ancient India

may be summarised as follows: no satisfactory explanation has been found to

account for the separate existence of Harappan archaeology and the Vedic literature,

both of which flourished in the same geographical region. On the one hand, there is

Harappan archaeology, the most extensive anywhere in the world, but no Harappan

literature. On the other, there is the Vedic literature, which exceeds in volume all

other ancient literature in the world combined several times over, but no Vedic

archaeological remains. So we have archaeology without literature for the Harappans

and literature without archaeology for the Vedic Aryans. This is all the more puzzling

considering that the Harappans were a literate people while we are told that the

Vedic Aryans knew no writing but used memory for preserving their immense

literature. This means only the literature of the illiterates has survived.

In the light of this incongruity, one may say that as long as this gulf between

archaeology and literature remains unbridged, there can be no such thing as history.

Neither the Harappans nor the Vedic Aryans have a historical context, but only

archaeological and literary sources hanging as loose ends. So the first step in any

writing (or rewriting) of ancient history should be a systematic programme to

rationally connect Harappan archaeology and the Vedic literature. These are the

primary sources; the theories that are now in textbooks are secondary, based on the

perceptions of scholars of the colonial era. More seriously, they contradict the

archaeological evidence.

Vedic-Harappan connection

Fortunately some progress is being made in accounting for both Harappan

archaeology and the Vedic literature, though, to a large extent, it owes to the work

of outsiders. Some Vedic scholars have noted that Harappan remains are replete

with sacred Vedic symbols like the swastika sign, the `OM' sign and the sacred

ashvattha leaf ( Ficus Religiosa ). No less dramatic is the discovery of the American

mathematician and historian of science, A. Seidenberg, tracing the origins of

Egyptian and Old Babylonian mathematics to Vedic mathematical texts known as the

Sulbasutras . As Seidenberg observed: " ... the elements of ancient geometry found

in Egypt (before 2100 BC) and Babylonia (c. 1900 — 1750 BC) stem from a ritual

system of the kind observed in the Sulbasutras ." This means that the mathematics of

the Sulbasutras , which are Vedic texts, must have existed long before 2000 BC, i.e.,

during the Harappan period. This is clear also from a technical examination of

Harappan archaeology, which displays skill in town planning and geometric design,

showing that Harappans must have had access to the Sulbasutras . This gives a

scientific link between Vedic literature ( Sulbasutras ) and Harappan archaeology. (The

Sulbasutras should not be confused with popular books on Vedic mathematics. These

are modern works that have little to do with the Vedas).

All this shows that progress can be made in explaining Harappan archaeology and

the Vedic literature if one is prepared to follow a multidisciplinary, scientifically

rigorous approach. The present incongruous situation — of mismatch between

archaeology and literature — is attributable to two factors. First, an attempt to

preserve a theory created on the basis of insufficient evidence before any

archaeological data became available. Next, the fact that even this theory and the

foundation that it rests on were created by linguists and other scholars whose

understanding of science and the scientific method left much to be desired.

Correcting past errors

Several historians have rightly expressed concern that history may soon be written

by individuals who lack the necessary knowledge of the historical method. But far

more serious is the fact that what is found in textbooks today is based on theories

created by men and women who had no qualifications to write about them. They are

based not on the primary sources, but explanations that seek to fit the data to a

particular Nineteenth century worldview — the Eurocolonial. The immediate task

before Indian historians is to get back to the fundamentals, ignoring the authority of

scholars from the past, no matter how great their reputations. Sri Aurobindo

suggested that the problem lies in the failure of Indian scholars to develop

independent schools of thought. In his words: "That Indian scholars have not been

able to form themselves into a great and independent school of learning is due to

two causes: the miserable scantiness of the mastery in Sanskrit provided by our

universities, crippling to all but born scholars, and our lack of sturdy independence

which makes us over-ready to defer to European (and Western) authority."

This is not to suggest that we should either deny or reject the findings of Western

scholarship. Only we should not accept them uncritically as authority figures. They

were products of their time and environment and the resulting weaknesses should be

recognised. Their contributions remain substantial, but cannot be treated as primary

knowledge. No less a person than Swami Vivekananda once said: "Study Sanskrit,

but along with it study Western sciences as well. Learn accuracy, ... study and labour

so that the time will come when you can put our history on a scientific basis... How

can foreigners, who understand very little of our manners and customs, or our

religion and philosophy, write faithful and unbiased histories of India? ...

Nevertheless they have shown us how to proceed making researches into our ancient

history. Now it is for us to strike out an independent path of historical research for

ourselves, ... It is for Indians to write Indian history."

His advice holds as good today as it did a century ago when he gave it to a group of

students. The recovery of history must begin with a thorough study of the primary

sources. The first step is to close the unnatural gap between archaeology and

literature.

N.S. RAJARAM

(The writer is the author with David Frawley of the book Vedic Aryans and the

Origins of Civilisation)

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