The Problem Of Aryan Origins

Chapter Nine

Pointers Towards Ultimate Aryan Origins

What lies in remotest time behind the belt that we have sketched is difficult to surmise. Was there in farthest prehistory a point from which a diffusion took place to form this belt? We have already noticed the Irānian Aryans' tradition of an ancient home, Airiyānam vaējo. E. Herzfeld believes that the Avesta locates it distinctly in "the vast plains of the Oxus and the Jaxartes".¹ But, even if he proves right, the region from which those Aryans who became the Irānians derived need not have been the ultimate home of all the Aryans. The absence of any suggestion of it in the oldest Aryan document, the Rigveda, should rule it out. True, the locality indicated by Herzfeld is very suitable for horse-domestication, so much so that Zeuner opines that "the original centre of the domestication of the horse might briefly be circumscribed as Turkestān",² though, with his scepticism about horse-finds at places like Anau and Shah Tepe, he is careful to make the reservation: "This view is, however, not based on archaeological evidence, but on biological considerations." Whatever the suitability of Turkestān, other areas could also serve well, yet actually none of these areas is necessarily the final origin. Horse-domestication could easily have been a phase of Aryan history, prior to which there might have been Aryans without the domesticated horse. Where such Aryans lived is still a mystery.

Aryanism may not have been confined to the belt we have traced. Our belt is what we can conceive of at present. A larger view emerges from a letter of Sri Aurobindo which ended with a glimmer of some future plans of his. One of them he words thus: "I hope also to lead up to the recovery of the sense of the ancient spiritual conceptions of which old symbol and myth give us the indications and which I believe

1.Irān in the Ancient East (Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 190.

2.Op. cit., p. 315.

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to have been at one time a common culture covering a great part of the globe with India perhaps as a centre."³

However, even in the epoch to which Sri Aurobindo directs us, when Aryanism occupied a wider space, we cannot regard India as its pristine foyer. If we are to proceed from what we may term indirect Rigvedic hints of a past far removed from any immediate background in time, we arrive at a notion somewhat sympathetic to Tilak's theory of an Arctic home shadowed forth in the Veda. Sri Aurobindo is positive that the Veda was composed in India, but face to face with its repeated imagery of the dawn he is led at the same time to a symbolic interpretation and an Arctic allusion. After demonstrating from a variety of typical examples how pervading is the image of the Cow of Light and how inevitably it points to a psychological sense for the Veda, he poses a few questions, gives his answer and returns to them with a new understanding.

"Why suppose a symbol where there is only an image? Why invite the difficulty of a double figure in which 'cow' means light of dawn and light of dawn is the symbol of an inner illumination? Why not take it that the Rishis were praying not for spiritual illumination, but for daylight?

"The objections are manifold and some of them overwhelming. If we assume that the Vedic hymns were composed in India and the dawn is the Indian dawn and the night the brief Indian night of ten or twelve hours, we have to start with the concession that the Vedic Rishis were savages overpowered by a terror of the darkness which they peopled with goblins, ignorant of the natural law of the succession of night and day, - which is yet beautifully hymned in many of the Suktas, - and believed that it was only by their prayers and sacrifices that the Sun rose in the heavens and the Dawn emerged from the embrace of her sister Night. Yet they speak of the undeviating rule of the action of the Gods, and

3. "Interpretation of the Veda" - a letter published in The Hindu (Madras), August 27,1914. See The Secret of the Veda, pp. 544-48, for the full text.

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of Dawn following always the path of the eternal Law or Truth! We have to suppose that when the Rishi gives vent to the joyous cry 'We have crossed over to the other shore of this darkness!', it was only the normal awakening to the daily sunrise that he thus eagerly hymned. We have to suppose that the Vedic peoples sat down to the sacrifice at dawn and prayed for the light when it had already come. And if we accept all these improbabilities, we are met by the clear statement that it was only after they had sat for nine or for ten months that the lost light and the lost sun were recovered by the Angirasa Rishis. And what are we to make of the constant assertion of the discovery of the Light by the Fathers; - 'Our fathers found out the hidden light, by the truth in their thoughts they brought to birth the Dawn', gūḷhaṁ jyotih pitaro anvavindan, satyamantrā ajanayan usāsam (VII. 76.4)? If we found such a verse in any collection of poems in any literature, we would at once give it a psychological or a spiritual sense; there is no just reason for a different treatment of the Veda.

"If, however, we are to give a naturalistic explanation and no other to the Vedic hymns, it is quite clear that the Vedic Dawn and Night cannot be the Night and Dawn of India; it is only in the Arctic regions that the attitude of the Rishis towards these natural circumstances and the statements about the Angirasas become at all intelligible. But though it is extremely probable that the memories of the Arctic home enter into the external sense of the Veda, the Arctic theory does not exclude an inner sense behind the ancient images drawn from Nature nor does it dispense with the necessity for a more coherent and straightforward explanation of the hymns to the Dawn."⁴

The Arctic allusion is implied in another passage too of Sri Aurobindo's on a Dawn-hymn:

"Thus the Dawns come with a constant alternation, thrice ten - the mystic number of our mentality - making the

4. Op. cit. pp. 122-123.

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month, till some day there shall break out upon us the wondrous experience of our forefathers in a long bygone age of humanity when the dawns succeeded each other without the intervention of any night, when they came to the Sun as to a lover and circled round him, not returning again and again in his front as a precursor of his periodical visitations. That shall be when the supramental consciousness shines out fulfilled in the mentality and we shall possess the year-long day enjoyed by the gods on the summit of the eternal mountain. Then shall be the dawning of the 'best' or highest, most glorious Dawn, when 'driving away the Enemy guardian of the Truth, born in the Truth, full of the bliss, uttering the highest truths, fulfilled in all boons she brings the birth and manifestation of the godheads' (I.113.12). Meanwhile each dawn comes as the first of a long succession that shall follow and pursues the path and goal of those that have already gone forward; each in her coming impels the life upwards and awakens in us 'someone who was dead' (I.113.8)."⁵

We may continue with another relevant passage. Sri Aurobindo writes of "the great work accomplished by the Angirasa Rishis" as being the "conquest of Swar" which is the solar world of truth and immortality. This conquest is "the aim of the sacrifice" which those Rishis carried on as Navagwas and Dashagwas, literally meaning "nine-cowed" and "ten-cowed", - "each cow representing collectively the thirty Dawns which constitute one month of the sacrificial year". Sri Aurobindo follows up with the reflections:

"But what is meant by the figure of the months? for it now becomes clear that it is a figure, a parable; the year is symbolic, the months are symbolic. It is in the revolution of the year that the recovery of the lost Sun and the lost cows is effected, for we have the explicit statement in X.62.2, rtenābhindan parivatsare valam, 'by the truth, in the revolution of the year, they broke Vala', or as Sayana interprets it, 'by sacrifice lasting for a year'. This passage certainly goes

5. Ibid. pp. 430-31.

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far to support the Arctic theory, for it speaks of a yearly and not a daily return of the Sun. But we are not concerned with the external figure, nor does its validity in any way affect our own theory; for it may very well be that the striking Arctic experience of the long night, the annual sunrise and the continuous dawns was made by the Mystics the figure of the spiritual night and its difficult illumination. But that this idea of Time, of the months and years is used as a symbol seems to be clear from other passages of the Veda, notably from Gritsamada's hymn to Brihaspati, II.24."⁶

Finally, we may cull a portion from a general comment on modern Vedic interpretations. It sends us back to a citation already made from Sri Aurobindo. There he says that, although nothing denotes any Aryan entry into India "near to the time of the Vedic hymns" or "the slow penetration of a small body of fair-skinned barbarians into a civilised Dravidian peninsula", it is always possible to think of a far distant forgotten age and of "the bulk of the peoples now inhabiting India" being "the descendants of a new race from more northern latitudes, even perhaps, as argued by Mr. Tilak, from the Arctic regions". Our new culling reads:

"Mr. Tilak in his Arctic Home in the Vedas has accepted the general conclusions of European scholarship, but by a fresh examination of the Vedic Dawn, the figure of the Vedic cows and the astronomical data of the hymns, has established at least a strong probability that the Aryan races descended originally from the Arctic regions in the glacial period. Mr. T. Paramasiva Aiyar [in The Riks] by a still bolder departure has attempted to prove that the whole of the Rig-veda is a figurative representation of our planet after its long-continued glacial death in the same period of terrestrial evolution. It is difficult to accept in their mass Mr. Aiyar's reasonings and conclusion, but he has at least thrown a new light on the great Vedic mythus of Ahi Vritra and the release of the seven rivers. His interpretation is far

6. Ibid., p. 170. The short phrases quoted before this passage come from pp. 170 and 168.

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more consistent and probable than the current theory which is not borne out by the language of the hymns. Taken in conjunction with Mr. Tilak's work it may serve as the starting-point for a new external interpretation of the old Scripture which will explain much that is now inexplicable and recreate for us the physical origins if not the actual physical environment of the old Aryan world."⁷

Evidently, according to Sri Aurobindo, if a naturalistic interpretation were accepted as colouring the symbolic, there would be two shades to it, either separate or commingled - one reflecting elements of the actually present Aryan life, such as cows, horses, chariots, weapons, treasures, fields, rivers, mountains, the other answering to impressions inherited from an antiquity which by its far-awayness has grown one with the projections of a mythic imagination and with the mysterious splendours of inner spiritual experience. What Sri Aurobindo has called "memories of the Arctic home" belong to the second shade crossed here and there by superimposed tinges from the first, as when the Vedic Dawn with its backdrop of Arctic tones is invoked to establish for the sacrificers a state of bliss full not only of cows (symbolizing light) but also of horses (symbolizing vital force),⁸ the latter animal not likely to have been a part of a polar scenario.

Arctic memories as discerned by Sri Aurobindo - that is, vague visions of a nature fused with supernature, "the wondrous experience of our forefathers in a long bygone age of humanity" - such are the sole probable clues we can catch from the world of pristine Aryanism towards solving the problem of Aryan origins.

Perhaps the Avesta too - in the teeth of all Western scholarship - may be taken to provide supporting clues. Beliefs like Herzfeld's arise from those references where the name Airiyānam vaējo occurs with a determinative clause. Thus Zarathustra is said to have worshipped "in the Airi-

7.Ibid., pp . 28-9.

8.Ibid., p. 121.

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yānam vaējo of the good (river) Daitya" (Yashts 5.104; 9.25; 17.45) and his patron King Vishtaspa is also shown as having worshipped "in sight" of the same river (Yashts 5.112; 9.29; 17.61). But the much earlier Yima (= Jamshed) is a ruler in an Airiyānam vaējo with no determinative clause and at the same time he is stated to have extended thrice the land "towards the south in the direction of the sun" (Vidēvdāt 2.10, 14, 18). Here, as the Parsi scholar Hormazdyer K. Mirza suggests, there seems to be a reference to a migration of the Irānian people southwards to the region where Zarathustra and Vishtaspa worshipped.⁹ An earlier more northward homeland seems to be hinted at. Tilak too has a similar understanding of the Avesta on the basis of the assertion (Vidēvdāt 2) that in Airiyānam vaējo there were ten months of severe winter and two of summer as well as on the statement that the sun, the moon and the stars appeared to rise and set once (in a year).

However, nothing conclusive can be affirmed and whatever "Arctic memories" there may be in the Rigveda bear no relation at all to any hypothesis of the Rigvedics coming from outside India into the Indo-Gangetic plain in the middle of the second millennium B.C.

9. "Observations on Ancient Iranian tradition", Jam-e-Jamshed (Bombay daily), June 12 and 26, 1978.

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