The Problem Of Aryan Origins

SUPPLEMENT III

"THE ARYAN QUESTION" AGAIN

1

Lately there has been a marked shift of opinion on the role of the Rigvedic Aryans in the destruction of the Indus Valley Civilization, known also as the Harappā Culture. On a TV programme from London, two eminent historians, Colin Renfrew and F. R. Allchin, dissociated themselves from the view which mainly Sir Mortimer Wheeler¹ had popularised, invoking the name of the Rigvedic Aryans' god-leader, often called puramdara, "fort-destroyer": "On circumstantial evidence Indra stands accused." Thus they have come over to the side of G. F. Dales² who, as far back as 1964, examined critically whatever evidence from excavations Wheeler had adduced. Finding it most indecisive, Dales depended on the alternative theory of floods, etc. and concluded: "The enemy of the Harappāns was Nature... Indra and the barbarian hordes are exonerated." K.M. Srivastava³ is the latest and most vociferous of the exonerators.

However, none of the defenders of Indra has taken the radical stand that the Rigvedic Aryans could not have destroyed the Harappā Culture because they did not invade India anywhere near the time when this culture can be shown to have ended. A still more radical position would be that there was no invasion at all at any historically postulable time. A negative argument in favour of it is the uncertainty of fixing the epoch of the alleged invasion. Wheeler⁴ has noted: "the middle of the [second] millennium B.C. has been suggested, without serious support..." In view of an

1.Antiquity 3.

2."The Mythical Massacre of Mohenjodāro", Expedition 3.

3."The Myth of Aryan Invasion", Frontiers of the Indus Civilization, edited with an Introduction by B.B. Lal, pp. 437-43.

4.The Indus Civilization (Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 131.

Page 185

earlier dating than 1500 B.C. for the end of the Indus civilization, proposed on the basis of new C-14 tests, Wheeler⁵ opts for a provisional bracket 2500-1700 B.C. or slightly earlier for this civilization in the Punjāb and Sind and feels no hesitation in supposing⁶ "that the Harappāns of the Indus Valley in their decadence, in or about the seventeenth century B.C., fell before the advancing Aryans..." H. Possehl,⁷ following such tests, asserts that whereas the terminal date of the Indus Civilization, at least of the Urban Phase during which the cities were fully occupied, cannot be projected below 1800 B.C. it is widely agreed that the Vedic literature from which the hypothesis of the Aryan destruction of these cities is drawn was compiled sometime between 1200 and 800 B.C. An invasion in the chronological gap of between 600 and 1000 years seems hardly reasonable to him. This implies that it could not have been much earlier than 1200 B.C. Long ago Dales, in his article, "The Decline of the Harappāns",⁸ had declared: "No one has any exact knowledge of the date when the Aryans first entered the Indus Valley area."

A very odd situation facing those who are so positive about the invasion! What makes it worse is that the honest admission by Dales after the words we have quoted above still holds true - that the supposed Aryan invaders "have not yet been identified archaeologicaliy." When on top of the complete chronological haze and this negative result, we get a "No" to the query whether any reliable documentary evidence exists of Aryan foreigners hailing from outside India, we start wondering why historians who claim to be scientific-minded persist in raising "the Aryan question" in any sense.

The obsession, however, dies hard and as late as 1987 we had one more attempt to raise it. In Lecture III of the series

5.Ibid., p. 133.

6.Ibid., p. 132.

7.Quoted in "The Myth of Aryan Invasion", p. 441, cols. 1-2.

8.Scientific American (New York 1966), p. 95

Page 186

"Religion and Society" delivered at Calcutta University by Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya⁹ a spirited front is put up against the plea of Dales and Srivastava to exonerate Indra.

Chattopadhyaya mentions the views of archaeologists that floods arising from climatic and tectonic or what Wheeler terms geomorphological changes were an important cause of the decline of the Indus Civilization. He agrees, but later cites D.D. Kosambi in an attempt to prove from the Rigveda that the Aryans demolished dams to inundate Harappān cities. This whole attempt is fanciful, as can be demonstrated by a straight look at the doings of the Rigvedic demon Vritra. Chattopadhyaya¹⁰ writes: " 'Vritra' literally means the Obstructor, and is also described as ahi, literally 'serpent'." Then some Vedic texts are quoted telling what Indra did with Vritra: e.g., "He smote Vritra who encompassed the waters (vi. 20.2)" - "He slew the dragon hidden in the waters and obstructing the waters and the sky (ii.11.5)" - "When he laid open the great mountain, he let loose the torrents and slew the Danava, he set free the pent-up springs, the udder of the mountain (v. 32.1-2)" - "He releases the streams which are imprisoned cows (i.61.10), or which, like lowing cows, flow to the ocean (i.32.2)" - "He won the cows and Soma and made the seven rivers flow (i.32.12; ii.12.12)". It should be clear that Indra is winning for his worshippers some boon for their own lives, some boon of light and happiness obstructed by the demonic Vritra. Here even the "sky" is involved and a "mountain" comes into the picture and the released waters go towards some "ocean". How can such verses be twisted à la Kosambi to signify that the invading Aryans broke up dams which had been made by the pre-Aryan Harappān Civilization for its agricultural needs and that they thus ruined the agriculture of the region and the possibility of continuing city life for long, or of maintaining the urban population? Vritra the

9. "Harappan Religion and the Aryan Question" (Prakashana, Bangalore 1987), pp. 75, 76.

10. Ibid.

Page 187

demon is the enemy, not any Indus Civilization, and the freeing of the waters is for the Aryans' own benefit, whatever that may be - physical or spiritual - and bespeaks no ulterior motive of harming anybody.

If the benefit is physical, the best explanation is to postulate a nature-myth as in the days of Max Muller: we have to see here a poetic representation of the rain-god letting pent-up waters loose from imprisoning clouds. A spiritual outlook would send us to Sri Aurobindo's Secret of the Veda. By no means can we be justified in making much of a few descriptions¹¹ like RV. 4.19.4-8; 2.15.3, in which, as Kosambi points out, the so-called demon Vritra "lay like a dark snake across the slopes. The rivers were brought to a standstill (tastabhānāḥ); when the demon was struck by Indra's shattering weapon (vajra) the ground buckled, the stones rolled away like chariot wheels, the pent-up waters flowed over the demon's recumbent body". Even such verses are quite consonant with a symbolic reading such as various other verses suggest. Chattopadhyaya, in backing Kosambi's hypothesis, thinks that it joins up with the "flood theory" which is receiving increasing emphasis among a section of archaeologists, but he quite forgets that this theory ascribes the floods to natural causes and that floods occurred several times antedating the supposed Aryan advent. Apropos of Mohenjo-dāro he¹² himself writes: "At least one of the factors that contributed to the decline of this city was repeated flooding of it... It is true that the Harappāns could and did rebuild or repair the city repeatedly after the devastating floods; but that must have sapped much of their energy and vitality, and hence also caused deviation from their main preoccupations." The "flood-theory" has scarcely any room for the shattering of dams by invading barbarians. In fact it is one of the reasons why the Aryan-invasion theory as a reason for the end of the Indus Civilization is sought to be given up.

Here a word of warning is necessary to counteract Chattopadhyaya's

11.Ibid., p. 86.

12.Ibid., p. 70.

Page 188

making capital out of the actual presence of "prehistoric dams, now called Gebr-bands", which, he ¹³ claims, "are still to be found on many water-courses in the western parts of the region under consideration". And he criticises Stuart Piggott for wrong thinking about what were broken up by Indra. He insists that these were "dams (not embankments as Piggott would have it)" and then he points at "Gebr-bands". When we turn to Piggott for further information we are surprised by our discovery. He¹⁴ writes in relation to the problems of climate and population in prehistoric times:

"In his explorations in Baluchistan these problems... were, of course, much before Sir Aurel Stein's eyes, and he was able to identify a large series of artificial stone-built dams and terraces, known locally as gabarbands, clearly designed to aid the irrigation of fields... Even though the age and culture of these works are still unknown, their presence is important in indicating greater rainfall in antiquity, and it is by no means improbable that they do, in fact, date back to the prehistoric occupation of the Baluchi Hills."

Plainly, Chattopadhyaya's "western parts of the region under consideration" are not the Indus Valley with which we are concerned but the Baluchi Hills. In fact, Piggott¹⁵ is at some pains to differentiate conditions in the latter area from those in Sind. In Sind the irrigation works were connected with the river Indus whose flow would be increased in spring by "the melting of the winter snows in the Himalayas, where the river rises". Piggott goes on to say: "This would have caused an annual inundation in primitive conditions... And... it is important to remember that there are only two really fixed points in the course of the river in Sind - at Sukkur and at Kotri - where it cuts through hard limestone instead of soft soils. Between these points, where the channel

13.Ibid., p. 86.

14.Prehistoric India (A Pelican Book, Harmondsworth, 1961), pp. 69-70.

15.Ibid., p. 70.

Page 189

cannot vary its position, the Indus would under natural conditions, without man-made embankments, tend to alter its course yearly, after every successive inundation. There is indeed abundant evidence from the sites of the Harappā Culture that such alterations of course, with consequent disastrous floods, was not uncommon in ancient times." From all this we can infer that there were no Gebr-bands or man-made dams in the Sind of Mohenjo-dāro for Indra to break.

The idea of a dam becomes relevant to Sind in one sole context which can have nothing to do with the Kosambi-Chattopadhyaya conjectures. Drillings during the winter of 1964-1965 carried out jointly at Mohenjo-daro by the University of Pennsylvania and the Pakistan Government Department of Archaeology penetrated through the ground water which, standing 15 feet below the surface of the plain, had prevented earlier workers from determining the total depth of the site's human occupation. Silt deposits, such as had been found even as high as 30 feet above ground level, were discovered to exist repeatedly below the plain's surface. Altogether they spanned a vertical distance of 70 feet, lying sandwiched between the city's successive occupations. Here lies hidden a long-term story of destruction by water again and again, which covered a period of several centuries far earlier than any epoch of Aryan invasion conceivable in the second millennium B.C. And this story can be connected with a dam-phenomenon quite unrelated either to the constructive skill of the Mohenjo-darians or to the destructive ill will of any invaders.

Dales has dwelt on this phenomenon in his "Decline of the Harappāns". The multilevel accumulations of silt in the Mohenjo-dāro area as well as at smaller neighbouring sites provoked the query: "Gould major changes caused in the structure of all these places by deformation have blocked the Indus River from time to time and gradually formed a huge upstream lake submerging the human settlements?" In 1940 the Indian palaeontologist M. R. Sahni, noticing silt deposits

Page 190

perched many feet above the level of the Indus plain near the city of Hyderabad in Sind, had suggested an affirmative answer. In 1960 the field-workers sent by Pennsylvania University, examining Harappān settlements along Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, could not help concluding that the coastline had risen considerably in the past 4000 years and the initial rise appeared to have occurred during the period of the Indus Valley Civilization itself. In 1960 the American hydrologist Robert L. Raikes was also conducting extensive surveys in Southern Balūchistān and the lower Indus Valley. His keen antiquarian interests led him to join forces with the Mohenjo-dāro expedition. And his preliminary research compelled him to revive Sahni's dam-and-lake theory. Guided by it, he was able to single out an area near Sehwan, about 90 miles downstream from Mohenjo-dāro, as the most likely seat of tectonic disturbances affecting the city.

Here the large-scale rock-faulting, accompanied by massive extrusions of mud that were aided by the pressure of accumulated underground gases, could easily have raised a natural barrier turning the upstream portion of the Indus into a slow-filling reservoir. With the spread of the rising waters small towns and villages would be submerged, the silt completely obliterating them. An empire's capital like Mohenjo-daro would undertake substantial community projects to protect itself. We actually see massive mud-brick platforms raised and faced with fire-brick to keep the level of the city above the damaging inundation. When the waters dammed up on the Indus managed to spill over, and cut away the barrier, normal life was resumed with the erection of new buildings on top of the older foundations and walls. Five times the lake seems to have intruded and withdrawn, lasting on each occasion for a number of decades, even up to 100 years. No invading Aryans can be conjured up for the natural breaking of a dam which had itself been built by natural forces and not by the Mohenjo-darians.

Page 191

2

No doubt, Chattopadhyaya is not bound down to his vision of Gebr-bands, important though it is for his general position. He has more than one string to his bow. If this vision is shown to be insufficient and needing to be replaced by Piggott's view of the Indus's altered course and by Dales's Sahni-Raikes picture of the Sehwan area, he will not feel frustrated. There is another line of defence which we have to breach.

He is in sympathy with the notion that pur and pur a in the Rgveda connoted nagara, "city", "town". He¹⁶ argues: "... the Rgveda speaks of a considerable number of cities in the Land of the Seven Seas and of the ransacking of these by Aryans under the leadership of the war-god Indra. The whole thing cannot be brushed aside as a mere figment of imagination of the Vedic poets for the simple reason that those who have never seen any city cannot refer to these: the Vedic peoples themselves could by no stretch of imagination be city-dwellers, it being overwhelmingly obvious from the internal evidence of the Rgveda that they were pastoral nomads after all. Therefore, before the discovery of Mohenjo-dāro and Harappā - soon followed by the discovery of many other cities within the Harappān cultural zone - there could at best be some speculations about these pura-s or cities and of Indra's role as purandara or the sacker of cities in the Rgveda - speculations, some specimens of which are to be found in the Vedic Index by Macdonell and Keith. With the discovery of ruined cities in the Harappā cultural zone by the archaeologists the Vedic scholars are relieved of the obligation of indulging in such speculations..." Chattopadhyaya is positive in denying to the Rigvedic Aryans any puras of their own. But R.P. Chanda who was the first in 1926 to hold Indra responsible for the destruction of Mohenjo-dāro and Harappā and who, according to Chatto-

16. Op. cit., p. 83.

Page 192

padhyaya, first brought up the subject of puras and whom Chattopadhyaya¹⁷ quotes at some length says: "In the Rgveda, Pura is much oftener connected with the enemies of the Aryas than with the Arya Rsis and warriors." Mark the comparative "oftener". So, if pur meant city or town, the Vedic peoples have to be thought of as living in at least some cities or towns of their own and not being absolutely pastoral and nomadic. Surely, here is an anomaly - and a gigantic one too. For, as Chanda writes: "In one stanza (7.15.14), an extensive (śatabhuji) Pur made of copper or iron (ayas) is referred to. In another stanza (1.58.8) prayer is offered to Agni to protect the worshipper with Purs of ayas." The Rigvedics must have been dwellers in mighty cities - essentially just like the Harappans! However, all discrepancies and historical vagaries would be avoided if the pur were no actual city like Mohenjo-daro or Harappa but a symbolic picture of inner experience - a stronghold of the soul in which spiritual light was defended or a stronghold of demon-forces of the in-world in which preternatural darkness was established.

The basic trouble with Chattopadhyaya and his ilk is that they are abysmally ignorant of Sri Aurobindo, who long ago saw that to take the Rigveda in a naturalistic or historical sense is to court disaster: on the one hand we shall commit howlers about the historical past and on the other reduce this scripture to a near-jumble, often a tale of exaggerative episodes and a string of impossible imagery. Unless an esoteric key is laid hold of, it is not of much use to us.

In addition to the fiasco about Vritra and the puras, we have an inconclusive discussion of the strange character named Pani by the Rigvedics. Chattopadhyaya¹⁸ makes a long quotation from Chanda, evidently with approval:

"It appears to me that the aboriginal town-folk with whom the Aryas came into collision in the Indus Valley were called Panis in hymns of all the books of the Rgveda. Yaska

17.Ibid., pp. 78 - 79.

18.Ibid., pp. 80-81.

Page 193

(Nirukta 6.27) in his comment on Rgveda 8.66.10 says, The Panis are merchants', and in his comment on R.V. 10.108.1 (Nirukta 11.25) he calls the Panis demons. The distinction between the human and the superhuman Pani is also recognised by Say ana, the author of the commentary on the Rgveda, and the context justifies the distinction. The word Pani is evidently derived from Pana, 'Price'. As trade finds no place in the list of professions and crafts practised by the Rigvedics, the conclusion that the much maligned Panis were the representatives of an earlier commercial civilization seems irresistible." Chanda continues: "Among the antiquities unearthed at Mohenjo-dāro are coins with picto-graphic legends that indicate the very early development of commercial life in the Indus Valley. The Panis probably represented this prehistoric civilization of the Indus Valley in its last phase when it came into contact with the invading Arya civilization."

Now let us see some of the things Sri Aurobindo¹⁹ says: "It is either an uncritical or a disingenuous method to take isolated passages and give them a particular sense which will do well enough there only while ignoring the numerous other passages in which that sense is patently inapplicable. We must take as a whole all the references in the Veda to the Panis, their wealth, their characteristics, the victory of the Gods, the seers and the Aryans over them and adopt uniformly that conclusion which arises from all the passages thus taken together. When we follow this method we find that in many of these passages the idea of the Panis as human beings is absolutely impossible and that they are powers either of physical or of spiritual darkness; in others that they cannot at all be powers of physical darkness, but may well be either human enemies of the god-seekers and sacrificers or else enemies of the spiritual Light; in yet others that they cannot be either human enemies or enemies of the physical Light, but are certainly the enemies of the spiritual

19. The Secret of the Veda (Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry 1972). pp. 215-16.

Page 194

Light, the Truth and the Thought. From these data there can be only one conclusion, that they are always and only enemies of the spiritual Light."

The Panis, says Sri Aurobindo²⁰, are constantly spoken of as Dasyus and Dāsas, and he adds: "We may take as the master-clue to the general character of these Dasyus the Rik V.14.4. 'Agni born shone out slaying the Dasyus, the darkness by the Light: he found the Cows, the Waters, Swar', agnir jāto arocata, ghnan dasyün jyotiṣā tamah avindad gaapah svah. There are two great divisions of the Dasyus, the Panis who intercept both the cows and the waters but are especially associated with the refusal of the cows, the Vritras who intercept the waters and the light, but are especially associated with the withholding of the waters; all Dasyus without exception stand in the way of the ascent to Swar, and oppose the acquisition of the wealth by the Aryan seers. The refusal of the light is their opposition to the vision of Swar, svardṛś, and the vision of the sun, to the supreme vision of knowledge, upamā ketuh (V. 34.9); the refusal of the waters is their opposition to the abundant movement of Swar, svarvatīr apah, the movement or streamings of the Truth, rtasya preṣā, rtasya dhārāh; the opposition to the wealth-acquisition is their refusal of the abundant substance of Swar, vasu, dhana, vāja, hiranya, that great wealth which is found in the sun and in the waters, apsu surye mahad dhanam (VIII.68.9). Still since the whole struggle is between the Light and the Darkness, the Truth and the Falsehood, the divine Maya and the undivine, all the Dasyus alike are here identified with the Darkness; and it is by the birth and shining of Agni that the Light is created with which he slays the Dasyus and the Darkness. The historical interpretation will not do at all here, though the naturalistic may pass if we isolate the passage and suppose the lighting of the sacrificial fire to be the cause of the daily sunrise; but we have to judge from a comparative study of the Veda and not on the

20. Ibid. pp. 215. 216-17.

Page 195

strength of isolated passages."

Another eye-opener in this context is Sri Aurobindo's statement:²¹ "It is not with physical weapons but with words that Indra fights the Panis (VI. 39.2), panīn vacobhir abhi yodhad indrah". Also in connection with another enemy of the Aryans, Vala who is the "coverer" as Vritra is the "obstructor", Indra uses no weapon. His martial achievement is related to the term brahman in the neuter gender, which, according to Macdonell,²² signifies in the Rigveda nothing more than "prayer" or "devotion". Sri Aurobindo²³ explains the term more elaborately along the same lines: "Brahman in the Veda signifies ordinarily the Vedic Word or Mantra in its profoundest aspect as the expression of the intuition arising out of the depth of the soul or being." Thus the Rigveda 11.24.3 in its closing portion tells us of divine action: "...the firm places were cast down, the fortified places were made weak; up Brihaspati drove the cows (rays), by the hymn (Brāhmaṇa) he broke Vala, he concealed the darkness, he made Swar visible."²⁴ Here the story is linked with Indra no less than Brihaspati, for the Rishi addresses them jointly. And we may observe that "fortified places" which are the puras that Indra is elsewhere said to destroy are on the scene here. Even when Indra's thunderbolt (vajra) comes in (1.33.10) and his "bow" is mentioned in the same hymn, we soon learn both the nature of the power his weapons really deploy and the way in which he works through his devotees: "O Indra, by the speakers of the word (brahmabhih) thou didst cast down the Dasyu, attacking those who can think not (the Truth) by those who think (amanyamānān abhi manyamānaih)"²⁵ As I say towards the end of my book: "To ascribe to the Rigvedic Indra and to his

21.Ibid., pp. 222.

22.A History of Sanskrit Literature (William Heinemann Ltd., London 1928), p. 219.

23.Op. cit., p. 306.

24.Ibid., pp.148, 223.

25.Ibid., p.228.

Page 196

fellow-deities or even to his thinker-protégés physical means of slaughter at any place is to strain the text impermissibly. Whatever weapons are named are symbolic and whatever material-looking objects they demolish are equally symbolisations."

3

So far as "the Aryan Question" is concerned, Chattopadhyaya's lecture is altogether on the wrong track and his invocation of "authorities" like Chanda and Kosambi does not bring him the slightest help. Srivastava is far from the Aurobindonian vision but his summing up in the matter of the Rigvedics and the Indus Civilization is not in the least, as Chattopadhyaya²⁶ puts it, "just Aryan chauvinism." It is the plain truth. Where Srivastava also errs, like Chattopadhyaya, is in thinking that an Aryan invasion of India did take place at some time in the second half of the second millennium B.C. Every piece of evidence militates against the belief - whether in connection with the end of the Indus civilization or in any other context - that the Rigvedics came from abroad as invaders of India or even that they were physically on the war-path against human Dāsas and Dasyus.

Extra inducements to this vision are three facts. One we have already touched upon - namely, that the Rigvedics ascribe mighty forts not only to their enemies but also now and then to themselves and thus spoil the picture of pastoral nomads pitted against great city-builders. The second fact is that - as my book has already stressed - the puras they speak of go far beyond anything we can find of human city-building at the time, whether Harappan or any other. They do not stop even with calling the puras prthvī ("broad") and urvī ("wide"); they proceed to designate them aśmanmayī ("made of stone"), āyasī (commonly rendered "made of

26. Op. cit., p. 89.

Page 197

iron") or śatabhujī ("with a hundred walls") and, as such, variously number them ninety, ninety-nine and a hundred. Can any fortified civilization known to our historians match these puras in magnitude, strength and multiplicity?

The third fact is a complex one with several strands. Dales has touched on some of them. He²⁷ writes: "A series of carbon-14 dates from Harappān sites along the coast of India... shows that many of these southerly towns and trading posts had continued to be occupied much later than sites in the Indus Valley. This and other bits of unexplained evidence have raised doubts concerning a fundamental hypothesis about the Harappān civilization: that Harappa and Mohenjo-daro had been sacked, and the Harappan civilization liquidated or absorbed, by the Aryan invaders..." Dales himself has not gone into the details of what he mentions as "other bits of unexplained evidence". Only to one bit he refers when he²⁸ remarks: "The northern Indus cities show no evidence of a decline in material prosperity before the abandonment but quite the opposite is true of Mohenjo-dāro and other southern sites. What does this contrast signify?" The contrast pulls us entirely away from the universe of discourse relevant to the invasion theory, just as much as it disposes of the suspicion that the decline, by about 1750 B.C. or so, was inherent in the character of the civilization developed. Aryan invaders, believed to be pressing into the country from the north-west, would affect the northern sites foremost. Both the morale and the material state of these sites should manifest a decline.

Nor can we plead that they were suddenly attacked and therefore abruptly left by their inhabitants. For, there is the further bit of "unexplained evidence" confronting the exponents of Indra's city-sacking: not the northern sites but the southern Mohenjo-daro shows signs of a possible violent end. The northern capital, Harappa, is indeed occupied after its desertion but with quite a time-lag: the desertion

27.'The Decline of the Harappans" p. 93.

28.Ibid. p. 98.

Page 198

and occupation have no conceivable link, as Lal and others have amply proved. And here comes in still another bit: unlike Harappa, Mohenjo-daro has no settlement at all on its ruins, none even of a late order as at Harappa - an absolute paradox if its violent termination was caused by Aryan invaders.

If neither of the capital cities can be connected in the least with them, we should be wary of pointing to them from whatever indications of foreign entry we may feel at smaller places like Chanhu-daro. Chanhu-daro itself, we may observe, is a southern site and, before we yield it up to the Aryan-invasion hypothesis, we must take stock of the South's general contrast to the undisturbed northern towns. Besides, Chanhu-daro gives, as Dales²⁹ notes, "abundant evidence of flooding."

Everything urges us to separate the end of the Indus Civilization from any warfare by the Rigvedic Aryans and to accept Sri Aurobindo's explanation of India's oldest scripture. In the light of this explanation all features of the situation fall into their proper places and we have the temptation neither to accuse nor to exonerate Indra. For we cut ourselves off from the structure of the invasion-hypothesis at any conceivable time - a hypothesis vainly trying to survive against the overwhelming lack of both aspects of scientific historical testimony: the archaeological and the documentary.

29. Ibid. p.95.

Page 199