The Problem Of Aryan Origins

Chapter Twelve

WHEELER ON THE Harappā CULTURE'S DESTRUCTION BY RIGVEDIC ARYANS

Some last words on two topics remain to be said in order to round off our treatment of the problem of Aryan origins. One of them is Wheeler's suggestion that whatever other causes there may have been for the decline of the Harappā Culture the coup de grâce was given to it by the Aryan composers of the Rigveda when they invaded India in the middle of the second millennium B.C.¹ What weight does this suggestion carry?

Wheeler points to the sprawling groups of earth-covered skeletons - seventeen definitely and perhaps thirty-eight in all - encumbering the latest stratum of Mohenjo-dāro. To him these are the vestiges of a final massacre at a time not distant from the period considered likely for Aryan-speaking peoples from beyond India's North-west to have invaded the Land of the Seven Rivers, the Punjāb and its neighbouring regions. Wheeler insists that the older hymns of the Rigveda reflect the invasion and he reminds us that the invasion constantly assumes the form of an onslaught, under the leadership of the god Indra, upon the walled cities of the aborigines, which are called purah, "ramparts", "forts", "strongholds". According to Wheeler, these purah correspond to the massive fortifications which the Indus Valley Civilization is now known to have employed, and Indra is titled purandara, "fort-destroyer", in respect of them. His clinching argument is that if we reject this view we have to assume that in the short interval which can, at the most, have intervened between the end of the Harappā Culture and the Aryan invasion some unidentified yet formidable civilization arose in the same region and presented an extensive fortified front to the invaders. As we have no evidence of any such civilization and as it is hardly credible that it

1. The Indus Civilization (1968 Ed.), pp. 131-32.

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should have arisen, Wheeler thinks it incumbent on us to suppose that the Harappāns of the Indus Valley in their decadence fell before the advancing Aryans in the manner the Rigvedic hymns proclaim.

The very first flaw in Wheeler's picture is his assumption of a large-scale massacre at Mohenjo-dāro. Aware of it, he tries to cover up its central part by saying: "The absence of skeletons (so far) from the citadel must imply that the raiders, whoever they were, occupied and cleared this commanding position for their own momentary use."² This is indeed a poor fight put up against the conclusion of Dales: "There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city, no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armour and surrounded by the weapons of war. The citadel, the only fortified part of the city, yielded no evidence of a final defence."³

We may add that not the slightest sign exists of any occupation, however momentary, of any sector of the city and, if the most important sector - the one prepared with fortification to resist attack - does not give the least trace of a final defence, it is pointless to talk of the citadel having been cleared of skeletons for a temporary purpose. An attack mounted by invading Aryans would have left a different story.

Even granting a massacre rather than the result of a natural disaster like an earthquake, we have to look at it as a small sporadic affair. Wheeler himself admits a possible alternative to his invasion-idea: "It may be that some hill-tribe fell upon the enfeebled city and put it to the sword."⁴ But there is no sign of the whole city having been slaughtered. Dales's proposal of a localized passing razzia by a neighbouring hill-tribe is more credible. Or there may have been a clash between a few people within the town itself. "It

2.Ibid., p. 131.

3."The Mythical Massacre at Mohenjo-dāro", Expedition, Expedition, No.3,1964, p. 37.

4.Op. cit., p. 131.

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is also plausible," as S.S. Sarkar says, "that the dead were the raiders themselves who were covered with earth by the local people after they were killed."⁵ Instead of a defeat of the Mohenjo-dārians, there may have been a small-scale victory of theirs. In any case, nothing calls in the least for so grandiose an event as an Aryan invasion.

A very relevant issue here is: how is it that Harappā, which is in the Punjāb and therefore more directly than Sind's Mohenjo-dāro in the path of Aryans supposedly invading from India's North-west, shows no "massacre" at all? Does it even show any special decline in material prosperity before its abandonment as does Mohenjo-dāro? Aryan invaders, pressing into the country from the North-west, would affect this northern site foremost. Both the morale and the material state of the site should manifest a decline greater than any in the South. They certainly fail to do so. Why a twin capital city like Harappā was ultimately abandoned is still a mystery. But an attack of any kind has to be completely ruled out - and this in spite of the fact that, unlike Mohenjo-dāro which Wheeler considers, as having been attacked, it was partly occupied for a short time after its end. Here a paradox seems to be at play but is soon resolved when we learn, in Sankalia's words, that "no less than 7 feet of debris intervened"⁶ between the deposits of the Harappāns proper and those of the people who briefly occupied the site later. The brief occupation came after an appreciable interval of time. Hence we cannot speak of it as the sequel of any attack on the town.

Surely, if the Aryans cannot be charged with having destroyed a place like Harappā, they must be exonerated from responsibility for Mohenjo-dāro's sprawling group of skeletons.

In Sind itself we are not faced with so macabre a scene elsewhere. At Chanhu-dāro, some 60 miles south of

5.Ancient Races of Baluchistan, Punjab and Sind (Bookland Private Ltd., Calcutta, 1964), p. 13.

6.Op. cit., p. 393, col. 2.

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Mohenjo-dāro, the Harappān remains are overlaid by relics of another culture about which Wheeler writes: "Where these intruders came from is not yet known. Their arrival would appear to have been separated from the departure of the Harappāns by no long interval of time."⁷ Here, again, direct confrontation is absent and there is not the smallest trail of fighting. The Harappāns had already left some time before the new people appeared.

Even if these new people and the culture that set itself up on Harappā's ruins be dubbed "Aryan", they cannot - by Wheeler's criterion - be the Rigvedics since they neither stormed their predecessors out of the sites nor indeed did they have a hand in ousting in any way the earlier occupants.

There was the discovery in 1976 that at Bhagwanpura in the Kurukshetra district of Haryana the people of Painted Grey Ware - supposed by some popularizers of history to be Aryan invaders - were the immediate successors of the Harappāns. But the discovery provides no evidence of a conflict. Actually we have an overlap and fusion between the two cultures, a continuity of pottery types, painted designs and terracotta figurines. The damage to the site was due to floods and not war: twice there was an inundation, the first when the late Harappāns alone were present, the second when the PGW people were living peacefully alongside them.⁸

The only site of the Harappāns where their level has been found destroyed is at Gumla in the Gomal Valley which lies immediately east of South Afghānistān's historic site, Mun-digak. Sankalia, reviewing the work of Ahmad Hassan Dani of the University of Peshawar, reports:

"Excavations at Gumla have yielded a long cultural sequence in which the Harappān culture comes fourth from the bottom... And... there is positive evidence... that this Harappān culture was destroyed by fire and a fight in which

7.Op. cit., p.58

8."New Light on Aryan Migration", The Indian Express, April 8, 1976, p. 10.

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sling balls and terracotta missiles were also used.

"Interestingly the site seems to have been only temporarily occupied, because no substantial structures were seen, except innumerable grave pits, some of which contain cremated human and animal bones...

"This is the first time that the practice of sacrificing the animals and burying them with the cremation of the human body has been recorded.

"Among the antiquities there were many red and black terracotta bangles with five different sections, terracotta female figures, three of animals - one being that of a saddled horse, tiny saucers, clay bells and flesh rubber.

"Curiously, except the terracotta horse, all other objects occur [also] in Period IV."⁹

At the end of his account Sankalia stresses as "significant" "the cremation graves which contain terracotta figurines as well as bones of horses."

What exactly Sankalia has in mind here is not apparent. Perhaps he is hinting that these destroyers of the Harappān level at Gumla were invading Aryans? Cremation and the domesticated horse are two of the signs of the Aryans who composed the Rigveda. And a hymn of theirs (X.16) speaks of sacrificing an animal with the dead man. But the animal is a goat, not a horse. And in the Rigvedic practice the animal was always burned, never buried. Again, the Rigveda attests human burial as well as cremation.¹⁰ So everything is not on a par between its composers and the Grave People of Gumla.

But, over and above the differences, there is the fact which Sankalia calls curious - that the Grave People and the Harappāns had a host of antiquities in common. In the context of these objects, they seem to have differed only in the matter of the horse. However, as the horse is now recognized as a part of Harappān life, even if not every

9. Prehistory and Protohistory of India and Pakistan (1974 Ed.). pp. 329-31.

10. Macdonell and Keith, The Vedic Index. I. p. 8.

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where very prominent, we cannot take it as a specific mark of the non-Harappān in the culture of the Grave People. The only non-Harappān and Aryan feature appears to be the custom of cremation. But is it characteristic of the Rig-vedics alone and is it really non-Harappān in all places?

Cremation of some sort is witnessed in a site that is both non-Harappān and non-Rigvedic. With regard to Periano Ghundāī in North Balūchistān Sankalia writes: "... it is evident that the occupants buried the cremated remains of the dead in tall urns, right in the house."¹¹ About Harappān Lothal he says: "...it is speculated that cremation was also practised."¹² And, what is most pertinent to our purpose, we hear from him about one type of grave at Harappān Kali-bangan, where "the grave-pit... curiously contained no skeletal material": "Is it because there was the custom of cremation-cum-burial, so that the body was burnt, and later only the ash and a few bones were buried in the urn, or even these were not kept but thrown in the river or sea, as some people do today? After this was written I read a very interesting paper, 'Harappān Cemetery at Kalibangan: A Demographic Survey' by A.K. Sharma, who comes to similar conclusions."¹³ Hence cremation in the true sense cannot be considered altogether foreign to the Harappā Culture.

How then shall we affirm either that the Grave People of Gumla were exclusively Rigvedic or that they were at any rate non-Harappān? The most likely conclusion, in view of those shared antiquities is: these people were a type of Harappāns that was rather uncommon. In fact, it is possible to talk of two kinds of Harappāns besides those bearing the name proper. In level III of Gumla, which, according to Dani, the Harappāns destroyed, the excavator has unearthed the images of a Serpent Goddess and of a Horned Deity.¹⁴ Now the Horned Deity, is a famous characteristic of the

11.Op. cit., p. 324, col. 2.

12.Ibid., p. 375, col. 1.

13.Ibid., p. 354, col. 2.

14.Ibid., p. 330, col. 1.

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Harappā Culture. Another characteristic is a species of snake-cult. "From a faience tablet showing a seated deity with a worshipper on either side and a hooded cobra over the head," observes Pusalker, "it appears that some form of Naga-worship was practised."¹⁵ Hence, at Gumla III, we have an occupation which can be labelled as proto-Harappān mixed with pre-Harappān, a "transitional phase" such as Sankalia finds in the "junction layers" at Kot Diji.¹⁶ May we not legitimately postulate, by virtue of several traits, the label "semi-Harappān" for the destroyers of Period IV?

It is to be noted that Sankalia does not commit himself, though his manner of expression may be somewhat suggestive. He is wise in remaining uncommitted - in accord with the conclusion of the advice, already quoted by us, which Wheeler himself has offered in a cautious mood apropos of the hunt for invading Aryanism in post-Harappān cultures: "If a word of warning is appropriate, it is on the desirability of avoiding an excessively Aryan 'preoccupation'."

Ironically, this word of warning can be made most applicable to the situation Wheeler regarded as archaeologically his strongest point. So far we have accepted that he is right at least in showing us at Mohenjo-dāro a fight-scene, however small we may consider it, at the end of this city. But quite a surprise meets us from one of the most prominent archaeologists in India, who is yet a believer like Wheeler in Aryans entering the country around the middle of the second millennium B.C. B.B. Lal begins his contradiction of the Wheelerian view of Mohenjo-dāro thus: "In the first place, the skeletons do not all belong to one and the same occupation level, which should also be the latest marking the end of the Indus settlement."¹⁷ Lal cuts the very ground from under Wheeler.

Besides, the paper by the physical anthropologist K.A.R.

15."The Indus Valley Civilization", The Vedic Age, p. 189.

16.Op. cit., p. 330, 2. and p. 352, col. 1.

17."The Indus Civilization", A Cultural History of India, edited by A.L. Basham (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1975), p. 19.

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Kennedy, 'Trauma and Disease in the Ancient Harappāns", as summed up by Lai in the 1986 publication Frontiers of the Indus Civilization¹⁸ informs us that as a result of his examination of these skeletons in detail he has come to the conclusion that the persons concerned died owing to some waterborne diseases and malaria rather than at the hands of an enemy. So the massacre-theory, the only one even distantly likely to suggest a possible Aryan invasion, fizzles out completely.

Clearly, all that we know of the termination of the Indus Valley Civilization fails to tally with the story read in the Rigveda of purah, in the sense of fortifications, repeatedly laid low by Aryan invaders in c. 1500 B.C. And there is no other formidable civilization in the wake of the Harappā Culture to meet the demands of this story. So, if the story is true, the Rigveda and, with it, any Aryan invasion cannot be dated to the middle of the second millennium B.C. The Rigveda must precede the Harappā Culture. If it is a part of the pre-Harappān Civilization that has been unearthed, the story read in it of destructive attacks on fortified cities is still not borne out. Actually, archaeology indicates the destruction of some pre-Harappān sites by the Harappā Culture. The immediate predecessors of the latter have to be the successors of the Rigvedics, who then have to come chronologically more or less where we have placed them.

In the role of invaders and destroyers, which they have been allotted, they would be confronted by some yet more ancient culture - pre-3500 B.C. - of which we have been ignorant hitherto. However, when we remember that the Rigveda's hymns yield no evidence of entry into India from abroad in any measurable past, we are left only with a tale of warfare which, for lack of archaeological support or of confirmation from an independent outside source, hangs in mid-air.

And the archaeologically negated tale of warfare is not the

18. Introduction, p., XIII, col. 2.

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sole foundation of sand for Wheeler's historical edifice. Sandy also is his very equation of the Rigvedic purah with the Harappān forts.

Wheeler believes that the authors of the Vedic Index (I, pp. 356, 539) ruled that the purah had been "merely places of refuge against attack, ramparts of hardened earth with palisades and a ditch", because Macdonell and Keith wrote before the walled Harappān towns were excavated.^18a He forgets that they proceeded on the actual indications in the hymns which did not warrant conjuring up any such towns. He forgets also that in the period of the Vedic Index (1912), the extensive area and massive fortification of ancient Pataliputra were known from the notes left by Megasthenes in c. 300 B.C. as well as from the Pali texts and that Macdonell and Keith (I, p. 539) rejected the hypothesis of Pischel and Geldner that the Rigveda's forts resembled this old capital of "Sandrocottus" on the Ganges. Sandrocottus's capital could very well be compared with Harappā and Mohenjo-dāro, as indeed done by Piggott in 1950.¹⁹ It is not because Macdonell and Keith were ignorant of anything like Harappā and Mohenjo-dāro that they ruled as they did about the forts of the Rigveda.

We may add that sixteen years after the Vedic Index was published, during which time the huge defensive palisades of ancient Pataliputra had been laid out to view by the archaeologist Spooner, Macdonell in his History of Sanskrit Literature could still write of these forts: "There is nothing to show that they were inhabited, much less that the pur ever meant a town or city as it did in later times."²⁰ Even Apte, writing in 1952 in full sight of the elaborately excavated Harappān cities, reaffirmed that "the so-called strongholds or forts" had been earth-work structures, with a protective barrier which "could be easily erected like the stockades made by

18a. Op. cit., p. 132.

19.Op. cit., p. 287.

20.Op. cit., p. 158.

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primitive tribes all over the world".²¹ Wheeler's verdict is absolutely unfounded.

Indeed it is difficult for any reader of the Rigveda with true insight to mistake the nature of its "fortified cities". The strongholds of the enemies are often referred to as those of Vala whom modern scholars would be inclined to take for a Dravidian chief. Thus we find the verses in Sri Aurobindo's translation:²²

"O lord of the thunderbolt [Indra], thou didst uncover the hole of Vala of the cows [valasya gomatah]" (I.11.5).

"So in thy ecstasy of the Soma thou didst break open, O hero (Indra), the pen of the Cow and the Horse, like a city" (VIII.32.5).

"That is the work to be done for the most divine of the gods; the firm places were cast down, the fortified places were made weak; up Brihaspati drove the cows,... he broke Vala..." (II.24.3).

There is the repeated indication here that what the Rig-vedics were after were pens of cows and horses, especially those of the former and that it is the pen that is "like a city The "firm places", the "fortified places", are a number of pens. Such walled cities as the Harappāns possessed are quite foreign to the cattle-minded and horse-desiring Rig-vedics in a seemingly pre-urban age - whatever the ultimate interpretation, whether symbolic or naturalistic, we may give to their bovines and equids.

Perhaps we shall be told that it is possible to see the purah in another light from the Rigveda's own text. About the forts, there are expressions like prithivī ("broad"), urvī ("wide"), āyasī (commonly rendered "made of iron") or śatabhujī("with a hundred walls") and, as such, are variously numbered ninety, ninety-nine and a hundred. But, even if we make a non-symbolic approach to the Rigveda, we should not allow ourselves to be misled by these descriptions. An element of hyperbole may very well be supposed.

21."Social and Economic Conditions", The Vedic Age, pp. 398-99.

22.Op. cit., pp. 137 , 140, 148.

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Most scholars translate the word anās, which the Rigvedics use for their enemies, by "noseless". Surely, no Indian, however flat his proboscis, can literally be considered as utterly lacking the olfactory organ. Hence the expression "a hundred walls" may be understood to indicate with poetic licence several rings of defences: each ring might have been only a hedge of thorns or row of stakes. "Broad" and "wide" are after all relative terms: a pen holding fifty cows or horses would deserve such an adjective as compared to one holding fifteen. And āyasī is obviously a figure of speech for the strongest structure within the Rishis' experience, no matter how primitive its character. But if we are driven to regard all these terms in an absolutely literal sense, the "hundred walls" and the "walls of iron" would mean fortifications of a magnitude that would go far beyond ancient Pataliputra itself and even throw all the cities of the Indus Valley Civilization into the shade.

For, Wheeler, in arguing his case, has slurred over many details of the real picture. Although he would like Rigvedic terms to fit the Harappā Culture, yet at one point he is himself constrained to say: "Sometimes strongholds are referred to metaphorically as 'of metal' (āyasī)."²³ Piggott, taking stock of all the Harappān settlements of both the Northern and the Southern Kingdoms, sums up that, with such sites as Sutkāgen-dor "excepted", "these settlements... do not seem to have been laid out for defence, and at the capital cities [Harappā and Mohenjo-dāro] the defences of the citadels alone have been proved to exist..."²⁴ Even Sutkāgen-dor-which, by the way, is nowhere near the heart of the Indus Valley Civilization but at the farthest western end of Southern Balūchistān near the Makran coast, where the alleged invasion by Rigvedic Aryans is never thought to have reached - even this site has only the citadel and not the whole town massively defended. The town itself, lying below the citadel to the north and east, is, to use Wheeler's own

23.Op. cit., pp. 131-2.

24.Op. cit., p. 138.

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words, "apparently unfenced".²⁵ Merely on the strength of a few well-fortified citadels are we indiscriminately to equate Harappān settlements to forts with a "hundred walls" or of "iron", forts numbering ninety-nine or a hundred on several occasions?

There is a clear dilemma. If the phrases of the Rigveda are understood in the total context of the picture the book gives of the times, the purah cannot be compared to the populous, elaborate, highly organized cities that were inhabited by the Harappāns at their most important sites. If they are understood in a limited context with complete literalness, the Harappān towns even at their greatest do not at all come up to the purah. Either way the fort-argument breaks down.

How then are we to estimate the view that the Rigveda is an epic of invasion and attack? Evidently, in that role it cannot be fitted into the middle of the second millennium B.C. Can it be so considered in any age? Archaeology and history appear to have no answer. What is the alternative?

Already we have quoted, apropos of the Rigvedic Dawn, Sri Aurobindo's appeal for an esoteric interpretation. Such a reading, while not completely excluding naturalistic echoes, is essentially symbolic, a testament of inner spiritual adventure and conquest. A glance at it should give a finishing touch not only to our treatment of Wheeler's suggestion but also to our whole enquiry whose starting-point was the Rigveda.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE

Since Piggott's time Kalibangan in Rajasthan and Surkotada in Kutch have been found to have had walls around the lower town as well as around the citadel. But in an overall view these sites are still exceptions, and even they cannot match a literal sense of those Rigvedic terms that are high-pitched in regard to the purah.

25. Op. cit., p.60.

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