Mother's Chronicles - Book Four

Appendix

The Invasion That Never Was

Every Indian child who goes to school soon meets with that special moment when he is told about his early ancestors, their origin, their story, their achievements. A window suddenly opens, his small horizon strains to encompass those faraway and mysterious times. Being Indian seems to acquire a greater meaning —though one that will long remain as misty as what he is being taught.

And what is he taught? If anything at all, it will be that some 1500 years before the Christian era, hordes of semi-barbarian, Sanskrit-speaking nomads called 'Aryans' poured from Central Asia or thereabouts into north-west India, where they came upon the highly developed Indus Valley or Harappan civilization, which had been flourishing there for over a millennium and whose inhabitants where Dravidians. The invading 'Aryans' destroyed this civilization and pushed the Dravidians south, then over a few centuries composed the Vedas, got Sanskrit to spread all over India, and built the mighty Ganges civilization. That, in a nutshell, is what most 'educated' Indians know of their distant past, and is still today presented as solid knowledge, something no one need or should argue about. It is there not only in textbooks, but in 'authoritative' reference books and in the best dictionaries.

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The sun's revolving around the earth, too, was for centuries such a dead certainty to early European astronomers that Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler had to be dangerous heretics to think otherwise —luckily, that certainty is now dead indeed, as are the countless instances of human blindness that litter the ages. The 'Aryan Invasion Theory,' as it is called, is another such instance. As established and apparently indisputable as it may have become through decades of thoughtless repetition, it does not rest on a single solid piece of evidence. In fact, it has by now been thoroughly disproved by all the evidence brought to light by archaeology, astronomy, ancient geography and mathematics. Nevertheless, those in India who today argue against it are still eyed with considerable suspicion, as if they had committed some awful crime, and we can expect this venerated if crumbling pillar of ancient history to figure in our Indian textbooks for some more time, during which the roots of India's civilization and culture will continue to be somewhere in Central Asia, just as the sun kept revolving around the earth for a few centuries after Copernicus, and species remained forbidden to evolve for decades after Darwin.

But how did this theory come to be so widely accepted if it is wholly groundless? To begin with, it was propounded by European scholars who could not help finding striking similarities between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin, pointing to an ancient link between these languages. And since the British Empire was then at the height of its glory and Europe as a whole was basking in her new-found Enlightenment, these proud scholars could hardly accept that they owed their languages and civilization to a benighted India —it had to be the other way

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round.¹ At the same time, the Indian mind had become largely subservient to the West (is it much better today?), and would rather listen to these worthy scholars led by the prestigious Max Muller (whose research work, interestingly, was commissioned and generously paid for by the East India Company) than to India's own savants and seers.

Swami Dayananda Saraswati was perhaps the first to reject the Aryan invasion theory, emphasizing that the word arya referred in the Veda to a moral or inner quality, not to any race or people. Swami Vivekananda followed suit with his characteristic vigour; in a lecture he remarked scornfully: "And what your European Pundits say about the Aryans swooping down from some foreign land snatching away the land of aborigines and settling in India by exterminating them is all nonsense, foolish talk. Strange that our Indian scholars too say amen to them." He added sadly, "And all these monstrous lies are being taught to our boys." They still are, a hundred years later. In another lecture, he concluded, "As for the truth of these theories, there is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to prove that the Aryan ever came from anywhere outside India, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan .... The whole of India is Aryan, nothing else." Then Sri Aurobindo, taking a straight look at the Veda, observed, "It did not take long to see that the Vedic indications of a racial division between Aryans and Dasyus and the identification of the latter with the indigenous Indians were of a far flimsier character than I had

1. Voltaire is a notable exception; he saw in India the source of much of Europe's civilization.

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supposed." This division was "a conjecture supported only by other conjectures ... A myth of the philologists." He forcefully refuted "the artificial and inimical distinction of Aryan and Dravidian which an erroneous philology has driven like a wedge into the homogeneous Indo-Afghan race." Some eighty years later, we know that the 'wedge,' driven now not only by scholars but also by politicians, has only gone absurdly deeper and, in South India for instance, has led to riots and taken lives : the Dravidians are India's 'original inhabitants,' while North Indians are 'Aryan invaders'! Yet Sri Aurobindo also showed that the original connection between the Sanskrit and Tamil tongues was "far closer and more extensive than is usually supposed" and that they were "two divergent families derived from one lost primitive tongue." More than anything else, Sri Aurobindo, in his Secret of the Veda, recovered its long lost symbolism and brought to light the Rishis' extraordinary experience.

But none listened —we Indians have long had the inexplicable habit of accepting change only if it comes to us from the West. Yet in recent years, some voices have begun to be heard, both in the West and in India, asserting that the time has come to chuck out this worm-eaten theory once and for all. The cumulative evidence from all scientific branches of knowledge, especially archaeology, has become simply too overwhelming to be ignored, except for historians with dubious motives.

Let us cast a glance at a few pieces of this evidence, making good use of the points established by Sri Aurobindo and supple-

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meriting them with those brought to light by recent research.

What strikes us at first sight is that the Aryan invasion theory and its resulting contrived reconstruction of India's ancient history is in head-on contradiction with Indian tradition. To begin with, no Sanskrit (excuse me, 'Aryan') scripture makes any reference to an original homeland outside India; quite the contrary, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas depict a highly developed civilization growing on Indian land and spanning several millennia, and a Great War waged around 3100 B.C. It is hard to imagine that the Vedic people, who had such a strong bond with the land, its mountains and forests and rivers, would not have carried into their culture the least memory of their supposed ancestral steppes in Central Asia. This is all the more strange if we remember that the Epics and Puranas are regarded as based on historical tradition (itihāsa), considerably embellished, to be sure, but still with a kernel of historicity. Of course, this historicity is all rubbish in the eyes of the 'invasionists' (though they may put it more politely), since the civilization those scriptures refer to could only come into being a few centuries after the invasion, i.e. from about 1000 B.C. The Great War, therefore, is at best, in the words of a prominent Indian historian, the glorification of a 'local feud' between two Aryan tribes!

That brings us to the next aberration: these learned people ask us to believe that in just a few centuries, five at the most, the semiprimitive, cattle-rearing Aryans not only conquered North India, but established there a great civilization and created all over the subcontinent a unique philosophy and culture founded on Sanskrit and the Veda —quite a stunning

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development. Anyone with some historical sense knows that civilizations take millennia, not a few centuries, to evolve, mature and spread. As Sri Aurobindo puts it, "The time limit allowed for the growth of civilization is impossibly short."

These points alone are enough for an unbiased mind to reject the ill-conceived theory. But let us now see what archaeology has to say in the matter. Its first observation, a negative one on which all archaeologists agree, is that no findings have been made east of the Indus which could be associated with an Aryan people coming into India; surprisingly the 'invaders,' who swamped a large part of India, have left no trace of their arrival. Then, we have the first archaeological discoveries in 1921 of the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization, whose dates (3000-1700 B.C.) compelled most scholars to conclude that the Harappan civilization was 'pre-Aryan' and pre-Vedic. Yet seals depicting deities seated in yogic postures, fire and sacrificial altars, figures of the so-called Pasupati and the bull, worship of a Mother goddess—all these are strongly suggestive of Vedic culture. Moreover, recent research (in particular by S. R. Rao and Subhash Kak) has shown beyond doubt a strong affinity between the Indus Valley language and Vedic Sanskrit. Finally, were the Harappan civilization indeed pre-Aryan (Dravidian or not), we would have the strange paradox, cogently pointed out by David Frawley, of the Indus Valley inhabitants leaving behind no literature, though they were literate, but a huge physical presence now brought to light by archaeology, while the Aryans, who though illiterate gave us an enormous literature, left no physical trace of any sort! All this has made an increasing number of Indian and Western archaeologists veer to the view that the

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Harappan civilization was late or even post-Vedic.

That is not all. The Veda, as we know, lavishly honours the river Saraswati. The great river has been found again —rather its long dried-up bed, traced in the early nineties by archaeologists (notably V. S. Wakankar), and confirmed by satellite photography. It flowed down from the Himalayas reaching the plains near Ambala in Punjab, then through Rajasthan and the Rann of Kutch in a course roughly parallel to the Indus, and finally into the Arabian sea. It was indeed a mighty river, six to eight kilometres in width, with the Sutlej, the Yamuna, and even at one time the Ganga as its tributaries. Detailed studies have shown that it changed course several times before drying up completely around 1900 B.C. As it happens, its location, its physical characteristics, even the stages of its drying, are all described in the Rig-Veda, the Mahabharata and several Puranas —scriptures which the invasion theory forcibly dates later than 1000 B.C., nearly a thousand years after the Saraswati went dry! Moreover, hundreds of Harappan sites have been found along its course (many more than along the Indus), further confirming the Vedic nature of the Harappan civilization. Indeed, some scholars are now suggesting that the Indus Valley or Harappan civilization would be better named the 'Saraswati civilization.'

Let us now pay a visit to Dwaraka, on the eastern tip of Saurashtra in Gujarat, the legendary town of Lord Krishna. Legendary? In the 1980s, the discovery of massive submerged walls revealed the existence of a major ancient port which served as a gateway to the subcontinent. This corroborated the story of the submergence of Krishna's city, regarded till now as a 'myth'

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from the Mahabharata. Although the Dwaraka findings, carbon-dated to about 1400 B.C., do not as yet fit with the traditional date ascribed to Krishna's time (let us however venture to suggest that further exploration will reveal more ancient remains), even this 'recent' date is incompatible with 'Aryan' tribes creating a great urban civilization in just a century! Or else, if the Dwaraka ruins are a late development of the 'pre-Aryan' Harappan civilization, what becomes of its association with 'Aryan' Krishna, or at least (if Krishna is denied the honour of a physical existence) with the 'Aryan' Mahabharata ? Could this self-inflicted puzzle be the reason why S. R. Rao's rediscovery of ancient Dwaraka has not attracted the degree of attention which that of ancient Troy by Schliemann did?

Is further proof needed? Well, there is plenty of it. From astronomy, since certain Brahmanas, which followed the Veda, contain references to celestial events such as solstices and equinoxes which can be dated as far as 3000 B.C. From mathematics, as the mathematical knowledge at the basis of the remarkably planned Harappan cities (from 3000 B.C.) and their elaborate fire altars is contained in certain Sutras, themselves dating later than the Brahmanas. From metallurgy, from climatology, from . . . but this should be enough.¹

1. An unbiased study of all available elements from all these fields has now established that the Veda must have been composed between 7000 and 4000 B.C. See the Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India by David Frawley (Delhi, Voice of India, 1994), The Astronomical Code of the Rigveda by

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Defendants of the Aryan invasion theory find themselves very much in the position of the geocentric astronomers who were compelled to assign highly convoluted and unnatural orbits to the planets in order to keep them revolving around the earth. Our historians are not shy of tying themselves into knots, as long as they can somehow preserve the non-Indian origin of India's civilization. But the moment we look at things simply, without prejudice, taking all the hard evidence into account, everything falls naturally into place, and the picture that emerges of India's ancient past is one of continuity through the ages: the Vedic Age maturing before 4000 B.C., followed by the Saraswati civilization which was its natural outgrowth, and by the Ganges civilization after the drying up of the Saraswati. India's ancient past has been delivered from the straitjacket of the invasionists. No doubt, much has to be integrated into the new perspective, and much more remains to be discovered, but we can now breathe a little more freely.

This picture is not wishful thinking: it is supported in a remarkably coherent way by both tradition and modern research. Nothing in our knowledge of those remote times warrants the fallacy of a sharp demarcation between Aryan and Dravidian races, languages, civilizations, even deities (Shiva is Dravidian, Vishnu is Aryan!). Whatever twists and

Subhash Kak (Delhi, Aditya Prakashan, 1994), and The Politics of History by Navaratna S. Rajaram (Delhi, Voice of India, 1995). This last work, besides giving irrefutable evidence against the Aryan invasion theory, relates its genesis and exposes in devastating fashion the intellectual dishonesty and camouflaged ignorance of nineteenth-century Western scholars and their Indian followers till today.

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turns the Indian civilization may have followed, whatever migrations may have taken place to and from India, a rigid break between pre- and post-Aryan India finds justification neither in the Scriptures nor in archaeology. It is safe to predict that future archaeological findings will further confirm the essential continuity of the Indian civilization.

Why, one may ask in. the end, should we worry so much over debunking a theory about our remote past? Precisely because it denies that remote past. Because it turns the Veda into a largely meaningless hodgepodge of superstition cobbled together by aboriginal savages. Because it makes nonsense of what has been for millennia the source of India's spiritual life and strength. And because the past is never past, never dead, and often holds the key to the future.

"The recovery of the perfect truth of the Veda is not merely a desideratum for our modern intellectual curiosity, but a practical necessity for the future of the human race," asserted Sri Aurobindo. "For I firmly believe that the secret concealed in the Veda, when entirely discovered, will be found to formulate perfectly that knowledge and practice of a divine life to which the march of humanity, after long wanderings in the satisfaction of the intellect and senses, must inevitably return."

M. D.

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