The Vedic Harappans excavated

(Hinduism Today, Dec. 2015)

 

 

Nonagenarian archaeologist B.B. Lal has synthesized his findings of the latest decades in the book The Rigvedic People: Invaders/Immigrants or Indigenous (Aryan Books, Delhi 2015). In it, he seeks to answer three questions: (1) did the Vedic Aryans originate outside India? (2) Did the Harappan civilization originate outside India? Were the Harappans Vedic Aryans?

 

We need not maintain the suspense; his answers are very straightforward. There is no sign of a foreign origin of either the Indus-Saraswati civilization or the Vedic Aryans. Indeed, recent excavations in Kunal and Bhirrana have pointedly confirmed an already existing impression of civilizational continuity since the 6^th millennium BC. Neither has anything “proto-Harappan” been found in Mesopotamia or anywhere else outside India, of which the typically Harappan lifestyle could have descended. Moreover, the area known to the Vedic Aryans and described in the youngest layer of the Rig-Veda (10:75:5-6) reaches from the Ganga to the Western tributaries of the Sindhu, thus coinciding with the Harappan territory (minus its Gujarati borderland). In earlier layers, the Vedic heartland is already on the then-mighty Saraswati river in Haryana, exactly where the highest concentration of Harappan settlements is found.Finally, Lal’s spade has never bumped into any trace of Aryans penetrating India.  

 

Especially in his case, this latter fact is remarkable. It was he who, as a young archaeologist in the 1950s, made his name by finally digging up the long-awaited proof of an Aryan invasion. He had identified a pottery style, the Painted Grey Ware (1200-800), as typifying the Aryans penetrating deeper into India. That is what was taught to us in university, and even recently-published books upholding the Aryan Invasion Theory cite this finding as “proof”. But Lal himself has grown away from it. At the time, he had simply applied the reigning invasionist framework, until he understood that this was but a hypothetical construct unsupported by hard findings.

 

 

 

Linguistic-archaeological disconnect

 

Sketching the earlier Homeland theories, Lal notes that in the late 18^th century, India itself became the first preferred Homeland, but was discarded in the early 19^th century. All in all, he takes a rather skeptical view of this Homeland search, as do some of the Western Homeland searchers themselves.

 

“The latest” among the Homeland theories is said to be the one by Johanna Nichols (1997): “She holds that the dispersal of the Indo-European languages commenced from a region somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana, thus bringing the scenario closer to the Indian subcontinent, but not quite there.” (p.6)

 

As a philologist, I may be forgiven for doing some nitpicking here: the Bactria region is not her innovation as a Homeland candidate. It has been in the running for two hundred years, but was discarded in the course of the 20th century in favour of the Pontic steppe area. But then she revived it with newer linguistic arguments. She did her work in ignorance of the archeological findings on which Lal relies to push the Homeland even farther east, into India.

 

Similarly, Lal asserts: “However, an important postulate in Nichols’ thesis is that it was only the language that got dispersed and not the people.” (p.6) This needs some explaining.

 

Indian critics of the Aryan Invasion Theory easily lapse into fulminations against the racial interpretation of the Indo-European dispersal. This tends to raise smiles (or worse) among Western specialists, because they discarded this interpretation ca. 1945, all while confidently maintaining a more westerly Homeland than India. They have faced the proven fact that languages can cross racial frontiers, e.g. Jamaicans are predominantly Black eventhough they speak the language imparted to them by the White Britons; Turks are European-looking through many generations of capture or enslavement of White women, eventhough their ancestors in Western Mongolia were (and fellow Turkic tribes like the Kirghiz and the Yakut still are) Mongoloid.

 

So, the Indo-European language too may have changed races. Indeed, it certainly has: either it started among Europeans and was adopted, through a very minoritarian migration, by differently-looking Indians (that would be the invasion theory), or else it was originally spoken by Indians and adopted by Europeans. For Nichols and her colleagues, this was already a given, and she did not have to contend with a theory that Indo-Europeans, all while migrating, retained their race without admixture. But she did privilege the linguistic evidence because that has persisted through the centuries and is available as a living remnant of ancient migrations.

 

Anyway, there is a slightly defective understanding among archaeologists of what linguists are busy with. And the reverse is also true. The findings that, to Lal, form such clinching evidence for an Indian Homeland, are mostly not even known by Western linguists (the main support base of the belief in a westerly Homeland), and at any rate their relevance to the whole debate is little understood.

 

They might, however, start to see the point by studying the European part of Indo-European archaeology. Around 2900 BCE, Central Europe witnessed an enormous upheaval caused by an invasion from the east, easily traceble in the material record, and a partial population replacement, now traceable with the new science of genetics. So that is what an Aryan invasion looks like. And that precisely is what is totally missing in the archaeological record of India. As robustly as the Aryan invasion of Europe has been proven, as conspicuously absent is the evidence for an Aryan invasion of India.

 

 

Chronology

 

Lal shows how the assumption of a non-Aryan identity for the Harappan Civilization in the 1920s followed from the chronology established (in spite of his later doubts about it) by Friedrich Max Müller. He had put the first Vedic hymns as late as 1200 BC, centuries after the demise of the Harappan cities. As a consequence, for almost a century, we have had to sail upstream against the non-Vedic and non-Aryan paradigm of the Harappan civilization. But his chronology was completely arbitrary, eventhough it is still commonly followed.

 

Like Umapada Sen and Shrikant Talageri, Lal dates the Rg-Veda mostly to the 3rd millennium BCE. This is one or two millennia earlier than in Max Müller’s account, but more moderate and sober than the ages or eternities proposed by some zealous Hindu scripturalists.

 

 

Reply to critics

 

As some points had been made by Lal in earlier publications, the opposite camp has tried to refute these. Unlike the many would-be decipherers of the Harappan script, who have smugly installed themselves in their own pretended solution and not taken account of criticisms or rival decipherments, Lal does take issue with his critics.

 

He opposes the attempts to understand the “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” (BMAC) as a settlement of pre-Vedic Indo-Aryans on the way from Russia to India. (p.26-33-) Thus, he mentions Viktor Sarianidi as citing a bas-relief found in Bactria from some 2000 BCE and relating it to objects found in Mitanni (Syria), where the local Hurrian language in 1500 BCE contained many Sanskrit words. Lal correctly remarks that this does not prove they were ancestral to the (India-based) “Vedic Aryans”, whom the invasion theory assumes to be more recent than the Mitanni Aryans. But it does prove (or at least indicate) something else: that the Bactrian culture was ancestral to the Mitanni culture. As per Sarianidi’s own evidence, an east-to-west migration from Bactria to Mitanni is indicated. And this may have been the second leg of a migration beginning in India.

 

Similarly, Lal opposes a claim made by the late Gregory Possehl that a horse find in Bactria indicates a Vedic horse sacrifice, performed by Aryans on their way to India. He points out that the horse was beheaded and does not satisfy the Vedic prescriptions for a horse sacrifice. We remark that there was no need for being so defensive: for argument’s sake, just let this horse be a Vedic sacrificial victim. Since the Rg-Veda was composed in the 3rd millennium (and not in 1200 BCE as Possehl assumed), earlier than this Bactrian horse, it only confirms an India-to-Bactria migration, not the other way around.

 

Speaking of horses, it is widely claimed that the Sindhu-Saraswati Civilization could not have been Vedic because it lacked the Vedic glamour animal, the horse. Admittedly, the horse remains are few in number,-- as they were in later, definitely Aryan cities such as Hastinapura, and even in the BMAC, where horses are native. Yet, they did exist, both in depictions and in reality. Apart from mentioning Lothal and Mohenjo Daro, Lal goes through the evidence for horse bones from Surkutada, certified by the Hungarian horse specialist Sándor Bökönyi,

 

Likewise it is often claimed that there were no spoked wheels in Harappa, though they make their appearance halfway through the Rg-Veda (as Talageri has shown). True, India’s hot and humid climate is not conducive to the preservation of wooden implements, but a number of terracotta models of the same spoked wheel have been dug up.

 

Finally, Lal’s claim that the excavated “fire altars”, of the kind Vedic priests used for fire ceremonies, has been ridiculed in the West. A typical Hindu mysitification when obviously these are just kitchen hearths, so they said. Therefore, Lal quotes a leading Western archaeologist, the late Raymond Allchin, as confirming the ritual purpose of these fire-pits. He also takes the trouble of showing in detail why these cannot be kitchen hearths. Among non-technical reasons, he highlights a finding of fire-altars where a genuine cooking hearth stood close by, as if to demonstrate the  difference.

 

 

Vedic Harappa

 

The continuity of the Harappan civilization is expressed in many ways. Several findings confirm the presence of Shiva in Harappa: lingam-yoni motifs are associated with a male figure seated in meditation posture, the same figure is the addressee of a bull sacrifice, and two attributes of Shiva are found together: a bull with a trident engraved on his hip. Ascetics are found depicted as sitting in Bhadrâsana (noble pose), Vajrâsana (diamond pose) or Siddhâsana (yogi pose).

 

There is also a depiction of a well-known Hindu fable: The Thirsty Crow. A deer could not drink from a narrow pitcher, but a crow could stick its beak in. When the water was still too low, it dropped stones into the pitcher so the water level rose, and he could drink.

 

Statuettes show the Namaste salute with folded hands. Married women are shown wearing red powder in the parting of their hair, like their modern granddaughters. The Harappan ladies wore spiraled bangles and other cosmetic gadgetry that is still in use today.

 

Concludes the dean of Indian archaeology: “So, it is abundantly clear that

all the objections against a Harappan-Vedic equation are baseless.” (p.151) Indeed, “the Harappan civilization and the Vedas are but two faces of the same coin.” (p.123)

 

 

Finishing the Aryan Homeland debate

The last fifteen years, two heady developments have made the westerly Homeland hard to sustain. Philological work, mainly by Talageri and by the Greek Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas, has given flesh to an Indian Homeland framework and traced it deeper in ancient Indian literature. The new genetic approach has discovered new proof for westward migrations from India.

 

The archaeological progress has been slower but no less spectacular. Though not given the proper publicity outside India, excavations in ever more Harappan cities have confirmed the emerging picture of full cultural continuity with early Neolithic as well as with later Hindu society. None of Lal’s colleagues has discovered the long-awaited trace of an invasion.

 

We ought to be happy that a synthesis of the archaeological arguments against the Aryan invasion has now been published. B.B. Lal’s life work has earned him a memorable place in history. After he had first discovered pillar-bases of the demolished Rama temple in Ayodhya, he was ridiculed and denounced as “Hindu fundamentalist”. Then, when he shifted from the invasionist to the “Vedic Harappa” position, he was denounced as that “known propagator of the non-existent temple”. Yet, later Court-ordered excavations laid bare the entire foundation of the temple, proving him right. Likewise, new findings confirm his stand on the Vedic Sindhi-Saraswati civilization.   

 

 

 

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The Star of Bethlehem

Many theories have been thought up about the star of Bethlehem. According to the Gospel, the Magi (wise men, astrologers) had seen "his" star in the East (on the ascendant?) and went on their way, stopping only when the star stood still, and there finding effectively a newborn destined to become king. The most convincing one is the one elaborated by my compatriot John Timperman:

"It must have been around this time of the year that more than 2000 years ago the Magi of the East ( Magus= wisest of the wise- astrologers) arrived in Bethlehem. They realised that they had reached their destination when they observed that the planet Jupiter was 'stationary' (stood still) before becoming retrograde.

"It was a long journey that started in September [of 3 BC] when they had witnessed an exceptionally rare astronomical phenomenon in the sky: the planet Jupiter, called the 'king's planet' (the biggest one) was heliacally rising and escaped from the rays of the sun.( was born again). A planetarium shows us that this time, the heliacal rise of Jupiter happened in conjunction with Regulus, the king's star, in the constellation of the royal sign of the Lion. Both objects were so close that, seen from the earth, they appeared as one star. The fact that this 'coming together' and so much symbolism of kingdom happened in the constellation of the Lion, the tribe of Judea, was a strong indication that the prediction of the profit Micah was fulfilled. For these Magi, it was a celestial omen that indicated that the King of Kings, the Messiah was born."

It is perfectly possible that the birth of Jesus was unconnected to this verifiable stellar phenomenon. Mohammed's birth was post factum connected to 570, the "year of the Elephant", when an Ethiopian army featuring an elephant besieged Mecca but was forced by an epidemic to withdraw, a sign of divine favour to the Meccans; but historians agree that the year of the Ethiopian siege probably fell earlier than 570. Except for children of royalty, most people didn't know their exact date or time of birth, and when they had acquired a following much later, a proper date or event befitting his glory was chosen as his "official" date of birth.

Indeed, if at all necessary, this constellation known as the star of Bethlehem may even be used as an argument against astrology. A configuration occurred, yet no king was born. Jesus was honoured as "king of the Jews" (INRI), yet the Jews never recognized him as king, and he is reputed precisely to have rejected this status, that some followers wanted to bestow on him. On the other hand, though he did not fulfil the scriptural prophecies (as Gospel writer Matthew and the Nicean Creed pretend), Jesus was undoubtedly an important haracter in history because of what others after his death made of him. In that case, the astrological expectation was fulfilled in whoever was born there and then, even if he was not genuinely what his followers believe(d) him to be. 

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St. Thomas and Anti-Brahminism

(originally ca. 1994, posted at Bharat-Bharati on August 17, 2010)         

      


The true prophets of the anti-Brahmin message were no doubt the Christian missionaries. In the sixteenth century, Francis Xavier wrote that Hindus were under the spell of the Brahmanas, who were in league with evil spirits, and that the elimination of Brahminism was the first priority in the large operation of bringing Salvation to the wretched Pagans of India. In this endeavour, he strongly advocated and practiced the use of force. Unfortunately for him, the Portuguese government could not always spare the troops which he so passionately asked for. Still, the destruction wrought by Francis Xavier was impressive, and he has described the joy he felt on seeing idols being smashed and temples demolished.[1]

 

Within the Portuguese territories, physical persecution of Paganism naturally hit the Brahmins hardest. Treaties with Hindu kings had to stipulate explicitly that the Portuguese must not kill Brahmins. But in the case of Christian anti-Brahminism, these physical persecutions were a small matter compared to the systematic ideological and propagandistic attack on Brahminism, which has conditioned the views of many non-missionaries and has by now been amplified enormously because Secularists, Akalis, Marxists and Muslims have joined the chorus. In fact, apart from anti-Judaism, the anti-Brahmin campaign started by the missionaries is the biggest vilification campaign in world history.

 

While the Portuguese mission establishment was unanimous in branding the Brahmins as the chief obstacle to the salvation of India, there was some dissent concerning the tactics to be employed against them. Robert de Nobili believed in fraud rather than force. He dressed as a Brahmin, and taught the Yesurveda, a fifth Veda which had been lost in India, but which the emigrant community of Romaka Brahmins had preserved. He seems to have had a few followers, but after his death, nothing remained of his infiltration movement. Recently he has been declared the patron saint of the theology of inculturation,[2] and his method is being actualized and perfected in the Christian ashrams.[3]

 

De Nobili’s approach was one possible application of the Jesuits larger strategy, which aimed at converting the elite in the hope that they would carry the masses with them. This approach had been tried in vain in China, in Japan, and even at the Moghul court (today, it is finally meeting with a measure of success in South Korea). A practical implication of this strategy was that Christianity had to be presented as a noble and elitist religion. This came naturally to the Jesuits, who (unlike, for instance, the Franciscans) styled themselves as an elite order.

 

Most importantly, that stage of missionary endeavour did not make use of any populist or democratic rhetoric of equality . At that time, political equality was not yet on the ideological agenda. On the contrary, even when in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, equality became a political hot item, the Church opposed it tooth and nail, and supported the aristocratic ancien regime and its restoration after the fall of Napoleon. Only in the late nineteenth century, when atheist socialism lured the urban masses away from Christianity, did the Church evolve what is known as the social teachings of the Church , formulated in encyclicals like Rerum Novarum. Before that time, any opposition of the Catholic Church (and of most Protestant Churches) against the caste system and the Brahmin caste had strictly nothing to do with a concern for social equality.

 

Recent claims that equality is an intrinsic and cardinal virtue of Christianity, and that the apostle Thomas came to India in A.D. 52 with a message of equality, abolition of caste, and women’s rights, are so many lies. Thus, C.A. Simon writes: The oppressed and downtrodden followed [St. Thomas] and claimed equal status in society as it was denied them by the prevailing social norms. He condemned untouchability and attempted to restore equal status for women. That St. Thomas ever came to India is already a myth, only kept alive in India with a lot of Christian-cum-secularist media effort; that he came with an Ambedkarist and feminist message is just ridiculous.

 

The source of the Thomas legend is an apocryphal text called the Acts of Thomas. If the [Jesuits and other Christian] missionaries want to continue to present it as history rather than legend, they should accept the consequences. In that case, they must tell the public about the way in which Thomas’s journey to India started, according to the very same text: he left Palestine because his twin brother Jesus sold him as a slave (Thomas is also called Didymus, ‘the twin brother’). They must give details of the destructive sorcery which Thomas practised, as in his first miracle, when he made a lion devour a boy for being impolite. They must tell the public that Thomas was put to death not by the ugly Brahmins but by the king who, after having had a lot of patience with him, and after offering him a safe exit from the country, decided to put a stop to his practice of luring women away from their homes and putting them in sackcloth and ashes behind locked doors, etc.

 

Briefly, if it is true that the apostle Thomas came to India, then the following information furnished by the Acts of Thomas is also true:

1. Thomas was an antisocial character;
2. Jesus was a slave trader;
3. Thomas was Jesus’s twin brother, implying that the four canonical Gospels are unreliable sources which have concealed a crucial fact, viz. that Jesus was not God’s Only Begotten Son. In fact, Jesus and Thomas were God’s twin-born sons. In other words, accepting the Thomas legend as history is equivalent to exploding the doctrinal foundation of Christianity.

The original Christian doctrine on equality has been expressed by St. Paul, who opposed attempts by slaves to free themselves because we have all been freed in Christ and that should be enough. St. Paul’s Letter to Philemon is actually a covering note which he sent along with a runaway slave whom he returned to the legal owner, the Christian convert Philemon.[4]

 

A Christian Bible commentary, The Lion Handbook to the Bible edited by David and Pat Alexander, admits: Slavery was such an integral part of the social structure of the day that to preach freedom would have been tantamount to revolution. Paul’s brief was not to engage in political campaigning but to preach a Gospel capable of transforming human life from within. This is a poor excuse: religious pluralism was also an integral part of the dominant culture, and yet Christianity confronted and destroyed it. Why should God make compromises with the world? The fact of the matter is that St. Paul wanted to convert people to his own belief system, and that he was not interested in other, non-salvationist pursuits such as social reform.

 

If the missionaries were sincerely unhappy with the institution of caste, it was not because of its intrinsic inequality. The problem with caste was that it offered a lot of communal togetherness, social security and a certain pride in one’s caste identity. Through the missionary propaganda, we have come to see caste as an exclusion-from, but in the first place it is a belonging-to. Even for the lowest castes, humiliation by higher placed people on account of caste did not outweigh the considerable benefits of belonging to at least some caste. This caste cohesion is an important reason why Hinduism could survive where the cultures of West Asia disappeared under the onslaught of Islam. The missionaries found that people were not willing to give up their caste by converting to Christianity, which implied breaking with a number of caste customs. The only way to convert people, was to convert entire caste groups and allow them to retain some of their caste identity.

 

Therefore, far from abolishing caste, the Church allowed caste distinctions to continue even within its own structure and functioning. Pope Gregory XV (1621-1623) formally sanctioned caste divisions in the Indian Church. This papal bull confirmed earlier decisions of the local Church hierarchy in 1599 and 1606.

 

It is therefore not true that the Church’s motivation in blackening the Brahmins had anything to do with a concern for equality. The Church was against equality in the first place, and even when equality became the irresistible fashion, the Church allowed caste inequality to continue wherever it considered it opportune to do so. As a missionary has admitted to me: in Goa, many churches still have separate doors for high-caste and low-caste people, and caste discrimination at many levels is still widespread. Commenting on the persistence of caste distinctions in the Church, a Dalit convert told me: I feel like a frog who has jumped from one muddy pool into another pool just as muddy.

 

Whenever the Church feels it should accommodate existing caste feelings in settled Christian communities, it accepts them; and whenever it thinks it profitable to take a bold anti-caste stand before a Dalit public, it will do just that. It is true that contemporary missionaries, who have grown up with the idea of social equality, mostly have a sincere aversion for caste inequality, and are more dependable when it comes to conducting Church affairs in a caste-neutral way (as opposed to Indian Christians who insistently claim descent from high-caste converts). But when considering the missionary machine as a whole, we must say that the missionary commitment to equality and social justice is not sincere, but is an opportunistic policy motivated by a greed for conversions.

 

In the past century, the Churches one after another came around to the decision that the lower ranks of society should be made the prime target of conversion campaigns. Finding that the conversion of the high-caste people was not getting anywhere, they settled for the low-castes and tribals, and adapted their own image accordingly. One implication was that the Brahmins were no longer just the guardians of Paganism, but also the antipodes of the low-castes on the caste ladder. A totally new line of propaganda was launched: Brahmins were the oppressors of the low-caste people.

 

In the proliferating mission schools, the missionary version of Indian history, including its view on caste, was taught to Indian pupils, and many internalized the hostile and motivated story which they had been fed. One of them was Jyotirao Phule of Maharashtra, the first modern leader to be called Mahatma. His position, while not yet all-out anti-Hindu, was strongly anti-Brahmin. He wrote: The Brahmin’s natural (instinctive) temperament is mischievous and cantankerous, and it is so inveterate that it can never be eradicated.

 

Then again, the Aryan Invasion theory was the alpha and omega of the version of India history spread by anti-Brahminism.[5] Phule’s book Slavery starts out with this view of history: Recent researches have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Brahmins were not the Aborigines of India…. Aryans came to India not as simple emigrants with peaceful intentions of colonization, but as conquerors. They appear to have been a race imbued with very high notions of self, extremely cunning, arrogant and bigoted.

 

For Phule, there could be no progress for the low-caste people without taking harsh anti-Brahmin measures, e.g.: Let there be schools for the Shudras in every village, but away with all Brahmin schoolmasters. This is exactly what the missionary school-builders wanted him to say. Through Phule, the missionary indoctrination has influenced all twentieth century anti-Brahmin leaders.

 

Even among the champions of the Hindu cause, anti-Brahminism acquired a following. The Hindu reform movement Arya Samaj rejected Brahminism and its heretical brainchildren, idolatry and the caste system, as utterly non-Vedic. Brahmin temples were desecrated in the name of Hinduism. Orthodox Brahmins were attacked as the traitors of Hindu interests.

 

Thus, it was said in those circles that when in the 1880s the Maharaja of Kashmir wanted to reconvert the forcibly converted Muslims in his domains, the Brahmins rejected this timely proposal, arguing from their obscurantist shastras that one is only a Hindu by birth. This well-known allegation has been argued to be unhistorical (though of course nobody denies that mindlessly scripturalist Brahmins do exist, in dwindling numbers): it cannot be traced farther back than 1946, sixty years after the facts which it claims to describe. Admittedly, this argumentum e silentio is not strong in itself, but it is strengthened by the fact that Brahmins have reconverted ex-Hindus ever since the forcible conversions by Mohammed bin Qasim in A.D. 712. The ritual effecting conversion into the Arya fold has been available and in use since Vedic times.

 

There is ample Christian testimony from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century that the majority of converts were taken back into the Hindu fold, and that those who remained Christian were mostly the individuals who, driven out of their castes on account of their vices or scandalous transgressions of their usages, are shunned afterwards by everybody (quoted by Jeevan Kulkarni in Historical Truths & Untruths Exposed). The people affected by this conversion and reconversion process were mostly, but not exclusively, from the lower castes.

 

Just as well, the missionaries knew whom to hold responsible for their failure: The Brahmin is therefore well worth looking at! We have more to do with him than with the Czar of all the Russians. The battle we have to fight with him is not against guns or rifles, not against flesh and blood. This assessment, written in a mood of vexation by Rev. Norman MacLeod in 1871, was comparatively mild next to what Abbe Dubois had written (and of which MacLeod approved) in 1820: And there is no stronghold of evil so impregnable as Brahmins.

 

The well-spring of anti-Brahminism is doubtlessly the Christian missionaries greedy design to rope in the souls of Hindus. From there onwards, it spread through the entire English-educated class and ultimately became an unquestionable dogma in India’s political parlance. Communist historians and sociologists have been fortifying it by rewriting Indian history as a perennial struggle between Brahmin oppressors and the rest. When defending the Mandal report in 1990, the then Prime Minister of India V.P. Singh could say that Brahmins have to do penance for the centuries of oppression which they inflicted on the Backwards, without anyone questioning his historical assumptions. Anti-Brahminism is now part of the official doctrine of the secular, socialist Republic of India. [6]

 

Notes:

 

1. Francis Xavier’s greatest success, though he didn’t live to see it, was to have the Holy Inquisition brought to Goa. The extraordinary perversions and cruelty practiced by this Church tribunal against the native Goan population have been recorded in The Goa Inquisition by A.K. Priolkar.

2. Not only Robert de Nobili, but St. Thomas is being roped in as a mascot of inculturation. Ivan Fernandez, in “Hindu-Christian Dialogue Produces Results”, in the Jesuit magazine Jivan, May-June 1994, New Delhi, writes, “Hindu scholars have for the first time accepted Christian contribution to Indian philosophy and conceded that Indian Philosophy does not necessarily mean Hindu Philosophy…. Some of the issues raised [in the symposium organised by the Indian Council of Philosophical Research and the Jesuit Philosophical Research Institute, Madras,] asked if there actually were Christian thinkers in the country. If so, what were their framework and concerns?… It is important to raise these issues since the Christian presence in India dates back to the beginning of the Christian era itself. Tradition says, St. Thomas the Apostle, who visited and preached in Kerala … was martyred in Madras. This seminar is not just meant to prove Christian contribution but to demand one’s membership in society as a grown up …” says Anand Amaladass. “Indian philosophy today cannot be considered the property of any one particular community in the country, even if its major contribution has come from, till now, the Hindu community.”

3. See Catholic Ashrams: Sannyasin or Swindlers by Sita Ram Goel, New Delhi, 2010

4. For St. Paul on slavery see Ephesians 6:5-9, Colossians 3:22-25 & 4:1, 1 Timothy 6:1-2, and Philemon. See also 1 Peter 2:18-25, which begins: “Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the forward.”

5. It should be understood here that the theory has been proved to be false. See Shrikant G. Talageri’s Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism and K.D. Sethna’s Karpasa in Prehistoric India: A Chronological and Cultural Clue.

6. Excerpted from Indigenous Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar, Voice of India, New Delhi, 1993.

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The concept of Pakistan in the Vedas

 (Law Animated World, Hyderabad, 30 Oct. 2015)

 

The three most famous sculptures from Mohenjo Daro, on the Sindhu/Indus river, seem ill-chosen to represent the Pakistani publicity campaign “5000 years of Pakistan”. The “king-priest” apparently is an officiant of a stellar cult, and at any rate of a cult other than Islam, so according to the Pakistani state ideology, raison d’être for Pakistan’s very existence, he was a leading figure in a false religion belonging to Jahiliyya, the “age of ignorance”. Like the seated yogi surrounded by animals, “Śiva Paśupati”, he must be burning in hell now. As for the “dancing girl”, stark naked and in a defying pose, in today’s Pakistan she would be stoned to death right away.

And yet, that Pakistani slogan does make sense. Bear with us, we will take the reader through a convoluted array of scriptural and historical data, and you will see why this conclusion is anything but far-fetched. Indeed, it is inevitable.

 

Foreign

The Northwest has always had a negative connotation in the Vedic tradition. Thus, R. Siddhantashastree (1978: History of the Pre-Kali-Yuga India, Delhi: Inter-India Publications, p.11) writes: “The valley of the five tributaries of the Indus had always been held as an unholy region because of its occupation by a non-Aryan tribe antagonistic to the civilized Aryans until the time of Sambarana, (...) the king of Hastinapura belonging to the Lunar dynasty. He was the first Aryan to settle in the valley after driving away the aboriginal non-Aryans to a considerable distance.”

The latter sentence suggests a concession to the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) by positing an antagonism between “Aryans” and “aboriginals”, contrary to the Puranic narrative revaluated by the same author, which has the Aryans come from inner India to this peripheral zone and then n to Central Asia. This simply exemplifies the confusion regarding Aryan origins. Then again, perhaps it is the reader who is misled by this received wisdom while the author has a different scenario in mind: the Aryans as natives of a part of India, who came as conquerors to subdue the natives of other parts of India, notably the Northwest.

As Shrikant Talageri (The Rigveda, an Historical Analysis, and The Rigveda and the Avesta, the Final Analysis, Delhi: Aditya Prakashan 2000 c.q. 2008) has argued, the ancient Hindu suspicion towards the Northwest is a strong argument against the AIT. Knowing the Hindu veneration for origins, they should have treated the region of their provenance far more positively. Anyway, we note that Siddhantashastree situates this anti-Northwest attitude already in the pre-Vedic age, in the very beginning of Aryan history.

 

Battle of the Ten Kings

By the time the Vedic seers start composing their hymns, though, the Northwest is already populated by cognate tribes speaking an Indo-European dialect: first the Druhyu tribe, still remembered in the Rg-Veda as a defeated enemy of the Vedic Pūru tribe, but largely already emigrated to Afghanistan and beyond; then the Anu tribe, the direct enemy confronted by the Vedic people themselves at the time the hymns were being composed. Though speaking related dialects, then probably still mutually understandable, they come into the Vedic horizon as enemies, as harbingers of evil. They add to the region’s negative aura.

Both the successive enemies, from the Druhyu and the Anu tribe, attack the Vedic Pūru tribe from the Northwest. A confederacy led by the Anu tribe comes to confront the Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the foremost historical event in the Ṛg-Veda (7:18-33-83). Unexpectedly, they suffer complete defeat and relocate to Afghanistan. In the names of the tribes and kings, we recognize Iranian (and not Dravidian) names, and in their religion, we recognize the main traits of Mazdeism. The enemies are said to be “without Indra” and “without the Devas”, who were indeed demonized in Mazdeism; and “without fire-sacrifice”, because in Mazdeism, fire is so sacred that one shouldn’t pollute it by throwing things into it. It seems that then already, near the beginning of Vedic history, Mazdeism had its distinctive features.

This is all the more remarkable because this was even before Zarathuštra., the supposed reformer who brought these traits into being. Some three generations later, another battle confirms the division of power and territory. In that more even battle, Ṛjāśva, descendant of Vṛṣagira (hence the “Vārṣāgira battle”), and Sahadeva, descendent of Sudās, face the Iranian king who is remembered in history through the mentions and praise he receives in his court priest Zarathuštra’s own hymns: Kavi Vištāspa. Both parties are mentioned in the Veda 1:100, 1:122) and the Avestā.

The proverbial demons, the Asuras (comprehensively discussed in Hale, Wash Edward: Asura in Early Vedic Religion, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1986, and in Krishna, Nanditha: The Book of Demons, Penguin, Delhi 2014 (2007)), originally indicate the class of gods preferentially worshipped by the Anu tribe, but also by the first Vedic seers. Varuṇa, god of the night sky with its orderly succession of constellations, hence god of the world order (ṛta/aša, seen in Persian names like Artaxerxes) is an Asura, a “lord” or “mighty one”. The Iranians, who often replaced /s/ with /h/, called him Ahura Mazda, “Lord Wisdom”. After the Iranians had demonized the Devas/Daēvas, the Indians started to demonize the Asuras, and Varuṇa gradually fell into disuse, even if by no means as steeply demonized as Indra by the Mazdeans. At any rate, Vedism and Mazdeism conceived of one another as antagonistic, much as Hinduism and Islam do today.

In theological respect, the Iranian religion Mazdeism has often been considered monotheistic, and in popular publications this account still persists. This was not entirely correct (SkjaervØ, Prods Oktor: “Zarathustra: a Revolutionary Monotheist?”, p. 317-350, in Pongratz-Leisten, Beate: Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, Eisenbrauns , Winona Lake IN 2011), it remained a polytheism, and Zarathuštra with his hyperfocus on one god was strictly speaking a “henotheist”, and hardly representative for the common religion. But it was sufficiently close. The Persians became the saviours of the Israelites with their budding monotheism, their preferred god Varuṇa was the moralist in the Indo-Iranian pantheon (as is apparent from RV 7:86), a bit like the Christian god, and the idea of exalting a single god so much above the others shows a would-be monotheist urge. All this allows for the conclusion that Islamic monotheism is but a radicalization of Zarathuštra’s henotheism. His religion, and possibly his personal religious dissent, was at any rate sufficiently different from the Vedic religion to be thematized as a factor in the long-drawn- out conflict described in the Ṛg-Veda.

So, Pakistan, which has a persianized form of Hindi as national language, can really be said to be the heir of the proto-Iranian tribes living in that same territory in the Vedic age, or at least to fulfil the same antagonistic role in the Hindu worldview.

 

 

Other considerations

The epics give even more flesh to this hostile attitude. In the epics, the troublesome characters typically come from the Northwest. The Rāmāyaṇa intrigue is caused by Kaikeyī, a co-wife of Rāma’s father coming from the northwestern Kaikeya tribe. Gāndhārī, mother of the enemy Kauravas, and her brother Śakuni, deceiver at dice and evil spirit behind the disrobing of Draupadī, come from Gandhāra in Afghanistan. Mādrī, who triggers the death of king Paṇḍu, cause of the whole war, belongs to the Iranian Madra tribe (apparently related to the Medes).

The first, to my knowledge, to become aware of this dislike’s relevance to the Aryan Homeland issue, was Shrikant Talageri. The negative aura of the Northwest was so consistent and unadulterated that this could not possibly be the venerated land of their ancestors. To the above and other considerations, he has added a fact he remembers from his own Saraswat Brahmin community. When it was time for religious fasting, rice was not eaten, but wheat products were. They did not consider wheat, which in the Vedic age came from the Northwest, as real food, and treated it on a par with foreign foods like potatoes. (Talageri 2008:102-106) The wheat-growing Northwest was a foreign country, as Pakistan now is to India.

For another consideration: a negative designation in Sanskrit is Mleccha, “barbarian”. The word is generally taken to come from Meluhha, the Mesopotamian name for Sindh, now in Pakistan. So, long before Pakistan existed, proto-Pakistanis were already called “barbarians” by orthodox Hindus.  

Another Vedic fact, peripheral but symbolically significant, is this. An enemy of the Pauravas is called the Guṅgu tribe (RV 10:48:8). But Guṅgu in Vedic means the firstly-appearing moon, the crescent. And what country has the crescent in its flag?

 

 

Territorial claims

The ancient Ānavas lived in West Panjab where they confronted the Vedic king Sudās in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the first Indo-Pak war. (Then already, such wars typically ended in Pakistani defeat.) But where did they come from? Aha, as per Puranic tradition, they immigrated from Kashmir, after taking Panjab from their Druhyu cousins. Kashmir was known in the Mazdean Videvdād as the Airiiānām Vaējo, the “seed of the Iranians”, their intermediary Homeland. It was the place of their ethnogenesis after having migrated westwards from Prayāga as part of Yayāti’s branch of the Lunar Dynasty; much like in 1947, the Mohajirs migrated from the Ganga-Yamuna plain to Pakistan.

This proves, as proofs go in irredentism, that Kashmir belongs with Pakistan. So, if all else fails, Pakistan can justify its separate existence, its hostility to India and its territorial demands by invoking Vedic testimony.

 

A breakthrough slogan

The Pakistani government ought to highlight this long-standing Hindu hostility to the Northwest. It would prove that the negative attitude to the territories now constituting Afghanistan and Pakistan dates back to the Vedic or even pre-Vedic age. If that implies shedding the AIT, so much the better.

Moreover, all this would validate its slogan for attracting tourists to Mohenjo-Daro: “Five thousand years of Pakistan!”

 

 

Dr. Koenraad Elst

(This paper was rejected by another Indian journal on the sole ground that defending the Pakistani claim on Kashmir is considered treason, and officialdom should not be deemed capable of understanding that this is only done tongue-in-cheek.)

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Learning from the electoral defeat in Bihar

In the India Ideas Conclave list, I offered following borrowed comment on 8 November 2015:

Dear listfolk,

 

if I would say it, the people concerned would rush to accuse me of "white man's burden" and other diversions. Fortunately, for most everything I say, I can find a like-minded Indian source, so here goes:

---

Van: "Shrikant Talageri"
Aan: indicbookclub@googlegroups.com
Verzonden: Zondag 8 november 2015 08:22:31
Onderwerp: The Bihar Election Results: Heads You Win Tails I Lose

Dear Friends

The Bihar election results are out. Now there will very likely be a lot of breast-beating or apologetics on the part of the supporters of the BJP and Modi, and gleeful crowing by their opponents.

As a consistently staunch Hindutva supporter but NOTA voter, I would like to make two points which may lead to my being heartily disliked and criticized by both sides, but then even if the truth is bitter it has to be swallowed.

1. It was basically a battle between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Supporters of one or the other will find something or the other to put forward in defence of their support for that particular group, but the truth is both the groups are equally indifferent to Hinduism and Indian culture. Bribing or blackmailing small groups of Muslims (as in Meerut) to convert to Hinduism (and ending up with egg on our own face), talking against reservations on the one hand and bribing more and more caste groups (and powerful ones like Jats and Marathas) with reservations on the other, pointlessly using abusive language against individuals from "minority communities", banning beef and attacking isolated individuals on the grounds that they possessed, ate or sold beef, defending disgraceful "Hindus" like Asaram "Bapu" and Radhe "Maa", etc. do not constitute acts of Hindutva. Real acts of Hindutva would have been: rigorously banning conversions from Hinduism to Christianity, making article 30 of the constitution applicable to all communities and disbanding the Minorities Commission and removing gender justice laws from religious ambits and making it clear that there would be no more such discrimination on the grounds of religion, openly declaring the cultural allegiance of the Indian state to India's ancient heritage and to its true history (which requires correction), etc. These would have constituted real acts of Hindutva. And all this would have to be done not by what is being called "fringe elements" and "hotheads", but by the very fountainhead of the so-called Hindutva power-hierarchy, i.e. by the Prime Minister, who would also have been required to publicly explain the full rationale of all these things clearly, logically and unapologetically to the whole world. However we had the BJP playing its usual two-faced games, with the top bosses maintaining a frigid silence or talking in doublespeak or in fact failing to openly disown fake "Hindutva" stands while totally failing to openly endorse genuine Hindutva stands. I have noticed in all my years of association with the Sangh Parivar and its supporters that they are actually inordinately proud of their "tactic" of doublespeak and double standards (criticising the Congress for certain things and then defending exactly similar actions of the BJP)! No amount of setbacks can convince them that only honesty and genuine ideology pays!

And not only did the BJP and its worshipping supporters not take an open and honest stand but we had the top leaders from the PM downwards making "secular" noises every time they were accused of Hindutva motives. What in my opinion took the cake was the God-given opportunity we had to make it clear to the whole world that genuine Hindutva, but not hate-ideology, was our ideology and that we were unapologetic about it. When Obama came to India and in his public address in the presence of Modi lectured to us about our treatment of "minorities" (something he would never have dared to even think of doing in, say, Saudi Arabia), it was a God-given opportunity for Modi to tell the world in Obama's presence itself (in diplomatic words of course) that treating Hindus as punching bags or as people who were permanently in the dock was now a thing of the past, and Hindus who had the most glowing history of treatment of minorities could teach the world a lot in these matters and did not require advice. But he maintained a benevolent silence and a few days later lectured Indians, in his turn, to treat the minorities better!

What is the difference between Tweedledum and Tweedledee? When Obama cracked the whip about FDI in multi-brand retail, the then PM Manmohan Singh jumped on to a stool like a lion in some circus performance and announced that he was willing to put the future of his government at stake in his determination to enforce FDI in multi-brand retail!

Doublespeak, double standards and two-timing games do not ensure electoral victories, as the Bihar results show.

2. The Bihar elections were ultimately a case of "Heads you win Tails I lose" for Hindus, Hindutva and Indian culture.

If the BJP had won, the secularist media would have shouted that it was a victory for Modi's "development agenda" and a defeat for the Hindutva "hotheads" and "fringe elements" and in fact for Hindutva or Hindu ideology itself, and the BJP would have dutifully accepted this logic and accelerated its increasing alienation and severance from Hindu ideology and pursuit of Americanisation and ruthless Capitalism= "development" Agenda.

Since the BJP has lost, the secularist media will predictably shout that it is a massive defeat caused by the BJP's "hotheads" and "fringe elements" and in fact by its "divisive" Hindutva policy itself. And not by its rabidly anti-poor, pro-rich, anti-environmentalist, crony-capitalist, pro-American, etc. policies and not even by the spiralling prices of pulses! and, again, the BJP will dutifully accept this logic and accelerate its increasing alienation and severance from Hindu ideology and pursuit of Americanisation and ruthless Capitalism= "development" Agenda.

Either way it was meant to be a defeat for Genuine Hindutva. And every election result will be the same so long as there is blind worship, election-oriented pseudo-Hindutva, doublespeak, dishonesty and insincerity, and where money and power mean everything and genuine Hindu causes mean nothing.

Shrikant Talageri   

          

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

Our comment on the Delhi election results has been vindicated, and now you know what more is in store. BJP secularism, focus on "development", and trying in vain to ingratiate yourself with the minorities, are sure-fire formulas for losing more elections. While the BJP strategists will draw all the wrong conclusions, the bulk of the time-servers who have clawed their way up in the Modi establishment will simply be pragmatic about it: since this government will not survive 2019, grab as much as you can now.

 

Kind regards,

 

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