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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“Horseplay at Harappa” revisited

 

By far the best-known incident in the Aryan controversy of the last quarter-century is the cover-story of the Chennai-based Communist fortnightly Frontline, “Horseplay at Harappa” (2000). This article by Prof. Michael Witzel and Dr. Steve Farmer makes a whole drama of Dr. Navaratna Rajaram’s attempt to prove the existence of horses in the Harappan civilization, and then puts it in a larger context of politically motivated history revision.

On these political motives, they show their ignorance, reliance on secondary sources and personal partisanship. Admittedly a heavy load of allegations, which I will have to discharge some day (except that much of it is already taken care of in the chapters on political motives and on VD Savarkar in my book Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan), but I will leave it for another occasion. Instead, a recent debate on the Aryan question has drawn my attention again to the substance of the Horseplay article: the deconstruction of the “horse seal” and of the Harappan decipherment thesis to which it serves as an illustration.

One implication of Rajaram’s decipherment is that the Harappan and even pre-Harappan societies spoke Vedic and were contemporaneous with the composition of the Vedic hymns. But in that case, the archaeologically well-attested Harappan civilization should show some sign of having been familiar with the horse, an oft-described animal in the Vedas. By now, the archaeological presence of horses in the archaeological record seems to have been established (vide Dilip Chakrabarti & Makkhan Lal’s new multi-volume work on ancient Indian history), but back then, Rajaram put his bet on an incomplete seal of which in his opinion the missing part showed a horse’s body.

What followed was slapstick involving the then-ongoing transition between complicated photography and digital photo manipulations: Witzel and Farmer accused Rajaram of having photoshopped his picture of the seal, a technology which he probably did not know yet. It was their mistake to think that any intentional visual manipulation had taken place. I have worked in the New Age sector long ago, a popular target for allegations of fraud by skeptics; so, having observed this problem very closely, I had to conclude that in the real world, there is far less willful deception than gullible self-deception.  Here also, it doesn’t require postulating any conspiracy to explain Rajaram’s wrong interpretation of the seal: there had not been any manipulation, he simply saw what he eagerly wanted to see. In reality, however, the incomplete seal could more logically be completed as a buffalo than as a horse.

When I myself first saw Rajaram’s “artist’s depiction” of the completed seal, in a pre-decipherment publication, I was struck by the unusual design, with the horse not in a normal posture but emphatically showing its hind part. Now, I can imagine a Playboy centerfold highlighting her posterior charms, but for a Harappan animal this is a bit odd. Still, I didn’t think anything of it, looking forward to Rajaram’s decipherment (with N. Jha), which reportedly was very promising. But when doubts were voiced by others, I was not surprised.

Unfortunately, when his decipherment came out, it was a disappointment. Like most decipherments, it made the Harappan seals too profound. Sumerian writing started as a commercial bookkeeping device, but in Harappa, apparently, they first used their script to eternalize their philosophical musings. Even mathematical formulas were read into it. Outsiders looking into the proposed decipherment named many different kinds of objections. The inevitable Michael Witzel remarked, for instance, that Rajaram’s reading of the well-known Shiva Pashupati seal was grammatically incorrect: Ishad yatta Mara (“The demon Mara tamed by Isha/Shiva”) presupposes that the agentive object is in the ablative (which would be true in Latin), but Sanskrit puts it in the instrumental case: Ishena yatta Mara. I was also unpleasantly surprised by Rajaram’s insistence that a symmetrical 3-shaped sign represented the well-known Aum sign – a shorthand for the rendering of the Aum sign in the Devanagari script, which is some 2000 years younger than the Harappan seals and grew out of the Brahmi script which didn’t have that particular Aum sign. Rajaram’s reply to the Frontline article, making yet another low-credibility claim for a horse depiction, only added to the atmosphere of ridicule.

Now, maybe these were just details and the decipherment could, with some amendments, still be upheld. But in that case, it fell to Rajaram to defend his decipherment. And this, to my knowledge, never happened.

What I would have done, is either to have stood by my decipherment, i.e. defended it, sought to improve on it with more evidence, compared it with other decipherments and shown how specific inscriptions are better accounted for by my own than by those other decipherments; or to have admitted defeat and publicly said so. This latter procedure is not some noble guideline, merely an application of the business principle of “writing off your losses”, limiting the damage. If you have the courage to acknowledge your mistake, you can again be taken seriously and, after a period of “delousing”, even hope to contribute something meaningful to the debate again. But that is not the course which Dr. Rajaram took. As for the other option, I have kept following this debate but have never heard from this decipherment again. Thus, Rajaram often collaborates with Dr. S. Kalyanaraman, also a decipherer and also a spokesman of the “Harappan is Sanskrit” thesis, and it would have been logical if the two had compared their readings and fought it out. But I, at least, have never heard of that.

At the time, the treatment which Rajaram received (or in another version, which he called upon himself) was so extremely humiliating that I admired the fortitude of the man to suffer it all without complaining. But then again, it may have been the haughtiness  that I have witnessed so often among internet Hindus: “I don’t have to convince those white critics”, “it is best to ignore them”, “we had better address the Hindu audience rather than those foreign interlopers”, “we should give history, appropriated by the scholars, back to the people”. Maybe so, but it is not the way to victory.   

The Horseplay in Harappa incident contributed immensely to the identification of Hindu history revision with superstition and fraud. It set the stage for the Hindu defeats in the history textbook controversies of India (2002-4) and of California (2005-9). For me, being mentioned there in passing added greatly to the “guilt by association” in the enemy camp’s rumour mills.

Ever since I started work on Indian history, I have had to reckon with bad company with whom I was willy-nilly associated. The enemy camp gloated over its artfully composed lists of purported “influences” on Hindu public opinion such as “PN Oak, Koenraad Elst, NS Rajaram…” And it is true that I had defended Rajaram in writing (articles in 1993, included in my book Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate, 1998, against Prof. Robert Zydenbos, who relayed the impression that Rajaram’s anti-AIT discourse had to be “Nazi” somehow, when in fact it is his own AIT that has solid Nazi connotations). Well, so be it. I stand by my writings on this subject, and remain confident that concentrating on the evidence is the way forward. The truth about the “Aryan” homeland question will shine through.

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Still no trace of an Aryan invasion

Last night, 1 March 2011, I attended a lecture by Cambridge (UK) archaeologist Cameron Petrie on the state of the art in Harappan excavations and the emerging picture of the "Indus" civilization. Interesting, but no real news.




Just a few highlights in this modest blog report. Petrie showed a map of excavation sites used by Michel Danino in "a popular book" on the Indus-Saraswati civilization, next to his own map. Danino's map shows a high concentration of sites along the Ghaggar river, i.e. the remains of the once-mighty Saraswati; but Petrie's map shows a paucity of sites in the same region. That looks serious. But the very next item in his talk reversed this impression. He reported on a survey of Haryana by a Ph.D. candidate from Rohtak who during 2008-10 identified hundreds of as yet unexcavated Harappan sites. His map showed a concentration of "new" sites precisely in the "empty" Ghaggar region... So, this seems to confirm that the Saraswati was an important centre of Harappan civilization after all.

Incidentally, for the most common chronology proposed by the non-invasionist school, a non-urbanized Saraswati basin would not be such a problem. People like K.D. Sethna and Nicholas Kazanas date the Rg-Vedic age to the early Harappan and even pre-Harappan age, in conformity with the lack of an urban setting in the Rg-Veda. But the latter information could also be matched to a Harappan date but in a non-urbanised border region of the Harappan area, as Shrikant Talageri opines. The latter also points out that the Asuras, a term apparently referring in that context to the Iranians, the Vedic Indians' westerly neighbours, are often described as more advanced in material culture. So, locating the Vedic tribes outside the metropolitan area could make sense. And the impression of a west-to-east gradient in Harappan development, confirmed once more by Petrie, would therefore not be a problem for Talageri's position. But many scenarios remain possible.

Petrie purposely avoided the topic of the alleged Aryan invasion. His survey of Harappan history at no point necessitated such a hypothesis, for the story could apparently be told with reference only to purely internal developments. He only agreed to discuss it when asked by the chairman in question time, but remained non-committal. He said the question was so complicated that it would perhaps never be decided.

At that point I proposed to narrow the question down to a degree of simplicity where a field archaeologist would definitely be able to answer. He agreed that Prof. B.B. Lal had made his name in the 1950s and 60s by detailing our knowledge of the Painted Grey Ware and identifying it as characteristic of the invading Aryans moving eastwards, deeper into India; and that Lal had later repudiated any claims of an Aryan invasion and is now a leading light of the non-invasionist school. Lal now says that no archaeological trace of an Aryan invasion has ever been found or identified. Petrie also conceded that Harvard Sanskritist Prof. Michael Witzel had likewise admitted that "as yet" no such arcaheological evidence of an Aryan invasion has been discovered. So, a very simple question would be: did Cameron Petrie, as a field archaeologist fresh from the recentmost excavation, ever come across actual pieces of evidence for an Aryan invasion. He smiled and agreed that he too had no such sensational discovery to announce. So: as of 2011, after many decades of being the official and much-funded hypothesis, the Aryan Invasion Theory has still not been confirmed by even a single piece of archaeological evidence.



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