(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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