Prof. B.B. Lal in the major debates

(Shorter version in First Post, 15 Sep 2022) Now that Prof. Braj Basi Lal, the Dean of Indian Archaeology, has left this world at 101, it is fitting to highlight the most striking among his many achievements. For seven decades he was in the forefront of India’s archaeological research, even charting new ground in our knowledge of the less-known Ganga Civilization (From the Mesolithic to the Mahājanapadas: The Rise of Civilisation in the Ganga Valley, Aryan Books International) in 2019, at age 98. But his place in his history has been made by two issues with an importance far beyond pure scholarship: the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy and the Indo-European (‘Aryan’) invasion debate. In the 1980s, when the present writer studied Oriental Philology and History in Leuven University, he took Prof. Lambert Isebaert’s course of Indo-European Linguistics, and once asked him if there was any proof for the generally assumed Southwest-Russian homeland of the Indo-European language family. Isebaert said that this had been proven by archaeology. Another professor in Leuven, the leading Dutch Indologist Pierre Eggermont, spoke in the same vein, and also named his source: Prof. Braj Basi Lal’s 1950s’ exploration of the Painted Grey Ware (PGW). This was a type of pottery that Lal explained as typical of the Aryans penetrating deeper into India (starting with Lal: ‘Excavation at Hastinapura and other explorations in the upper Ganga and Sutlej basins’, Ancient India (Bulletin of the Archaeological Survey of India), 1950-52, no.10-11, p.5-151; and ‘New Light on the ‘dark Age’ of Indian History: Recent Excavations at the Hastinapura Site, Near Delhi‘, Illustrated London News, 1952). Thirty years later, he had not fundamentally changed his mind yet (‘The Indo-Aryan hypothesis vis-à-vis Indian archaeology’, EPHCA, Moscow, 1981). So when, around that same time, I heard my professors quote him as a source of authority, they were simply reproducing the state of the art. Indeed, till today, Lal’s invasionist interpretation of his own PGW findings is still being cited as proof of an Aryan invasion, e.g.: ‘Lal considered PGW to be intrusive’ (SV Pradhan: The Elusive Aryans, 2014, p.67), and we heard the same opinion at the annual conference of the European Archaeological Association, Maastricht 2017. This decades-long exclusive appeal to Lal’s finding at least confirmed that in the intervening decades, no other ‘proof’ has materialized. Even today, that state of the art has not been strengthened by any new evidence. The elusive Aryans fail to show up in the archaeological record. And the state of the art has evolved since then, because crown witness BB Lal realized that his invasionist explanation was only an interpretation, viz. a force-fitting of the data into the reigning paradigm, the one he had absorbed from his mentor, invasionist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Later he came to understand that he had merely developed an application of the paradigm, not an independent proof of it. So now we have to face the complete absence of archaeological evidence for an Aryan immigration. An invasion of the military type has long been ruled out (as opposed to Europe, where an “Aryan” or Indo-European military conquest emanating from the Black Sea coast has been confirmed by all manner of archaeologically attested material and cultural innovations), but a peaceful influx under the radar yet replacing the thickly-populated Subcontinent’s language and religion as well. Even Invasionist champion Michael Witzel confirms that no archaeological proof for the Aryan invasion has been found ‘yet’. This explains why most leading Indian archaeologists are no longer shy about their skepticism of the invasion scenario. Since the 1990s, Lal has published a number of books detailing the archaeological evidence for a full continuity between the Harappan cities, such as The Saraswati Flows On: the Continuity of Indian Culture (2002), The Homeland of the Aryans. Evidence of Rigvedic Flora and Fauna, and Archaeology (2005), and culminating in The Rigvedic People: ‘Invaders’/’Immigrants’? or Indigenous? Evidence of Archaeology and Literature, (2015, all through Aryan Books International, Delhi). Thus far, Lal’s efforts have not yet made a dent in the dominance of the invasionist paradigm: ‘An ostrich-like attitude is perpetuating the Aryan invasion myth’. (in Bal Ram Singh: Origin of Indian Civilization, Delhi/Dartmouth MA, 2010:23-36) But the Indo-Europeanist establishment cannot keep on stonewalling the accumulating archaeological and other evidence forever. They can look the other way when their only archaeo-supporter turns away from their Aryan invasion scenario, and even when his younger colleagues, together with scholars from other fields, find new evidence against it. But the truth has a way of finally asserting itself. We have already seen it in the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy. In the 1970s, the same BB Lal came up with archaeological evidence for the temple, of which remains formed part of the foundations and the pillars of the Babri Masjid. This was the first scientific confirmation of a commonly accepted tradition (also by the local Muslims and the British) about a pre-existing Rama temple at the mosque site. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered Lal to keep silent about it. But once the ‘Eminent Historians’ started roundly denouncing the existing consensus, among scholars Lal’s evidence was highlighted, together with a growing body of documentary evidence. Yet, the media kept the old consensus and the new evidence for it for some more years out of view; they stonewalled Lal’s evidence just as the Indo-Europeanist establishment is still doing, or even decried him as a ‘born-again Hindu nationalist’. Unfortunately for the Eminent Historians, truth bypassed their efforts at suppressing it, and now judgments by Uttar Pradesh’s High Court (2011) and the Supreme Court (2019) have definitively confirmed that Prof. Lal had been right all along. A similar end of the affair seems to be in store for the Aryan immigration debate. Here Lal is instrumental in a return to the assumption of an Indian Homeland of the Indo-European language family, common in Europe in the half-century around 1800. As the leading linguist from Leiden, RSP Beekes (Vergelijkende Taalwetenschap, = ‘Comparative linguistics’, Utrecht 1990, p.73), wrote: ‘When the IE family was discovered and people sought its land of origin, they at first thought of India’. The Out-of-India Theory is not some far-fetched novelty, but stood at the cradle of the very notion of an Indo-European language family. It is to Prof. Lal’s eternal credit that he has played a crucial role in restoring the true story with new evidence.
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A case of good nationalism: DK Chakrabarti on historiography

 

 

A case of good nationalism

 

(Pragyata, 5 February 2021)

 

Outside India, and in India’s secularist circles, “nationalism” counts as a bad thing, a kind of collective self-centredness, a refusal of solidarity with the rest of the world. In the 19^th century, it counted by contrast as a form of generous solidarity with people you didn’t know, simply because they belonged to the same nation. The Great War of 1941-18 saw the highest tide of nationalism. Thus, in my native Belgium, an artificial state without a soul, it was the war that first created a national feeling, focused on war leader King Albert I. In the inter-war years, all manner of associations for trade-unionism, sports or even music affected military mannerisms with parades and uniforms, an atmosphere in which the emerging authoritarian-nationalist movements could flourish. India’s newly founded mass movement RSS (1925) followed this same fashion, and has kept it up till today, long after it disappeared abroad.

At the same time, the war was followed by the emergence of a pacifist and internationalist spirit, embodied at the highest level by the creation of the League of Nations. A number of writers expressed this weariness of the nationalist passions that first had led to the war and then been exacerbated by it, such as Goodbye to All That by frontline veteran and famous classicist Robert Graves.  After World War Two, when the Axis powers had profiled themselves as fervently nationalist (and in spite of the fact that the Allies and the Resistance movements had done likewise), nationalism definitely went out of fashion. Intellectuals developed a keen eye for the distortive influence that nationalist (even more than other) passions had on history-writing.

 

Nationalism in the British period

But now Dilip K. Chakrabarti, emeritus professor of Archaeology at Cambridge UK, defends nationalism as a research framework: Nationalism in the Study of Ancient Indian History (Aryan Books International, Delhi). Not the fanatical nationalism of some Hindutva trolls, but the modest and quiet nationalism visible in the colonial-age and Nehru-age Indian historians. Their historiography simply and unsensationally paid proper attention to the scientific and cultural achievements of Hindu civilization and to its already ancient search for unity.

This nationalist tendency marked itself off against the rival tendency of colonialist history. The latter would deny any originality or agency to Indian culture, all inventions and important doctrines borrowed from Greek or other foreign sources. This tendency persists among today’s dominant anti-nationalist or self-described “secularist” school, for political reasons out to belittle India’s achievements. Yet, we get to see that the great British historians (discussed on p.76-156), as distinct from non-historians like TB Macaulay, rarely gave signs of belittling India.

At the other end we find the traditionalists, who were then and still are scornful of the canons of academic history. They derive history from sources like the Puranas and take the epics literally.  Ridiculed but persistent, they are impervious to scholarship. There is for any reader of this book, or any other by Chakravarti, no occasion for confusing him with these far-fetched chauvinists.

Chakrabarti surveys the British-age Indian historians at length. (p.157-250). An interesting example was Rajendra Lala Mitra  (p.157-173) We may quote him here for disturbing the common Hindu chauvinist allegation that the alleged Indian lack of historical sense is but a colonial concoction meant to belittle India. No, it is a fact based in common observation, also by Indians themselves. Mitra is quoted as lamenting his own civilization’s lack of historical sense: “India never produced a Xenophon or a Thucydides, and her heroes and their mighty exploits, her greatness and her early civilization, where they live, live but in song (…) there are few ancient books which bear authentic dates”. (p.159)

Not that the Indians lacked a calendar system – they had too many of them: “It was held to be a distinguishing mark for a great sovereign to establish an era (…) But unfortunately Indian writers never brought their systems of chronology to bear upon history; and in the absence of chronology their history degenerated into the most inconsistent fables and legends. (..) Almost every date is doubtful.” (p. 167)

Same remark by the greatest historian of the 20^th century, RC Majumdar, whose voluminous work is discussed in detail. (p.226-8 and p.273-287) He is quoted as diagnosing the “almost all-encompassing absence of historical texts from the earliest times to the Muhammadan conquest” and the “absence of a definite chronology”. (p.380) Like Mitra and Majumdar, Chakrabarti is clearly not a nationalist in the sense of a blind glorifier of his country. But acknowledgement of India’s weak points is all the easier as the said flaw is compensated by the many achievements of Indian civilization. And moreover, the admitted weakness has a silver lining: India’s record of its early history is a bit garbled, but on the other hand it reaches deeper in time (with very pre-Vedic histories of Manu and his successors) than comparable records in the other great civilizations.

 

Indo-European

Another pioneer was Ramesh Chandra Dutta, who “like many of the period [= late 19^th], was an avid supporter of the Aryan theory”. (p.182) He is quoted as considering the results of the “industry, perseverance and genius” of early Indo-Europeanists like “Bopp, Grimm, and Humboldt” as “one of the noblest and most brilliant of the century”: the Indo-European language family. (p.183)

Today, many nationalists including Chakrabarti himself reject the notion of Indo-European, but he concedes that back then, far from being resented by the Indians of the day as an imperialist concoction, they generally welcomed it, because: “The Aryan hypothesis implied that the ruling Anglo-Saxons and the ruling Indians (at least the higher castes among the North-Indians) belonged to the same stock and could claim a cousinship, however removed, with their rulers.” (p.183)

But he himself is not convinced: “To the present author, the Aryans are a historical non-issue because this is nothing more than a historical concoction to imagine a group of all-conquering dominating people on the model of the Europeans in the 16th-20^th centuries.” (p.9)

Like a very large number of Hindus, Chakravarti assumes, following the AIT school, that “comparative philology” necessarily implies the AIT; and is therefore to be shunned. He rejects not only the Aryan Invasion/Immigration Theory but the Out-of-India Theory as well: “The so-called ‘out-of-India’ theory postulated for the Aryan origin, which is current among a section of Indian scholars, should not mean anything historically tangible or verifiable because the whole Aryan issue is irrelevant to the rational understanding of ancient India.” (p.9-10)

Well, some of the historians he discusses contradict this view. Mountstuart Elphinstone was the Governor of Mumbai  Presidency before he became a historian, which makes him formally an out-and-out colonialist. Yet, he was in two minds about the Aryan invasion thesis. In his day (1841), the Aryan Invasion Theory was still young (August van Schlegel posited a Caucasus homeland in 1834) and disputed. He simply notes the dilemma whether the high castes had been invaders or “merely a portion of one of the native states (a religious sect, for instance) which had outstripped their fellow citizens in knowledge”.  (p.115)

Then he proceeds to give a cautious answer. Even if conquest was at the origin of the power equation in caste society, that doesn’t make it a foreign conquest: “It is opposed to their foreign origin that neither in the code [of Manu], nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence”. (p.115)

To be sure, there is no such recorded memory among the other Indo-European branches either, e.g. the Germanic Edda of ca. 1200 CE  knows nothing of an immigration whereas the Out-of-India Theory (and even the still-common peri-Caucasus homeland theory) posits their immigration into Northern Europe ca. 2500 BCE, obviously because the long time-lapse made this forgetfulness a natural outcome. The Aryan Invasion Theory, by contrast, posits an immigration ca. 1500 BCE and immediately thereafter the composition of the Rg-Veda, including (at least in the AIT school’s reading) descriptions of battles between invaders and natives. So unlike in the Edda, especially in the Vedas we ought to find references to very recent foreign origins, given the importance that ancient peoples in general and Indians in particular attached to origins.  

Where I completely agree with Elphinstone but Chakrabarti does only partly, is this: “The common origin of the Sanscrit language with those of the west leaves no doubt that there was once a connection between the nations by whom they are used; but it proves nothing regarding the place where such a connection subsisted, nor about the time, (…) To say that it spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption (…) Where, also, could the central point be, from which a language could spread over India, Greece and Italy, and yet leave Chaldaea, Syria and Arabia untouched? The question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present.” (p.115-6)

Indeed, we agree that the Hindus came from India. As for the Europeans, we say that the linguistically decisive part of their ancestry came from India, whereas most Indians including Chakrabarti say it didn’t; though essentially they don’t give a damn about these non-Indians, as their horizon stops at the Khyber Pass. Here, persuasion will have to come from Chakrabarti’s own field: archaeology. So far it has shown a complete absence of indications of Aryans moving into India (as opposed to  Europe, where both archaeological and genetic evidence of the Aryan invasion is plentiful), but much less work has been done to identify Indian emigrant traces in the Central-Asian record. These will give more body to a scenario of Aryan expansion via a secondary homeland on the steppes, then into Europe.

 

Negationism

One great merit of this book is the insider’s account of the Leftist take-over of the education establishment, mainly during Indira Gandhi’s 1972-77 tenure, with PN Haksar as her political secretary, Saiyid Nurul Hasan as her Education Minister, and card-carrying Communist Prof. RS Sharma as the first chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, newly founded in 1972. (p.3-20, p.293-311, passim) Sharma’s textbook Ancient India, the ICHR’s first, with the protest against it by archaeologist Swarajya Prasad Gupta, was the first salvo in the ‘textbook controversy’ that has never really died down ever since.

As for his own experience:  “In several Indian universities that I can think of – Delhi University, for instance -- students were positively discouraged to read those ‘nationalist’ writings” (p.4), i.e. sober India-minded historians like RC Majumdar. Chakrabarti himself served at Delhi University for a while, and was the target of Communist slander there. Editing A History of Ancient India in 2013, he found that major publishers refused, slated contributors withdrew etc.: “cancel culture”.

After SP Gupta, a very small handful of minor publications dealt with this Communist coup against objective historiography. Then “the first major criticism of the ‘left-liberal’ or ‘progressive’ historians was made by Arun Shourie with special reference to the state of the ICHR in their control.” (p.11, referring to Shourie’s 1998 book Eminent Historians. Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud) The title Eminent Historians refers to how they call each other to pull rank against the non-conformist historians mostly excluded from an academic career; it is also pun on a colonial-age book title, Eminent Victorians. The book documented the eminent historians’ misuse of the lavish subsidies they received, and focused on their systematic history manipulation.

Though “these earlier scholars never transcended the limits of objective historical research in their championing of some nationalist premises” and “in no case did they try to glorify ancient India at the expense of objectivity”, yet “the communists launched a propaganda war against the earlier scholars by styling themselves ‘progressives’ as opposed to the ‘revivalist’ and ‘regressive’ Indian scholars of the earlier generations. They did not find the necessity of citing facts to support their contention”. (p.381) The Left purposely conflates Bhāratīya Vidyā Bhavan (that published RC Majumdar’s magnum opus) historians with the eccentric Bhāratīya Itihās Saṇkalan Yojanā history-rewriters. They also portrayed themselves, though power-wielders, as oppressed.

Thus, DN Jha’s Myth of the Holy Cow (Verso, 2002) tried to shock the Hindus, who protested. So Jha roped in worldwide sympathy by presenting himself as a victim of Hindu fanaticism. Yet the case of historian Rajendra Lala Mitra’s 1881 book Indo-Aryans, with the same message, had not led to any persecution. (p.169) The Hindu public had had no problem with the message that Hindu norms had been different 3000 years ago compared to today; only with the Hindu-bashing that Jha added to it.

Did the scene change under Narendra Modi, the supposed Hindu fanatic? Not quite: under BJP rule, no counter-strategy was developed, and the much-discussed problem of “Right-wing history rewriting” remains a figment of the feverish Leftist imagination: “The communists had a free run so far, their opponents being no match in the psychological warfare launched by the communists. These opponents have had the control of the ICHR uninterruptedly since 2014 but they have basically been unable to neutralize the communist lobby in Indian historical studies. They are not motivated enough and focused enough. They regrettably are not even professional enough to realize where the communists have to be hurt to their disadvantage. They remain content by merely uttering platitudes about the Aryans or the Sarasvati. In the latter entreprise they regrettably have been joined by a large number of people who have never taken a day’s course in historical studies on a professional level.” (p.382)

                To sum up: this book is a very good overview of the main trends in Indian historiography. It introduces the main conflicts within the field, marking these for future in-depth studies. The Left would have liked us to ignore their motivated power-grab, but after this book, this will become impossible.

 

Dilip K. Chakrabarti: Nationalism in the Study of Ancient Indian History, Aryan Books International, Delhi 2020, 398 pp., ISBN 978-81-7305-648-2, Rs 995.

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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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