Courtesy Front Line
The
Cover Story of its October 13, 2000, issue, Frontlinepresented the
findings of a major scholarly investigation by Michael Witzel, Wales Professor
of Sanskrit at Harvard University, and Steve Farmer, comparative historian,
exposing as hoax the claims made by "historian" N.S. Rajaram and paleographist
Natwar Jha that horse was important to Indus civilisation and, therefore, it was
Aryan civilisation. Hindutvavadis have always claimed that the Indus Valley
script has been deciphered and the language of Harappa is late Vedic Sanskrit.
Rajaram and Jha had projected a computer-enhanced image of a bull unicorn seal
as a horse seal. Frontline invited Romila Thapar to provide a perspective
on this Cover feature. Here, we reproduce in full the eminent historian's
article on the meaning and significance of the "horseplay in Harappa".
October
13, 2000
“THE
Aryans” became a historical category in the late nineteenth century. There was
much confusion between “Aryan” as race and as language, a confusion that has not
entirely cleared in popular perception. In its application to Indian history, it
was argued that the aryas referred to in the Rigveda were the Aryans who
had invaded and conquered northern India, founded Indian civilisation, and
spread their Indo-Aryan language. The theory had an immediate impact,
particularly on those with a political agenda and on historians.
Jyotiba
Phule maintained that the Aryan invasion explained the arrival of alien brahmans
and their dominance and oppression of the lower castes. The invasion was
necessary to this view of history. For those concerned with a Hindutva ideology,
the invasion had to be denied. The definition of a Hindu as given by Savarkar
was that India had to be his pitribhumi (ancestral land) and
his punyabhumi (the land of his religion).
A
Hindu therefore could not be descended from alien invaders. Since Hindus sought
a lineal descent from the Aryans, and a cultural heritage, the Aryans had to be
indigenous. This definition of the Hindu excluded Muslims and Christians from
being indigenous since their religion did not originate in India.
Historians
initially accepted the invasion theory and some even argued that the decline of
the Indus cities was due to the invasion of the Aryans, although the
archaeological evidence for this was being discounted. But the invasion theory
came to be discarded in favour of alternative theories of how the language,
Indo-Aryan, entered the subcontinent. In 1968, I had argued at a session of the
Indian History Congress that invasion was untenable and that the
language—Indo-Aryan—had come with a series of migrations and therefore involving
multiple avenues of the acculturation of peoples. The historically relevant
question was not the identity of the Aryans (identities are never permanent) but
why and how languages and cultures change in a given area.
Why
then do Hindutva ideologues—Indian and non-Indian—keep flogging a dead horse and
refuse to consider the more recent alternative theories? For them the only
alternative is that if the Aryans were not invaders, they must have been
indigenous. That there is a range of possibilities between the two extremes of
invaders or indigenes does not interest them.
The
insistence on the indigenous origin of the Aryans allows them to maintain that
the present-day Hindus are the lineal descendants of the Aryans and the
inheritors of the land since the beginning of history. This then requires that
the presence of the Aryans be taken back into earliest history. Hence the
attempt to prove, against the prevailing evidence from linguistics and
archaeology, that the authors of the Rigveda were the people of the Indus cities
or were possibly even prior to that.
The
equation is based on identifying words from the Rigveda with objects from the
Indus cities. That the village-based, pastoral society of the Rigveda could not
be identical with the complex urban society of the Indus cities is not conceded.
Yet there are no descriptions of the city in the Rigveda or even the later Vedic
corpus, that could be applied to the Indus cities: no references to structures
built on platforms, or the grid pattern of streets and the careful construction
of drainage systems, to granaries, warehouses and areas of intensive craft
production, to seals and their function, and to the names of the places where
goods were sent. If the two societies were identical, the two systems would at
least have to be similar.
In
order to prove that the Indus civilisation was Aryan, the language has to be
deciphered as a form of Sanskrit and there has to be evidence of an Aryan
presence, which currently is being associated with the horse and the chariot.
Attempts to decipher the language have so far not succeeded and those reading it
as Sanskrit have been equally unsuccessful. But there are linguistic rules that
have to be observed in any decipherment. These make it necessary for a claim to
stand the test of linguistic analyses. The readings also have to show some
contextual consistency. These have been demonstrated as lacking in the
decipherment claimed by Rajaram and Jha.
To
insist that a particular seal represents the horse as Rajaram does, was an
attempt to foreclose the argument and maintain that the horse was important to
the Indus civilisation, therefore it was an Aryan civilisation. Quite apart from
the changes made in the computer-enhanced image of the seal to give the
impression of a horse, which have been discussed in the article by Witzel and
Farmer, the animal in the photograph of the seal is clearly not a horse.
Furthermore, if the horse had been as central to the Indus civilisation as it
was to the Vedic corpus, there would have been many seals depicting horses. But
the largest number of seals are those which depict the bull unicorn. Indian
history from the perspective of the Hindutva ideology reintroduces ideas that
have long been discarded and are of little relevance to an understanding of the
past. The way in which information is put together, and generalisations drawn
from this, do not stand the test of analyses as used in the contemporary study
of history. The rewriting of history according to these ideas is not to illumine
the past but to allow an easier legitimation from the past for the political
requirements of the present. The Hindutva obsession with identity is not a
problem related to the early history of India but arises out of an attempt to
manipulate identities in contemporary politics. Yet ironically, this can only be
done if the existing interpretations of history are revised and forced into the
Hindutva ideological mould. To go by present indications, this would imply a
history based on dogma with formulaic answers, mono-causal explanations, and no
intellectual explorations. Dogmatic assertions with no space for alternative
ideas often arise from a sense of inferiority and the fear of debate. Hence the
determination to prevent the publication of volumes on history which do not
conform to Hindutva ideology.
History
as projected by Hindutva ideologues, which is being introduced to children
through textbooks and is being thrust upon research institutes, precludes an
open discussion of evidence and interpretation. Nor does it bear any trace of
the new methods of historical analyses now being used in centres of historical
research. Such history is dismissed by the Hindutva ideologues as Western,
imperialist, Marxist, or whatever, but they are themselves unaware of what these
labels mean or the nature of these readings. There is no recognition of the
technical training required of historians and archaeologists or of the
foundations of social science essential to historical explanation. Engineers,
computer experts, journalists-turned-politicians, foreign journalists posing as
scholars of Indology, and what have you, assume infallibility, and pronounce on
archaeology and history. And the media accord them the status.
The
article by Witzel and Farmer is a serious critique of the claims that have been
made by Rajaram and Jha about the Aryan identity of the Indus civilisation and
the decipherment of the Harappan script. The critique was first put out on the
Internet but those who have access to the Internet in India are still a limited
few. It is important for this article to be published, for it is a salutary
lesson for the media to be more cautious in unfamiliar areas and not rush to
publicise anything that sounds sensational. It is also necessary that the debate
be made accessible to the reading public so that people are not repeatedly taken
for a ride. It shows up the defective library resources in India that would need
to be radically improved if research in early Indian history is to be made more
effective. But above all, the article demonstrates the lengths to which
historical sources can be manipulated by those supporting the claims of Hindutva
ideology.
©
Romila Thapar, 2000
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