psuedo-science Uncertain ancestries

UNCERTAIN ANCESTRIES
- Who are the Indians?
Writing on the wall - Ashok V. Desai

There are many similarities between Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages like Greek and Latin. But the similarity does not extend to the people who speak them. Europeans are taller and fairer, and often have blue eyes and blonde hair, whereas Indians generally stick to brown eyes and black hair. These facts have caused confusion, and generated copious academic and pseudo-scholarly literature.

According to Christian mythology, every human and animal is descended from those whom Noah accommodated in his boat at the time of the great flood. Thus, humans are all descended from Noah’s three sons. His family lived on the mountain of Ararat in Armenia. It spoke the same language. But after the Tower of Babel was built, verbose debate broke out, and different languages emerged. Thus Père Coeurdoux, a French priest, stated in 1768: “The Samskroutam language is that of the ancient Brahmes; they came to India from Caucasia. Of the sons of Japhet, some spoke Samskroutam.” The linguistic similarities were noticed even earlier. Soon after Vasco Da Gama discovered the Cape route to India. Filippo Sassetti, an Italian Jesuit priest who was in Goa in the 1580s, noted that the terms in Sanskrit and in Mediterranean languages for six, seven, eight and nine, God, snakes, etc were similar. Some held that Sanskrit was the original language whence all others emerged. In the 19th century, philologists formulated rules of linguistic evolution, which went against that notion. But even if Sanskrit was not the mother of all languages, it was believed to be the oldest surviving daughter of the original Indo-European language.

The 19th century saw the beginnings of anthropology. One of its first conceptual categories was race: Caucasian, negroid, mongoloid, etc. Strangely, anthropologists did not specify a race for Indians. They were dark like negroes, but did not have their curly hair or broad noses. Some British colonials referred to Indians as niggers; but this was not a commonly accepted classification. But whatever they were, Indians were not regarded as Caucasian once India was colonized. So the question arose: how did these un-Aryan people have their scriptures in an ancient Aryan language?

The answer in the 19th century was that Sanskrit was the language of Aryans who came to India from Iran, Afghanistan or central Asia, and that they intermarried with local Dravidian and Munda people until the present mixture emerged. The geography of languages fitted the theory. Northerners spoke Aryan languages, southerners Dravidian languages, and Mundas were scattered towards the east. A few Dravid and Munda words were found in Sanskrit, which seemed to support the story of migration.

When did the Aryans come to India? Evidently before the Vedas were written. No references to European or central Asian flora and fauna are found in the Vedas. So they were written in India; the Aryans must have come to India before they composed their Sanskrit literature. Max Müller, professor of Sanskrit in Oxford in the second half of the 19th century, found a reference to one Katyayana Vararuchi in Kathasaritsagara, the Ocean of Stories. He was supposed to have been made prime minister by King Nanda. Nanda ruled before the Mauryas. So Max Müller placed him in 350-300 BC. He assumed this was the same Katyayana who had written some sutras. So he assigned them to 600-200 BC. The sutras refer to parts of Vedic texts called Brahmanas, so the latter must have been written before the former; he assigned them to 800-600 BC. Brahmanas were preceded by certain mantras, and mantras by chhandas.

Max Müller gave each a period of 200 years, and so came to 1200-1000 BC for the earliest parts of Vedic literature. He thought that 200 years was too short, but one had to start somewhere. Later, he himself said that it was impossible to determine the date of the Vedas. But it did not matter; Western scholars adopted Max Müller’s dates as definitive.

Meanwhile, Sir Alexander Cunningham, while wandering across Punjab and Sind, came across Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in 1853. His discoveries were forgotten till the 1920s, when Sir John Marshall excavated Mohenjo Daro. He had found an urban civilization; it did not fit with the Vedas, which hardly mention cities. Indus seals found in Mesopotamia, which placed the Indus civilization in 2000-1500 BC at the latest. The (still undeciphered) script of the Indus seals was unrelated to Devanagari, and ruled out the civilization as having been Aryan. If the Aryans came to India, crossed the Indus valley and wrote the Vedas in 1200-1000 BC, they must have crossed the path of the Indus people. On the basis of 37 skeletons he found in the citadel of Mohenjo Daro, Sir John concluded that the city had been overrun by Aryan hordes. Later examination showed that only one of the 37 could have met a violent death. If Aryans had destroyed the Indus civilization, they should have left substantial evidence of destruction and death. It has not been found yet, so the story of invasion remains unproved.

The Indus civilization was so called because Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, the first sites discovered, were in the Indus valley. With Partition, Indian archaeologists lost the Indus valley sites. They had to find something else to do, so they started excavating sites in India. They found plenty of Indus valley sites; Lothal in Gujarat and Dholera in Kutch are the best known.

Vedic literature talks of Saptasindhu, the seven rivers. Five are the rivers of Punjab — Beas, Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum. Indus is the sixth; where is the seventh? The Vedas called it Saraswati, but it has disappeared meanwhile. C.F. Oldham made a guess in 1893 that a dry riverbed called Ghaggar or Hakra running through Bikaner and Bahawalpur was once the Saraswati about which the Vedic writers waxed so lyrical. Satellite imagery has revealed that both the Sutlej and the Jumna once flowed into the Ghaggar; they would have made it a substantial river. Both changed course and left Ghaggar dry. Sir Aurel Stein found many Harappan and post-Harappan sites along its course. In Pakistan, Rafique Mughal has found 414 sites from 4000-2000 BC along the Hakra. Potsherds known as Painted Grey Ware, found in the bed of the Ghaggar, are dated to 1000 BC, so the river must have dried up before then. These dates place the Vedas much before 1000 BC. And if they are older, their composers must have coincided with or preceded the Harappans.

The Vedas show no awareness of any region outside India; but there is outside literature that bears close resemblance to them. The oldest part of Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrians, is called yasna; it consists of five gathas whose language is close to Sanskrit. It mentions Hapta Hendu, Harahvaiti and Harayu. Then there is a 14th-century BC treaty between a Hittite and a Mitanni king (Turkish and Iraqi in modern parlance) which mentions the gods Indara, Mitras, and Uruvanass, who could be Indra, Mitra and Varuna. Edwin Bryant tells us all this in his The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford, 2003), but does not answer in the end who Indians are.