Author: Subhash Kak
Publication: Bharatiya Pragna
Date: February 2001
Our narratives about the past are
scraps of evidence joined with the glue of imagination. So there can be
many narratives and many retellings as the vocabulary changes with time.
This is all ancient history can be and we should be satisfied with that.
It is sensible to accept that our reconstructions of the past are subjective.
But what does one do if a narrative
is at variance with the evidence and yet, because of endless repetition,
it has become entrenched in popular imagination as well as scholarly discourse?
And what if such a narrative is accepted as the only truth?
Here I am talking of the fabrication
of the narrative of Aryan invasions of the 2nd millennium BC. All evidence
we have goes against it: There is biological continuity in the skeletal
record for 4500-800 BC; the archaeological record has been seen to belong
to the same cultural tradition from 7000 BC to historical times; the literary
texts know of no other geography but that of India; and so on. Furthermore,
the texts remember several astronomical events that took place during 5000
BC to 1000 BC; they also state that the Sarasvati flowed to the sea, which
is memory of a period prior to 2000 BC, because we now know that the river
dried up around that time. Here it is not my intention to review the evidence
for which broad consensus exists amongst archaeologists.
So what should we do if some textbooks
continue to repeat this fabrication? There are those who say that history
doesn't matter and so let's not worry about what the books say and in due
course better books will be published.
Maybe true. But isn't it foolish
to let wrong things be taught in schools and colleges? How does it help
education if we assault the intelligence of the youth and tell them something
to be a fact for which there is no evidence?
Indology and Racism
It is bad enough if a fabrication-
a story -is palmed off as the truth, but what if the fabrication is driven
not just by poor logic but by racism?
Ten years ago, the distinguished
British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, wrote a famous essay on this problem
titled "Aryan Invasions Over Four Millennia". Published in a book called
"Culture Through Time" (edited by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University
Press, 1990), this essay exposed the racist basis of the 19th century construction
of Indian prehistory and, perhaps more important for us, it showed how
racism persists in the academic approach to the study of India. The implication
of Leach's charge is that many of the assumptions at the basis of the academic
study of Indian social organization, language development, and evolution
of religion are simply wrong! Here are some excerpts from this essay:
Why do serious scholars persist
in believing in the Aryan invasions?... Why is this sort of thing attractive?
Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come
to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion?...
Where the Indo-European philologists
are concerned, the invasion argument is tied in with their assumption that
if a particular language is identified as having been used in a particular
locality at a particular time, no attention need be paid to what was there
before; the slate is wiped clean. Obviously, the easiest way to imagine
this happening in real life is to have a military conquest that obliterates
the previously existing population! The details of the theory fit in with
this racist framework... Because of their commitment to a unilineal segmentary
history of language development that needed to be mapped onto the ground,
the philologists took it for granted that proto-Indo-Iranian was a language
that had originated outside either India or Iran. Hence it followed that
the text of the Rig Veda was in a language that was actually spoken by
those who introduced this earliest form of Sanskrit into India. From this
we derived the myth of the Aryan invasions. QED.
The origin myth of British colonial
imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service
to see themselves as bringing 'pure' civilization to a country in which
civilization of the most sophisticated (but morally corrupt) kind was already
nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth
on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44
years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent
India and independent Pakistan, the Aryan invasions of the second millennium
BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history.
In editorial comments, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney
summarizes Leach's arguments regarding the fabrication: "Seemingly objective
academic endeavors are affected by the mentalite of the culture to which
they belong. Leach describes how cherished but erroneous assumptions in
linguistics and anthropology were accepted without question. If the mentalite
of the academic culture was in part responsible for the fabrication, geopolitics
was even more responsible for upholding the Aryan invasion as history.
The theory fit the Western or British vision of their place in the world
at the time. The conquest of Asian civilization needed a mythical charter
to serve as the moral justification for colonial expansion. Convenient,
if not consciously acknowledged, was the Aryan invasion by a fair-skinned
people, speaking the so-called Proto-Indo-European language, militarily
conquering the dark-skinned, peasant Dasa (Dasyu), who spoke a non-European
language and with whom the conquerors lived, as Leach puts it, in a 'system
of sexual apartheid.' ...A remarkable case of Orientalism indeed."
The Hegemonic Circle
According to the postmodern theorist
Lalita Pandit conventions of history writing are more often than not marked
by intellectual bad faith that serves and maintains hegemonic ideologies.
She adds, "it is nearly impossible to alter the premises of hegemonic claims,
because hegemonies are founded in such retellings, and passing off of myth
for fact and history, non-truth for belief. In part at least, all hegemonies
are founded in discourses. Discourse conventions are automatically set
to deal with exigencies. When a contrary, anti-hegemonic view comes out
strong, historiagraphic conventions, having become habit or mind-sets,
are all set to transform the contrary view and absorb into a grand paradigm
that ultimately only serves the hegemonic ideology. At the same time, hegemonic
institutions are automatically set up to not validate, not give authority
to contrary views. After all, what is considered truth is what comes from
the horse's mouth, and who decides who this privileged horse, the subject
who knows the truth is?"
One example of this phenomenon is
the interesting strategy devised by the defenders of the Invasion theory
to beat back criticism. They say: The critics are Hindu nationalists motivated
by political considerations and besides they are not from academic departments.
This is nonsense. The issue is the
message and it shouldn't matter who the messenger is. Anyway, this charge
that the Invasion/migration theory has been criticised only by independent
scholars and nationalists is false. Edmund Leach was not a Hindu nationalist.
Neither are Jim Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein, perhaps the foremost modem
scholars of Indian prehistory, who write in a recent essay:
The South Asian archaeological record
reviewed here does not support ... any version of the migration/invasion
hypothesis. Rather, the physical distribution of sites and artifacts, stratigraphic
data, radiometric dates, and geological data can account form the Vedic
oral tradition describing an internal cultural discontinuity of indigenous
population movement.
Shaffer and Lichtenstein go to the
heart of the matter when they further say about the Invasion/ migration
theories: "[These theories] are significantly diminished by Europeam ethnocentrism,
colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism. Surely, as South Asian studies
approaches the twenty-first century, it is time to describe emerging data
objectively rather than perpetuate interpretations without regard to the
data archaeologists have worked so hard to reveal."
A Question of Method
Let's for a moment forget the sorry
history of the construction of India's past; Edmund Leach has covered that
ground very well in his essay. I am prepared to concede that what Leach
called racism in Indic studies may not be obvious to the protagonists.
Wearing the blinkers of the tradition in their subspeciality, they may
believe that they are merely following in the footsteps of their predecessors.
But if a method is wrong the incremental
"advances" in the framework will only lead one more astray. There are many
examples of this such as the research during the Lysenko regime in the
Soviet Union or the work done by the believers in cold fusion.
The basic error in the Orientalist
enterprise of Indian prehistory is the "logic" of apportionment of credit
for culture to one "race" or another. It is comparable to the search for
Aryan and Jewish components in modern science, the absurdity of which is
clear to everyone excepting extremist racist groups.
Yet it has become common in Indic
studies to write whole volumes on the discovery of the "Aryan" and "Dravidian"
components of Indian culture! Words and cultural ideas that have evolved
over all of India are now being examined to find which elements of these
are Aryan and Dravidian! These are questions to which no definitive answers
can be, found. If nothing else this is a colossal waste of academic resources.
There are studies, for example,
which trace the caste system to the Indo-European tripartite scheme, and
there are still others that trace it to the Dravidian social organization!
The Puranas are seen by some to be an organic outgrowth of the Vedic system,
and by others to be an expression of the earlier Dravidian Hinduism. This
and that of the cultural life are assigned to Aryans and Dravidians with
no consistent logic. This list goes on and on.
Edmund Leach ridiculed the method
used by Indo-Europeanists. He commanded a paper, "Did the Dravidians of
India obtain their culture from Aryan immigrant?", written by P.T. Srinivas
Iyengar in 1914 (Anthropos, vol. 9, pp. 1-15) that clearly shows the propositions
of the Invasionsit/migrationsts are "either fictitious or unproved." Iyengar
has some fun in the process: "it was reserved for the philologists of the
first half of the 19th century to discover that Arya and Dasyu were names
of different races. They diligently searched the Veda for indication of
this, and their discoveries remind us of the proverbial mouse begotten
of the mountain." The philological edifice has been punctured by Swaminathan
Aiyar in his remarkable "Dravidian Theories" which appeared in 1975.
Discourse as Theatre
Geertz's eloquent argument, in 1980,
for a 'theatre state' interpretation of the Balinese kingdom provides us
with a useful insight for the examination of the Indian prehistory paradigm.
In a discipline as a theatre, the continuing 'elaborations' of the basic
schema are part of a ritual that has nothing to do with the reality of
the evidence. Geertz seems to be addressing us when he says, "The state
[..is a] metaphysical theatre: theatre designed to express a view of the
ultimate nature of reality and, at the same time, to shape the existing
conditions of life to be consistent with that reality: that is, theatre
to present an ontology of the world and, by presenting it, to make it happen-make
it actual."
The theatre of Indian prehistory
has likewise moulded the current conditions to conform to its reality.
It is not physical force but words and ideas (or shall we call them mantras)
that bind people.
In the hour of defeat, the theatre
state expired with the puputans, the royal parade, with parasols and all,
into the fire of the attacking Dutch troops. Is such mass suicide the only
end possible for a theatre state? Can there be a peaceful resolution?
Coda
Edmund Leach was a great anthropologist,
a sober man, who was for many years a professor at Cambridge and later
provost at King's College. He used the charge of racism against Indo-Europeanists
deliberately. He said, "[To] bring about a shift in this entrenched paradigm
is like trying to cut down a 300year-old oak tree with a penknife. But
the job will have to be done one day."
Academic study on ancient India
will remain "like a patient etherized upon a table" unless it finds a proper
center and fresh energy. This center will be located only as a result of
critiques like that of Leach. But what about energy? Will it be provided
by the financial support of Indians in the West, who have made enormous
fortunes in the electronic and computer industry? I don't think so, at
least not in the near future. The racism at the basis of Indic studies,
which Indians have experienced in their own education and of which they
continue to hear from their children in college, has made them reluctant
to support academic programs.
The Aryan affair is, nevertheless,
of great interest to the anthropologist. Paraphrasing Leach, one may raise
questions like: Why do serious people spend their lives in the elaboration
of a racist paradigm? It seems to be like the scholiasts of the Middle
Ages spinning volumes on how many angels can rest on the point of a needle!
References:
Aiyar, R. Swaminathan. Dravidian
Theories. The Madras Law Journal Office, Madras, 1975.
Geertz, C. Negara: The theatre state
in nineteenth-century Bali. Princeton University Press, Priticeton, 1980,
p. 104.
Iyengar, P.T. Srinivas. "Did the
Dravidians of India obtain their culture from Aryan immigrant?" Anthropos,
vol. 9, 1914, pp. 1- 15.
Leach, Edmund. "Aryan invasions
over four millennia." In Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches,
edited by E. Ohnuki-Tierney, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1990,
pp. 227-245.
Pandit, Lalita. "Caste, Race, and
Nation: History and Dialectic in Rabindranath Tagore's Gora". In Literary
India: Comparative Studies in Aesthetics, Colonialism, And Culture." Eds.
Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit. Albany, New York: State University
of New York Press, 1995.
Shaffer, Jim and Lichtenstein, Diane.
"Migration, philology and South Asian Archaeology." In Aryan and Non-Aryan
in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology, edited by J. Bronkhorst
and M. Deshpande, CSSAS, Univ of Michigan, 1999.
(Sri Subhash Kak teaches in Louisiana
University and lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA)