Author: Romila Thapar
Publication: Frontline
Date: October 13, 2000
Frontline invited Romila
Thapar, the eminent historian of ancient India, to provide a perspective
on the Cover feature.
"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 argu ed 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 politica l 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 invasio n 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 H indus 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 disc arded in favour of alternative theories of how the language,
Indo-Aryan, entered the sub-continent. 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 a re 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 g ranaries, 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 t he 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 analys es.
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 t o 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.
© HARP
The ancient Harappans
had bronze weapons like these from Harappa. Whether they had warfare
is unknown.
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 journa lists 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 se nsational. 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 earl y 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.
