Hinduism: A Short History (7 page)

15.

   The full text of Tavernier’s description is found in E S. Growse,

(pp. 128ff.), originally published in 1882, reprinted in 1979 by Asian Educational Services, New Delhi. E S. Growse was District Magistrate in Mathurā from 1871 to 1877 and described in his “Memoir” his area of work with great sympathy and knowledge. He was responsible for much restoration and conservation work on temples in Mathurā and Vrindāban.

16.

   Elliot-Dowson,

…, vol. VII, p. 184f.

17.

   Entwistle,

, p. 107f., offers vivid descriptions by contemporaries of this gruesome slaughter.

18.

   F. S. Growse is the author of one of the most important modern sources for the history of Mathurā:

, originally published in 1882.

19.

   Vṛṇḍā is a name for the Tulasī tree, which apparently grew abundantly in the area.The correct Sanskrit spelling for the place is Vṛṇdāvana, the spelling adopted here – Vrindāban – is the one most frequently used in the place itself. Other variations are Brindaban, Brindabon, Vrindavan.

20.

   His followers even saw him as an incarnation of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa.

21.

   The

devoted its Winter 1994 (Vol. 3, No. 1) issues to this conference and printed several of the presentations made.

22.

   A very vivid and informative description is given in David L. Haberman,

. New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

23.

   There are a number of

of Vāraṇāsī in Sanskrit. Besides there is a huge work, the so-called

of the

, probably from the fourteenth century, which describes and praises in detail numerous specific holy spots in Banaras.

24.

   P. V Kane,

, vol. IV, p. 618, Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1953.

25.

   Diana L. Eck,

. New York: A. Knopf, 1982, p. 43.

26.

   See A. K. Narain and T. N. Roy,

, Vārāṇasi: Banaras Hindu University, 1976.

27.

   K. S. Sukul, author of

(Patna, 1974) thinks that the Kāśis were a non-āryan people who were subdued by the Vedic āryans.

28.

   S. Beal, trans.

. London: Truebner & Co., 1894, II, 44–45.

29.

   Hasan Nizami,

in Elliot-Dowson,

, vol. II, p. 223.

30.

   See Sukul,

, pp. 217–222.

31.

   E. B. Ha veil,

. London: Thacker & Co., 2nd ed., 1905, Preface.

32.

   Count Hermann A. Keyserling,

, trans. J. Holroyd-Reece, Mumbay and New Delhi: Bharatiya Vidyā Bhavan/Kapur Surya Foundation, second edition 1999. Count Keyserling undertook his Indian travels between 1911 and 1914. Benares occupies 88 pages in the 251-page work! The quotes are on pp. 130, 133, 135.

3

THE BEGINNINGS OF HINDUISM:

A Controversy

In most textbooks the beginning of Hinduism is identified with the invasion of India by the Āryans, dated c.1500 B.C.E., and their composition of the hymns of the
Ṛgveda
, dated between 1400 and 1200 B.C.E. What the same textbooks do not mention is that the so-called Āryan invasion theory is based on pure speculation, and that there is absolutely no archeological or literary evidence for it. The Āryan invasion of India was the invention of some European scholars of the late nineteenth century and it was resisted as unfounded by others from the very beginning.
¹
In the light of recent archeological finds it has become less and less tenable. Nevertheless, the Āryan invasion is still defended and forms part of the standard histories of Hinduism. In the following the arguments pro and con will be presented, and it is left to the reader to judge the merits of the case.

THE ĀRYAN INVASION THEORY

Indian scholars frequently refer to the “Āryan invasion theory” as “colonial-missionary,” implying that it was the brain-child of conquerors of foreign colonies who could not but imagine that all elements of higher culture in India must have come from outside that backward country, and who likewise assumed that a religion could only spread in a larger population through a politically supported missionary effort.

There is no doubt that nineteenth-century European attempts to explain the presence of Hindus in India had much to do with the commonly held biblical belief that humankind originated from one pair, Adam and Eve, who were believed to have been created directly by God in 4005 B.C.E., and that all people on earth descended from one of the sons of Noah, who survived the Great Flood (dated 2350 B.C.E.). The major problem seemed to be to connect peoples
not
mentioned in Chapter Ten of Genesis, “The Peopling of the Earth,” with one of the biblical genealogical lists.

Abbé Dubois (1770–1848), spent many years in India (1792–1823), during which he collected a large amount of interesting material concerning the customs and traditions of the Hindus. His (French) manuscript was purchased by the British East India Company and appeared in an English translation under the title
Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies
in 1897 with a Prefatory Note by the Right Hon. F Max Müller.
²
Abbé Dubois, loath “to oppose [his] conjectures to [the Indians’] absurd fables” categorically stated: “It is practically admitted that India was inhabited very soon after the Deluge, which made a desert of the whole world. The fact that it was so close to the plains of Sennaar, where Noah’s descendants remained stationary so long, as well as its good climate and the fertility of the country, soon led to its settlement.” Rejecting other scholars’ opinions which linked the Indians to Egyptian or Arabic origins, he ventured to suggest them “to be descendants not of Shem, as many argue, but of Japhet.”
³
He explains: “According to my theory they reached India from the north, and I should place the first abode of their ancestors in the neighbourhood of the Caucasus”.
⁴
The reasons he provides to substantiate his theory are utterly unconvincing – but he goes on to build the rest of his migration theory (not yet an “Āryan” migration theory) on this shaky foundation.

Max Müller (1823–1903), who was largely responsible for the “Āryan invasion theory” and the “old chronology,” was too close in spirit and time to this kind of thinking not to have adopted it fairly unquestioningly. In his Prefatory Note he praises the work of Abbé Dubois as a “trustworthy authority ... which will always retain its value.”

When the affinity between many European languages and Sanskrit became a commonly accepted notion, scholars almost automatically concluded that the Sanskrit-speaking ancestors of the present-day Indians had to be found somewhere halfway between India and the western borders of Europe – Northern Germany, Scandinavia, Southern Russia, the Pamir – from which they invaded the Punjab.
⁵
(It is also worth noting that the early arm-chair scholars who conceived these grandiose migration theories had no actual knowledge of the terrain their “Āryan invaders” were supposed to have traversed, the passes they were supposed to have crossed, or the various climates they were believed to have been living in.) Assuming that the Vedic Indians were semi-nomadic warriors and cattle-breeders, it fitted the picture, when Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were discovered, to assume also that these were the cities the Āryan invaders destroyed under the leadership of their god Indra, the “city-destroyer,” and that the dark-skinned indigenous people were the ones on whom they imposed their religion and their caste system.

Western scholars decided to apply their own methodologies and, in the absence of reliable evidence, postulated a time frame for Indian history on the basis of conjecture. Considering the traditional dates for the life of Gautama, the Buddha, as fairly well established in the sixth century B.C.E, supposedly pre-Buddhist Indian records were placed in a sequence that seemed plausible to philologists. Accepting on linguistic grounds the traditional claims that the
Ṛgveda
was the oldest Indian literary document, Max Müller, allowing a timespan of 200 years each for the formation of every class of Vedic literature, and assuming that the Vedic period had come to an end by the time of the Buddha, established the following sequence that was widely accepted:

Ṛgveda c
. 1200 B.C.E.

Yajurveda, Sāmaveda, Atharvaveda
, c.1000 B.C.E.

Brāhmaṇas
, c.800 B.C.E.

Āraṇyakas, Upaniṣads, c.600
B.C.E.

Max Müller himself conceded the purely conjectural nature of the Vedic chronology, and in his last work,
The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy
, published shortly before his death, he admitted: “Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 1500 or 15,000 B.C., they have their own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world.”
⁶
There were, already in Max Müller’s time, Western scholars, such as Moriz Winternitz and Indians like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who disagreed with his chronology and postulated a much earlier date for the
Ṛgveda
.

Indian scholars had pointed out that there was no reference in the Veda to a migration from outside India, that all the geographical features mentioned in the
Ṛgveda
were those of northwestern India, and that there was no archeological evidence whatsoever for the Āryan invasion theory. On the other hand, there were references to constellations in Vedic works whose time frame could be reestablished by commonly accepted astronomical calculations. The dates arrived at, however, 4500 B.C.E. for one observation in the
Ṛgveda
, 3200 B.C.E. for a date in the
Śatapatha Brāhmana
, seemed far too remote to be acceptable, especially if one assumed – as many nineteenth-century scholars did, that the world was only about 6000 years old and that the flood had taken place only 4500 years ago.

DEBUNKING THE ĀRYAN INVASION THEORY

Many contemporary Indian scholars, admittedly motivated not only by academic interests, vehemently reject what they call the “colonial-missionary Āryan invasion theory.” They accuse its originators of superimposing – for a reason – the purpose and process of the colonial conquest of India by the Western powers in modern times onto the beginnings of Indian civilization: as the Europeans came to India as bearers of a supposedly superior civilization and a higher religion, so the original Āryans were assumed to have invaded a country that they subjected and on which they imposed their culture and their religion.

A recent major work
⁷
offers “seventeen arguments: why the Āryan invasion never happened.” It may be worthwhile to summarize and analyze these briefly:

The Āryan invasion model is based on linguistic conjectures which are unjustified (and wrong). Languages develop much more slowly than assumed by nineteenth-century scholars. Speakers of Indo- European languages may have lived in Anatolia as early as 7000 B.C.E.

The supposed large-scale migrations of Āryan people in the second millennium B.C. first into Western Asia and then into northern India (by 1500 B.C.) cannot be maintained in view of the fact that the Hittites were in Anatolia already by 2200 B.C.E. and the Kassites and Mitanni had kings and dynasties by 1600 B.C.E.

There is no memory of an invasion or of large-scale migration in the records of Ancient India – neither in the Vedas, in Buddhist or Jain writings, nor in Tamil literature. The fauna and flora, the geography and the climate described in the
Ṛgveda
, are those of northern India.

There is a striking cultural continuity between the archeological artefacts of the Indus-Saraswatī civilization and subsequent Indian society and culture: a continuity of religious ideas, arts, crafts, architecture, and system of weights and measures.

The archeological finds of Mehrgarh of c.6500 B.C.E. (copper, cattle, barley) reveal a culture similar to that of the Vedic Indians. Contrary to former interpretations, the
Ṛgveda
shows not a nomadic but an urban culture
(puruṣa
, “man,” “person,” is derived from
pur vāsa
= town-dweller).
⁸

The Āryan invasion theory was based on the assumption that a nomadic people in possession of horses and chariots defeated an urban civilization that did not know horses, and that horses are depicted only from the middle of the second millennium onwards. Meanwhile archeological evidence for horses has been found in Harappan and pre-Harappan sites; drawings of horses have been found in paleolithic caves in India; drawings of riders on horses dated c.4300 B.C.E. have been found in Ukraina. Horse-drawn war chariots are not typical for nomadic breeders but for urban civilizations.

The racial diversity found in skeletons in the cities of the Indus civilization is the same as in today’s India; there is no evidence of the coming of a new race.