The Hindus (16 page)

The non-Veda, if I may call it that, has been a largely uncredited partner of Hinduism, for we have heard it only at those relatively late historical moments when it crashed the Sanskrit club. The only way we can tell the story of the literature of the Hindus is to begin with those texts that survived—the Sanskrit texts—but at the same time we must acknowledge, right from the start, from the time of the
Rig Veda
, the presence of something else in these texts, something that is non-Vedic.

Between about 2000 and 1500 BCE, one culture in Northwest India was dying and another was beginning to preserve its poetry. Fade out: Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). Fade in: the Vedas. Each of these cultures may have been in some way a prequel to Hinduism. The objects of the IVC, things without words, give us a certain kind of information about the people who lived there, but no evidence of where the people of the IVC went after the death of their cities (and, presumably, their texts). With the Vedas we have the opposite problem, words without (most) things (just a few pots and an altar or two), and many words
about
things, but without much physical evidence about the daily life of the people who first spoke those words or, again, about where they came from. Before we can begin to talk about people, however, we need to say a word about words, about language, and about the prehistory of the people who composed the
Rig Veda
.

Nineteenth-century German and British linguists, building on some seventeenth-and eighteenth-century hunches,
^ay
demonstrated that Vedic Sanskrit was one of the oldest recorded forms of a language family that included ancient Greek and Latin, Hittite (in ancient Anatolia), the Celtic and Norse-Germanic languages, and, ultimately, French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and all their friends and relations.
²
All these languages are alleged to have run away from the home of a single parent language sometime in the fourth millennium BCE,
³
a language that linguists call Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryan—more about the overtones of this word, below), more precisely, *Indo-European. We have no attested examples of that language before the breakup; the *Indo-European speakers almost certainly had no knowledge of writing,
⁴
and the earliest example of an Indo-European language that we have is a fourteenth-century BCE Anatolian treaty in Hittite that calls on the Hittite version of several Vedic gods: Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and the Ashvins [Nasatyas]). Therefore, an apologetic or apotropaic asterisk usually hovers over the reconstructed, hypothetical (nowadays we would say virtual) forms of Indo-European (or *Proto-Indo-European, as it is usually called, as easy as *PIE) to indicate the absence of any actual occurrences of the word. For instance, linguists use the Latin
equus
, Gallic
epos
, Greek
hippos
, Sanskrit
ashsva
, old English
eoh
, French
cheval
, and so forth, to reconstruct the *PIE word for “horse”:
^ay
Hekwo-
, or
^ay
ekwos
to its pals in the linguists’ club. And
*deiwos
develops into
deus
in Latin,
deva
in Sanskrit,
divo
in Russian, and, eventually, our English “Tues[day]” as well as “divine.” Sanskrit and Iranian (or Avestan) formed one of the oldest subfamilies, Indo-Iranian, within this larger group.

How are we to explain the fact (and it is a fact) that people speak one form or another of Indo-European languages from India to Ireland? The hypothesis that a single parent language was the historical source of all the known Indo-European languages is not an observable fact, but linguists regard it as an “inescapable hypothesis.”
⁵
The Indo-European map is linguistic, linking languages together in a family (a rather dysfunctional family, but a family) that is distinct from, for instance, Chinese or the Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic) or, more significantly for Hinduism, Tamil and the other South Indian languages in the group called Dravidian. The majority of people in India speak an Indo-European language (76 percent), with Dravidian-language speakers accounting for 22 percent, and the remaining 2 percent taken up by Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and tribal languages.

The evidence that the Indo-European languages are related lies primarily in their grammar and vocabulary. Thus the Sanskrit
agni
(“fire”) is cognate with Latin
ignis
, English “ignite”; “foot” is
pada
in Sanskrit,
pes, pedis
in Latin,
pied
in French,
Fuss
in German,
foot
in English; and so forth. Many Sanskrit words have English cognates: for example, the Sanskrit
pashu
(“cattle”), preserved in the Latin
pecus
, is embedded in the English “impecunious” (“out of cattle, or low on cash”).

But the temptation to draw simple conclusions about nonverbal facts from such verbal correspondences must be resisted; the fact that the word for “hand” is different in most of these languages should not be taken to mean that the Indo-European speakers had feet but not hands. So too, people change while words remain the same; words are often, as the French say, “false friends” (
faux amis
), the same word meaning something different in two different languages, often the very opposite thing. Meanings change in time even within a single culture. Antigods, Asuras (whose name incorporates the word
asu
, “breath”), are the equal and morally indistinguishable elder brothers and rivals of the gods in the Indo-European or at least Indo-Iranian period (when Ahura Mazda, the “great Asura,” is the chief god of the Avesta), but they later become totally demonic demons. (“Demons,” for that matter, were once benevolent
daimons
in Greek, before the Christians demonized them, as it were). Sanskrit then created a back formation, taking Asura to mean “non-Sura” (splitting off the initial
a
of
asu
to make an
a
in its privative sense, as in “a-theist”) and inventing the word “Suras” (now said to derive from
sura
, “wine”) to apply to the wine-drinking gods, the anti-antigods. Although this sort of reasoning might be called etymologic, certainly not logic, people persist in using lexicons as the basis of history and in building elaborate theories about social systems and homelands on this flimsy Indo-European linguistic scaffolding.

Indo-European is a language group; technically, there are no Indo-Europeans, merely Indo-European speakers. But since European scholars also assumed, quite reasonably, that wherever the languages went, there had to be people to carry them, Indo-European speakers are often called Indo-Europeans. Moreover, we are able to construct some of Indo-European culture, not merely from isolated words and parallel grammar structures but from the more substantial historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. For instance, we know that cattle rustling was the basic trade of all of the Indo-European speakers, from the Celts to the Indians, because closely parallel myths from Greece, India, Iran, northern Europe, the Near East, and Scandinavia allow us to reconstruct a *Proto-Indo-European cattle raiding myth.
⁶

Who were these cattle rustlers? More broadly, what is the relationship between the language and the geographical origin and ethnic identity of the *PIE people? Or to put it differently and to limit it to the culture that is the subject of this book . . .

 

WHERE WERE THE PEOPLE WHO COMPOSED THE VEDAS

BEFORE THEY COMPOSED THE VEDAS?

We do not know for sure, but we can guess, and the craze for origins makes us guess. Some guesses make more sense than others. Here are the four most often cited.

 

FIRST GUESS: THE ARYANS INVADED INDIA FROM *INDO-EUROPE

“Once upon a time,” the story goes, “blue-haired, blond-eyed people from the north drove their chariots into India and beat the hell out of the dark-skinned people who lived there.” (The northern element was often taken to the extreme. In 1903, Bal Gangadhar Tilak argued, in his
The Arctic Home in the Vedas
, that the Aryans had composed the Vedas at the North Pole and, on the journey south, divided into two branches, one of which went to Europe, the other to India.) Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century European scholars, serving colonial powers, favored theories of cultural interaction involving invasions or colonization, and the theory that the Vedic people invaded India still has general currency. Behind this guess lies the assumption of a diffusionist, centrifugal cultural movement; like an airline hub dispersing planes, the political center sends out armies and imposes its rule on the neighboring lands. The paradigm of this model is Latin, which did indeed diffuse outward from Rome to all the lands that the Romans conquered and that therefore speak the so-called Romance languages. Linguists then constructed, on the Roman model, an earlier family tree of languages diverging from the center, in this case not from Rome but from the Caucasus, somewhere east of the southern Urals, in southeastern Russia, perhaps on the shores of the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.
⁷
(This is where, as we will see, someone—probably, though not certainly, the *Indo-European people—probably domesticated horses, an event of great significance for the history of Hinduism.) Therefore, the *Indo-European people were also called Caucasians. The mythical land of their family home, recently rechristened Eurostan,
⁸
might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land East of the Asterisk.

According to this scenario, one branch of this group traveled down the east side of the Caspian Sea and continued east through Afghanistan, reaching the Punjab before the middle of the second millennium BCE.
⁹
But to say that the languages formed a family is
not
to say that the people who spoke them formed a race. There is nothing intrinsically racist about this story of linguistic migration. On the contrary, the eighteenth-century discovery of the Indo-European link was, at first, a preracial discovery of brotherhood; these people are our (linguistic) cousins. But then the nineteenth-century Orientalists, who now had a theory of race to color their perceptions, gave it a distinctly racist thrust. Their attitude to the nineteenth-century inhabitants of India came to something like “Well, they are black, but their skin color is irrelevant; they are white inside, Greek inside, just like us.” There were also anti-Semitic implications: One reason why British and German scholars were so happy to discover Sanskrit was that they were delighted to find a language older than Hebrew (which they regarded as, on the one hand, their own language, the language of what they called the Old Testament and, on the other hand, the language of the despised “others,” the Jews, for whom the book was the Hebrew Bible). At last, they thought, Hebrew was no longer the oldest language in the world.

Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word
arya
, the word that the Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates a linguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather than demographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language. But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for they may never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguistic community.
¹⁰
After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in their veins.

Nevertheless, the Orientalist version of the Aryan hypothesis boasted not only of the purity of Aryan blood but of the quantity of non-Aryan blood that the Aryans spilled, and this myth was certainly racist. The “invasion of the blonds” story took root and prevailed for many reasons, among them that the British found a history of invasions of India a convenient way to justify their own military conquest of India. And of course the story became an even more racist myth when the Nazis got hold of it and made “Aryan” a word that, like “gay,” or “holocaust,” or “adult” (in the sense of “pornographic,” as in “adult books and films, adult viewing”), no longer means what it once meant.
^az
People always think about race when you say “Aryan,” even though you tell them not to; we can’t forget what we now know about the word; we can’t regain our earlier naiveté. “Hindu” is a somewhat tainted word, but there is no other easy alternative; “Aryan,” by contrast, is a
deeply
tainted word, and there are easy alternatives. It is therefore best to avoid using the
A
word, and to call the people who spoke Indo-European languages Indo-European speakers (or, less cumbersome, Indo-Europeans, though this implies an ethnic group).

And since the people who composed the Veda left few archaeological footprints, and all we know for certain about them is that they composed the Veda, let us call its authors, and their community, the Vedic people.

A frequent corollary to the Indo-European invasion theory is the hypothesis that the Vedic people were responsible for the end of the Indus Valley cities. Invasion implies conquest, and who else was there for them to conquer in India? The advocates of this theory cite statements in the Veda about knocking down the fortresses of the barbarians, for the Indus cities did have massive fortification walls.
¹¹
They also cite what they interpret as archaeological evidence of sudden, mass deaths in the Indus Valley, and the verses of the
Rig Veda
that refer to the Dasas as dark-skinned (7.5.3) or dark (1.130.8, 9.41.1, 9.73.5), though the term in question more often refers to evil than to skin color,
¹²
as well as the one Vedic verse that describes them as snub-nosed (“noseless”
^ba
) (5.29.10). Put these data together and you have blond Vedic people responsible for mass death to dark-skinned people in the Indus Valley.