The Hindus (17 page)

But there is no reason to make this connection. The Vedic people had other enemies, and the Indus Valley people had other, more likely sources of destruction, nor is there reliable evidence that their cities were ever sacked.
¹³
Moreover, it is more likely that the Indo-European incursions came in a series of individual or small group movements, rather than the one, big charge of the light(-skinned) brigade scenario imagined by this first guess.

The smug theory that a cavalcade of Aryans rode roughshod into India, bringing civilization with them, has thus been seriously challenged. The certainty has gone, and new answers have thrown their hats into the ring, just as politically driven as the Aryan invasion theory, and, like most politically driven scholarship (but is there really any other kind?), ranging from plausible (if unsupported) to totally bonkers.

 

SECOND GUESS: THE CAUCASIANS STROLLED IN FROM THE CAUCASUS

“Once upon a time,” the story goes, “people from the north brought their families and their agriculture into India and settled among the people who lived there.” The first guess, the Aryan invasion theory, is one of the great testosterone myths: They’re guys, they beat everyone up. This second guess, by replacing the word “invasion” with “migration,” takes the military triumphalism out of the theory but retains the basic mechanism and the basic structures: Migrants may have brought an Indo-European language into India.
¹⁴
This approach accounts for a gradual cultural linguistic infusion into India, still with all the baggage that linguists load onto languages—the social classes, the mythology—and supported by the same linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence (such as burial customs
¹⁵
) and pottery that support the invasion theory.
¹⁶
Those who hold by either of these two theories (invasion or migration) have recourse to later Indian history. The two powers that built the greatest empires in India, the forces of Central Asian Turks and of the British Raj, first entered India not as military conquerors but as traders and merchants, but in the end, it took force majeure to establish and maintain the control of the subcontinent.

Martin West, a leading scholar of Indo-European languages, disdains the idea that the Indo-European speakers came not as conquerors but as peaceful migrants: “In the last fifty years or so there has been a scholarly reaction against the old idea of militant hordes swarming out of Eurostan with battle-axes held high and occupying one territory after another. It has been fashionable to deride this model and to put all the emphasis on peaceful processes of population and language diffuision.”
¹⁷
But, he continues, both on the analogy with the way that in observable history, other linguistic groups (such as Arabic, Turkic, Latin, Celtic, and German, as well as English and Spanish in the New World, which West does not mention) “grew multitudinous and poured across the length and breadth of Europe,” and considering the fact that “there are constant references to battles and descriptions of fighting” in Indo-European poetic and narrative traditions, it appears “by no means implausible that similar bouts of aggressive migration in earlier eras played a large part in effecting the Indo-European diaspora.” This theory, which is quite plausible, is no longer regarded as PC (in the double sense of “postcolonial” or “politically correct”), because of its political history, and the aptly named Professor West can make it only because he is privileged to belong to a generation of Western (more precisely British) scholars for whom “PC” stands for nothing but “police constable.”

 

THIRD GUESS: THE VEDIC PEOPLE ORIGINATED IN INDIA

“From the dawn of history, *Indo-European speakers lived in India, in the Punjab, where they composed the
Rig Veda
.” A stronger version of the theory adds: “They emigrated to Iran (where they composed the
Avesta
), Anatolia (leaving that early Hittite inscription), Greece and Italy (where they incorporated local languages to develop Greek and Latin), and, finally, ancient Britain.” (The most extreme version of this guess adds: “All the languages in the world are derived from Sanskrit.”
¹⁸
) In this view, the Vedic people may have been, rather than invaders (or immigrants) from southern Russia, “indigenous for an unknown period of time in the lower Central Himalayan regions,”
¹⁹
particularly in the Punjab. A variant of this argument presupposes not the same centrifugal diffusion that underlies the first two guesses (simply radiating from India instead of the Caucasus) but a centripetal convergence, into India rather than from the Caucasus: Separate languages came together in India, influencing their neighbors to produce a family resemblance; the people who spoke those separate languages came together and then took back home, like souvenirs, bits of one another’s languages.

Why couldn’t it have happened that way? In reaction to the blatantly racist spin and colonial thrust of the first two guesses, which imply that Europeans brought civilization to India, this theory says, “Look, we in India had civilization before you Europeans did!” (This is certainly true; no matter where they came from or what their relationship was, the people of the Indus were building great cities and the people of the Vedas creating a great literature at a time when the British were still swinging in trees.) And then it goes on to say, “You came from us. The people who created Vedic culture did not enter India; they began in India.” As a theory, it is reasonable in itself, but there is considerable evidence against it,
²⁰
and both linguistic and archaeological arguments render it even more purely speculative than the Aryan invasion theory.
²¹
It has the additional disadvantage of being susceptible to exploitation by the particular brand of Hindu nationalism that wants the Muslims (and Christians) to get out of India: “We were always here, not even just since the
Rig Veda
, but much, much earlier. This land was always ours.”

 

FOURTH GUESS: THE VEDIC PEOPLE LIVED IN THE INDUS VALLEY

“Once upon a time, the people of the Indus Valley Civilization composed the Vedas.” The final step is simply to assume that some or all of the inhabitants of the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were themselves Indo-European speakers; that the people who built the cities also composed the Vedas,
²²
that the Indus civilization itself is the site of the mythological Vedic age.
²³
In favor of this is the evidence of some continuity between both the space and the time of the Indus and Vedic civilizations,
²⁴
which almost certainly shared some of the territory of the greater Punjab during some part of the second millennium BCE, as well as a number of cultural features. One variant of this theory argues that (1) since there are Dravidian (and Munda) loan words in the Vedas (which is true), and (2) since the Harappan script is a form of Sanskrit (which is almost certainly not true, and certainly unproved, though reputable scholars as well as cranks have identified the Indus inscriptions as part of “the Indian/Persian/ Indo-European religious system and Sanskrit language”
²⁵
), therefore (3) the IVC is a hybrid Sanskrit/Dravidian culture produced by (4) Indo-European speakers who came from Europe to North India to interact with Dravidian speakers from India, starting in the middle of the fourth millennium BCE.
²⁶

This theory still assumes a migration into India from Europe, but one that is met by an earlier Dravidian presence. Some see in the Indus Valley not merely the seeds of later Hinduism but the very religion described in the almost contemporaneous
Rig Veda;
they argue, for instance, that the brick platforms found in the Indus were used for Vedic sacrifices.
²⁷
This hybrid is sometimes called the Sarasvati Valley culture, or the Indus-Sarasvati culture, because there were Indus settlements on the Sarasvati River (though it dried up around 1900 BCE) and the
Rig Veda
mentions a Sarasvati River.
²⁸
But even when we grant that some sort of gradual cultural interaction took place, and not simply an invasion, it is not likely that the same people could have built the Indus cities and also composed the
Rig Veda
.

The linguistic and archaeological evidence against this fourth guess is pretty conclusive. It is hard work to fit the ruins of the IVC into the landscape of the
Rig Veda.
²⁹
The
Rig Veda
does not know any of the places or artifacts or urban techniques of the Indus Valley.
³⁰
None of the things the Veda describes look like the things we see in the archaeology of the Indus. The
Rig Veda
never mentions inscribed seals or a Great Bath or trade with Mesopotamia, despite the fact that it glories in the stuff of everyday life. It never refers to sculptured representations of the human body.
³¹
It has no words, not even borrowed ones, for scripts or writing, for records, scribes, or letters.
³²
After the Indus script, writing was not used again in India until the time of Ashoka, in the third century BCE.

Many of the words that the
Rig Veda
uses for agricultural implements, such as the plow, as well as words for furrow and threshing floor and, significantly, rice, come from non-Sanskritic languages, suggesting that the Vedic people learned much of their agriculture from communities in place in India before they arrived. But the Indus people, who obviously did have plows and mortar, presumably would have had their own words for them. Even in the Vedic period, there was multilingualism. But how could the Vedic people have forgotten about architecture, about bricks, about mortar (let alone about writing)? The answer is simple enough: They had never had them. In the good old days they had always slept on their saddlebags, and once they got to the Punjab they built in wood and straw, like the first two of the three little piggies, not in brick, like the third (and like the Indus people).

It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Indus people composed the
Rig Veda
. The final nail in the coffin of this theory comes not from the rather technical linguistic arguments but from the testimony of animals, particularly horses.

Animals in general provide strong clues; they make suggestions, sometimes overwhelmingly persuasive suggestions, if not airtight proofs. The evidence of animals suggests that the civilizations of the Indus Valley and the Vedas were entirely different, though this does not mean that they did not eventually interact. The
Rig Veda
mentions (here in alphabetical order) ants, antelope, boars, deer, foxes, gazelles, jackals, lions, monkeys, rabbits, rats, quail, and wolves, and other Vedas mention bears, beaver, elk, hares, lynxes, and otters.
³³
The
Rig Veda
also mentions lions (10.28.11), though the Vedic people had to invent a word for “lion”
³⁴
(and to borrow a word for “peacock”
³⁵
). (Lions may or may not be depicted in the Indus Valley; there’s a figurine that
might
be a lion or a tiger.)

The Vedic people knew the elephant but regarded it as a curiosity; they had to make up a word for it and called it “the wild animal with a hand”
(mrigahastin
). But they do not mention tigers or rhinoceroses, animals familiar from the Harappan seals. Nor are there any references to unicorns, mythical or real.
³⁶
The zoological argument from silence (“the lion that didn’t roar in the night”) is never conclusive (beware the false negative; the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence), but all this suggests that the Vedic people originally lived north of the land where the tiger and the elephant roam, and generally north of the Indus rhinoceroses, on the nonfalsifiable assumption that people who had seen an animal as weird as a rhinoceros would have mentioned it.

Cattle are central to both cultures—though the Indus Valley Civilization favored bulls, the Vedas cows—as well as to many other ancient cultures and therefore of little use as differentiating markers. But the IVC does not seem to know, or care about, the horse, who speaks loudly and clearly in the Vedas (as horses are said to do, beginning in the Vedic tale of the Ashvins—twin horse-headed gods). Let us consider first the possible existence and then the symbolic importance of the horse in each of the two cultures.

On the one hand, wherever Indo-European-speaking cultures have been identified, evidence of horses has been found.
³⁷
This does not in itself prove that an ancient culture with
no
horses is
not
Indo-European,
³⁸
nor does it follow that wherever people had horses, they spoke Indo-European languages. Indo-European culture is contained within the broader range of ancient horse-having cultures, such as China and Egypt. For one thing, the ancestor of the horse, the so-called Dawn Horse, or
Eohippus
, much smaller than the modern horse, lived throughout Europe as well as North America in the Eocene age (“the dawn of time”), some sixty to forty million years ago. The horse was probably domesticated in several places, and it didn’t happen all at once even in Central Asia.

Nevertheless, the spread of the Central Asian horse (and, after around 2000 BCE, the chariot, for people rode astride for a long time before they began to drive horses) suggests that in general, when Indo-Aryan speakers arrived somewhere, horses trotted in at the same time, and the archaeological record supports the hypothesis that Indo-European speakers did in fact ride and/or drive, rather than walk, into India. For the horse is not indigenous to India. There is archaeological evidence of many horses in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent only in the second millennium BCE, after the decline of the IVC. Horse bits and copper and iron objects were used in Maharashtra, and horse paraphernalia (such as bits) south of the Narmada during or after this period suggest an extensive network of horse traders from northwestern India.
³⁹