In the context of the present day historians finding that “history books

were biased, badly written and full of inaccuracies rendering them

unsuitable”, it is time to turn to books of unbiased authors who had
access to recent archeological and other research methods. A reading
of Mr. Michel Danino’s “The Invasion that never was” will prove
that “Aryian Invasion theory” — a thoughtless repetition through the
decades — does not rest on a single solid piece of evidence. Arsha
, Vidya Newsletter will serialize from this Issue onwards this school
edition of the book.

The Invasion That Never Was

Michel Danino
The Invasion That Never Was
A time must come when the Indian mind will shake off the darkness
that has fallen upon it, cease to think or hold opinions at second and
third hand and reassert its right to judge and enquire in a perfect free-
dom into the meaning of its own Scriptures. Sri Aurobindo (c. 1911)
This book is a school edition of the book by the same title published
in 1996 and republished in a revised 2nd edition in 2000 (3rd further
revised and updated edition under preparation) This school edition is
based on the second edition (first part only), with updated material.
© Michel Danino, 2004. All rights reserved. No part of this book may
be reproduced in any form without written permission from the author.
This book is not for sale in bookstores. It is available only to schools,
educational and research institutions, and only through the distributor
mentioned below.
Schools wishing to receive a free specimen copy of this school edition
may write to:
Michel Danino

1
80, Swarnambika Layout Ramnagar COIMBATORE - 641 009 (Tamil
Nadu)
Email: micheld@sify.com

2
Foreword
The Invasion That Never Was first appeared in September 1996, with a
revised and enlarged second edition in 2000 (reprinted in 2001); a third,
further updated edition is due in 2004. The book aimed at bringing the
“Aryan problem” to the larger Indian public with little or no access to
recent archaeological and other research. The rise, decline and fall of
the Aryan myth has its tragic but also its comic elements, and a lighter
tone, irreverent when necessary, was preferred to an academic one.
The book was well received: 3,000 copies of the first edition and nearly
5,000 of the second were promptly sold. Besides, I received numerous
letters from readėrs, laymen and scholars alike. Puratattva, the journal
Of the Indian Archaeological Society, found the book “most readable,
enjoyable and thought-provoking” (N°26, 1995-96, p. 144).
A request was made in the educational world to bring out a slimmer
edition which schools, if they so desire, could use as supplementary
reading material (or “non-detailed material”). Indeed, with most In-
dian textbooks (with the notable exception of recent NCERT textbooks)
still carrying outdated material on the so-called “Aryan invasion” and
on the Indus Valley civilization, there is a great need to make available
to Indian students new evidence and fresh thinking in those fields.
For the purposes of this “school edition,” an easier language has been
used and some of the more complex aspects of the question have been
simplified or omitted; teaching and learning aids such as summaries
of important points, questions and answers, and a glossary, have been
added; detailed references for quotations have been removed, but
a brief bibliography remains; finally, more illustrations have been
included. The book does not claim to give a full account of the Aryan
question, but to present enough genuine material to help an Indian
student reach his or her own conclusions, and study further. An
educational CD along similar lines will hopefully follow soon.
If a few students feel tempted to explore the great forest that Indian
civilization is, my goal will have been achieved.
Michel Danino

3
Coimbatore, January 2004

4
Contents
The Invasion That Never Was 1
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
The Birth of a Myth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Oriental Renaissance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
“Inconvenient Guests” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Scholarly Trickery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
Divide and Convert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Aryan-Dravidian Divide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
The Aryan invasion of Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
From Sanskrit to the Master Race. . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
A Miracle of Faith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Voices of Dissent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
European Protests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Indian Protests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Evidence from Indian Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Vedic Lore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
Epic & Puranic Lore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
North-South Kinship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
Evidence from Archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Taking Care of Citizens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
A Prosperous Civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
A Comedy of Errors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Signs of Invasion? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Could anything be clearer? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
Cultural Background . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
The Mighty Sarasvati . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Cultural Continuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
Of Skeletons and Tongues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Race and Genetics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

5
 The oft-invoked linguistic evidence for a European
Urheimat [original homeland] and for an
Aryan invasion of India is completely wanting-
One after another, the classical proofs of
the European Urheimat theory have been
discredited. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
Astronomy, Mathematics, Metallurgy… . . . . . . . . . 66
A Decent Burial . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
The Core of Civilization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Suggesfed Further Reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Introduction

1. Every Indian child who goes to school soon meets with that special
moment when he is told about his early ancestors, their origin, their
story, their achievements. A window suddenly opens, his small horizon
tries to grasp those faraway and mysterious times.
2. And what is he taught? If anything, it will be that some 1,500 years
before the Christian era, large groups of uncivilized, Sanskrit-speaking
pastoral nomads (rural wanderers), the “Aryans,” entered into North-
west India from Central Asia, where they came upon the highly devel-
oped Indus Valley (or Harappan) civilization, which had been flourish-
ing there for over a millennium and whose inhabitants were Dravidi-
ans. The invading “Aryans” destroyed this civilization and pushed the
Dravidians south, then over a few centuries composed the Vedas, got
Sanskrit to spread all over India, and built the great Ganges civilization.
That, in a nutshell, is what most educated Indians know of their distant
past, and is still today presented as solid knowledge. It is there not only
in textbooks, but in “authoritative” reference books and in the best dic-
tionaries.
3. As established as it may have become through decades of thoughtless
repetition, the “Aryan invasion theory” as it is called, does not rest on
a single solid piece of evidence. In fact, it has by now been thoroughly

6
disproved by all the evidence brought to light by archeology, anthropol-
ogy, astronomy and ancient mathematics, among other disciplines.
4. But how did this Aryan myth come to be so widely accepted if it
was completely baseless? Extensive studies have been devoted to the
factors that contributed to its origin and surprisingly large scale growth;
we will only give here a brief overview, followed by a survey of literary,
archaeological and other evidence that contradict it. In the process, we
will try to lay a healthier foundation, for an inquiry into India’s ancient
past.

The Birth of a Myth

5. Of the first contacts between Europe and India, early Greek histo-
rians and geographers left accounts which are a fascinating mixture of
fact and fancy. But when it comes to describing the Indian character,
there is a broad agreement. Megasthenes, for example, who visited the
Maurya court at Pataliputra in the fourth century bc, noted:
All Indians are free, and none of them is a slave…. Indi-
ans neither invade other peoples, nor do other peoples in-
vade India…. They fare happily, because of their simplicity
and their frugality…. Since they esteem beauty, they prac-
tise everything that can beautify their appearance. Further,
they respect alike virtue and truth….
6. With the break-up of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity,
Europe saw India recede into a mythical distance; legends about her un-
told riches survived, but direct contacts were rare. Later, it was mostly
Arab sailors, merchants, and scholars (such as the famous Alberuni),
who left records of India. In AD 1066, Andalusi, an Arab writer from
Spain, wrote:
The Indians, among all nations, through many centuries
and since antiquity, have been the source of wisdom,
fairness and moderation. They are creators of sublime
thoughts, universal fables, rare inventions and remarkable

7
 concepts.
7. Bedi ezr Zenan recorded that “Indians are innumerable, like grains
of sand, free from all deceit and violence. They fear neither death nor
life.” Five centuries later, Akbar’s friend, Abul Fazl, wrote; “The Hindus
are religious, affable, lovers of justice, given to retirement, able in busi-
ness, admirers of truth, grateful and of unbounded fidelity; and their
soldiers know not what it is to fly from the field of battle.” It was the
celebrated Friedrich Max Muller who gave the last two testimonies in
a 1882 lecture in defence of the “Character of the Hindus,” and he ob-
served:
It is surely extremely strange that whenever, either in
Greek, or in Chinese, or in Persian, or in Arab writings, we
meet with any attempts at describing the distinguishing
features in the national character of the Indians, regard for
truth and justice should always be mentioned first.

The Oriental Renaissance

8. Even the first British travellers, settlers and rulers often noted the
same “distinguishing features.” In 1841, Mountstuart Elphinstone, the
first Governor of the Bombay Presidency, wrote in his History of India:
“No set of people among the Hindus are so depraved as the dregs of our
great towns. The villagers are everywhere amiable, affectionate to their
families, kind to their neighbours…. The Hindus are mild and gentle
people…. Their superiority in purity of manners is not flattering to our
self-esteem.” Thomas Munro was even more emphatic:
If a good system of agriculture, unrivalled manufacturing
skill, a capacity to produce whatever can contribute to con-
venience or luxury; schools established in every village for
teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; the general prac-
tice of hospitality and charity among each other: and above
all, a treatment of the female sex full of confidence, respect,
and delicacy, [if all these] are among the signs which de-
note a civilised people, then the Hindus are not inferior to

8
 the nations of Europe; and if civilisation is to become an ar-
ticle of trade between England and India. I am convinced
that England will gain by the import cargo.
9. A pity England was hardly interested in trading in civilization!
When, going deeper, a few European thinkers began in the eighteenth
century to try and fathom India’s philosophy and religion, they were
so struck by the wisdom, the ancientness, the richness they saw, that
they soon declared India to have been the “cradle of the human race”
and the “birthplace of civilization,” in the words of Christian Dohm,
a German scholar. The great French thinker Voltaire lent his name to
this view:
We have shown how much we surpass the Indians in
courage and wickedness, and how inferior to them we
are in wisdom. Our European nations have mutually
destroyed themselves in this land where we only go in
search of money, while the first Greeks travelled to the
same land only to instruct themselves…. I am convinced
that everything has come down to us from the banks of
the Ganges, astronomy, astrology, metempsychosis, etc.
Most of the early travellers to India of the time tended to share this en-
thusiasm. “All history points to India as the mother of science and art,”
William Macintosh wrote. “This country was anciently so renowned
for knowledge and wisdom that the philosophers of Greece did not dis-
dain to travel thither for their improvement.” Pierre Sonnerat, a French
naturalist, agreed: “We find among the Indians the vestiges of the most
remote antiquity…. We know that all peoples came there to draw the
elements of their knowledge…. India, in her splendour, gave religions
and laws to all the other peoples; Egypt and Greece owed to her both
their fables and their wisdom.”
Serious Western students of Indian civilization — “Orientalists” as they
were called — tended to share such views, especially after the 1780s,
when the first European scholars started reading Sanskrit. The founder
of Calcutta’s Asiatic Society, Sir William Jones, in his well-known praise
of Sanskrit, found it to be “of wonderful structure, more perfect than

9
the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined
than either.” The German historian and novelist Friedrich Schlegel saw
in Sanskrit the “original language” and declared in 1803, “Everything
without exception is Of Indian origin…. Whether directly or indirectly,
all nations are originally nothing but Indian colonies…. The oriental
antiquity could, if we consented to deepen it, bring us back more safely
towards the divine.”
All in all the mood was in favour of an “Oriental renaissance”: as his-
torian Thomas R. Trautmann explains, its proponents hoped that “the
study of Sanskrit and Indian antiquities would bring a second renais-
sance to the West, as the study of Greek learning had been the founda-
tion of the first Renaissance.”

“Inconvenient Guests”

However, this generous estimate of Indian civilization and its contri-

bution to the West started changing at the turn of the nineteenth cen-
tury. The British supremacy over most of India was now almost unchal-
lenged, and the colonial masters could now concentrate on draining of
India’s fabulous wealth. While most eighteenth- century European trav-
ellers to India described her as “flourishing,” less than a century later she
had sunk into depths of dismal misery. One British historian noted in
1901: “Time was, not more distant than a century and a half ago, when
Bengal was much more wealthy than was Britain.” Another even as-
serted that Britain’s Industrial Revolution could not have taken off with-
out the influx of money that followed the conquest of Bengal. With all
his admiration of the British, Dadabhai Naoroji, the “Grand Old Man”
of Indian nationalism, recorded how the East India Company itself ad-
mitted in 1766 “a scene of the most tyrannic and oppressive conduct
that ever was known in any age or country.”
In 1778, Anquetil-Duperron, a French Orientalist who spent seven
years in India, penned this moving testimony:
Peaceful Indians …, did the rumour of your riches have
to penetrate a clime in which artificial needs know no

10
 bounds? Soon, new foreigners reached your shores;
inconvenient guests, everything they touched belonged
to them …; it was not enough that they should invade
your commerce, make the price of foodstuffs and goods
triple, alter their quality; your factories almost wiped out,
the workers taking refuge in the mountains, a dying son
asking his father what harm he did those foreigners who
have taken the bread out of his mouth — nothing touches
or softens their hearts: “Your gold,” the Peruvians and
Mexicans were told; here, the revenue of Industan is what
we demand, even if for that streams of blood have to flow.
At least, unfortunate Indians, you will perhaps learn that
in the space of two hundred years, one European who saw
you and lived among you! has dared to plead your cause
and present to the Court of the Universe your wounded
rights, those of mankind blackened by a vile interest.
But unlike the Portuguese or the earlier Muslim invaders, the British
were anxious to clothe their greed in lofty ideals: the “white man’s bur-
den” of civilizing (and, naturally. Christianizing) less enlightened races,
the “divinely ordained mission” of bringing to India the glory of Eu-
rope’s commercial and industrial civilization, and so forth. Articles,
pamphlets, speeches, volumes poured forth year after year in praise of
the “tremendous task of rescuing India” from the darkness into which
she had fallen. It was Britain’s historic duty to “spread the highest kind
of civilisation.” Understandably, the recognition of India’s far more an-
cient and refined civilization made such noble motives untenable. Thus
began a systematic campaign to disparage not only this civilization, its
culture and society, but the very roots of Hinduism.

Scholarly Trickery

From the end of the eighteenth century, English translations of San-

skrit scriptures had begun to appear; but the initial enthusiasm they
generated among the translators often turned to scorn in the second

11
half of the nineteenth century. As a matter of fact, European scholars
and missionaries were, more often than not, two sides of the same coin.
Indeed, much scholarly writing of the time abounds with references
to the primitiveness of Hinduism in contrast to the “true religion” of
Christianity. Sadly, but mistakenly, many of Europe’s Sanskrit scholars
were now certain that these translations would “carry their own con-
demnation.” Even Max Muller, despite his generous praise of the In-
dians’ character, went with the stream, blinded by his view of history,
which, to his mind, taught that “the whole human race required a grad-
ual education before, in the fullness of time, it could be admitted to the
truths of Christianity.” To him, the religion of India “through its very
errors … may have but served to prepare the way of Christ….” It is
therefore small wonder that, after his prodigious labour produced the
first edition of the Rig-Veda, he wrote to his wife;
This edition of mine and the translation of the Veda, will
hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on
the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the
root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I
feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung
from it during the last three thousand years.
That this plan misfired and eventually led to renewed interest in India
is another story, one that is a testimony to the strength of her culture.
In the meantime, the study of Sanskrit soon revealed an unexpected
fact: there were many striking similarities between Sanskrit and Greek
and Latin, both in their vocabularies and grammars, pointing to an
ancient link between those languages. William Jones, for instance, as-
serted that Sanskrit bore to Greek and Latin “a stronger affinity … than
could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that
no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to
have sprung from some common source.” The question — still hotly
debated today — was: where was this “common source” to be located?
Nineteenth-century European scholars could no longer accept that they
owed their languages and civilization to a crude and primitive India
— that would have been dealing a blow to the very foundation of Eu-

12
rope’s mission in India, and in particular to the British Empire now
at the height of its glory. Instead, they imposed a racial interpreta-
tion on the Rig-Veda: they declared the Aryans to be a “race” and ar-
bitrarily identified the Dasas and Dasyus (representing dark forces in
the Vedic text), with “Dravidians,” and saw in the wars opposing them
to the Aryans the “proof ” of the bloody conquest of Northern India
by “the great army of Aryan immigrants in their onward march” from
Central Asia. These Aryans, first mentioned as a race in 1843, soon
became “Indo-Europeans,” or “Indo-Germans,” whose original tongue
was the hypothetical reconstruction called “proto- Indo-European,” the
common source of Greek, Latin and Germanic on one side, and Indo-
Iranian and Sanskrit on the Other. The result of these racial theories
was that the roots of the Vedas and the origins of Indian civilization
were really to be found in the Aryans’ original homeland, wherever it
may have been — but outside India.
Never mind that all this was mere conjecture, that the Rig-Veda itself
made it clear that the wars between Aryans and Dasyus were battles be-
tween powers of light and darkness, that the word “Arya” was plainly
used in the Veda to describe not a racial group, but a quality of be-
ing, a noble culture, a readiness to fight for the truth — all this was
simply brushed aside, and an imposing edifice was erected on these
nonexistent foundations.
Nor was that all. The Aryan invasion theory — now almost a proved
“fact” — was soon put to perverted uses, as the British exploited it to
strengthen their rule in India.
One such use was to cut down the Indian’s pride in his past and na-
tion — since India was no longer the source of Indian civilization —
and to make him all the more willing to accept the white man’s rule:
now that the Hindus were shown to be descendants of former invaders
who belonged to the same u Aryan race” as the Europeans’ ancestors, it
was easier to legitimize Britain’s conquest of India as merely one more
“Aryan wave” which, this time, would bring the true light to this land:
“What has taken place since the commencement of the British rule in
India is only a reunion, to a certain extent, of the members of the same

13
great family,” John Wilson, a leading missionary of the time, declared
in all seriousness in 1858, and naturally this happy family reunion had
now brought India into contact “with the most enlightened and philan-
thropic nation in the world” (!)
Max Muller too, sitting away in Oxford in 1847, romanticized about
“how the [English] descendants of the same [Aryan] race, to which the
first conquerors and masters of India belonged, return … to accomplish
the glorious work of civilization, which had been left unfinished by their
Aryan brethren.”
That this strategy was a strong strand in the colonial web is made clear
by a speech Stanley Baldwin gave in Britain’s House of Commons in
1929, some seventy years after Wilson; waxing eloquent (as the British
were prone to do whenever they looked back to the dawn of history),
he intoned:
Ages and ages ago there sat, side by side, the ancestors of the English,
Rajputs and Brahmins. Now, after ages …, the two branches of the great
Aryan ancestry have again been brought together by Providence…. By
establishing British rule in India, God said to the British, “I have again
brought you and the Indians together after a long separation, not in
order that you
should lord over them, or that you should exploit them, but in order
that you should recognize your kinship with them…. It is your duty to
raise them to their own level as quickly as possible, and work together,
brothers as you are, for the evolution of humanity”
A strange mixture of generous idealism and vindication of colonial rule
as God’s work via the Aryan invasion!
Its second perverted application was to sharpen divisions in Hindu soci-
ety and caste conflicts so as to legitimate and boost the efforts at conver-
sion that had been going on for several centuries. Suddenly, the Brah-
mins were said to be the pure descendants of the Aryan invaders and
to have created the caste system in order to establish their domination
over the native inhabitants. In support of this line, attempts were made
to equate caste with race and classify the entire Indian population along

14
several racial types by measuring imaginary features of their skulls and
noses.
From such pseudo-science, it followed that the tribals, the lower castes
and the so- called “Dravidians,” all victims of the Aryan “oppressors,”
were to be encouraged to rebel and reject everything Aryan, beginning
of course with Hinduism — such indeed has been the ideological foun-
dation of Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian movement, and of much missionary
propaganda, which concentrated on the conversion of India’s numer-
ous tribes. The intention was to look down on Hindu society without at-
tempting to understand its true roots and what had given it the strength
to live through centuries of onslaught, stagnation and decay. It is not
for nothing that India is today home to the only ancient culture that
has survived the combined waves of Christianity and Islam — all oth-
ers have disappeared under the sands of Time.

Divide and Convert

Such was, with rare exceptions, the ignorant hostile attitude prevalent
in the second half of the nineteenth century, especially in Britain.
Rulers, scholars, civil servants and missionaries shared it in generous
measure. Almost overnight, Indians acquired all possible faults and
failings. Charles Grant, an evangelist influential with the East India
Company, found the Indians to be “a people exceedingly depraved”
and was one of the first to suggest that their only salvation lay in ed-
ucation through English: British arts, philosophy and religion would
“silently undermine, and at length subvert, the fabric of [Hindu] error”
James Mill, author of a popular History of British India, ridiculed the
enthusiasm of early Sanskritists such as Jones and the very notion
of Indian civilization, since the Indians’ condition was “one of the
rudest and weakest states of the human mind” and “the Hindu, like the
eunuch, excels in the qualities of a slave.” Thomas B. Macaulay, the first
Law Member of the Govemor-General’s Legislature, took up Grant’s
ideas on English education, and was also a great admirer of Mill’s. In
his notorious 1835 Minute on Indian Education, he maintained that

15
Hinduism was based on “a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic
value, … [one] that inculcates the most serious errors on the most
important subjects … hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality
… fruitful of monstrous superstitions.” Hindus had therefore been fed
for millennia with a “false history, false astronomy, false medicine …
in company with a false religion”
About the same time, Alexander Duff, a prominent missionary, wrote,
“Of all the systems of false religion ever fabricated by the perverse inge-
nuity of fallen man, Hinduism is surely the most stupendous.” Richard
Temple, another high officer, said in a 1883 speech to a London mis-
sionary society intended to generate donations to missions:
India is a country which of all others we are bound to en-
lighten with eternal truth…. But what is most important
to you friends of missions, is this — that there is a large
population of aborigines, a people who are outside caste….
If they are attached, as they rapidly may be, to Christian-
ity, they will form a nucleus round which British power
and influence may gather. Remember, too, that Hinduism,
although it is dying, yet has force … and such tribes, if
not converted to Christi anity, may be perverted to Hin-
duism…. You may be confident that the missions in India
are doing a work which strengthens the imperial founda-
tions of British power…. I say that, of all the departments
I have ever administered, I never saw one more efficient
than the missionary department.
Thus the policy of the colonial masters did not stop at “divide and rule”
it was equally “divide and convert.” The convert found himself cut off
from his ancient roots and taught to despise and revile everything that
for millennia had been an object of worship for his ancestors — includ-
ing his own land. Then as now, the clinching factor in most conversions
was the use of all manner of inducements, monetary and other, often
taking advantage of the great poverty caused by the colonial rule.
Unfortunately, many of the wounds the Aryan invasion theory inflicted
on Indian society are still painfully open today, nurtured as they

16
have been by missionaries, Marxist historians, and politicians, who
together have made sure that divisions between castes have sharpened
rather than subsided — for the simple reason that without such di-
visions they would all be out of business. A typical example of this
short sighted strategy is the common identification of Dalits with
“non-Aryans” and the use of the word adivasi (i.e., “original inhabitant”
or aboriginal) to depict the tribals, thus trying to put a stamp of
evidence on the “colonization” and “Aryanization” of India by the
higher castes. Yet, as we will see, the so-called Adivasis are no more
“adi” than Brahmins or any other higher castes.

Aryan-Dravidian Divide

Another instance can be found in South Indian politics, where a fre-

quently heard refrain has been, with varying shades of intensity, that
the Dravidians came to India long before the “Aryan invaders,” whose
Brahmin descendants have sought to “impose their culture on all non-
Aryans” and should therefore be resisted. “Dravidian culture” is said
to be completely “separate,” and we frequently hecr that Sanskrit, Hin-
duism, Buddhism or Jainism are foreign to Tamil culture, in contrast to
Swami Vivekananda’s statement: “The South had been the repository
of Vedic learning.”
As we will see, neither Tamil tradition nor archaeology show any North-
South or Aryan-Dravidian conflict on the cultural level. Before the
nineteenth century, Tamilians had no
recollection-of having ever lived in North India, or of the so-called
Aryans having ever been a separate race, much less their enemies; nor
had they ever known that “Dravidian” languages are unconnected to
the family of Indo-European languages — but since European schol-
ars were now telling them all this, it had to be true! In 1856, Robert
Caldwell, Bishop of Tirunelveli, published his *Comparative Grammar
of the Dravidian or South-lndian Family of Languages*, in which for
the first time he gave a linguistic meaning to the geographical term of
“Dravida.” Caldwell did not stop at language: building upon the inva-

17
sionist model, he saw Indians south of the Vindhyas as members of “one
and the same race,” naturally distinct from the “conquering race” of the
Aryans.
It is striking- how, in the process, the word *dravida* underwent the
same abusive misinterpretation as the word *arya*, both of which
never had any linguistic or racial sense in India. The meaning of
*dravida* had always been purely geographical: it first appears in
inscriptions as early as the second century bc as *dramira*, later as
*dramila* or *dramida*, and was simply synonymous with The word
Tamil (from which, in fact, most scholars derive dravida). Later on, it
came to mean loosely Southern India, and, interestingly, the traditional
Panchadravida or five Dravidian regions included Maharashtra and
Gujarat.
Caldwell, finally, had a strong anti-Brahmin bias (something, again,
non-existent in Tamil literature or tradition), and affirmed that “few
Brahmans have written [in Tamil] anything worthy of preservation”
— a crudely false statement when Brahmins (and non-Brahmins alike)
composed so much devotional literature in Tamil. This “brahminopho-
bia” makes perfect sense, however, if we remember that Caldwell was
first and foremost a missionary (he prefaced the second edition of his
book from the “Office of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel”
in London), and that missionaries always considered Brahmins as the
greatest stumbling block to India’s Christianization.
Once again, the Aryan invasion theory refused to be confined to dusty
academic stud ies and lecture halls. Caldwell’s theories were lapped up
by more and more scholars, and finally by the “Dravidian movement”
launched by E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker (“Periyar”). Not only was the
teaching and study of Sanskrit discouraged in Tamil Nadu, there was
also (mostly in the 1940s and 1950s) a drive to “cleanse” the Tamil lan-
guage of its large Sanskrit vocabulary. In Salem and other cities of Tamil
Nadu, “Aryan” gods such as Lord Rama were taken out in mock pro-
cessions, garlanded with old chappaIs and beaten with broomsticks; pic-
tures of Rama were burned, idols Of Ganesh were broken. Brahmins
were assaulted, their sacred threads forcibly cut. Eventually, a few “Dra-

18
vidian” leaders started calling for secession from India and the creation
of an independent “Dravidanad,” a demand made by C. N. Annadurai
in the Indian parliament in 1962. But the Chinese aggression on India
the same year relegated such demands to the background, and they were
soon abandoned as they had no popular support. However, in 1997, the
government of Tamil Nadu ordered that pujas and archanas in temples
would be conducted only in Tamil and no longer in Sanskrit, ignoring
the fact that both languages had long coexisted h armoniously in Tamil
Nadu’s temples. And it is still the hobby of some “Dravidian” activists
to burn in public a Sanskrit grammar or the effigy of a Sankaracharya
(as happened again in Chennai in 1999).
Are such acts the manifestations of “rationalism” to use these activists
favourite word? Or are they not rather the result of obscurantism plain
and simple? Similar misuse of the Aryan invasion theory can be noted
in other parts of India, especially by politicians who claim to represent
the “Dalits.” Linguistic frictions, caste or religious riots and loss of life
have often followed. If the Indian society has not disintegrated in the
face of such divisive propaganda, it is clearly thanks to the deep cultural
unity that India fostered over millennia. But after two centuries, the
strain is beginning to tell.

The Aryan invasion of Europe

Let us now go back to the dawn of ages. Emerging from their mysterious
“original homeland,” our footloose Aryans, not content with invading
India, overran Europe too — and thereby hangs an instructive tale. For
Christian Europe, the sudden appearance of the Aryan race out of the
misty plateaux of Central Asia was seen as a godsend in the strongly
anti-Semitic atmosphere of the nineteenth century. Thus was born one
more myth, this time of the Aryan European, Christian of course, and
preferably Germanic. It had the added advantage of confirming the
“natural” supremacy of the White race.
In 1859, the Swiss linguist Adolphe Pictet wrote:
In a prehistoric era lost in the miStS of time, a whole race,

19
 destined by Providence to reign one day supreme over the
entire earth, was slowly growing in the primeval cradle, in
which it was preparing for a brilliant future…. Favoured
among all others by the beauty of its blood and the gifts of
its intelligence, … this was the race of the Aryas, blessed
from the beginning with the very qualities which the He-
brews lacked in order to become civilizers of the world….
The religion of Christ was destined to become the torch
of humanity: the Greek genius welcomed it; the power of
Rome propagated it far end wide, Germanic energy it new
strength. Through a thousand battles, the whole race of
the European Aryas … came to be the main instrument of
God’s designs for the destiny of mankind.
That there was not shrod of evidence in support of such bloated
rhetoric was not going to deter those daydreaming scholars. The
“European Arya” grew into the “Indo-German”, and the Aryan myth
fueled nineteenth-century theories of racial supremacy, especially of a
Teutonic or Nordic sort. A few dissenting voices (we will hear them in
the next chapter) did try to point out that the Aryan doctrine was “a
figment of the professional imagination”; but they were all drowned in
the delirious rise of German nationalism.
Max Muller was an articulate proponent of the new Aryan concept.
From 1859 onward, in his well-attended lectures in Oxford and Lon-
don, he asserted that “the Brahmans of India belong to the same family,
the Aryan or Indo-European family, which civilised the whole of Eu-
rope;” he saw in the imaginary “Aryan race” the common ancestor of
Germans, Celts, Romans, Slavs, Greeks, Persians, and Hindus.” Max
Muller’s major mistake was to equate language and race; today it is well
established that language and ethnicity (for the notion of “race” has
long been rejected as unscientific) are independent from each other.

20
From Sanskrit to the Master Race.

Max Muller did realize his folly, but too late. When, in 1870-71, Ger-
many was reunified following its victory over France and began growing
in power, he made a brave attempt
to reject the racial side of the Aryan theory which he had earlier propa-
gated. He now argued that the Word “Arya” only referred to a linguistic
group, not to a race. But nobody listened: the harm had been done.
Year after year, raging debates went on across borders to determine
which European people was the true descendant of the Aryan “master
race,” and therefore which nation could claim a divine right to dominate
others. Europe witnessed “the ridiculous and humiliating spectacle of
eminent scholars subordinating their interest in truth to the inflation
of racial and national pride.” The loudest were undoubtedly the pro-
Germanic in romantic search of the *Herrenvolk* or master race. Thus
the German linguist August Schleicher asserted: “For the fatherland of
the original Indo-Germanic people, we have to look to Upper Central
Asia.” In fact it came to be doubted that the Aryans’ original homeland
was at all Central Asia or Iran, and an increasing number of German
scholars sought to prove on “scientific grounds” that it must have been
Scandinavia or Switzerland, or even Germany itself (Central and West-
ern Germany, to be precise!).
Thus, our mythical Aryan, first spotted in ancient India through dis-
torted readings of the Veda, then transposed from the banks of the In-
dus and the Sarasvati to the plateaux of Central Asia, was now brought
closer to Germany, his ideal original home! In the process, the aggres-
sive, conquering white man, preferably blond-haired, blue-eyed and
broad-chested, had shoved aside not only the despicable Hebrew, but
also the meek and “swarthy” Indian, and was now claiming the entire
Aryan heritage to himself. What began as a linguistic and cultural ex-
ploration in India ended as racial propaganda in Western Europe. And
so, “the Indians came to be excluded from the Aryan concept to which
they had supplied the name.”
When in 1924 Hitler wrote in his notorious *Mein Kamp* [“My Battle”],

21
“The Aryan alone can be considered as the founder of culture … a con-
queror who subjugated inferior races,” he was merely echoing and am-
plifying dozens of nineteenth-century scholars who had written thick
tomes in support of their fantasy. A few years later, full-blown Nazism
was no more than a monstrous — but in a way perfectly logical — ap-
plication of their race theories, with the consequences we all know.
With World War II, all those scholarly castles in the air fell down with
a thud, and no one dared speak of an Aryan race any longer: “The be-
lief in an Aryan ‘race’ had become accepted by philologists who knew
nothing of science” wrote the British biologist Julian Huxley in 1939, at
the start of the War; “what these men have written on the subject has
been cast by historians into the limbo of discarded and discredited theo-
ries.” “Aryan has no validity as an ethnological term,” says the Webster
dictionary (1980).

A Miracle of Faith

The collapse of race theories meant the end of the Aryan Myth — but
only as far as Europe was concerned. For the Aryan invasion theory
was still good enough for India, where students often continue t0 learn
about Aryans and Dravidians as enemy races. One reason for the sur-
vival of such disgraceful teaching is that textbook writers in India are, as
a rule, largely ignorant of science, and use hopelessly outdated sources,
often the very colonial sources that modern research has discredited.
Trautmann’s conclusion is luminous, if gently mocking:
That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a miracle of
faith. Is it not time we did away with it?… The concept of race does
nothing to illuminate our understanding of the ancient sources of In-
dian history and, on the contrary, has only served to corrupt our read-
ing of them.
A second reason is that independent India adopted the old colonial
framework with hardly any change: the new masters found the same
gains in keeping Indian masses divided along regional, linguistic, re-
ligious or caste lines. In that reborn oppression, the Aryan invasion

22
theory came in handy and got a fresh lease of life from the political,
academic and media elites: the rulers changed, but not the rule.
There is, however, a third reason for the survival of the invasionist the-
ory: the Western view of the world is, of course, the dominant one (in
Indian universities too), and, consciously or not, Western scholarship
remains as self-assured as it was last century, as quick to dismiss dif-
fering views without a hearing, especially if they leave the door open
to the faintest possibility of Indian origins. Once the mention of race
had become taboo, the Aryan myth simply shifted back to the old lin-
guistic ground: the “Aryans” or Indo-Europeans now represented not
a race, but various peoples belonging to a single linguistic group. Fair
enough, but, as we will see, the quest for their original homeland has
remained an obsession with modern linguists, for which they are pre-
pared to consider virtually any part of Eurasia — except India. The
very country which led to the concept of Indo-European languages is
ruled out. In other words, nothing much has changed since the colonial
times, except the terminology: the Aryan invasion of India has become
the “migration of Indo-Europeans into the Indian subcontinent,” with
no more evidence than before.
Yet one thing has certainly chang0d: archaeology, whose considerable
progress gives us a surer footing than the shifting sands of linguistics.
But before we begin our archaeological exploration, let us stop awhile
to hear a few of the voices that had the courage to swim against the tide.
Had they been heard at the time, the cultural and even political life of
twentieth-century Europe might have been very different.

Voices of Dissent

As a matter of fact, a few scholars did see through the Aryan invasion
theory and found themselves unable to reconcile it with facts. Although
their objections went unheard, today we can see how valid they were.
Let us hear a few of the better-known protests from Europe as well as
from India.

23
European Protests

Mountstuart Elphinstone, whom we met earlier, was one of the first

dissenters. He was wore of the connection between Sanskrit and Euro-
pean tongues, but found the theory of their “spread from a central point
… a gratuitous assumption.” In his 1841 History of India, he observed,
“Neither in the Vedas, nor in any book … is there any allusion to a prior
residence … out of India…. There is no reason whatever for thinking
that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one.”
The French archaeologist Salomon Reinach, writing in 1892 at the
height of the Aryan myth, was perhaps the first to reject the very
notion of an Aryan race: “To Speak of an Aryan race of three thousand
years ago is to put forward a gratuitous hypothesis; but to speak of it as
if it still existed today is quite simply absurd.”
Even though most European “Indologists” accepted the outside origin
of Vedic culture, many Sanskritists, such as H. H. Wilson, T. Gold-
stucker, W. D. Whitney, found themselves unable to agree with Max
Muller’s recent date for the Rig-Veda. A German scholar, Moritz Win-
ternitz, proposed a date of 2500 BC on literary grounds: “We cannot
explain the development of the whole of this great [Sanskrit] literature
if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 BC or 1500 BC as its
starting point.”
In 1922, the British scholar F. E. Pargiter tried to make sense of histor-
ical data scattered in the Puranas, especially long lists of dynasties and
kings; his inquiry led him to unexpected conclusions. With rare com-
monsense, he noted that “there is a strong presumption in favour of
[Indian] tradition; if anyone contests tradition, the burden lies on him
to show that it is wrong.” Pargiter found that Indian tradition clearly
recorded “an outflow of people from India before the fifteenth century
bc” and thought that “the Iranians may have been an offshoot from In-
dia.” He pertinently observed that in the famous Nadi Sukta,1 the Rig-
Veda lists rivers of North India from east to west, and remarked: “If the
Aryans had entered India from the north-west, and had advanced east-
ward through the Panjab only as far as the Sarasvati or Yamuna when

24
the Rigvedic hymns were composed, it is very surprising that the hymn
arranges the rivers, not according to their progress, but reversely from
the Ganges which they had hardly reached.”
Strangely, one of the loudest European voices against the whole Aryan
myth was none other than Max Muller, one of its chief creators! In
1888, forty years after he had promoted the concept of an Aryan race,
he flatly denied having ever spoken of an Aryan race: “I have declared
again and again that if I say Aryas, I mean neither blood nor bones,
nor hair nor skull; i mean simply those who speak an Aryan language.”
Two years later, he even disowned the short chronology he himself had
arbitrarily fixed for Indian scriptures. In a famous declaration of 1890,
he said: “Whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000 or 1500 or
2000 or 3000 bc, no power on earth will ever determine.” Finally, in his
*Autobiography* published just after his death in 1900, he made this
astonishing statement: “As to the actual date of the Veda … if we were
to place it at 5000 BC, I doubt whether anybody could refute such a
date, while if we go back beyond the Veda, and come to measure the
time required for the formation of Sanskrit … I doubt whether even
5,000 years would suffice for that.”
A pity scholars were no longer listening to him and preferred to go along
with the rash theories of his younger days.

Indian Protests

Let US now turn to India and see some reactions to the Aryan inva-
sion theory — which, let us repeat, Indians had never heard of before
Orientalists came along. At first, it met with no opposition here: the In-
dian mind had become largely subservient to the West (is it much better
today?), and would rather listen to biased European scholars than to In-
dia’s own savants and seers.
Swami Dayananda Saraswati was perhaps the first Indian to dispute the
Aryan myth: “In none of the Sanskrit or history textbooks” he wrote,
“has it been stated that the Aryans came from Iran, vanquished the abo-
rigines … and became rulers” He stressed that the word arya reffered

25
in the Veda to a moral or inner quality, not to any race or people, and
insisted that India was Aryavarta, the home of the Aryans — a word he
used purely in its original sense of “Vedic Indian”
In fact, it was the whole European view of the Veda that Dayananda
Saraswati rejected: “He seized justly on the Veda as India’s Rock of
Ages,” wrote Sri Aurobindo. “In the matter of Vedic interpretation I
am convinced that whatever may be the final complete interpretation,
Dayananda will be honoured as the first discoverer of the right clues.”
By the same token, he forcefully opposed the Christian missionaries’
vilification of India’s ancient culture, and engaged in public debates with
some of them (with maulanas too), especially in Pun|ab where a wave
of conversions had taken place.
Swami Vivekananda, with his phenomenal force, hammered into his
fellow Indians the need to feel proud of their great heritage, though
equally conscious of their present degradation. With his deep knowl-
edge not only of Hindu scriptures but of Western history and religions,
he was quick to see through the gaps in the Aryan edifice. In a lecture in
the U.S.A., he remarked scornfully: “And what your European Pandits
say about the Aryans swooping down from some foreign land snatch-
ing away the land of aborigines and settling in India by exterminating
them, is all pure nonsense, foolish talk. Strange that our Indian schol-
ars too say ‘Amen’ to them.” He added sadly, “And all these monstrous
lies are being taught to our boys!” They still are, a hundred years later.
In another lecture, this time in India, he was in a more sarcastic mood,
but mercilessly to the point:
Our [European] archaeologist dreams of India being full
of dark-eyed aborigines, and the bright Aryans came from
— the Lord knows where. According to some, they came
from Central Tibet, others will have it that they came from
Central Asia. There are patriotic Englishmen who think
that the Aryans were all red-haired…. If the writer hap-
pens to be a black-haired man, the Aryans were all black-
haired. Of late, there was an attempt made to prove that

26
 the Aryans lived on the Swiss lakes. I should not be sorry
if they had been all drowned there, theory and all. Some
say now that they lived at the North Pole. Lord bless the
Aryans and their habitations! As for the truth of these the-
ories, there is not one word in our scriptures, not one, to
prove that the Aryan ever came from anywhere outside In-
dia, and in ancient India was included Afghanistan. There
it ends. And the theory that the Shudra caste were all non-
Aryans … is equally illogical and equally irrational…. The
whole of India is Aryan, nothing else.
Sensing the divisive intentions of the colonial rulers, he warned his fel-
low countrymen:
And the more you go on fighting and quarrelling about all
trivialities such as “Dravidian” and “Aryan” and the ques-
tion of Brahmins and non-Brahmins and all that, the fur-
ther you are from that accumulation of energy and power
which is going to make the future India.
Swami Vivekananda was also acutely aware of the work of the mission-
aries in India as in the West, he himself was the object of their calum-
nies during his first stay in America, where he called up a living image
of India’s spirituality and roused much genuine interest in it — hardly
to the liking of the missions. His one concern was therefore to awaken
his countrymen to their own riches: “India can never be Europe until
she dies…. Shall India die? Then from the world all spirituality will be
extinct, all moral perfection will be extinct, all sweet-souled sympathy
for religion will be extinct, all ideality will be extinct…. Such a thing
can never be…. Say not that you are weak. The spirit is omnipotent….
Call up the divinity within you.”
The first systematic refutation of the Aryan invasion theory had to
wait for Sri Aurobindo. In 1910, after he had worked for a decade to
awaken the spirit of independence in India, and spent a year in prison,
he learned that the British had finally decided to deport him under
new draconian laws: India’s Viceroy, Lord Minto, regarded him as “the
most dangerous man we have to deal with at present.” Leaving Bengal,

27
Sri Aurobindo sought refuge in Pondicherry, then a French colony.
There, he soon took up his study of the Veda, and was surprised to find
in it a confirmation of experiences he had recently had in the pursuit
of his intensive sadhana.
While reading the Sanskrit text, he also came to question the European
scholars’ view of the Veda which, “like the majority of educated Indi-
ans,” he had so far “passively accepted without examination.” Finding
it confused and crudely distorted, Sri Aurobindo wrote: “In India …
we are ready to accept all European theories, the theory of an ‘Aryan’
colonisation of a Dravidian India, the theory of Nature-worship … of
the Vedic Rishis … as if these hazardous speculations were on a par in
authority and certainty with the law of gravitation and the theory of evo-
lution.” With his keen vision, he realized the dangers in such a passive
acceptance on the part of Indian scholars:
So great is the force of attractive generalisations and widely
popularised errors that all the world goes on perpetuating
the blunder talking of the Indo-European races, claiming
or disclaiming Aryan kinship and building on that basis of
falsehood the most far-reaching political, social or pseudo-
scientific conclusions.
How prophetic, if we consider that this was written some twenty years
before the growth of Nazism with its claims to “Aryan kinship”!
In his *Secret of the Veda,* which started appearing from 1914, Sri Au-
robindo called on Indians not to be “haunted by the unfortunate mis-
construction of the Veda which European scholarship has imposed on
the modern mind.” Taking a straight look at the original text, he ob-
served: “The indications in the Veda on which this theory of a recent
Aryan invasion is built, are very scanty in quantity and uncertain in
their significance. There is no actual mention of such an invasion.”
Ninety years later, Western scholars are coming round to this view and
reject the racial interpretation of the Rig-Veda. Well ahead of his time,
Sri Aurobindo questioned the very concept of race, and to him the racial
identification of supposed Aryans and non-Aryans was just “a conjec-

28
ture supported only by other conjectures … a myth of the philologists.
I am, indeed, disposed to doubt whether there was ever any such entity
in India as a separate Aryan or a separate Dravidian race.”
Finally, Sri Aurobindo’s study of Tamil, which he did with the help ;of
Subramania Bharati, led him to discover that the “original connection
between the Sanskrit and Tamil tongues” was “far closer and more ex-
tensive than is usually supposed” and that they were “two divergent
families derived from one lost primitive tongue.” The artificial division
between Indo-European and Dravidian languages had gone: “My first
study of Tamil words had brought me to what seemed a clue to the very
origins and structure of the ancient Sanskrit tongue.”
Sri Aurobindo’s study, however, led him to far more momentous results,
for he recovered the long lost symbolism of the Veda and, in his *Secret
of the Veda*, brought to light the Rishis’ extraordinary experience.
And, like Swami Vivekananda, he saw the dangers looming ahead:
“Will the spiritual motive which India represents prevail on Europe
and create there new forms congenial to the West, or will European
rationalism and commercialism put an end for ever to the Indian type
of culture? That is the one radical and poignant question at issue.”
The question we must now ask is: Are historians who still swear by
Marx or Max Muller, or both, and are often ignorant of Sanskrit and
India’s traditions, better equipped than a Swami Vivekananda or a Sri
Aurobindo, with their depth of knowledge and understanding, to tell
us what the meaning of the Veda is and the conclusions we are to draw
from it?
Yet it is not as if there were no scholars in India to agree with these
great seers. Let us mention here one other example of ignored Indian
scholarship.
B. R. Ambedkar is known in India chiefly for his campaign in support
of the lower castes and “Untouchables” (he himself was one), and also
for his work on the Indian Constitution.
But it is often overlooked that in order to find out the truth of the Eu-
ropean theories about Aryans and non-Aryans, high and low castes, he

29
studied the Veda for himself, with an open mind. His conclusions are
categorical, though regrettably they are ignored by those who claim to
follow his lead — and who often continue to misuse the same racial
theories that he rejected:
The theory of invasion is an invention. This invention is
necessary because of a gratuitous assumption that the Indo-
Germanic people are the purest of the modern representa-
tives of the original Aryan race. The theory is a perversion
of scientific investigation. It is not allowed to evolve out
of facts. On the contrary, the theory is preconceived and
facts are selected to prove it. It falls to the ground at every
point.
[My conclusions] are:
1.The Vedas do not know any such race as the Aryan race.
2.There is no evidence in the Vedas of any invasion of India
by the Aryan race and its having conquered the Dasas and
Dasyus supposed to be the natives of India.
3.There is no evidence to show that the distinction between
Aryans, Dasas and Dasyus was a racial distinction.
4.The Vedas do not support the contention that the Aryas
were different in Colour from the Dasas and Dasyus….
Despite such remarkable protests, few listened — we in India have long
had the inexplicable habit of accepting change only if it comes to us
from the West. Yet in recent years, more and more voices have begun
to be heard, both in the West and in India, asserting that the time has
come to dismiss the worm-eaten Aryan invasion theory once and for
all. The accumulating evidence from Indian tradition, as well as from
archaeology and other sciences, has become simply too overwhelming
to be ignored.
It is now time to examine this evidence and see objectively what it has
to say on the Aryan problem.

30
Evidence from Indian Tradition

If we examine the so-called Aryan problem with a fresh eye, what

strikes us at first sight is that the Aryan invasion theory and its
resulting reconstruction of India’s ancient history are in head-on
contradiction with Indian tradition on many essential points.

Vedic Lore

To begin with, let us repeat that neither the Veda nor any other Sanskrit
scripture make any reference to an original homeland outside India; in
fact, all descriptions of the Vedic homeland called variously *Aryavorta,
Bharatvarsha, lla,* etc., apply to North India and nowhere else. The
Rig-Veda refers to the “Land of the Seven Rivers” (*Saptasindhu* or
*Saptasindhava): the Sarasvati to the east, the Indus to the west, and
its five tributaries in between; with the exception of the Beas (named
in other hymns), all the rivers are explicitly invoked in the Nadi Sukta
(X.75).
As the historian P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar noted in 1926, “A careful study
of the Vedas … reveals the fact that Vedic culture is so redolent of the In-
dian soil and of the Indian atmosphere that the idea of the non-Indian
origin of that culture is absurd.” It is hard to imagine that the Vedic
people, who had such a strong bond with their land and constantly
praised or deified its rivers and mountains and forests, would not have
carried into their culture the least memory of their supposed ances-
tral steppes away in Central Asia. A strange amnesia for people who
cultivated their memory so methodically that they could transmit the
four Vedas orally generation after generation to the present day! “As
far as I can see,” writes the British archaeologist Colin Renfrew, “there
is nothing in the *Hymns of the Rigveda* which demonstrates that the
Vedic-speaking populations were intrusive to the area…. Nothing im-
plies that the Aryas were strangers there.”
As regards the battles against the Dasyus in the Rig-Veda, as Sri Au-
robindo and others pointed out, they have nothing to do with wars be-

31
tween “Aryans” and “Dravidians.” In reality they are nothing but bat-
tles between forces of light and forces of evil — a universal theme of
the ancient world, found in every other mythology from the Greek to
the Norse or the Assyrian. But European scholarship thought that it
alone could make sense of India’s past, and went on repeating its fanci-
ful reading of the Veda. As a result, it wasted many decades, and Only
recently have some Western scholars started looking deeper. Traut-
mann, for instance, traces the history of those illegitimate extrapola-
tions, and concludes that “the [Dasyus’] image of the ‘dark-skinned sav-
age’ is only imposed on the Vedic evidence with a considerable amount
of text-torturing.” Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, a U.S. archaeologist who
has worked on Indus cities for over twenty years, refers to the “uncriti-
cal and inaccurate readings of the Vedic texts by some scholars.” George
Erdosy, a Canadian scholar, is refreshingly perceptive:
Even apparently clear indications of historical struggles be-
tween dark aborigines and Arya conquerors turn out to be
misleading…. [The Dasas and Dasyus] appear to be de-
monic rather than human enemies…. It is a cosmic Strug-
gle which is described in detailed accounts that are consis-
tent with one another.
Which is exactly what Sri Aurobindo had said eighty years earlier.
Moreover, we are asked to believe that in a few centuries, the Aryans not
only composed the Veda, but conquered North India, “imposed” over
most of the country their culture and literature founded on Sanskrit,
then built up a great civilization from scratch in the Gangetic plains
— quite a stunning development, if we remember that the said Aryans
were said to be semiprimitive, pastoral nomads. Such a simplistic view
overlooks the very meaning of the word *sanskrit,* which is “refined”
or “cultured.” As some early Sanskritists such as William Jones imme-
diately recognized, the Sanskrit language fully deserves its name, and.
such a rich, complex, vibrant tongue could not have reached that stage
in a few centuries — in fact Max Mūller, as we saw, ended up suggesting
5,000 years as the bare minimum! No more could the refined literature
and subtle culture born of Sanskrit have been created by “marauding

32
tribesmen” or “wild, turbulent people” rushing down the Khyber pass
in their horse-drawn war chariots, or by their immediate descendants.
Not only that, the Rig-Veda makes dozens of references to samudra, the
sea or the ocean, which “dearly show a maritime culture,” in the words
of the Vedic scholar David Frawley: ’The image of the ocean permeates
the entire text of the Rig Veda.” Even India’s eastern and western oceans
are clearly mentioned (X. 136.5), SO are ships and shipping. All this
does not fit with invaders from Central Asia, where the sea is unknown.
Expectedly, they also had to play down any significant spiritual content
of the Veda, since that too would have run against the primitiveness
of the imagined invaders. “The earliest religious ideas of the Aryans”
writes Romila Thapar, “were those of a primitive animism where the
forces around them, which they could not control or understand, were
invested with divinity and personified as male or female gods.” How
far we are from the Rishis’ extraordinary conquest of the inner worlds!
“If the modern interpretation stands,” Sri Aurobindo wrote with biting
irony, “the Vedas are no doubt of high interest and value to the philolo-
gist, the anthropologist and the historian; but poetically and spiritually
they are null and worthless. Its reputation for spiritual knowledge and
deep religious wealth, is the most imposing and baseless hoax that has
ever been worked upon the imagination of a whole people throughout
many millenniums. Is this, then, the last word about the Veda? Or is
it not rather the culmination of a long increasing and ever progressing
error?”
An error which today’s inheritors of nineteenth-century scholarship go
on repeating as a gospel truth. Which is not surprising, since the Vedic
Rishis had themselves spelt out the condition on which their hymns
could be understood: “Secret words, seer-wisdoms that utter their inner
meaning to the seer” (Rig-Veda, IV.3.16). And seers our historians do
not try to be.

33
Epic & Puranic Lore

Let us pay a visit to Dwaraka, on the western tip of Saurashtra in Gu-

jarat, the legendary town of Lord Krishna. Legendary? In the 1980s,
underwater explorations off the modern town of Dwarka, conducted by
the National Institute of Oceanography under the direction of archae-
ologist S. R. Rao, brought to light massive walls submerged at a depth
of up to twelve metres, extending as far as 700 metres offshore, with
“important structures Such as fortwalls, gateways, bastions, mooring
station.” This revealed the existence of a major ancient port, with a har-
bour line at least 1,200 metres from the shore. Another submerged port
was found off the nearby island of Bet-Dwarka, which probably served
as one of the gateways to India. Huge stone anchors, pottery, several
stone and iron objects, a few inscriptions in late Harappan script, have
helped date the sites 1700-1600 BC. S. R. Rao has made out a case that
the structures off Dwarka and Bet-Dwarka fit the descriptions given in
the Mahabharata. Thus the Mahabharata story of the submergence of
Sri Krishna’s city can no longer be dismissed as a “myth.”
True, the dates provided do not fit with the traditional time ascribed
to Sri Krishna; let us however venture to suggest that they must be re-
garded as a provisional lower limit, and that fuller exploration and ex-
cavation of the submerged structures, especially the -farthest ones, may
reveal more ancient relics. In any case, even these “recent” dates place
Dwaraka before the supposed arrival of Aryan tribes and therefore of
“Aryan” Krishna. Could this self-inflicted puzzle be the reason why S.
R. Rao’s rediscovery of ancient Dwaraka has not attracted the degree of
attention which that of ancient Troy by Schliemann did?
As far as the Puranas are concerned, many scholars did find in them
a lot of historical substance waiting to be extracted from legend and
many successive additions. Recently, Shrikant Talageri, a young
scholar, found that the joint testimony of the Rigveda and the Puranas
broadly agrees on the “different dynasties ruling in different parts on
northern India … during, and even before, the composition of the
majority of the hymns of the Rig-Veda; and that the movement of

34
these dynasties took place from east to west, and not vice versa.” Other
scholars (including Pargiter whom we mentioned previously) agree
that the Puranas explicitly mention migrations *out of India.*
If, therefore, there is nothing in Sanskrit scriptures in support of an
Aryan invasion of India, there is clearly also a lot that clashes with it.

North-South Kinship

Strangely, it is not just the conquerors who were struck with amnesia
— the conquered too! For South Indian traditions make no mention of
any confrontation with supposed Aryans, followed by a migration from
North to South.
Quite the contrary, one ancient Tamil tradition traces its origins to
a submerged island or continent, *Kumari Kandam,* situated to the
south of India. The Tamil epics *Shilappadikaram* and *Manimekha-
lai* give glorious descriptions of the legendary city and port of Puhar,
which the second text says was swallowed by the sea. As in the case
of Dwaraka, initial findings at and off Poompuhar, at the mouth of the
Cauvery, show that there may well be a historical basis to this legend:
several structures were excavated near the shore, such as brick walls,
water reservoirs, even a wharf, all dated 200-300 bc, and there seem
to be more farther offshore. Only systematic explorations along Tamil
Nadu’s coast, especially at Poompuhar, Mahabalipuram, and around
Kanyakumari (where fishermen have reported submerged structures)
could throw more light on other lost cities, which are probably the ori-
gin of the *Kumari Kondam* legend. In any case, the legend makes it
clear that Tamil tradition knows no origin for the Tamil people except
Southern India.
Not only that, the descriptions of Puhar in the two Epics are full of tem-
ples and gods. The *Shilappadikaram,* the older of the two (between
the second and the fifth century AD), relates the beautiful and tragic
story of Kannagi and Kovalan; it opens with invocations to Chandra,
Surya, and Indra, all of them Vedic Gods, and frequently mentions
Shiva, Subrahmanya, Vishnu and Krishna. When Kovalan and Kannagi

35
are married, they “walk around the holy fire,” a typically Vedic rite still
at the centre of the Hindu wedding; there is also a reference to “Vedic
sacrifices being faultlessly performed.” Welcomed by a tribe of fierce
hunters on their way to Madurai, they witness a striking apparition of
Durga, who is addressed equally as Lakshmi and Sarasvati — the three
Shaktis of the Hindu trinity. There are countless references to legends
from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the Puranas. The Chera
king Shenguttuvan, on his way to the Himalayas in search of a stone for
Kannagi’s idol, worships at two temples, one of Shiva and one of Vishnu;
after battling a few Northern kings and obtaining the stone, he bathes
it in the Ganges — in fact, the Waters of Ganga and those of the Cau-
very were said to be equally sacred. Similar examples could be given
from the *Manimekhalai:* even though it is a mainly Buddhist work, it
also mentions many Vedic and Puranic gods, and attributes the submer-
gence of Puhar to the neglect of a festival to Indra. Without the least
hint of sectarian intolerance, these two epics testify that what we call
today Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism coexisted in perfect harmony:
“The sectarian spirit was totally absent,” writes V. R. Ramachandra Dik-
shitar, who translated the *Shilappadikaram* into English.
The most ancient Sangam literature paints the same picture. The
*Tolkappiyam* refers to Vedic mantras as “the exalted expression of
great sages.” In its well-known fivefold division of the Tamil land
(the five *tinai*), each *tinai* is associated not only with one poetical
mood, but also with one deify: Cheyon (MuruganJf Korravai (Durga),
Mayon (Vishnu-Krishna), Varuna and Ventan (Indra), a fine synthesis
of non-Vedic, Vedic and Puranic gods. The “Eight Anthologies” (Et-
tuttokai) abound in references to many gods: Shiva, Uma, Murugan,
Vishnu, Lakshmi (Tiru) and several other Saktis. The *Paripadal,* for
instance, consists almost entirely of devotional poetry to Vishnu. The
*Purananuru,* whose poems stress human heroism and sentiments
more than religious feelings, still refers to Lord Shiva as the source
of the four Vedas (166) and describes Lord Vishnu as “blue-hued
(174) and”Garuda-bannered” (56). Similarly, a poem (360) of a third
anthology, the *Akananuru,* declares that Shiva and Vishnu are the
greatest of gods. Deities apart, landmarks sacred in the North, such as

36
the Himalayas or Ganga, also become objects of great veneration in
Tamil poetry. India was seen as one entity “from Cape Kumari in the
south, from the great mountain in the north, from the oceans on the
east and on the west….” (Purananuru, 1 7).
As for Tiruvalluvar, the celebrated author of the Kural, some are fond
of describing him as “atheist,” because his aphorisms mostly deal with
ethics, polity and love; yet the very first chapter of ten couplets is an in-
vocation to God: “The ocean of births can be crossed by those who clasp
God’s feet, and none else” (10). The same idea recurs later, for instance
in this profound thought: “Cling to the One who clings to nothing; and
so clinging, cease to cling” (350). The Kural also has references to Bha-
gavan (1), Indra (25), Vishnu’s avatar of Vamana (610), also to Lakshmi
(167, 179, 920). Moreover, it follows the traditional Sanskritic four
objects of human life: *dharma* (*aram* in Tamil), *artha* (*porul*)
*Kama* (*Inbam*) — the last (*moksha*) being only suggested. Far
from being an “atheistic” text, the *Kural* reflects much the same val-
ues we find in the Gita and Other scriptures.
Then we have the tradition that regards Agastya, the great Vedic Rishi,
as the originator of the Tamil language. He is said to have written a
Tamil grammar, Agattiyam, to have presided over the first two Sangams,
and is even now honoured in many temples of Tamil Nadu and wor-
shipped in many homes. The *Shilappadikaram* refers to him as “the
great sage of the Podiyil hill,” and a hill is still today named after him
at the southernmost tip of the Western Ghats. The legend of the birth
of Tamil is both delightful and rich in meaning. Ages ago, people from
the south travelled to the North to attend the wedding of Lord Shiva
and Uma on Mount Kailash; such was the multitude that there were
fears the earth might tilt over. Appeals were made to Lord Shiva, who,
ever compassionate, asked Rishi Agastya to go south: though he was of
small stature, his spiritual power was such that his very presence would
be enough to restore the earth’s balance. Agastya agreed to go with his
wife Lopamudra, but asked Lord Shiva to instruct him first in the mys-
teries of the language of the South. Shiva, placing Agastya to his left and
Panini, another Rishi, to his right, seized a drum and started beating it

37
with his two hands. From the sounds that flowed from the right, Panini
gave shape to Sanskrit, while Agastya turned the sounds from the left
into Tamil. We have here a good example of how tradition might hold
ancient knowledge: is this legend not telling us that Tamil and Sanskrit
flow from the same source? Which is exactly what Sri Aurobindo found
by studying the roots of these two languages.
In historical accounts, we find Chola and Chera kings proudly claim-
ing descent from Lord Rama or from kings of the Lunar dynasty — in
other words, an “Aryan” descent. We are told that the greatest Chola
king, Karikala, Was a patron of both the Vedic religion and Tamil lit-
erature, while the Pandya king Nedunjelyan performed many Vedic
sacrifices, and the dynasty of the Pallavas made their capital Kanchi
into a great centre of Sanskrit learning and culture. The first named
Chera king, Udiyanjeral, is said to have sumptuously fed the armies on
both sides during the Bharata war at Kurukshetra, and such claims were
soon made for Chola and Pandya kings too. An inscription records
that a Pandya king led the elephant force in the Great War on behalf of
the Pandavas, and that early Pandyas translaated the Mahabharata into
Tamil. The archaeologist K. V. Raman, who excavated many sites in
Tamil Nadu, Summarizes the “religious inheritance of the Pandyas” in
these words:
The Pandyan kings were great champions of the Vedic
religion from very early times…. According to the Sinna-
manur plates, one of the early Pandyan kings performed
a thousand *velvi* or yagas [Vedic sacrifices]…. The
Pandyas patronised all the six systems or schools of Hin-
duism…. Their religion was not one of narrow sectarian
nature but broad-based with Vedic roots. They were
free from linguistic or regional bias and took pride in
saying that they considered Tamil and Sanskritic studies
as complementary and equally valuable.
Nowhere in all this do we find any trace of an “Aryan-Dravidian” di-
vide or conflict, or even just rivalry. Several Tamil kings are indeed
said to have fought “Aryan” kings, i.e. from the North (of course, the

38
Tamil Chola, Chera and Pandya kings fought even much more among
themselves!), but there is no hint anywhere of any cultural or religious
clash. Quite the contrary, there is every sign of a deep cultural kinship
between North and South as far as the eye can see into the past. No
doubt, long ago, Vedic culture spread in the South from the North, but
not through any “imposition”: it took place in a natural and peaceful
manner, through assimilation and integration, as everywhere else in
India and beyond.
It is clear, too, that it was not a one-way affair: in exchange, the South
generously gave elements from its own rich temperament and spirit. In
fact, all four Southern States have massively added to every genre of
Sanskrit literature, not to speak of the contributions of a Shankara, a
Ramanuja or a Madhwa. For cultural kinship does not mean that there
is nothing distinctive about South Indian tradition; the Tamil land can
justly be proud of its ancient language, culture and genius, which have
a stamp of their own, as anyone who
browses through Sangam texts can immediately see. But the kinship
highlighted here does mean that those South Indian scholars or politi-
cians who today continue to produce imaginary maps of Dravidian
migrations from the North under the Aryan impact, or to assert that
the ancient Dravidians had “nothing in common with the Indo-Aryan
races of North India” and were “oppressed” by the Aryans, choose to
rely on outdated nineteenth-century European scholarship in complete
disregard of their own tradition — for they cannot quote a single line
from the Sangam works in support of their bitter claims. To them, Cald-
well and his successors alone are acceptable, the whole of Tamil tradi-
tion as well as archaeological evidence must be thrown overboard so
that the colonial task of division may live on! For people who claim
“rationalism” as the basis of their ideology, we have here a remarkable
example of irrational and unscientific narrow-mindedness, which has
caused needless harm to the Tamil psyche and society for the sake of
political gains.
Let us finally note that it is only in Tamil Nadu that this absurd cult
of separateness took root; people from Kerala, Karnataka or Andhra

39
Pradesh have rarely if ever been bothered by a “separate Dravidian iden-
tity.” They feel no guilt about the large share of Sanskrit in their lan-
guages (in Malayalam perhaps more than in others), or the Vedic contri-
bution to their cultures. We may certainly speak of a distinct Tamil cul-
ture, a distinct Malayalam culture, just as we can speak of a distinct Gu-
jarati or Bengali culture. But distinctiveness is not separateness. Each
of those rich regional cultures of India has its own stamp and contribu-
tion, just as the various branches of a single tree have their own indi-
viduality, yet without being “separate”: they cannot live apart from the
tree, and without them the tree would wither away.

Evidence from Archaeology

Invasionists, finding no support in Indian tradition, whether in the

North or South, were quick to take refuge in the usual charge that In-
dians have “no historical sense.” That is where archaeology comes into
the picture, for the simple reason that such a massive event — the inva-
sion and conquest of such a huge region — could not have taken place
without leaving traces on the ground. Let us, then, examine the verdict
of archaeology. In the process, we will also gain some sseful insights
into the dawn of Indian civilization.

The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization

In 1921, Indian archaeologist Daya Ram Sahni carried out the first sys-
tematic excavation of the buried city of Harappa, on the Ravi river. The
next year, his colleague Rakhaldas Banerjee followed suit at Mohenjo-
daro, on the Indus river. It soon became clear that those cities were far
more ancient than anything previously found on Indian soil. So far, In-
dian civilization was thought to begin about the fourth century BC —
suddenly, it was pushed back to the third millennium bc, an “ageing”
of more than 2,000 years!
In the following years, more such sites came to light in the region, re-
vealing not only the

40
extent but also the advanced stage of this civilization, which was called
Indus Valley or Harappan civilization. However, since the highest con-
centration of sites was later found along the dry bed of the Sarasvati
river east of the Indus (we will return to this point later), the more ac-
curate name of “Indus-Sarasvati civilization” is now increasingly used.
With over 2,600 sites discovered so far, we now know that it extended
much farther than initially thought: in the west almost as far as Iran’s
borders, in the north to Turkmenia, Bactria beyond the Hindu Kush
range, the foot of The Pamir mountains in Tadzhikistan, and Kashmir,
In the south all the way to the Narmada and the Godavari, and to
western Uttar Pradesh in the east. The total area was over one million
square kilometres, far larger than contemporary civilizations in Egypt
or Mesopotamia — about one third of modern India!
The Indus-Sarasvati civilization flourished for at least seven centuries,
from 2600 to 1900 BC, during what is called its “mature phase”; this
phase was characterized by urban development, sophisticated metal-
lurgy and other technologies, standardized systems of weights and
measures, writing, external trade, extensive agriculture, and Cultural
integration: that is the time of the great cities, such as Mohenjo-daro
(with 50,000 to 70,000 inhabitants), Harappa, Rakhigarhi in Haryana,
Kalibangan in Rajasthan, or Lothal and Dholavira in Gujarat. Of
course, this mature phase did not appear overnight, and it was pre-
ceded by a long “early Harappan” or “pre-urban” phase during which
villages grew, started interacting, and many technologies (pottery,
metallurgy, farming etc.) appeared, as well as graffiti on pottery pieces,
possibly even the first rudimentary writing; that phase is usually dated
3200-2700 bc, though some archaeologists (such as J. M. Kenoyer)
adopt the dates of 5000-2700 bc. An even earlier phase, when the
first village farming communities and pastoral camps emerged (as
in many other regions of the world) took place from about 7000 bc;
Mehrgarh, for instance, at the foot of the Bolan Pass in the Kachi plain
of Baluchistan, extends over more than 250 hectares, and shows “a
veritable agricultural economy solidly established as early as 6000 BC.”
Taken as a whole, therefore, the Harappan tradition shows over four

41
millennia of unbroken evolution, till the abandonment of the great
cities about 1900 bc. However, according to current thinking among
archaeologists, even that major disruption was not the “end” of this
civilization, as previously thought: it evolved into a “late Harappan”
or “post-urban” phase until 1300 bc (possibly as late as 1000 bc),
providing a transition to the first historical states in the Ganga plains.

Taking Care of Citizens

It was one of the great civilizations of the ancient world. A striking

feature of its mature phase was not monumental architecture or
profuse artistic creation, as in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia, but the
sophistication of its urban development, with town-planning of a level
that would be found only 2,000 years later in Europe. Geometrically
designed in a “grid-iron” pattern, oriented according to the cardinal
points, the cities had fortifications, several distinct zones, assembly
halls and manufacturing units of various types, including -furnaces for
the production of tools, weapons or ornaments made of copper and
bronze. Public baths (probably often part of temples), private baths
for most inhabitants, sewerage through underground drains built with
precisely laid bricks, and an efficient system of water management
with numerous wells and reservoirs testify to the care that was taken
of the ordinary inhabitant. Mohenjo-daro, for instance, probably had
over 700 wells, some of them fifteen metres deep, built with special
trapezoid bricks (to prevent collapse by the pressure of the surrounding
soil), and maintained for several centuries; quite a few of those wells
were found in private houses. Dholavira had separate drains to collect
rain water and six or seven dams built across nearby streams (apart
from several large reservoirs located in the lower town). “The fact
that even smaller towns and villages had impressive drainage systems”
remarks Kenoyer, “indicates that removing polluted water and sewage
was an important part of the daily concerns of the Indus people.”
The houses were generally built with mud bricks (often fired in kilns),
of different sizes, but with a generally fixed ratio of 4:2:1 . Walls were on

42
average 70 cm thick, and many houses were two storeys high or more. A
few houses, perhaps those of rulers or wealthy traders, were particularly
large, with up to seven rooms. A number of big buildings, such as that
around Mohenjo-daro’s “Great Bath,” seem to have served a community
purpose. Dholavira, in Kutch, even boasts a large maidon; apart from
standardized bricks, stones were also used there on a large scale, un-
dressed as well as dressed (the dressing was done only with hardened
bronze tools, since iron was not yet in use). Dholavira’s fortification
walls were more than ten metres thick in places!
All this made the British archaeologist John Marshall, who took charge
of the excavations at Mohenjo-daro, remark in wonder:
There is nothing that we know of in pre-historic Egypt or
Mesopotamia or anywhere else in Western Asia to compare
with the well-built baths and commodious houses of the cit-
izens of Mohenjo-daro. In those countries, much money
and thought were lavished on the building of magnificent
temples for the gods and on the palaces and tombs of kings,
but the rest of the people seemingly had to content them-
selves with insignificant dwellings of mud. In the Indus
Valley, the picture is reversed and the finest structures are
those erected for the convenience of the citizen’s.

A Prosperous Civilization

We have evidence of considerable internal trade in metals (such as cop-

per, tin, gold and silver), semiprecious stones, food items and timber,
etc. In addition, the Indus-Sarasvati civilization enjoyed a flourishing
overseas trade with Oman, Bahrain, and Sumer; exchanges with the
Sumerians went on for some seven centuries, with merchant colonies
established in Bahrain and the Euphrates-Tigris valley 2,500 kilometres
away. Of course, this required high skills in ship-making and sailing,
based on some knowledge of the stars and constellations. A few repre-
sentations of ships have been found on Indus seals, while dozens of mas-
sive stone anchors have come up at Lothal and other sites of Saurashtra

43
and Kutch.
As regards the crafts that produced the materials exported, the Harap-
pans made beads of cornelian, agate, amethyst, turquoise, lapis lazuli,
etc.; they manufactured bangles out of shells, glazed faience and terra-
cotta; they carved ivory and worked shells into
ornaments, bowls and ladles; they cast copper (which they mined them-
selves in Baluchistan and Rajasthan) and bronze for weapons, tools, do-
mestic objects and statues (such as the famous “dancing girl”); they also
worked silver and gold with great skill, specially for ornaments. In fact,
jewellery was perhaps the chief item of export, as Harappan beads were
much to the liking of Mesopotamian princesses.
The Harappans also baked pottery in large quantity — to the delight of
archaeologists, since the different shapes, styles, and painted motifs are
among their best guides in the material evolution of civilizations (let
us remember that most objects made of cloth, wood, reed, palm leaves
etc., usually vanish without a trace, especially in hot tropical climates).
We also know that they excelled at Stone-carving, complex weaving and
carpet-making, inlaid woodwork and decorative architecture.
And, of course, the Harappans engraved with remarkable artistry their
famous seals, mostly in steatite (soapstone); those seals, over 3,500 of
which have been found, seem to have served various purposes: for iden-
tifying commercial consignments to be shipped, but also a ritual or
spiritual purpose, perhaps to invoke deities and their protection. (To
be hard enough to give repeated impressions on soft clay, the engraved
seals were fired for several days in kilns that reached the temperature
of 1000° C.) The development of all these crafts was enhanced by stan-
dardized tools and techniques, also by an advanced system of units of
lengths and weights, which makes partial use of a decimal system — in
fact the Harappans seem to have been among the first to have thought
of a decimal system, which we find also used in house and street pro-
portions.
Dancing, painting, sculpture, and music (there is. evidence of drums
and of stringed instruments) were part of Harappan culture. Probably

44
drama and puppet shows too, as a number of masks were found. The
Harappans may also have been the inventors of an ancestor of the game
of chess, of which one terracotta set was found at Lothal. Other kinds
of gaming boards and pieces have come up at many sites, as well as cu-
bical dice identical to those used today. Children do not seem to have
been neglected, judging from the exquisite care with which craftsmen
fashioned toy oxcarts and figurines, spinning tops, marbles, rattles and
whistles. And they could also amuse themselves with pet dogs and mon-
keys, possibly pet squirrels and birds too.
Naturally, with hundreds of rural settlements, agriculture was practised
on a wide scale, the result of a long tradition going back four millen-
nia. There is evidence of carefully shaped ploughs and ingenious till-
ing methods. at Kalibangan, for instance, excavations revealed a field
ploughed with two perpendicular networks of furrows, allowing two
crops of different height to be grown at the same time. (As the archae-
ologist B. B. Lal has shown, this technique is still used today in the same
region.) In the Indus valley, wheat, barley, pulses, a number of vegeta-
bles, and cotton were some of the common crops, and were planted
following the two-season pattern still in use today (*rabi* or winter,
*kharif* or summer); in Gujarat, rice and vaiious millets were grown,
too. The Harappans hunted wild animals, but they also started domes-
ticating cattle (including the majestic humped bull depicted on many
seals), sheep, goats and pigs from about 5000 BC.
A central pillar of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization was an efficient ad-
ministration ensuring that the society remained well-knit.
S. R. Rao notes:
The Harappans were a highly disciplined people conscious
of their civic duties, which explains the meticulous care
taken to keep the cities clean. No encroachment of streets
is seen tor over 500 years at Lothal in spite of the fact
that the houses had to be rebuilt several times after the
havoc wrought by floods…. The story of the rise and
decline of the Indus Civilization is an epitome of man’s
struggle for Conquering nature and building an integrated

45
 peace-loving and prosperous society. In this struggle the
Harappans ’seem to have succeeded to a large extent.
But who exactly ruled this civilization, and how, remains a deep mys-
tery to this day. Some archaeologists have spoken Of a “Harappan state,”
or even a “Harappan empire,” with Mohenjo-daro as its capital,-others,
arguing that a single central authority could not have ruled over such
vast distances, favour a sort of federation of regional states. B. B. Lal,
for instance, thinks it might have been similar to the sixteen states or
*Mahajanapadas* ( India’s “republics”) which flourished from the sixth
century bc in the Ganges valley. Quite possible, if we note the sur-
prising lack of glorification or even representation of ruiers on seals
or sculptures. Kenoyer, who argues for a similar model of “city-states,”
notes: “The Indus rulers appear to have governed their cities through
the control of trade and religion, rather than with military might. No
monuments were erected to glorify their power, and no depictions of
warfare or conquered enemies are found in the entire corpus of Indus
art or sculpture.” This is in sharp contrast to contemporary civilizations
in Egypt or Mesopotamia, where pharaohs and kings were glorified and
widely depicted in art pieces.
Whether an empire, a federation or a loose association of city-states,
each of its different regions or states of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization
had an identity of its own, as we can see from regional variations in
arts, crafts, etc. Yet they were all united by a common culture and a
common script, possibly a common language, regardless of regional di-
alects. That was no mean achievement, and a clear hallmark of the In-
dian genius, which prefers assimilation and integration to rivalry and
conflict, and cultural to military conquest. The Indian archaeologist D.
P. Agrawal, puts it this way:
In a third millennium context, when communication and
transport must have been difficult, the credit for unifying
the north and west of the subcontinent goes to the Harap-
pans. They were the first to achieve this unification of a
society with so much diversity.
Kenoyer’s reference above to the invisibility of “military might” brings

46
us to another unique feature of the Harappan world: archaeologists,
used in most other civilizations to glorious depictions of warfare and
conquest, were struck here by a complete absence of any such evidence
— no trace of armies or armed conflict or slaughter or man-made
destruction in any settlement and at any point of time, even as regards
the early phase. Not a single seal or |ar depicts a battle or a captive or
a victor. True, there were massive fortifications, but probably to guard
against local tribes or marauders, and as protections against floods
(Mohenjo-daro, for instance, has a long history of repeated floods). So
far as we can trust the archaeological record, major disruptions in the
Cities life were caused by natural calamities. In no other civilization
(and especially not in ours!) is warfare so absent, and over such a long
period of time.
If this picture of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization appears too rosy, we
must remember that it is still very incomplete: no more than three per
cent of all the sites enumerated so far have been substantially excavated
— this leaves 97% of them buried with their secrets, including a few gi-
ant sites. It is clear that our understanding of this civilization is still in its
“early phase”; yet it is enough to make our modern boasts of “progress”
sound somewhat hollow.

A Comedy of Errors

The discovery of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa started a virtual comedy

of errors. At first, all the archaeologists and historians who had
accepted the invasion theory concluded that this civilization was
“pre-Aryan,” and therefore pre-Vedic, since it was clearly more ancient
than the supposed arrival of the Aryans in India (1500 bc). To make
it fit-with the invasion paradigm, they also assumed that its creators
must have been Dravidians; then they declared that skeletons found at
Mohenjo-daro and Harappa provided evidence of the slaughters com-
mitted by the advancing Aryans — “Indra stands accused,” declared
the famous British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, Indra being, of
course, the chief of the “Aryan” gods.

47
Thus one more myth was born, that of the bloody end of the Dravido-
Harappan civilization at the hands of the fierce Aryans! But it was
shabby archaeology: U.S. archaeologist George P. Dales proved in 1964
that the owners of The said skeletons had lived in different periods;
moreover, neither weapons nor any signs of war were found at the sup-
posed sites of the “mythical massacre,” as he called it: “Despite the ex-
tensive excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single
bit of evidence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an
armed conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan
invasion.
The discovery of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa started a virtual comedy
of errors. At first, all the archaeologists and historians who had ac-
cepted the invasion theory concluded that this civilization was “pre-
Aryan,” and therefore pre-Vedic, since it was clearly more ancient than
the supposed arrival of the Aryans in India (1500 bc). To make it fit with
the invasion paradigm, they also assumed that its creators must have
been Dravidians; then they declared that skeletons found at Mohenjo-
daro and Harappa provided evidence of the slaughters committed by
the advancing Aryans — “Indra stands accused” declared the famous
British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, Indra being, of course, the
chief of the “Aryan” gods.
Thus one more myth was born, that of the bloody end of the Dravido-
Harappan civilization at the hands of fierce Aryans! But it was shabby
archaeology: U.S. archaeologist George F. Dales proved in 1964 that
the owners of the said skeletons had lived in different periods; more-
over, neither weapons nor any signs of war were found at the supposed
sites of the “mythical massacre,” as he called it: “Despite the extensive
excavations at the largest Harappan sites, there is not a single bit of ev-
idence that can be brought forth as unconditional proof of an armed
conquest and the destruction on the supposed scale of the Aryan inva-
sion.” Finally, U.S. anthropologist K. A. R. Kennedy (whom we shall
meet again in the next chapter) showed that the supposed injuries left
on the bones of some skeletons had actually healed well before death.
As a result, “the destruction of the Indus cities by invading tribes of

48
Aryans,” says U.S. archaeologist Richard H. Meadow, “has long since
been discounted by serious scholars” (though some of our textbooks
still swear by it). Poor Indra must have heaved a heavenly sigh of relief!
Not just humans, there has been an intense debate about horse bones
found in the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. The Rig-Veda has many ref-
erences to the noble animal, a symbol of swiftness and power, also to
horse-drawn chariots; for that reason, the horse was assumed to have
been brought into India by the invading Aryan hordes. That was how
some scholars explained the ease with which the Aryans conquered the
Harappans, who were said not to know the horse. Here again, a hurried
conclusion was erected on this supposed “negative evidence,” which
turned out to be faulty, since a number of horse teeth and bones have
been reported from Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Kalibangan, Ropar, Mal-
van, Kuntasi, Shikarpur, Surkotada, Lothal…. In the last case, the In-
dian archaeozoologist Bhola Nath certified the identification of a tooth.
A. K. Sharma’s observations at Surkotada (in Kutch) were endorsed by
the late Hungarian archaeozoologist Sandor Bokonyi, an authority in
the field; in 1991 he examined bones and teeth found there and con-
firmed at least six of them to be “remnants of true horses [Equus ca-
ballus].” Not only that, Bokonyi found signs that the animal was do-
mesticated. (Let alone the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, evidence of the
horse in India is found even in earlier times, e.g. at Neolithic sites such
as Koldihwa in the Belan valley of Allahabad district, and Mahagara in
the Ganga valley, where horse fossils were identified by G. R. Sharma
and his multinational team.)
We find a few depictions of the horse Harappan artefacts (though none
on the seals): some rather rough figurines from Mohenjo-daro, one
from Balu with what appears to be a saddle, another from Lothal, and
a knight chessman also from Lothal. There are also representations
of wheels with spokes (for instance at Kalibangan and Rakhigarhi).
Clearly, both the horse and the spoked wheel were part of the Indus-
Sarasvati civilization; they did not come into India with the imaginary
Aryans.

49
Signs of Invasion?

Such attempts to show that Harappan culture was “non-Aryan” have

confused the real issue: Aryan hordes invading North India would have
made their way through the Khyber pass (or some other pass, such as
the Bolan) into the vast Indus plains below, which is the territory the
Indus-Sarasvati civilization occupied; bringing with them a very differ-
ent culture, and numbers sufficient to swamp the Harappans or their
descendants, their arrival would necessarily have left visible signs, at the
very least sudden disruptions in the local cultures. So what do we find
on the ground? Nothing. Not a single finding in the Indus-Sarasvati
region can be associated with the arrival of an Aryan people (or any
other people, for that matter) — neither pottery nor utensils nor tools
nor weapons nor graves nor any form of art. Oddly, the “invaders” have
left no trace of their coming. The Aryans gave rise to thick speculative
tomes, filled countless pages in history books in which they were said
to have brought about an abrupt shift in India’s prehistory — and they
did not even have the courtesy to leave behind the smallest potsherd!
On this one point, at least, there is complete unanimity. We quoted
above Dales’s “not a single bit of evidence”; here is now a conclusion
drawn in 1998 by one of his younger collaborators, J. M. Kenoyer, who
is still pursuing excavations at Harappa:
There is no archaeological or biological evidence for inva-
sions or mass migrations into the Indus Valley between the
end of the Harappan Phase, about 1900 B.C. and the begin-
ning of the Early Historic period around 600 B.C.

Could anything be clearer?

In a 1984 article entitled “Indo-Aryan Invasions: Myth or Reality?”,

Jim G. Shaffer, another U.S. archaeologist with first-hand experience of
Harappan sites, demolished the invasion framework. His conclusion as
regards the archaeological record was:

50
 Current archaeological data do not support the existence of
an Indo-Aryan or European invasion into South Asia any
time in the pre-or protohistoric periods.
J. F. Jarrige, a French archaeologist who has led excavations at
Mehrgarh, Nausharo and Pirak, three crucial sites in Baluchistan,
examined some of the important changes that took place at the end
of the mature phase in the Indus valley, especially in the field of
agriculture; he found that none of those transformations “can be
explained in the context of invasions of semi-nomadic peoples coming
from the [Central Asian] steppes…. Nothing, in the present state
of archaeological research … enables us to reconstruct convincingly
invasions thpt could be clearly attributed To Aryan groups.”
Many Indian archaeologists share those views. For instance, S. R. Rao:
“There is no indication of any invasion of Indus towns nor is any artefact
attributable to the so-called ‘invaders’.” Or again B. B. Lal: “The sup-
porters of the Aryan-invasion theory have not been able to cite even a
single example where there is evidence of ‘invaders,’ represented either
by weapons of warfare or even of cultural remains left by them.” Simi-
lar assertions could be quoted from other noted archaeologists such as
(alphabetically) Madhav Acharya, R. S. Bisht, Dilip K. Chakrabarti, M.
K. Dhavalikar, S. P. Gupta, Jagat Pati Joshi, V. N. Misra, A. M. Shastri,
K. M. Srivastava, V. S. Wakankar, among others.
Despite this remarkable agreement, a few scholars have opted to stick to
the invasion construct, partly as a convenient explanation of the linguis-
tic kinship between Sanskrit and Indo-European languages, and partly
because it is not easy to dismantle a whole structure accepted as gospel
truth for a lifetime. But to account for its absence of evidence, they
have toned down the old invasion, which now becomes a mere “migra-
tion” of “small bands” of Indo-Aryans, in a “series of waves” etc. This
dilution is, in reality, nothing but a tacit confession of failure. With
a touch of irony, Jarrige remarks: “Phoenix-like, the theory of the in-
vaders, preferably Indo-Europeans, always rises from its ashes” Thus
respected “old-schoo!” archaeologists such as Raymond and Bridget
Allchin now admit that the arrival of Indo-Aryans in Northwest India

51
is “scarcely attested in the archaeological record, presumably because
their material culture and life-style were already virtually indistinguish-
able from those of the existing population.” What a contrast with the
textbook depiction of the invading Aryans whose culture A. L. Basham
declared to be “diametrically opposed to its [Harappan] predecessor”!
Dear invasionists, have pity on us: was the invaders’ culture “diametri-
cally opposed to,” or “virtually indistinguishable from,” Harappan cul-
ture? It cannot be both!

Cultural Background

After disposing of all this “negative” evidence, it is time to take a closer

look at the real nature of the cultural backdrop of the Indus-Sarasvati
civilization. Prom the names of rivers listed in the Rig-Veda, we know
that the Vedic people lived in the same region as the Harappans did.
What evidence, then, do we have to connect those two cultures, and
thus pull them out of their prehistoric mists?
First, the Rig-Veda contains not only numerous references to ships and
navigation, as we already saw, but also to stockbreeding, agriculture,
cities, trade (both inland and overseas), and industry — in other words,
a civilized society long established on the land. Even an invasionist
scholar such as B. K. Ghosh was forced to observe in 1958 that “the
Rgveda clearly reflects the picture of a highly complex society in the
full blaze of civilisation.” This in itself is as consistent with the Indus-
Sarasvati civilization as it is inconsistent with pastoral nomads just
arrived from Central Asia. The “pastoral” and “animist” society which
nineteenth-century scholars extracted from the Veda existed only in
their imagination; the Vedic society was clearly much more advanced,
as any objective reading of the Rig-Vedic samhita makes dear. R. S.
Bisht, for instance, the excavator of the large site of Dholavira in Kutch,
finds three distinct areas “designated tentatively as ‘citadel’, ‘middle
town’ and ‘lower town’ which temptingly sound analogous to three
interesting terms in the Rig-Veda, viz., *‘parama’,* *‘madhyama’*and
*‘avama’*….” To him, therefore, Dholavira is “a virtual reality of what

52
the Rig-Veda, the world’s oldest literary record, describes.”
One of the best known seals depicts the so-called Pasupati (“Lord of the
beasts”), the awe-inspiring three-faced deity sitting in a yogic posture,
with a headdress of wide buffalo horns in the general shape of a trishul
(trident), surrounded by a buffalo, a rhinoceros, an elephant and a tiger,
and two antelopes beneath his throne, with an obvious symbolism of
mastery; the yogic posture apart, the triple face is striking and reminis-
cent of Rig-Vedic Agni, also described as triple-headed (e.g. 1.146.1).
Evidence of worship of a Mother Goddess too is in line with the Rig-
Veda, in which goddesses such as Usha, Sarasvati, Aditi, Prithwi, etc.,
are prominently revered. We find on one tablet a figure slaying a buf-
falo, reminiscent of Durga as Mahishamardini, while the same horned
deity looks on. And of course, numerous seals depict a magnificent bull,
a symbol of Agni and Indra (among others) in the Veda. As for the ma-
jestic Unicorn, found on hundreds of seals, and the mysterious three-
headed creature, they are mentioned in the Mahabharata as aspects of
Krishna, as N. Jha, a Vedic scholar, has shown: “I was called *ekasringa*
(‘one-horned’) … I am renowned also as *trikakut* (‘with three body
parts’)” (Shanti Parva, 330.27, 28). Even the key Vedic theme of the
marriage of Heaven and Earth is dearly depicted on a seal (where a bull
mates with a woman from whose head a plant emerges), as the Allchins
themselves concede.
By themselves, therefore, the Indus seals are, at the very least, suggestive
of Vedic symbolism. But that is not all. Apart from Indus seals depict-
ing deities seated or standing in yogic postures, we find a number of
figurines in various yoga asanas (such as at Lothal), all of which makes
clear that yoga was an integral part of Harappan culture. On one Seal,
a yogi is seen taming a tiger. The famous stone statue of a “priest-king”
found at Mohenjo-daro shows him in deep meditation, eyes half-closed
— an attitude natural to a yogi or a rishi. Yoga, therefore, was an impor-
tant Harappan tradition, just as it is the central pillar of the Vedic quest.
We find, too, fire and sacrificial altars, at Kalibangan and Banawali in
the east or Lothal in the west, with fire altars often in individual homes;
this evidence is crucial, because fire worship is an essential element of

53
Vedic rituals, with the Rig-Veda containing hundreds of hymns to Agni,
the divine Fire. And sacrifice, of different kinds, is of course present
throughout the Veda. Lingam worship, too, is found at a few places,
such as Harappa and Kalibangan, making another important connec-
tion with later Hinduism. So too with ritual bathing for purification,
clearly evidenced by Mohenjo-daro’s Great Bath.
Ritual oil lamps (deep) were used, as is clear from soot found in the
cups forming part of the headdress of several mother-goddess figurines
(such as the one p.???). Other female figurines show marks of vermilion
at the parting of the hair, a custom Hindu married women still practice
today. Indeed, quite a few symbols central to later Indian culture, such
as the trishul or the swastika, the conch (used both to pour libations and
as a trumpet), the pipal tree or the endless-knot design, are common
Indus-Sarasvati features.
To describe Harappan culture as “non-Aryan” as the invasionists used
to do, is clearly absurd. The above examples (more could be cited) are
enough to show at least a strong connection between the Harappan and
the Vedic worlds.
Naturally, conclusive proof of the Vedic nature of the Indus-Sarasvati
Civilization will come only when the mysterious Indus script is finally
deciphered. Let us just mention here that well over a hundred scholars
have claimed to have cracked it, but that no two of them, agree with
each other! So far, no decipherment has been accepted unanimously
or even widely. That is due to the brevity of the inscriptions (most have
only a few signs, sometimes even just one, while the longest has 26). An-
other reason is the absence of any multilingual inscription, such as the
Rosetta stone which gave Champollion the clue to the Egyptian hiero-
glyphics. Some of the attempts have claimed to read “proto-Dravidian”
on the Indus seals, others Vedic Sanskrit or yet other languages, but we
will have to wait till much longer inscriptions, or a bilingual one, come
to light. The day the script yields its secret, not only win we have a
clearer picture of the Harappan culture, we will also know whether or
not the Indus script has any connection with the later Brahmi script of
historical times.

54
The Mighty Sarasvati

One point, however, does offer conclusive proof. In a number of its

hymns, the Rig-Veda lavishly honours the river Sarasvati: she is “great
among the great, mightiest of rivers” (Vl.61.13), “surpassing in majesty
and might all other waters” (Vll.95.1), with a “limitless unbroken flow,
swift-moving with a rapid rush and a tempestuous roar’‘(VI.61.8).
(Note the’ word”unbroken,” to which we will return.) The lost river has
been found again — rather its long dried-up bed, traced since the late
nineteenth century by numerous archaeologists and geologists, and
confirmed since the 1970s by satellite photography. It flowed down
from the Siwalik Hills at the foot of the Himalayas, touched the plains
near Ambala in Punjab, flowed through the Ghaggar valley in Haryana
and Rajasthan, and its continuation called Hakra in Pakistan’s desert
of Cholistan, in a course roughly parallel to the Indus, finally reaching
the upper Rann of Kutch through the Nara valley. There, it emptied
into the Arabian sea through a huge delta which extended from the
present delta of the Indus possibly to that of the Narmada.
It was indeed a mighty river: the Ghaggar valley is eight kilometres wide
on average, twelve in places. The Sarasvati system seems to have been
fed by the millennial melting of the icecaps and glaciers accumulated
in the Himalayas during the last Ice Age, which ended about 10000
BC. The river changed course several times owing to floods, but also
to earthquakes, which, according to most experts, diverted the Saras-
vati waters partly to the Sutleg in the west, and to the Yamuna in the
east. Evidence of strong seismic activity has in fact been found at sev-
eral Harappan sites in the region (Kalibangan, for instance). There are
also signs of an “abrupt climatic change” and prolonged drought (2200-
1900 bc) in the whole of West and South Asia, which must have con-
tributed to the Sarasvati’s break-up into several segments and its final
drying up around 2000-1900 bc. Interestingly, a 1995 study conducted
by the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (Barc) in parts of Rajasthan
found that even in extreme desert conditions, water remains available
at a depth of fifty to sixty metres along one course of the “defunct river”
in the north-western part of the Jaisalmer district, and that the area

55
supports vegetation even during the torrid Rajasthani summer. Radio-
carbon measurements showed that no modern recharge of the aquifer
is discernible, and found water samples to be “a few thousand years
old” The scientists conclude, “Freshwater, high lake level conditions
prevailed until about 2000 BC,” in agreement with earlier findings from
archaeology and geology.
It is noteworthy that from the nineteenth century onward, what first
guided archaeologists in their quest for the “lost Sarasvati” was not only
its description in the Rig-Veda (whose Nadi Sukto, as we saw, locates
the river precisely between the Yamuna and the Sutlej), but also local
tradition, especially that which still identifies with the lost Vedic river
today’s small and now seasonal Sarasvati in Haryana and Punjab, which
joins with the Ghaggar. This is all the more remarkable as this tradition
has been carried for no less than 4,000 years — for a people “devoid
of historical sense,”the Indians have done pretty well“. Moreover, - we
find in the Rig-Veda, the Mahabharata and several Puranas hints to the
river’s location (in the form of holy places), its physical characteristics,
even the stages of its drying: for instance, the Rig-Veda says the great
river flowed”from the mountain to the ocean” (VII.95.2), while the Ma-
habharata describes it as “disappearing into the desert” (3.80.118) or
even “lost” (9.36.1), which suggests it had lost the Yamuna and the Sut-
lej by then.
As a matter of fact, archaeologists did not just discover a dry bed: they
found well over 1,500 Harappan sites of all sizes along its course and
tributaries, against fewer than 200 along the Indus. Among the better
known sites along the Sarasvati we find, moving downstream, Bhagwan-
pura, Kunal, Banawali, Kalibangan, Ganweriwala. The Allchins, for in-
stance, note that it was for them “a most moving experience to stand on
the mound at Kalibangan, and to see still preserved in the modern crop-
ping the area of the flood plain of the Sarasvati still clearly visible.” The
sheer density of sites in the Sarasvati valley shows the inadequacy of the
old name of “Indus Valley civilization.” After independence, hundreds
of sites were found in Indian Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan, while
in Pakistan’s Cholistan desert alone, the Pakistani archaeologist M. R.

56
Mughal counted over 400 sites!
The presence of so many settlements along the Sarasvati provides the
clearest proof of the Vedic nature of the Harappan civilization. The ar-
chaeologist Dilip K. Chakrabarti, for example, notes: “The location of
the epicentre of the Indus civilization in the Saraswati-Drishadvati sys-
tem is, according to us, a definite indication that this civilization was
Speaking an early form of Sanskrit.”
In effect, the rediscovery of the Sarasvati deals a death-blow to the in-
vasion theory. Who will believe that the Aryans entered India around
1500 bc, crossed up to six great rivers — the Indus and all its tributaries
— only to settle down on the banks of a river that had gone dry five hun-
dred years earlier, and went on to worship this dry bed as the “best of
mothers, best of rivers, best of goddesses” (II.41.16)? It is clear that the
Vedic people who sang hymns in praise of the Sarasvati lived along its
banks while it was in full flow (“unbroken,” “flowing from the moun-
tains to the ocean”). This is a point Western archaeologists, though
agreeing that the Ghaggar-Hakra was the Sarasvati, are beginning to
accept. Kenoyer, for instance writes:
In the east, the ancient Saraswati (or Ghaggar-Hakra) river
ran parallel to the Indus…. Towards the end of the Indus
Valley civilization, the ancient Saraswati had totally dried
up…. Many episodes of the Rig-Veda take place along the
sacred Saraswati.
This is indeed the now accepted view, and we should therefore expect
to be informed that the Rig-Vedic people and the Harappans were the
same — the only logical conclusion if the Veda’s episodes “take place
along the sacred Saraswati” which “totally dried up towards the end of
the Indus Valley civilization.” Only one civilization has been found on
the banks of the Sarasvati, not two. Kenoyer is understandably cautious
in challenging Indologists in their own field, and does not conclude. Yet
it is plain that the composers of the Rig-Vedic hymns must have been
there while the Sarasvati was “unbroken,” not in the process of drying —
and that may take us back to 2500-3000 bc, according to archaeological
and geological data.

57
Unless we are prepared to maintain that the Vedic Rishis talked non-
sense, knew nothing of their own geography, and, just to mislead us,
located an “unbroken Sarasvati” precisely where a dry bed dotted with
hundreds of Harappan sites has been found, the equation “Rig-Vedic
people = Sarasvati in full flow Harappan times” is inescapable.

Cultural Continuity

“It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Val-
ley civilization,” observed Renfrew, merely stating the obvious.
Indeed all evidence, whether cultural or geological, points to a culture
rooted in the Veda. This is a view now shared by many Indian archae-
ologists; we heard S. R. Rao, R. S. Bisht and D. K. Chakrabarti above,
and among others we could add S. P. Gupta: “Our analysis shows that
… the Indus-Saraswati civilization reflects the Vedic literature.”
It is therefore time to do away with the so-called “Vedic night” which
was first thought to have followed the Indus-Sarasvati civilization and
the arrival of the Aryans — a “dark age” between two bright civiliza-
tions, which appeared to fit the supposed primitiveness of the supposed
Aryans.
But that notion is, again, rejected by archaeological evidence, which
year after year has been steadily filling the gap. Archaeologists now
agree that the end of the urban phase of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization
was caused by a combination of factors (exactly in what proportion is
still being debated): seismic activity which shifted the course of sev-
eral rivers, the drying up of the Sarasvati, floods in the Indus, possibly
severe ecological imbalance apparently caused by deforestation. “Eco-
logical stresses, caused both climatically and tectonically, played an im-
portant role in the life and decay of the Harappan civilization,” write D.
P. Agrawal and R. K. Sood. All these, coupled with a collapse of the
foreign trade, contributed to the decline of the Indus-Sarasvati civiliza-
tion. It was not as cataclysmic as previously assumed but spread over a
few centuries.

58
While most cities were abandoned, life continued uninterrupted in the
villages; some of the “late Harappans” moved eastward towards the Ya-
muna and the Ganges. As the archaeologist and discoverer of hundreds
of sites, J. P. Joshi, remarked, “the increase in frequency of sites while
moving from the west to the east” establishes the “eastward movement
of the late Harappans in Punjab, Haryana and western U.P.
We have therefore a clear *physical* continuity with the Ganges civiliza-
tion, which started about 800 BC (although some sites go back 1200 bc).
In Shaffer’s words, “the previous concept of a ‘Dark Age’ in South Asian
archaeology is no longer valid.” “It is clear that this period of more than
700 years [between 1900 and 1200 bc] was not a chaotic ‘Dark Age’, but
rather a time of reorganization and expansion,” adds Kenoyer, who sees
between those two civilizations “no significant break or hiatus.”
Quite naturally, therefore, we find a Continuity with the historical pe-
riod, which inherited from the Indus-Sarasvati civilization the system
Of city-states, much of its technology (metallurgy in particular), its wa-
ter management and agricultural techniques, standardized weights and
lengths, chess and other games, etc. In fact, the continuity extends even
to today’s Indian rural life: some agricultural or building techniques
still in use can be traced all the way to the Harappan times (as Lai has
shown at Kalibangan and Jarrige at Pirak), so too with regards to many
crafts and technologies, even folk stories found on Harappan pottery.
Thus, the long journey through time of Indian civilization, at least as
far as archaeology tells us, began about 7000 BC: Mehrgarh shows (as
would certainly other yet unexplored Neolithic sites) a continuous se-
quence of cultures spanning some 4,000 years and leading to the “ma-
ture” Harappan civilization, with no break or disruption from outside,
the journey continues through the brilliant Indus-Sarasvati civilization,
is jolted when its urban structure collapses, but goes On nonetheless,
preserving the Vedic culture based on yoga which was evolved on the
banks of the Sarasvati in the land of the “seven rivers” until conditions
become ripe for a new urban development in the Gangetic plains. Noth-
ing has been dug out of nine-thousand-year-old soil that shows a break
with Vedic Culture as it still exists in India under its present form of

59
Hinduism.
Even Marshall, who accepted the Aryan invasion theory wholesale like
almost everyone else in his time, could not help observing;
Taken as a whole, their [the Indus Valley people’s] religion is so
characteristically Indian as *hardly to be distinguished from still living
Hinduism….* One thing that ‘stands out both at Mohenjo-daro and
Harappa is that the civilization hitherto revealed at these two places is
not an incipient civilization, but one already age-old and stereotyped
on Indian soil, with many millennia of human endeavour behind it.
Millennia behind it, millennia after it. A cultural continuity without
parallel anywhere else in the world.

Of Skeletons and Tongues

We have seen that there are no traces in Indian tradition as well as in

archaeology of any “Aryans” entering India. But there are other sides
to the “Aryan problem”: genetics, linguistics, ancient astronomy, math-
ematics, metallurgy, the study of ancient flora and fauna, all have their
say in the matter. We will take a brief look at a few of them.

Race and Genetics

As we have already stressed a few times, the very concept of race is now
outdated. Says the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1998): “The designation
‘race’ has been applied to language groups (the Aryan race), national
groups (the Scottish race), religious groups (the Jewish race), and the
entire species of humans (the human race), but these usages are biolog-
ically and scientifically meaningless.” Or to quote from Possehl:
*Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries has been totally discredited os a useful con-
cept in human biology…. There is no reason to believe
today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-
European languages and was possessed with a coherent

60
 and well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural
features.*
S. P. Gupta is therefore perfectly justified in asserting, ‘There was neither
an Aryan race nor a Dravidan Race. The concept of ’race’ itself is a
myth.”
A thousand pities that our textbook writers, often many decades behind
the times, do not hear such healthy statements. But then, one may ask,
if race has no meaning, are there no physiological differences between
Asians and Europeans or Africans, for instance? Of course there are,
but in ways too diverse and complex to be defined; today, biologists
and anthropologists speak of “biological groupings” or “human types.”
U.S. anthropologist K. A. R. Kennedy, who made detailed examinations
of skeletons at many Harappan sites, confesses, tongue in cheek, his
“appalling state of ignorance” at what an Aryan skeleton might look like!
More seriously, he asks, “How could one recognize an Aryan, living
or dead, when the biological criteria for Aryanness are non-existent?”
Kennedy’s conclusions are categorical:
Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support
to any of the theories concerning an Aryan biological or
demographic entity…. What the biological data demon-
strate is that no exotic races are apparent from laboratory
studies of human remains excavated from any archaeolog-
ical sites…. In short, there is no evidence of demographic
disruptions in the north western sector of the subcontinent
during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan
culture.
“No exotic races,” “no demographic disruptions” means no intrusion
from outside, no invasion or large-scale migration into India — by
“Aryans” or anyone else. Kennedy, referring to a “biological contin-
uum [… with] the modern populations of Punjab and Sind,” thus
endorses earlier skeletal studies by Indian experts, who had found little
difference between Harappan skeletons and present-day populations
in those regions (also in Gujarat).

61
Interestingly, these findings also rule out the old theory that the inhab-
itants of Harappan cities and villages were “Dravidians.” Even from
an archaeological point of view, that assumption made no sense at all,
since nowhere in South India “is there any trace whatsoever of the ma-
terial remains of the Harappan Civilization,” as B. B. Lal puts it. Let us
also remember that we find no signs of urban civilization in the South
until the third Century BC; therefore, had the so -called “Dravidians”
migrated from the Indus and Sarasvati valleys, it means that they would
have forgotten their town-planning, agriculture, crafts, also their gods
and writing system, for about 1 ,500 years! Moreover, such a massive
north-south migration would have left clear traces in settlement pat-
terns on the way — again, there are none.
What about genetic differences between North and South? Are there
none at all? There are, just as there are commonalities (not only with
each other, also with other world populations). But genetic studies con-
ducted in India since the 1980s are still limited, based on samples insuf-
ficient with regard to the extraordinary geographical and social diver-
sity of Indian populations. In fact,5 a recent study noted a crucial fact:
“Geographical, proximity has a Stronger effect than sociocultural prox-
imity in determining genetic affinity.” In plain English, | it means, for
instance, that Brahmins all over India do not belong to a single genetic
group : j a Tamil Brahmin, say, is genetically closer to a low-caste Tamil
than to a North Indian Brahmin. This clashes with the invasion the-
ory, which assumed Brahmins to be “pure descendants” of the “Aryans.”
Another genetic study admitted that the “supposed Aryan invasion of
India 3000-4000 years ago was much less significant than is generally
believed.”
The fact is that we know next to nothing about movements of prehis-
toric populations. Thus it turns out that the Indus plains saw “long dis-
tance trade networks” in the Neolithic, much earlier than previously
thought; the same region had, towards the end of the mature Harappan
phase, considerable exchanges with the contemporary Bactria civiliza-
tion west of the Hindu Kush, in ways that are not yet understood; a
Harappan outpost was in fact found at Shortugai on the Amu Darya

62
in Northern Bactria, some 1,600 kilometres away from Lothal in the
South! We ran only speculate about the extents of contacts and ex-
changes that took place over millennia, and the more remote the con-
tact, the more questionable the speculation. Whatever genetic affini-
ties or differences may therefore be found between Indian and other
Eurasian populations, we know at present far too little to interpret them.
We have a great genetic diversity in India, but certainly no genetic proof
of any invasion or migration around 1500 bc!

Linguistics

For the same reason, trying to reconstruct the evolution of language all
the way to Neolithic times is hazardous. Yet that is exactly what Western
linguists have tried to do with the “Indo-European family of languages/’
by reconstructing a hypothetical 6,000-year-old”Profo-Indo-European”
language from which Indo-lranian (a supposed ancestor of both San-
skrit and Avestan), Greek, Latin, Germanic, etc., are all assumed lo have
derived. Linguistics thus remains the last refuge of the invasionists,
who insist that the presence of Indo-European languages in Northern
India is “proof ” of the penetration into India of Indo-European peoples.
The theory might have some weight if linguists, after almost two cen-
turies of stupendous labour, could tell us with some precision where the
Indo-Europeans homeland was located and when they emerged from it.
But there’s the rub: even recently, linguists have given us areas ranging
from Western Europe to the Caspian sea, with the steppes of Southern
Russia on the way! Renfrew, criticizing “the simplistic use of such data
[of comparative linguistics] to reach supposedly historical conclusions,’
rightly notes that or linguistic grounds, the Indo-Europeans”could prob-
ably be accommodated to almost any homeland theory.”
A second point to note is the increasing rejection of the equating of
language with e‘-hnic groups: “Linguistic change and associations are
brought about by Complex cultural processes which do not necessarily
invo ve the movements of people,” as more and more scholars begin to
recognize. So even a linguistic kinship need not entail any invasion or

63
mass migration.
A third point is that even accepting Indo-European comparative lin-
guistics in no way requires the doctrine of an invasion of India. Thus
in the course of a recent study of most aspects of the Aryan invasion
debuts, the Belgian linguist and scholar Koenraad Elst carefully exam-
ined one by one all elements of the supposed ˆlinguistic evidence” and
concluded:

The oft-invoked linguistic evidence for a European Urheimat [orig-

inal homeland] and for an Aryan invasion of India is completely
wanting- One after another, the classical proofs of the European
Urheimat theory have been discredited.

Elst in fact makes out a strong case for a linguistic dispersion originat-
ing from India in the sixth millennium bc, a line two Indian scholars,
Satya Swarup Misra and Shrikant Talageri, developed independently.
In their studies, they argued that the linguistic kinship between ancient
India and the first cultures of Central Asia and Europe in fact points to
migrations from India, such as those mentioned in the Veda and Pu-
ranas. Naturally, that is heresy to Western linguists, but if they are pre-
pared to envisage homelands ranging from Western Europe to Bactria,
why not travel a little farther and include India as a possibility, at least,
especially when it agrees with archaeology and also Indian tradition?
Another heresy has to do with the so-called separateness of the Indo-
European and Dravidian families of languages. Everyone agrees that
there are a number of similarities, but they are explained away by the
convenient device of “borrowings” from Sanskrit by ancient Tamil and
vice versa. But several Indian scholars, who certainly have a more in-
timate knowledge of Indian languages than Western scholars can ever
get, have argued that there is more to it than mere borrowings. For
instance, in the 1920s we find R. Swaminatha Aiyar, a Tamil admin-
istrator, linguist and mathematician, and C. Narayana Rao, a Telugu
scholar, who both conducted a wide-ranging scrutiny of the grammar
and roots of South Indian languages. Swaminatha , Aiyar found most

64
Dravidian suffixes and other verb forms “of Indo-Aryan origin,” and
that “the basic portion of Dravidian vocabularies consists of words of
Indo-Aryan origin though … these words have been greatly corrupted
;and are very difficult of recognition.” He did not hide that his views
were “tantamount to a total negation of the current Dravidian theory
in all its details.” Like Sri Aurobindo (whose work he does not seem
to have been aware of), he found the connection between Tamil and
Sanskrit to go back to pre-Vedic times. As for Narayana Rao, he too
rejected much of Caldwell’s theory, and pointed out that a compari-
son with Prakrit (i.e. dialects derived from Sanskrit) and South Indian
languages brings forth a “close resemblance” (Marathi, for instance, is
known to have many “Dravidian” elements). Narayana Rao therefore
found it “impossible to conceive that … the Dravidian idioms could be
considered other than Prakrits.”
Similar conclusions were endorsed more recently by a number of Indian
scholars. The artificial gulf created between South and North Indian
languages was, as we saw earlier, part of the Aryan invasion scheme.
Poignantly but fittingly, the South Indian dancer and scholar Padma
Subrahmanyam, pleading against this linguistic divide, asks, “Is it not a
violence to my heritage?”
Let us add a word of caution and stress again that any model assuming
a single, “confined” homeland for Indo-European languages at a single
point in time, is doomed to obsolescence, because it ignores the fact that
“prehistoric” life and cultures were far more Complex than previously
thought, a fact fresh archaeological findings keep confirming. Linguis-
tic reconstructions, in Shaffer’s words, neglect “too many intervening
cultural and historical variables to permit any degree of cross-cultural
accuracy.” There is no reason why the evolution of language, which
Started with modern man some 100,000 years ago, should have been
docile enough to conform to simplistic, linear models when there was
nothing linear in actual life.

65
Astronomy, Mathematics, Metallurgy…

Many astronomical references can be found in the Scriptures and In-

dian tradition, which is not surprising since astronomy has been a pas-
sion with Indians from the earliest Vedic times. As it is a vast field, we
will only note a few points here. In 1894, the great Indian nationalist
leader, B. G. Tilak, who was also a mathematician, examined many such
references and found that they pointed to a period between 4500 and
2500 BC. Among other evidence, he showed that the Rig-Veda referred
to the sun being in the constellation Mrigo (Orion) at the time of the
spring equinox, which took place around 4500 BC, while the later Brah-
manas referred to the sun as being in Krittika (Pleiades), which takes
us to 2500 bc. The very same year, the German Sanskritist Hermann
Jacobi independently obtained similar results and dates. Since then,
many other scholars have come up with more examples drawn from
the Vedic texts. An Indian astronomer, B. G. Siddharth, even finds in
the Krishna Yaiur Veda a dear reference to solstices around 8500 bc,
which would of course make the Rig-Veda older than that. All these
dates are of course incompatible with the short chronology imposed by
the Aryan invasion theory, which is why “most Indologists fight shy
of the profuse astronomical data, which are capable of giving very re-
liableFor the same reason, trying to reconstruct the evolution of lan-
guage all the way to Neolithic times is hazardous. Yet that is exactly
what Western linguists have tried to do with the”Indo-European family
of languages’ by reconstructing a hypothetical 6,000-year-old “Profo-
Indo-European” language from which Indo-lranian (a supposed ances-
tor of both Sanskrit and Avestan), Greek, Latin, Germanic, etc., are
all assumed lo have derived. Linguistics thus remains the last refuge
of the invasionists, who insist that the presence of Indo-European lan-
guages in Northern India is “proof ” of the penetration into India of
Indo-European peoples.
The theory might have some weight if linguists, after almost two cen-
turies of stupendous labour, could tell us with some precision where the
Indo-Europeans homeland was located and when they emerged from it.
But there’s the rub: even recently, linguists have given us areas ranging

66
from Western Europe to the Caspian sea, with the steppes of Southern
Russia on the way! Renfrew, criticizing “the simplistic use of such data
[of comparative linguistics] to reach supposedly historical conclusions,’
rightly notes that or linguistic grounds, the Indo-Europeans”could prob-
ably be accommodated to almost any homeland theory.”
A second point to note is the increasing rejection of the equating of
language with e‘-hnic groups: “Linguistic change and associations are
brought about by Complex cultural processes which do not necessarily
involve the movements of people,” as more and more scholars begin to
recognize. So even a linguistic kinship need not entail any invasion or
mass migration.
A third point is that even accepting Indo-European comparative lin-
guistics in no way requires the doctrine of an invasion of India. Thus
in the course of a recent study of most aspects of the Aryan invasion
debuts, the Belgian linguist and scholar Koenraad Elst carefully exam-
ined one by one all elements of the supposed ˆlinguistic evidence” and
concluded:
The oft-invoked linguistic evidence for a European Urheimat [original
homeland] and for an Aryan invasion of India is completely wanting-
One after another, the classical proofs of the European Urheimat theory
have been discredited.
Elst in fact makes out a strong case for a linguistic dispersion originat-
ing from India in the sixth millennium bc, a line two Indian scholars,
Satya Swarup Misra and Shrikant Talageri, developed independently.
In their studies, they argued that the linguistic kinship between ancient
India and the first cultures of Central Asia and Europe in fact points to
migrations from India, such as those mentioned in the Veda and Pu-
ranas. Naturally, that is heresy to Western linguists, but if they are pre-
pared to envisage homelands ranging from Western Europe to Bactria,
why not travel a little farther and include India as a possibility, at least,
especially when it agrees with archaeology and also Indian tradition?
Another heresy has to do with the so-called separateness of the
Indo-European and Dravidian families of languages. Everyone agrees

67
that there are a number of similarities, but they are explained away
by the convenient device of “borrowings” from Sanskrit by ancient
Tamil and vice versa. But several Indian scholars, who certainly have
a more dates, in the Vedic literature,” as K. C. Varma puts it. We
may add that, recently, Holger Wanzke showed that Mohenjo-daro’s
citadel was in fact aligned not exactly north-south, but east- west,
along the Krittikaa (Pleiades), which during the mature Harappan
phase rose due east and set due west at the spring equinox (because
of the precession of the equinoxes, it no longer does today). This
brings to light another interesting Harappan-Vedic parallel, since in
the earliest astronomical texts, Krittika is the first of the 27 Nakshatras.
As the Finnish scholar Asko Parpola notes, “Many things point to a
Harappan origin of the nakshatra calendar. This connection between
Harappan town-planning and Vedic astronomy has been endorsed by
astrophysicist J. McKim Malville, among others.
Moreover, there is now general agreement that India’s most ancient ex-
isting text of astronomy, the Vedanga Jyotisha, must be dated around
1300 bc, if not earlier. But as the language is obviously a later Sanskrit
than that of the Vedas, it confirms that the Vedas must be much more
ancient than it.
Coming to mathematics, the U.S. historian of science A. Seidenberg
showed that the knowledge found in the Sulbasutra (an ancient treatise
of geometry, conventionally dated around the fifth century BC, and in
any case much later than the Vedic texts) must go back to 1700 or even
2200 bc, as the ancient Babylonians derived part of their own mathe-
matics from it. This is one more piece of evidence that makes us reject
a late date for the Veda.
Metallurgy too has evidence to offer. It is now widely accepted that the
word ayas in the Rig-Veda meant bronze, or sometimes simply “metal”:
the Rig-Vedic people did not know iron, which appears in India be-
tween 1800 and 1200 bc (and is referred to as krishna ayas in later
texts); they lived therefore in earlier times — one more correlation with
the Indus-Sarasvati civilization where copper and bronze were the chief
metals used.

68
A Decent Burial

The Aryan invasion theory is so full of inconsistencies that other com-

pelling arguments against it are not lacking. But this should be enough.
It is, in fact, no longer a “theory” but a dogma to be accepted on faith.
Our invasionist historians, like India’s former Colonial masters, do not
mind tying themselves in knots, as long as they can somehow preserve
the non-Indian origin of India’s Civilization. It is a pathetic spectacle
that they offer, pretending that nothing has happened in archaeology
since the last century that requires them to take a new look at their the-
ories.
A few years ago, the eminent British anthropologist Edmund Leach
asked a few simple questions which perfectly summarize our whole ex-
ploration:
Even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler … the Aryan
invasions of the second millennium bc are still treated as if
they were an established fact of history…. Why do serious
scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions?…
Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of
early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with
an Aryan invasion?… The details of this i theory fit in
with the racist framework…. The origin myth of British
colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators … to
see themselves as bringing “pure” civilization to [India].
It is time to give the Aryan invasion theory a decent burial, to the vi-
brant sounds, if we may suggest, of Vedic hymns.

The Core of Civilization

With the distorting glass which the Aryan invasion theory imposed on
India’s past now shattered, it is tempting to steal a glance at the emerging
picture and draw a few lessons. But we must keep in mind that the
new picture of ancient Indian history has only begun to emerge: much

69
remains to be integrated into the new perspective. Nevertheless, we can
now breathe more freely.
Also, we should not forget that archaeology in India, though it has
worked on a very extensive field in the face of great difficulties (scanty
means and bureaucratic red tape in particular), has after all only
scratched the surface. As regards the Indus-Sarasvati civilization alone,
we have already seen that most of its sites are yet to be excavated.
One point now established is the antiquity of the Veda. Though Indian
tradition and seers always held the Veda to be “many thousands of years
old,” Max Mūller and his school brought this down to 1200-1000 bc.
But the Vedic background of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization and the
presence of the Vedic people along the Sarasvati in full flow now pushes
this date back to at least 2500-3000 BC. That would have come as no
surprise to Voltaire, who remarked with much common-sense: “It is
not for us, who were only savages and barbarians when these Indian and
Chinese peoples were civilized and learned, to dispute their antiquity.”
Some scholars go further and place the Rig-Veda’s composition in the
early Harappan phase before 4000 bc or even 5000 BC. At any rate, the
Vedic tradition itself goes farther into the past than the hymns, for they
frequently refer to “human fathers” (pitaro manusyah) and to “ancient”
Rishis in contrast to the “modern” authors of the hymns. Whatever its
exact dates, we have before us the oldest living tradition in the world,
carried to US across 5,000 years or more through meticulous oral repe-
tition from one generation to the next.
Can we go farther into the past? Although palaeontologists have
already pushed back “modern man” to 100,000 years ago, Mehrgarh
in Baluchistan and other farming settlements such as tatal Huyūk or
Nevali Cori in ancient Anatolia date “only” from about 7000 BC; there
are as yet few older signs of civilization — which does not mean that
none will come to light. We should not forget that archaeology, like
all our sciences, is after all very young. For instance, it cannot yet
explain the mysterious “Nasca lines” found in desert plains of Peru,
sacred pathways hundreds of metres long forming all sorts of human
and animal designs that are visible only from the air; nor can it make

70
sense of the huge stone slabs forming a giant causeway on the seabed
off Bimini, near the Bahamas, and temporarily dated 3000 bc. It can
only speculate on the Colossus of Rhodes or Easter Island’s culture
with its gigantic stone heads; it st;ll knows little about the sudden and
massive emergence of urban civilization in Egypt or the arrival of the
first humans in America. It knows even less of the reality behind myths
such as the Atlantis, our own kumari kandam, or the Austro-Asiatic
legends of a great flood.
Also, an unspoken assumption underlying all modern research is that
human society evolved in a straight line from the “primitive” stage;
but that is no more than an assumption: lt is a superstition of mod-
ern thought,” wrote Sri Aurobindo, “that the march ; of knowledge has
in all its parts progressed always in a line of forward progress. I will …
suppose at least that there was a great Vedic age of advanced civilisation
broken afterwards by Time and circumstance…. It is probable that this
ancient culture had none of those material conveniences on which we
vaunt ourselves — but it may have had others of a higher, possibly even
a more potent kind/’ Admittedly, this takes us far ahead of present-day
science. Yet if we will put aside for a moment our”modern” spectacles,
we will see throughout the Age of Mysteries, from Chaldea to Memphis,
from Iran to the Mayas and from Eleusis to the Druids and the Norse
mythology, traces of that “ancient culture,” which saw the same cosmic
powers flow and work and fight through a river, a mountain, a man un-
der the stars, which worshipped the great play of the universe in a small
flame, and invited friendly gods to break our petty limits. Our vision
of “prehistory” is terribly inadequate. We have not yet rid our minds
from the hold of a one-and-only God or one- (and-only Book, and now
a one-and-only | Science with its .superficial notions of (“progress” and
civilization. This narrowness |of vision will have to go before we witness
The “revolution in knowledge” Sri Aurobindo foresaw.
The ancientness of the Veda once established, the Brahmanas, the Up-
anishads, the Sutras and the Epics will also benefit from this “ageing”
process: their previous recent dates, fixed as arbitrarily as that of the
Veda, will have to be similarly pushed back. This will make it easier

71
to extract their historical content, which scholars had often discarded
simply because it contradicted the “established” chronology. How far
the long dynasties of ancient kings, for instance, agree with the new
chronology will be interesting to see. This is not to say that everything
in the Scriptures or tradition is historical: much evidently mixes in a
knowledge of the inner worlds put in a symbolic language full of im-
agery. But there is certainly a mine of information that remains to be
sifted.
Also, the achievements of ancient India In many fields and their impact
on the rest of the world call for reconsideration. We have already men-
tioned how Seidenberg showed that the mathematics of the Sulbasutras
must have travelled to Mesopotamia. The discovery by Subhash Kak
of an astronomical code embedded in the Rig-Veda has led to new in-
sights in Indian astronomy; it showed that the ancient Rishis knew the
distance between the Sun and the Earth to be about 108 times the Sun’s
diameter (the same with the Moon’s distance from the Earth); they had
also observed the periods of revolution of the five planets (Mercury,
Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), and determined the solar year to last
between 365 and 366 days — all this long before similar knowledge
showed up in Egypt, Babylonia or Greece.
Mathematics, astronomy, language, and a perennial culture. That is ex-
actly what the famous U.S. historian Will Durant meant when he wrote
in 1930:
India, was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the
mother of Europe’s languages; she was the mother of
our philosophy, mother, through the Arabs, of much of
our mathematics; mother, through Buddha, of the ideals
embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village
community, of self-government and democracy. Mother
India is, in many ways, the mother of us all.
Which does not mean, as some lover-enthusiastic scholars have tried
to establish, that India is the origin of all civilization; other ancient civ-
ilizations, in Mesopotamia, Egypt,

72
China, Mesoamerica for instance, did develop independently and had
great achievements of their own, and it will be a long time before we
can properly assess how much each received from or gave to the other.
For some time, therefore, these debates will remain in the academic
field. Are there meanwhile practical lessons, of immediate concern to
us, to be drawn from the ancient Vedic hymns, from the long-dry Saras-
vati, from the dusty ruins on its banks and those of the Indus?
There are certainly two.
The first is the confirmation of the essential continuity of India’s his-
tory through the ages. It hardly matters right now whether the Veda
dates back to 3000 or 8000 bc (dates for which there is still insufficient
evidence anyhow). The central point is the unbroken thread of Indian
civilization and culture from pre-Harappan days to the Indus-Sarasvati
civilization and the Ganga civilization after the drying of the Sarasvati.
Whatever twists and turns Indian civilization may have followed, what-
ever migrations may have taken place to and from India, nothing in
Indian tradition or in archaeology justifies a rigid break between pre-
and post-Vedic India; nothing warrants the fallacy of a sharp demar-
cation between Aryan and dravidian-peoples, languages, civilizations,
even deities. Our present knowledge of Indian prehistory shows a con-
tinuous evolution for millennia, with no signs of war or disruption ex-
cept for that caused by natural calamities and perhaps social collapse.
It safe to predict that future archaeological findings will only confirm
the essential continuity of Indian civilization. The neat little labels our
Westernized mind has stuck on if after cutting it into well-defined bits
— Vedism, Brahminism, Hinduism, and so forth — create separations
where none exist. The river flowing down the mountains, then through
forests, and finally meandering through the plains is one and the same.
Continuity in time, and continuity in space: each region of India cer-
tainly has its own character, its peculiar stamp, but none can find its ful-
filment without keeping alive this underlying unity and essential com-
monness. Denying it would be the surest way to disintegration.
* The second lesson is that no civilization can last without some inherent

73
strength at its foundation; if this strength is for any reason exhausted,
the civilization is doomed, whatever its apparent achievements. The
barely three- 1 century-old Western scientific and technological civi-
lization, which has erected dazzling constructions on the foundation of
greed and plunder, is already showing signs of decay; some of its lucid
thinkers are wondering how long it can go on in its chosen direction.
Let us quote just one of them, the French thinker Pierre Thuillier:
Westerners remain convinced that their mode of life is
the privileged and definitive incarnation of “civilization”;
they are unable to understand that this “civilization” has
become as fragile as an eggshell. At the end of the twenti-
eth century, political, economic and cultural elites behave
as if the gravity of the situation eluded them____ Those
who profess to be progressive clearly no longer know what
a culture is; they no longer even realize that a society can
continue to function more or lees normally even as it has
lost its soul…. in their eyes, a society is dead only when it
is physically destroyed; they do not realize that the decay
of a ˆcivilization is inner before anything else.
Western civilization might turn out to be short lived — unless it takes
a leaf or two out of the Indian book: “Asia is long-lived, Europe brief,
ephemeral,” said 5ri Aurobindo. “Europe lives by centuries, Asia by mil-
lenniums…. Everything in Europe is small, rapid and short lived; she
has not the secret of immortality.” Immortality, the constant refrain
of the Rig-Veda, can only be founded on our reality above, below and
behind the prison of the mind.
That ie why just a week before his death in 1894, Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee, who gave India her Mantra of freedom, Bande Mataram, ex-
horted young Bengalis thus: Do not lose your reverence for the past; it
is on the past that you must plant your foot firmly, if you wish to mount
high in the future. You are not a race of savages who have no past to
remember.
You cannot dissever yourselves in a day from the associations and in-
fluences of ; a past which extends over at least five hundred centuries.

74
You cannot annihilate in a day a post national existence which has sur-
vived the annihilation of hundreds of empires, of hundred systems of
religion, and which has surveyed unconcerned the downfall and ruin
of many kindred civilizations.
I have to make my warning so emphatic because the general tendency
of European scholars, who have great an influence over you, is to decry
your past history, to call for its virtual erasure from your memory, and
to lead you in the opposite direction.
Indian civilization has lasted through the ages because it knew how to
hold on to its essential strength and spirit, and how to evolve with it,
never clinging to the forms of the moment except in periods of stagna-
tion, as in recent centuries. Today’s challenges will not be overcome by
abandoning this strength and spirit. Agni, the ancient flame; can still
be kindled in us; Sarasvati can still flow in us as it flowed in the Rishis
of old.
Why, one may ask in the end, should we worry so much over debunk-
ing a theory about our remote past? Precisely because it denies that
remote past. Because it turns the Veda into a largely meaningless hodge-
podge of superstition cobbled together by “primitive animists.” Because
it makes nonsense of what has been for millennia the source of India’s
spiritual life and strength, and divides her into countless fragments des-
tined to fly at each other’s throat, instead of seeing them as the many
facets of a single precious stone.
And because the past IS nevor past, never dead, and often holds the key
to the future.
In Sri Aurobindo’s words:
The recovery of the perfect truth of the Veda is not merely
a desideratum for our modern intellectual curiosity, but a
practical necessity for the future of the human race. For I
firmly believe that the secret concealed in the Veda, when
entirely discovered, will be found to formulate perfectly
that knowledge and practice of a divine life to which the
march of humanity, after long wanderings in the satisfac-

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 tion of the intellect and senses, must inevitably return.

Suggesfed Further Reading

This brief list includes o few books recently published in English and
accessible to a general public with an interest in the Harappan civiliza-
tion and the Aryan question; more detailed references can be found in
the full edition of The Invasion That Never Was (3rd. ed. forthcoming).
I. The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization
Allchin, Raymond & Bridget, Origins of a Civilization -The Prehistory
and Early Archaeology of South Asia (New Delhi: Viking, 1997)
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization
(Karachi & Islamabad: Oxford University
Press & American Institute of Pakistan Studies, 1 998)
Lal, B. B., India l?47-l??7: New Light on the Indus Civilization (New
Delhi: Aryan Books International, 1998)
The Sarasvati Flows On — the Continuity of Indian Culture (New Delhi,
Aryan Books International, 2002)
PossEHi, Gregory L., The Indus Age: The Writing System (New Delhi;
Oxford & IBM, 1??6)
Radhakrishnan, B. P., & Merh, S. S., eds., Vedic Sarasvati - Evolutionary
History of a Lost River of Northwestern India (Bangalore: Oeological
Society of India, 1999)
Rao, S. R., Dawn and Devolution of the Indus Civilization (New Delhi:
Aditya Prakashan, 1991)
II. The Aryan Problem Bryant, Edwin, The Quest for the Origins of
Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002)
Elst, Koenraad, Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate (New Delhi:
Aditya Prakashan, 1999) FEUERSTEIN, Georg, KaK, Subhash &

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Frawley, David, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization (Wheaton,
U.S.A.: Quest Books, 1995; reprint Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1 999)
Frawley, David, The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India (New Delhi:
Voice of India, 1994)
Rajaram, N. S. & Frawley, David, Vedic Aryans and the Origins of Civ-
ilization - A Literary and Scientific Perspective
(New Delhi: Voice of India, 1997)
Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Centenary Edition (Pondicherry:
Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), vol. 10
Talageri, Shrikant G., The Aryan Invasion Theory - a Reappraisal (New
Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1993)
MlCHEL Danino was born in 1956 at Honfleur, in France. From the age
of sixteen he was drawn to India and to Sri Aurobindo and Mother. In
1977, after four years of higher scientific studies, he left for South India.
He participated in the English translation and publication of Mother’s
Agenda and many other works. He also edited of Indio’s Rebirth (a
selection from Sri Aurobindo’s works about India) and India the Mother
(a selection from Mother’s works).
For many years Michel Danino has been studying the roots of India’s
ancient history and some of the challenges faced by Indian culture. He
has given many lectures, some of which were published under the titles
Sri Aurobindo and Indian Civilization (l999), The Indian Mind Then
one/ Mow (2000), Is Indian Culture Obsolete? (2000) and Kali Yuga or
the Age of Confusion (2001).
In 2001, Michel Danino convened the International FORUM FOR In-
DIA*S Heritage (www.ifih.org) with over 50 eminent founder members,
whose mission is to promote the essential values of India’s heritage in
every field of life, especially in the educational field.
Email:
micheld@sify.com / micheld@hclinfinet.com
Homepage: http://www.bharatvani.org / michel_danino/homepage.htm

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