Author:
Publication: The Weekend
Observer
Date: August 26, 2000.
Francois Gautier is a
well-known French journalist and a writer. In his latest book Arise, O
India Gautier says that India was a melting pot of different influences
coming from the West and owes many of her achievements to out side cultures.
But both archaeological
and linguistic discoveries are pointing to the fact that it is the Indian
civilisation which went gradually westwards and influenced the religions,
the sciences and the philosophies of many of the civilisations. Whatever
her shortcomings, India has remained a democracy and the spirit of dharma
has been preserved in spite of ten centuries of bloody invasion. Excerpts
from the chapter The Three Great Disinformations on India.
The theory of the Aryan
invasion is still taken as the foundation stone of the history of India.
According to this theory, which was actually devised in the 18th and l9th
century by British linguists and archaeologists, the first inhabitants
of India were good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned shepherds, called the
Dravidians, who had founded what is called the Harappan or valley of the
Indus civilisation.
They were supposedly
remarkable builders, witness the city of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistani Sind,
but had no culture to speak-off, no literature, no proper script even.
Then, around 1500 BC, India is said to have been invaded by tribes called
the Aryans: white skinned, nomadic people, who originated somewhere in
western Russia and imposed upon the Dravidians the hateful caste system.
To the Aryans, are attributed Sanskrit, the Vedic - or Hindu religion,
India's greatest spiritual texts, the Vedas, as well as a host of subsequent
writings, the Upanishads, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana.
This was indeed a masterly
stroke on the part of the British: thanks to the Aryan theory, they showed
on the one hand that Indian civilisation was not that ancient and that
it was posterior to the cultures which influenced the western world Mesopotamia,
Sumeria, or Babylon - and that whatever good things India had developed
- Sanskrit, literature, or even its architecture, had been influenced by
the West. Thus, Sanskrit, instead of being the mother of all Indo-European
languages, became just a branch of their huge family; thus, the religion
of Zarathustra is said to have influenced Hinduism, and not vice versa.
And on the other hand, it divided India and pitted against each other the
low caste dark-skinned Dravidians and the high caste light-skinned Aryans,
a rift which is till enduring.
But today, this theory
is being challenged by two new discoveries, one archaeological and the
other linguistic. Firstly, in the Rig Veda, the Ganges is only mentioned
once, but the mythic Saraswati is praised fifty times.
For a long time, the
Saraswati river was indeed considered a myth, until the American satellite
Landstat was able to photograph and map the bed of this magnificent river,
which was nearly fourteen kilometers wide and took its source in the Himalayas.
It was found out that the Saraswati had "disappeared", because around 2200
BC, an immense drought reduced the whole region to aridity and famine.
Thus, most inhabitants
moved away from the Saraswati to settle on the banks of the Indus and Sutlej
rivers. The Vedas were composed around 1500 BC, some even say 1200 BC.
Yet, the Rigveda, describes India as it was before the great drought which
dried-up the Saraswati, which means in effect that the so-called Indus,
or Harappan civilisation was a continuation of the Vedic epoch, which ended
approximately when the Saraswati dried-up.
Recently, the famous
Indus seals, discovered on the site of Mohenja Daro and Harappa, have been
reportedly deciphered. In the biased light of the Aryan invasion theory,
these seals were presumed to be written in a crude Harappan (read Dravidian)
script, although they had never been convincingly deciphered.
But "the Harappan Civilization,
of which the seals are a product, belonged to the later part of the Vedic
Age. It had close connections with Vedantic works like the Sutras and the
Upanishads."
The style of writing
reflects the short aphorisms found in Sutra works. The imagery and symbolism
are strongly Vedic. The vocabulary depends heavily on the Vedic glossary
Nighantu and its commentary by Yaska known as the Nirukta. The name of
Yaska is found on at least two seals. This means that the Rigveda must
already have been quite ancient by' the time of the Harappan Civilization.
Since the Harappan Civilization was known to be flourishing in the 3100-1900
BC period, the Rigveda must have been in existence by 4000 BC, This now
receives archaeological support following R S Bisht's investigation of
the great Harappan city of Dholavira. Bisht (and other archaeologists)
have concluded that the Vedic Aryans of the Sarasvati heartland were the
people who created the Harappan cities and the civilization associated
with it.
Sri Aurobindo, too, India's
greatest yogi, poet and philosopher, also shatters the myth of the difference
of language to support the theory of meeting of races: "For on examining
the vocabulary of the Tamil language, in appearance so foreign to the Sanskrit
form and character, I yet found myself continuously guided by words, or
families of words supposed to be pure Tamil, in establishing new relations
between Sanskrit and its distant sister, Latin, and occasionally between
the Greek and the Sanskrit. Sometimes the Tamil vocable not only suggested
the connection but proved the missing link in a family of connected words.
And it was through this Dravidian language that I came first to perceive
what seems to me now the true law, origins and, as it were, the embryology
of the Aryan tongues. The possibility suggests itself that they may even
have been two diversions, or families derived from one lost primitive tongue."
Hence, it is clear that
there probably never was an Aryan invasion in India, a theory which was
imposed upon the subcontinent by its colonisers and is today kept alive
by Nehruvian historians, Christian missionaries (it is thus easy to convert
the downtrodden tribals and Dravidians, by telling them that Hinduism was
a religion thrust upon them by the hated "Brahmin" invaders) and the communists.
History should be rewritten
so that Indian children learn to be proud of their ancient and Indigenous
civilisation - and the consequences of this new theory applies not only
to Asia, but also to the entire history of the whole world.
