Author: Ariel: Literary Notes
Publication: Dawn, Karachi
Date: April 11, 2001
KARACHI, April 10: Great hopes were
being pinned on the decipherment of the Moenjodaro script on the seals
found in excavations. The seals were entrusted to Prof Aska Parpola of
Helsinki University, an expert in Aryan and pre-Aryan languages.
Prof Parpola keeps on visiting Pakistan.
The last time he came here was in 1997. However, according to the latest
report from Helsinki, the mystery about the script remains unresolved.
The professor thinks this cannot be unlocked unless some bilingual seals
or parchments having Moenjodaro's pictographic script, with the Sumerian
script, are available for study.
Some features of the Indus Valley
habitat have been unravelled. The valley people were highly artistic and
innovative, far more than the Aryans. They knew the art of town planning
and embodied in their construction ingenious architectural techniques for
braving the heat.
Much of the difficulty in deciphering
the script is also because of the fact that the better seals were sent
to Delhi by the British authorities of the pre-partition India. The famous
Dancing Girl was given to Delhi. Some among us contend that the Dancing
Girl was whisked away for fear of being 'sacrileged' in Pakistan. The question,
then, arises why the King Priest was left behind. After all, we have lately
seen the Bamiyan Buddha and other Buddhas mercilessly dynamited by the
Taliban. My answer to this apprehension is that such 'desecration' was
not possible in Pakistan. We have a good track record of preserving Buddhist
and Hindu relics in our museums and functioning temples.
The dismal news from Helsinki is
being made a bit more dismal by the theory or theories linking the Aryan
to the Moenjodaro civilization. Some Indian scholars seem to give much
importance to the late scholar-cum politician K. M. Munshi's thesis about
the Aryans. He contended that the Aryan were not foreign invaders as had
been supposed by the archaeologists and historians. In fact, India was
the original home of the Aryans and it is the Indian Aryans who migrated
to Iran and Europe, with some Central Asian nomadic tribes. If we were
to accept this theory that Moenjodaro's original population was not composed
of the Dravidians and that the Moenjodaro script was the pictographic variation
of the most extant form of the Aryan script?
The latest theory about the Aryans'
indigenous home has been partly corroborated by Prof Parpola because he
admits that the Brahvi was not a Dravidian language as was considered by
Bray and some other British and European linguists. There is no connection
between Tamil-Sinhalese-Malyalam triad of languages and Brahvi since there
were only 180 Dravidian words in Brahvi. The Baloch poet and scholar, Gul
Khan Naseer, in his important work Kooch-o-Baloch had also contended that
the Brahvis were Baloch - the former belonged to the first wave of the
Baloch one thousand years before and the latter were part of the next big
wave that made Balochistan its home during the 13th to 14th century.
Another work, Nurul Zaman Auj's
Harappan heritage, which has been published recently, sticks to the old
view that the Harappans were the Dravidians and it is the Aryan invaders
who made short work of the great Harappan civilization. He is a member
of the princely family of Bahawalpur and has devoted his entire life to
research on the Dravidian relics found in Balochistan, particularly in
Cholistan. He contends that the Harappan relics were so innovative and
immaculate in their designs and artistic executions that the Aryans couldn't
be attributed this flush of creativity so early in the day of their history.
Nurul Zaman Auj subscribes to the view that India's present-day stock of
population belong to the Harappan stock of indigenous people and the artifacts
of Harappa belong to the same family of imagination and artisanhip.
Regardless of the fact whether the
Harappans were Dravidians or the Aryans, it is a fact that Auj's work proves
beyond any shadow of doubt that the Indus Valley script reveals that the
Harappan society was the first in the subcontinent in which the process
of creating a script was under way. In fact, the Brahimi Lipi is somewhere
in the middle between the pictographic seals of the Indus and the modern
Devnagiri script. The Harappans were also the first to establish the general
character of proto-Indian cosmogonic concepts and the calendar system.
The concept of dasas (slaves) was also Harappan and it found eventually
its way into the Verna structure of Hindu society. The concepts of Shiva
and mother goddess are also Harappan.
I am sure that the day Prof Parpola
or some other scholar unlocks the Indus seals, a floodlight of new discoveries
would unravel the mysteries of the Indus Valley culture.
* * * * *
Faziz's PhD synopsis: A fellow columnist
in a Lahore weekly doesn't agree with the view that the most eminent Urdu
poet after Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, had formally requested Punjab University
to give him permission to embark on a PhD thesis, titled Modern Urdu Poetry
(1857-1939), but his request was declined with the remark that the scope
of the suggested topic was too wide.
Dr Ibadat Barelvi, known for unearthing
a number of archives and manuscripts, found Faiz's application buried in
the old records of Punjab University. The application was addressed by
Faiz Ahmed, M.A., then a lecturer of English at the M.A.O. College, Amritsar,
to the Dean of the University Instruction of Punjab University. The application
was dated November 3, 1939 and it was received by the university on November
8, 1939.
It is interesting to note that Faiz
never made any mention of this application in any of his biographical narratives.
It is common knowledge that it was Dr Taseer who had asked Faiz to go ahead
with the PhD programme. Dr Mahmud Khan Shirani was supposed to be the person
who was to be contacted for limiting the scope of the thesis. Faiz decided
to give up the project. Perhaps the Second World War had changed his mind
who then became Faiz Ahmed Faiz instead of the plain Faiz Ahmed, MA, who
had applied to the Dean of Punjab University.
Faiz's application contained a synopsis
of the PhD thesis. It envisaged 15 chapters, starting from the background
and origin. It is strange that Mir Taqi Mir and his contemporaries were
to be discussed as the precursors of the modern movement in the second
chapter. A person intending to write on the modern Urdu poetry in 1939
is quite likely to begin with Mir Taqi Mir, Sauda and Insha as the precursors
of the modern movement. It is not likely to occur to a student of Urdu
literature to begin with Mir Taqi Mir as the first of the moderns. Faiz
was absolutely right. He has deemed in his subsequent chapters the importance
of Sir Syed Group, Akbar Allahabadi, Hali, Azad, the Lucknow School and
the court poets of Rampur and Hyderabad.
Faiz also discusses Jigar, Fani,
Hasrat and Asghar Gondvi besides Bekhud, Simab, Yaas Yagana Changezi, Josh,
Zafar Ali Khan, Akhtar Shirani, Saghar and Rawish. He proposed to devote
one full chapter to Iqbal, his life, work and influence.
It is quite strange, however, that
no chapter was earmarked for the progressive literature. At the time of
this application the controversy between the progressives and the Halqa-i-Arbab-i-
Zauq was in full swing. perhaps Faiz intended to discuss this development
which was given the heading The Coming Poets and the future outlook.
Concluding his application, Faiz
writes: "I have permitted myself a few liberties with chronology and I
do not propose to deal with those poets whose contribution to this (poetic)
tradition has been negligible."
Dr Ibadat has published the record
of Faiz's PhD application in a form of booklet that contains all the material
about Faiz's application. It is entitled Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Modern Urdu Literature
(1857-1939). Published in 1939 by the Idara-i-Adab-o-Tanquid, Lahore, it
is now for all readers of Urdu literature to judge for themselves that
Faiz was a catholic in his literary taste and his research plan had laudable
intentions to do justice to all who deserved.
