Author: Dilip K Chakrabarti
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: September 9, 2009
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/514737/
Professor K. P.N.Rao and his associates assert,
on the basis of their recently published computer studies on the Indus script,
that this script has statistical regularities which are in line with other
natural languages. Thus, the various signs of the Indus script cannot be explained
away as only symbols of different sorts. The latter opinion was expressed
by an American group sometime back and apparently taken seriously enough by
Rao and his colleagues to undertake their own analysis. That the Indus script
represents a language is amply shown by the way its signs were found scratched
from the right to the left on an inscribed potsherd from Kalibangan and the
way in which the signs were arranged on the seals of Mohenjodaro. Further,
the rarity with which many of these signs occur is almost a certain indication
of the fact that much of the textual corpus of the Indus civilisation was
written, on the analogy of the Indian tradition which continued down to the
end of the nineteenth century, on perishable materials like palm and birch
leaves.
The basic problem, however, lies elsewhere.
There is a conscious attempt in certain quarters to disassociate this civilisation
from the later mainstream tradition of Indian/ Vedic culture. Historically,
the beginning of this attempt can be traced to the period around India's Independence
when Mortimer Wheeler proposed that the impetus for this civilisation came
from Mesopotamia. Earlier, when India was a jewel in the British crown, there
was no compulsion to depict it as an offshoot of Mesopotamian or other contemporary
civilisations. The early excavators had no problem hypothesising that this
civilisation was deeply rooted in the Indian soil and that many of its features
could be explained with reference to the later Indian civilisation.
The current attempts to disassociate the Indus
civilisation from the mainstream Indian tradition has assumed many forms.
The term 'Indus valley civilisation', which is being increasingly common,
suggests that this civilisation was primarily a product of the Indus valley
alone, which is far from being the case. The civilisation is also bandied
about as the product of what is dubiously dubbed as the 'middle Asian interaction
sphere' and not as a product of a vast region of the sub-continent. Its chronology
has been needlessly shortened, suppressing a long and continuous developmental
span of about 2500 years in the modern Indian section of its distribution
area. The civilisation is also visualised at the end of a straight arrow-line
of wheat-barley-based development beginning in Baluchistan at c.7000 BC, completely
ignoring the contribution which came from the east - from the early farming
and metallurgical developments in the Aravallis or from the rice-cultivating
tradition that began in the Ganga plain and its Vindhyan periphery in the
seventh millennium BC. The famous Sramana image from Mohenjodaro, which shows
the bust of a shawl-wearing man with a meditative expression, is now advocated
as belonging to an artistic tradition of north Afghanistan and beyond. Notorious
Hindu-baiters are aghast at the thought that anything related to Hinduism
could occur in that civilisation, whereas the first excavators' frame of reference
for the study of the religion of this civilisation was Hinduism. That Siva
was worshipped in this civilisation is proved not merely by the phallus-shaped
stone objects found at Mohenjodaro and Dholavira but also by the find of an
indisputedly Sivalinga set in a Yonipatta at Kalibangan. If anybody is interested,
Bhang and Dhatura , both favourites with a class of Siva-worshippers, occur
in the Indus civilisation.
The battle raging these days is whether there
can be a relation between the life depicted in the Vedic literature and this
civilisation. Without trying to pull down this debate to the all-too-common
Indian level of 'progress versus reaction' syndrome which implies that that
any talk in favour of Veda-Indus civilization relationship is a 'right reactionary'
proposition (a la Irfan Habib), we note that scholars of the stature of M.S.Vats,
R.P.Chanda, B.N.Datta and P.V.Kane had no difficulty in arguing for a relationship
between the two.
The opinions which we have noted above and
which try to disassociate the Indus civilisation from the mainstream Indian
tradition are endemic in modern First World archaeological literature on the
subject and its followers in India. First World Archaeology, as my long familiarity
with it tells me, suffers from a sense of inordinate superiority in relation
to the archaeologists of the Third World. By allowing it to enjoy a free run
in the country as the present archaeological policy of the government does
and by allowing it to set up 'Indus Centres' in Vadodara or Pune, grievous
damage is being caused to national archaeological scholarship in India.
- The writer is emeritus professor of South
Asian archaeology, Cambridge University.
