Author: Ashok Sanjay Guha
Publication: The Telegraph India
Date: August 11, 2015
URL: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150811/jsp/opinion/story_36462.jsp#.VcljX3Gqqko
Few chapters in history are as intriguing as the tale of the Indus Valley civilization. The largest of the world's ancient civilizations, with sophisticated town-planning, drainage and sewerage systems unparalleled anywhere till the 19th century, with great public baths, dockyards, granaries, international trade and exquisite art works, the Indus culture flourished throughout the third millennium BC from Afghanistan and Baluchistan to Gujarat and western Uttar Pradesh and then vanished without a trace by about 1600 BC.
Who were the people who created the IVC? What language did they speak? And what happened to them after their civilization collapsed? These are abiding mysteries of our ancient history.
According to the standard view, propounded by archaeologists like John Marshall and Mortimer Wheeler, the IVC preceded the advent of the Aryans, the speakers of Sanskrit and the authors of the Vedas. The latter appear only around 1600 BC, when Mohenjodaro and Harappa were already in terminal decline. Perhaps, indeed, they administered the death-blow: Wheeler, on the evidence of 37 skeletons lying where they fell, postulated a 'Massacre at Mohenjodaro'. In the best tradition of the murder whodunnit, he announced, "Indra stands accused."
Indra has since been exculpated. The 37, it seems, died in very different eras, only two had cut wounds and these too had healed before their deaths, the murder weapons are nowhere to be seen and so on. The myth of the Mohenjodaro massacre has been replaced by a less dramatic story of slow infiltration by small groups of Aryans from Iran or Central Asia. The groups must have been small because of two reasons. Human remains from the region reveal a basic biological continuity from 4500 BC to 800 BC, with the only possible breaks occurring before the earlier date or after the later. Further, DNA evidence indicates that the contribution of Central Asia to the pre-existing Indian gene pool was minor.
But how did such small groups of immigrants impose their language and their backward culture on a more numerous and sophisticated population? They could do so, we are told, essentially because they were an elite whose dominance rested on military superiority. The Harvard Sanskritist, Michael Witzel, stresses not just the technological superiority of Aryan horse-drawn chariots but also their psychological impact. In an ancient enactment of Bush's 'shock and awe', the thundering horse-drawn chariots of the immigrants reduced the natives to trembling obeisance and ultimately to linguistic and cultural submission manifested in the pervasiveness of Sanskritic languages all over India north of the Vindhyas.
'Shock and awe', however, work only in the short run, as Bush discovered in Iraq. In a war of attrition protracted over centuries like that between the supposed Aryan immigrants and the natives, it would have rapidly lost its potency, especially since the Panis and the Dasyus, chief enemies of the Rigvedic Aryans, acquired horses (as mentioned in the Rig Veda, RV I.83.4, IV.28.5, X.108.7) and must have learnt to build chariots themselves within a generation or two. So why should the erstwhile Harappans have surrendered to the point of forgetting their own language and adopting the immigrants'?
Perhaps the erstwhile Indus people were not awestruck into submission by the Aryans but simply driven south as refugees along with their language to constitute the Dravidian peoples of the peninsula. But then why hasn't a single outpost of the IVC been unearthed anywhere in south India? Why isn't a single Dravidian river- or place-name found in north India - unlike names such as Iowa, Ohio, Mississippi, Missouri, Massachusetts, Milwaukee and so on which the European immigrants in the United States of America inherited from their predecessors?
In fact, each of the three possible endings to the story of the Indus people - extinction, submission and flight - poses unanswerable questions. These questions persist even if we believe that the IVC died of natural causes, that the Aryans had no role whatsoever in its demise and that in fact they stepped centuries later into the vacuum left by the disappearance of the Harappans. The questions beset us as long as we believe that the Indus inhabitants were replaced, instantly or later, by an ethnically and linguistically distinct people who may be the ancestors of most modern Indians. In this scenario, the Harappans constitute a most uncomfortable presence: after playing a glorious part on the stage of history, one would like them to disappear quietly into its mists, but how to make them do so?
An alternative school of opinion has recently emerged, claiming that the Indus people were in fact the Sanskrit-speaking Rigvedic Aryans. This school has somewhat less to explain than the mainstream scholars. These scholars do not have to trace the footprints of a missing people or of their language; they have to account only for the loss of their culture. This alternative theory is partly inspired by the recent discovery of over 600 separate Harappan sites in the semi-arid region between the Sutlej and the Yamuna. These include some of the largest, such as Rakhigarhi, Ganweriwala or the port of Dholavira in the Rann of Kutch. Many are in the Cholistan desert of Pakistan or in the Thar. Almost all are in the valley of the now-seasonal stream of Ghaggar-Hakra or alongside its dried-up courses. Obviously, such a far-flung civilization with some towns larger than Harappa itself could not have survived without an adequate water-supply, certainly not on the basis of the existing thin monsoonal trickle. And indeed, satellite imagery reveals that in the ancient past, a substantial river flowed through the region, its course coinciding largely with that of today's Ghaggar-Hakra.
At this point, our story links up with yet another mystery of our ancient past. This is the tale of the fabled lost river Saraswati, celebrated in the Rig Veda as the most majestic of the Sapta Sindhu and geographically located by the Nadistuti (Rig Veda 10.75) as lying between the Sutlej and the Yamuna. The Rigvedic Saraswati was a perennial river in full flow; but in later texts, it is the lost river, the one that has vanished in the sands. Could the Ghaggar- Hakra be today's vestige of the mighty Saraswati? But, if the Saraswati was indeed the river that sustained much of the IVC, the Rig Veda, but not the later texts, must have been composed while this civilization was flourishing - or perhaps even earlier. Further, the Aryan authors of the Rig Veda must then have been established in the Saraswati region and, ergo, been part of the IVC. Who knows - they may even have been its creators.
The IVC must have been based largely on irrigation because its primary staples were barley and wheat. Both are winter crops cultivated long after the monsoon is over. And though repeated catastrophic floods would certainly erase all traces of irrigation channels, close computer analysis of satellite images discloses a fine network of abandoned river courses which appear to have been converted, with some additions, into irrigation channels. This network connects almost all known Harappan sites to riverine sources of water. As long as the Saraswati was in full flow, Harappan agriculture must have flourished; but the demise of the river would certainly have spelled doom for the IVC. There may have been other reasons as well for the collapse - floods in the lower Indus valley, earthquakes, desiccation as the monsoons shifted eastward, decline of trade with Mesopotamia as that civilization migrated north due to climate change towards the Levant and the Mediterranean, deforestation because of excessive demand for wood for copper-smelting, social unrest as the economy declined. But there can be little doubt that the civilization could not have survived the death of the Saraswati. As irrigated agriculture lost its water supply, the Indus people migrated east towards the Ganga or reverted to nomadic pastoralism. Urban life, trade, industry and fine arts lost their way along with the Saraswati in the sands of the Thar.
To be concluded
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