Fairly soon a predictable doctrine began to take form. ‘This’, explains Gregory Possehl,
had to do with the Aryan race, proposed to be the people who spoke the languages of the Indo-European family. European intellectual and moral superiority was a foregone conclusion to most savants of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The success of European colonialism, Christianity and the Industrial Revolution proved that. This condition of innate superiority was seen in the Classical Greeks and to have been carried forward by Rome. With the discovery of the Indo-European family of languages there was evidence for an even earlier history, one set within a prehistoric past that only archaeology could uncover. The Aryans, or Indo-Europeans, must have been blessed with this ‘superiority’ since they too were successful conquerors of vast lands, from the Bay of Bengal to the outer islands of Scandinavia and the United Kingdom.12
It was against this ideological background of inevitable European superiority, combined with misunderstood references to the Aryas in the Rig, that the doctrine of the ‘the Aryan invasion of India’ arose and gained universal acceptance amongst scientists as an event that had taken place at a specific moment in history and that had involved a mass movement of peoples from a European ‘homeland’ into India.
Indeed, the earliest version of this scenario remained widely accepted until the twentieth century was quite far advanced. It held that India – which before had been inhabited exclusively by dark-skinned aboriginal and Dravidian tribes – was invaded from the north-west through the passes of Afghanistan by a light-skinned and perhaps even blue-eyed European race at some time during the second millennium BC. The pale nomadic invaders, mounted on horses, armed with iron weapons and driving fast war chariots, called themselves the ‘Aryas’. They rapidly overwhelmed and subjugated the indigenous inhabitants, whose civilization was at a lower level than their own. At the same time they imported their own naturalistic religion – expressed in the Rig Veda – which they imposed on the ‘inferior’ conquered races of India.
The second scenario began to take shape after the discovery and excavation of the Indus valley sites of Harappa and Mohenjodaro during the 1920s and 1930s. It rapidly became clear that these sophisticated, centrally planned cities were much older than the supposed 1500 BC date for the Aryan invasion of India and that they belonged to a previously unidentified high civilization of remote antiquity, perhaps almost as old, it was speculated, as Sumer or Egypt – in other words, dating back to 3000 BC or earlier.
Like other resilient bad ideas, the Aryan invasion theory survived what should have been critical evidence against it by adapting. Although the chronology had to be increasingly stretched to fit in with the new archaeological discoveries, historians were for a long while able to cling on to the notion of an invasion by ‘Aryan’ hordes in the second millennium BC.
What changed was the background. Previously, the pale Aryas had overrun primitive tribes of dark-skinned hunter-gatherers. Now it had to be admitted that they had overrun a sophisticated urban civilization that had flourished in India for at least a thousand years before their arrival and that had been far ahead of them in culture but no match for their superior military prowess and technology. Previously the Aryas had been the bringers of civilization to a benighted and barbaric India; now they were the destroyers of a far older civilization than their own – a literate civilization, moreover, and one that had clearly been prosperous for a very long time.
It was generally agreed that this earlier race of city dwellers had been Dravidians – an ethno-linguistic group, principally represented by Tamil-speakers, that is now almost entirely confined to southern India. With no more evidence than the authoritative (and in this case incorrect) opinion of the revered British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler concerning a few dozen skeletons thought to display wound marks that had been found at Mohenjodaro, scholars adopted the theory that the invading Aryas had ‘massacred’ the Dravidian inhabitants of the Indus-Sarasvati cities, forcibly taken over their lands and driven the survivors towards the south.
Although the massacre theory was later discredited (the skeletons came from different epochs, showed no signs of fatal wounds, and were not the result of any one event),13 the idea of a violent invasion of India by a non-Indian people calling themselves the Aryas survived in at least some enclaves of mainstream scholarship into the early 1990s – when even its most ardent supporters began to distance themselves from it. By 1999 the standard texts on the subject had caught up and Gregory Possehl was able to write the definitive obituary of the Aryan invasion hypothesis in his massive tome Indus Age:
In the end there is no reason to believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages and was possessed of a coherent or well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural features.14
1500 BC or 15,000 BC?
So it is not controversial to state that the top scholars in this field now accept, absolutely, that there was no Aryan race and no Aryan invasion. Strangely, however, very few of them seem to have noticed that these conclusions must have implications for the history that we ascribe to the Vedas – hitherto assumed to have been composed by the Aryan invaders, and codified by them into the form that is with us now, during the first few centuries after their arrival in India around 1500 BC.
It turns out that this assumption, which in all logic cannot stand now that the core idea of an Aryan invasion has been abandoned, is one of the pillars of the orthodox chronology of the Vedas. This dates the codification of the four principal books – the Rig Veda, the Atharva Veda, the Yajur Veda and the Sama Veda – to between 1200 and 800 BC (with the three centuries between 1500 BC and 1200 BC allocated to the actual composition of the hymns).
The second pillar has to do with metals and the supposed date of the ‘Iron Age’ in India. The Rig Veda, which is thought to be the oldest Vedic text, uses a general term, ayas, for metal. By the time of the codification of the slightly later Atharva Veda, however, a new term has been introduced: krsna ayas, meaning ‘black metal’. Scholars have taken this to be a reference to iron, and have drawn very large chronological conclusions from it. Gregory Possehl:
There is some content of the Rig Veda that hints at its age. There are references made to metals … but not iron. However, by the time of the Atharva Veda iron is known. This can be used to suggest that the Rig Veda was codified prior to the widespread use of iron in northern India and Pakistan and that the Atharva Veda is on the other side of this timeline; nominally 1000 BC or slightly earlier.15
Possehl describes this as nothing more than a ‘reasonable or interesting observation, not a hard and fast historical point’.16 This is certainly a wise caution. For example, the metal krsna ayas might have been known in Rig Vedic times but simply not mentioned in the Rig itself. Or, as a number of authorities have argued, it may be that krsna ayas has been mistranslated as iron and that some other dark-coloured metal was intended. Or again, with no indication given in the texts as to how the krsna ayas was acquired or manufactured, it is also possible – even if ‘iron’ was intended – that the references are to meteoritic iron (as opposed to man-made smelted or forged iron). This is widely understood to be the case, for example, with the many references to ‘iron’ – bja – in the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (c.2300 BC, long before the Egyptian ‘Iron Age’) and there is no reason from the context why it should not also be so in the Atharva Veda.
The third pillar supporting the orthodox chronology of the Vedas, and the one most relied upon for dating the Vedas today, is a linguistic argument extrapolated from a ‘feeling’ certain specialized scholars have about the pace at which Sanskrit might have evolved. Gregory Possehl again, setting out the orthodox view as it stood in 1999:
Based on the language of the Rig Veda, its vocabulary and grammar, Vedic Sanskrit can be thought of as the archaic form of this language. The Sanskritists on whose judgement I rely, feel that the date for the codification of the Rig Veda is not likely to be
earlier than 1200 BC nor later than 800 BC. There is some bias toward the later date. These dates are not based on a process of reasoning rich in data and cross-checks. They emerge instead from a sense of how rapidly Sanskrit might have changed, using the grammar of Panini (c.5th century BC) as a baseline and working backward from this point. There are few chronological checkpoints in this process and the period between 1200 BC and 800 BC emerges as a scholarly judgement; a kind of ballpark guess …17
Possehl then goes on to warn that since ‘this date for the Rig Veda is based primarily on language’, it gives at best ‘the approximate date for the codification of the text, but not for the history that may be represented there, which is certainly earlier; how much earlier is simply not known’.18
Likewise, it is surely significant that Max Muller, perhaps the most eminent Indologist of all, and in fact the first Sanskritist to propose a codification date of 1200 BC for the Rig Veda, was himself much more hesitant than the generations of scholars following uncritically after him, who have allowed the date of 1200 BC to crystallize into received wisdom. It is clear that Muller became aware during his own lifetime that such a ‘crystallization’ process was underway – and that he resisted it. ‘I have repeatedly dwelt on the entirely hypothetical nature of the dates which I ventured to assign to the first three periods of Vedic literature,’ he protested at one point.19 Again, in his Gifford Lectures in 1890, Muller warned his students that 1200 BC was a purely arbitrary date based on unproven assumptions about the rate of evolution of Sanskrit: ‘Whether the Vedic hymns were composed in 1000 or 1500 or 2000 or 3000 BC no power on earth could ever fix.’20 And in his book The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, which describes the Vedas as ‘tombs of thought richer in relics than the royal tombs of Egypt’, Muller cautions:
If we grant that they belonged to the second millennium before our era, we are probably on safe ground, though we should not forget that this is a constructive date only, and that such a date does not become positive by mere repetition … Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 1500 or 15,000 BC, they have their own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world …21
Alchemy
Despite Muller’s insistent and repeated caveats, the date of around 1200 BC that he had once ‘Ventured to assign’ to the codification of the Rig Veda was the date that stuck. The master himself never saw it as anything more than a hypothesis, but the alchemy of his own prestige and authority transformed it after his death into a ‘fact’.
Such cults of the personalities of great men have converted opinions into facts before – usually only for short periods of time until common sense reasserts itself. But Muller’s nineteenth-century hypothesis about Vedic chronology is still treated as a fact virtually universally in the twenty-first century even, as we have seen, amongst such wise and insightful scholars as Gregory Possehl. To give just one further example out of many that are available to make the point, Professor Jonathan Mark Kennoyer of the University of Wisconsin, another leading authority on the Indus age, states as fact in his 1998 book Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization that:
The Rig Veda is a compilation of sacred hymns that was codified in its present form during the mid-second to first millennium BC at around the same time as the Indus cities were declining …22
As anyone who knows their work can attest, Kennoyer and Possehl are far from being dogmatic about the interpretation of the past. On the contrary, they are amongst a number of really fine thinkers and brilliant field-researchers in universities all around the world – not least in India itself and in Pakistan – who are today confronting the enduring riddle of Indian antiquity with a formidable combination of open minds and scientific method. It is important also to remind ourselves that they are only proposing codification dates for the Rig Veda and fully endorse Muller’s earlier recognition that many of the compositions within the standardized collections may have had an extremely long prior existence in India’s ancient and fantastically elaborate oral tradition. So while their approach does recognize a date of approximately 1200 BC for codification, Possehl, Kennoyer and others are advocates of much earlier dates of composition. Kennoyer in particular seems willing to explore the possibility of continuity between Indus-Sarasvati motifs and the Rig Vedic hymns23 – when not so long ago such a line of thought would have been inconceivable for mainstream scholars.
Yet so far neither Possehl nor Kennoyer, nor any other Western Indologist of whom I am aware, nor any Western historian, archaeologist, linguist or any other academic from any other discipline working in a university outside India itself, has ever seriously considered the possibility that the Indus Valley civilization, hitherto believed ‘mute’ because its script cannot be deciphered, could in reality have been speaking to us all along through the medium of Vedic Sanskrit.
Having taken two big steps towards such a conclusion – dumping the Aryan invasion theory, and accepting that the Vedas are likely to be significantly older than their date of codification – it is, I think, rather strange that scholars outside India have not yet been prepared to take the third obvious step, which would involve giving proper consideration to the possibility that the true parent of these orphaned scriptures could be the Indus-Sarasvati civilization itself rather than the evaporated ‘Aryan invaders’ of the second millennium BC.
Could it be that the reason for this reluctance is the same as the reason that the Aryan invasion theory was allowed to flourish during the colonial era in the first place?
How to have your Aryan invasion and not admit it
There can be little serious doubt that the evolution and lengthy survival of the Aryan invasion theory was underpinned by an ingrained conviction on the part of European scholars that the presence in India of a ‘superior’ language such as Sanskrit that was related to European languages must imply a movement of that language from Europe to India in remote prehistory rather than from India to Europe.
Vere Gordon Childe, Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and later Director of the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, was one of the most influential exponents of this gross scholarly racism. In 1926, while Harappa and Mohenjodaro were actually under excavation, Childe eulogized the ‘gift’ that he believed had been given to India by brawny ‘Nordic’ Aryans:
The lasting gift bequeathed by the Aryans to the conquered peoples was neither material culture nor a superior physique, but a more excellent language and the mentality it generated … At the same time the fact that the first Aryans were Nordics was not without importance. The physical qualities of that stock did enable them by bare fact of superior strength to conquer even more advanced peoples and so to impose their language on areas from which their bodily type was almost completely vanished. This is the truth underlying the panegyrics of the Germanists; the Nordics’ superiority in physique fitted them to be the vehicles of a superior language.24
Such ideas, endorsed and propagated by the leading archaeologists and ethnologists of the time, played a crucial role in the growth of the Nazi cult of ‘Aryan’ racial superiority during the 1930s and 1940s and led, ultimately, to the abomination of the Holocaust. One would expect, therefore, that archaeologists of today would take an entirely different line. This is what Colin Renfrew, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University, has to say on the subject:
As far as I can see there is nothing in the Rig Veda which demonstrates that the Vedic-speaking population were intrusive [to India]; this comes rather from a historical assumption about the ‘coming’ of the Indo-Europeans …25
Renfrew blames Vere Gordon Childe’s contemporary Sir Mortimer Wheeler for the widespread diffusion and rapid uptake of the ‘invasion’ idea, which
is rooted entirely in assumptions … When Wheeler speaks of ‘the Aryan invasion of the Land of the Seven Rivers in the Punjab’, he has no warranty at all, so far as I can see. If one checks the dozen references in the Rig Veda to the Seven Rivers, there
is nothing in any of them that to me implies invasion: the Land of the Seven Rivers is the land of the Rig Veda, the scene of the action. Nothing implies that the Aryas were strangers there.26
Finally Renfrew makes the significant observation that despite Wheeler’s attempt to hold the Aryas responsible for massacres they never committed in the Indus-Sarasvati cities, and to blame them for those cities’ collapse in the second millennium BC:
It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley civilization, which on this hypothesis would be speaking the Indo-European ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit.27
But ultimately Renfrew too turns out to be proposing an Aryan invasion of India – only in a freshly scrubbed, politically correct incarnation. Renfrew’s scenario enables him to keep a non-Indian origin for Sanskrit while abandoning the now untenable theory of an invasion in the second millennium BC. His argument, in the simplest terms, is that the ‘invasion’ was actually a peaceful agricultural ‘migration’ or ‘dispersal’ and that it took place much earlier than the second millennium BC – indeed he prefers a date at the beginning of the Neolithic perhaps as much as 9000 years ago.28 In his important study Archaeology and Language he makes the case that Anatolia (in modern Turkey, occupying the peninsula between the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the Aegean) was
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