by John Keay
In the Vedas there is even mention of ‘Hariyupiya’ as a placename. It could be the Harappan site itself, although most scholars take its context to indicate a river, probably west of the Indus. Finally, there is the intriguing possibility that the word ‘Meluhha’, the name by which the Sumerians apparently designated their Harappan trading partners, eventually resurfaced in Sanskrit as mleccha. The latter was a term of contempt used by the arya to disparage those whom they regarded as non-arya. It thus meant much the same as dasa and dasyu, words which unfortunately predate its appearance. Philologists, however, insist that mleccha cannot possibly be Sanskrit in origin. The reflexive consonants clearly show the word to have been borrowed from some local tongue. Perhaps it was just an onomatopoeic word derived from the uncouth gobbledygook in which, to arya ears, the dasa spoke. But if it was derived from the term by which the dasa peoples described themselves, then coincidence can scarcely deny that the mleccha people must have been the Harappans, or rather the ‘Meluhhans’.
INVASIONS OR MIGRATIONS?
Other examples of loanwords in the Sanskrit of the Vedas can be equally revealing. The word for ‘plough’, for instance, is said to be non-Sanskritic. If the arya, when they arrived in India, did not have a word for a plough – and so had to borrow someone else’s – it is safe to assume that they did not have a plough. The Harappans, however, did. It therefore follows that the arya probably learned about ploughs and their use from the indigenous successors of the Harappans. These may have been the despised dasa of the Vedic texts, although there are now grounds to suppose that the dasa were in fact survivors of an earlier wave of the Indo-European diaspora and were not therefore indigenous. It has also been suggested that arya – dasa contact may have taken place in Afghanistan before the arya reached India.
Similar conclusions may be drawn about the arya’s words for ‘furrow’ and for ‘threshing floor’. They too appear to be non-Sanskritic. Obviously the Aryans were not engaged in arable farming in any big way. Nor, evidently, were they interested in architecture. Whereas it is no surprise that they had to borrow a word for ‘peacock’, a bird then not much known outside India, or that they had to invent one for ‘elephant’ (they called it the ‘beast with a hand’, i.e. a trunk), it is more revealing that they had also to borrow a word for ‘mortar’. Archaeology supports the obvious inference; no buildings have yet been found which can certainly be ascribed to the Vedic arya.
For ‘writing’, ‘record’, ‘scribe’, or ‘letter’ the arya of the Vedas had no words at all, not even borrowed ones. It is therefore almost certain that they brought no knowledge of writing into India with them and that, by the time they arrived, the literacy skills of the Harappans had been forgotten, at least in areas where the arya first settled. When and how later scripts emerged is unknown. The first mention of writing occurs in oral compositions dating from after 500 BC. Inscriptions do not appear until two hundred years later, but they use two comparatively sophisticated scripts which suggest several centuries of prior familiarity. One of these scripts may owe something to the ideograms of the Harappan seals; the other looks to have been derived from the Aramaic script of western Asia.
Illiterate and ignorant of many basic agrarian skills, the arya yet knew all, and more, about livestock. While the Harappans used ox-transport and may have found totemic roles for bulls and many other animals, they do not seem to have had a passion for dairy farming or horse-racing; in fact the horse was probably unknown to them, India’s lack of native bloodstock being then, as ever after, the Achilles heel of its ambitious empire-builders. The arya, though, were veritable cowboys. As well as advertising their prowess in the rustling of cattle and the driving of two-horse chariots, they spattered their verses with metaphors about affectionate cows and fiery steeds. In the Rig Veda storm clouds invariably ‘gallop’ across the heavens; their thunder is as the neigh of a stallion. Rivers rush from the hills like cattle stampeding towards pasture; and when the Beas river is joined by a tributary, ‘one the other licks, like the mother-cow her calf’. Cattle were also currency, value being expressed in so many cows; and go, the Sanskrit root for ‘cow’, also features in the word used to indicate warfare, evidence that strife originally resulted from competition not for land and territory but for cows and wealth.
The arya were therefore originally pastoralists and, assuming a migration into India, plus the herdsman’s need to be forever seeking new pastures, they must have been semi-nomadic. We may infer that, like pastoralists the world over, they lived an itinerant outdoor life. Much exposed to the elements, they may have been inclined to discover divine powers in the forces of nature and to assume a ready communion with these powers. The names of their gods predate arrival in India, many (e.g. Indra, Agni, Varuna) being almost synonymous with their counterparts in Persian, Greek and Latin mythology; but their attributes and achievements relate to the Indian environment. It would seem, also, that the basic unit of human society was initially the small nomadic group rather than the settlement. The word grama, although it soon came to mean a village, was originally indicative of a troupe of wagons and their perhaps three or four related families, plus livestock.
During the monsoon months, when pasture became plentiful and transhumance difficult, the arya must have formed their first temporary settlements. No doubt they then also planted their grain crop which, watered by the rains and fertilised by the manure from their cattle pens, would have been harvested during the winter months. The grain was probably barley. Rice, although apparently cultivated by the Harappans, does not feature in the earliest of the Vedas. Nor is the word used to designate it Sanskritic. It, too, was probably acquired from one of India’s aboriginal peoples. Later, however, after the arya had adopted a settled life, rice receives its first mention, and later still, following their colonisation of the middle Ganga in the early centuries of the first millennium BC, the cultivation of irrigated padi would become crucial to their pattern of settlement.
That they initially settled in the Panjab and astride what is now the Indo–Pakistan frontier is clear from references in the Rig Veda to the Sapta-sindhu, ‘the Land of the Seven Rivers’. Each of these rivers has been identified, and most were tributaries of the Indus. They are mentioned frequently, and must therefore have been familiar to the arya (although the most important, the Saraswati, has since dried up). On the other hand, there is only one mention of the mighty Ganga, and that in what is thought to be the latest of Rig Vedic compositions. Subsequent works, like the Brahmanas and Upanisads (C900–600 BC), confirm a shift in geographical focus to the east and specifically to the Doab, the crescent of land between the Jamuna and the Ganga (immediately east of Delhi). As the setting for the Mahabharata, the Doab became arya-varta, ‘the land of the arya’. If one accepts C950 BC as the probable date of the Bharata war, this migration, or colonisation, may therefore have occurred C1100–1000 BC. It would be followed by a further move into the valley of the Ganga itself before the arya, much changed in the interim, began founding states, building cities and rediscovering the trail of civilisation which the Harappans had trodden two thousand years earlier.
As to when the arya made their initial debut in India there remains grave doubt. Nearly two hundred years ago Mountstuart Elphinstone, one of the most outstanding scholar-administrators in the employ of the English East India Company, headed the first British mission into Afghanistan. He failed to reach Kabul, but from Peshawar in what was then Afghan territory Elphinstone got a look at the Khyber Pass and formed some idea of the harsh lands whence the Aryans supposedly came. Years later, having declined the governor-generalship to concentrate on his studies, he produced a magisterial History of India. In it he devoted much attention to Sanskrit tradition, and recalling that dramatic contrast between the arid Afghan hills and the smiling gardens of Peshawar, he for the first time threw serious doubt on the central Asian provenance of the Aryans.
Neither in the code of Manu [the survivor of the flood, who was later credited with c
ompiling a standard compendium of Hindu law] nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any other book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence, or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no farther than the Himalaya chain, in which is fixed the habitation of the gods.7
To Elphinstone it was quite incredible that the Aryans could have made the transition from mountain desert to monsoonal paradise and yet failed to record it. He also noted that, throughout the ages, civilisation had more commonly spread from east to west than vice versa. Perhaps, therefore, the Aryans had originated in India.
Although this idea currently derives no credibility from its aggressive repetition in Hindu nationalist publications, and although it is flatly denied by the arya’s familiarity with horses (typically central Asian) and their ignorance of elephants (typically Indian), it is certainly curious that the Vedas say nothing of life in central Asia, nor of an epic journey thence through the mountains, nor of arriving in the deliciously different environment of the subcontinent. The usual explanation is that, by the time the Vedas were composed, this migration was so remote that all memory of it had faded; and on this basis a tentative chronology is proposed. Allowing, then, first for a major time-lapse (say two hundred years) between the Late Harappan phase and the Aryan arrival in India, and then for a plausible memory gap (say another two hundred years) between arrival and the composition of the earliest Vedas, it looks as if the arya must have entered India some time between 1500 BC and 1300 BC. Most authorities now suppose several waves of migration rather than a single mass movement. These waves probably consisted of different tribes and, on linguistic evidence, may have been spread over centuries. So possibly the entire period was one of Aryan incursion.
As to whether all or any of these incursions constituted invasions rather than migrations it is impossible to say. We may, though, speculate. Considered in the light of later incursions into north-west India by Alexander the Great and a host of other intruders, including those afire with the spirit of Islam, the Aryan coming has traditionally been seen as a full-scale invasion. The indigenous people ‘naturally resisted the newcomers, and a fierce and protracted struggle ensued’. In a standard textbook on ancient India, R.C. Majumdar goes on to identify the indigenous resistance as coming from ‘Dravidians’, the assumption being that the indigenous dasa spoke a Dravidian, as opposed to a Sanskritic, language.
It was not merely a struggle between two nationalities. The Dravidians had to fight for their very existence … But all in vain … The Dravidians put up a brave fight, and laid down their lives in hundreds and thousands on various battlefields, but ultimately had to succumb to the attacks of the invaders. The Aryans destroyed their castles and cities, burnt their houses, and reduced a large number of them to slaves.8
Recent theories of multiple migrations have somewhat softened this picture. Perhaps some of the Aryan clans were invited into India as allies, mercenaries or traders; the indigenous dasa may not have been ‘Dravidians’ but earlier Indo-Aryan arrivals; there is nothing to suggest that they ever constructed ‘castles and cities’; and the archaeological evidence, being almost entirely ceramic, gives no hint of the sudden change one would expect from the conquest and suppression of an entire ‘nationality’.
There is, though, another explanation. Seen in the context not of later invasions in the north-west, but of later extensions of arya influence to the rest of India, a rather different and more intriguing picture emerges. Arguably this process of ‘Aryanisation’ by which arya culture spread to non-arya peoples continued throughout the subcontinent’s history, indeed is still going on to this day. In little-frequented enclaves of central and north-eastern India tribal communities of adivasi, or aboriginal, people may even now be found in various transitional stages of Aryanisation (or ‘Sanskritisation’). A similar process is said to have been observable amongst distant peoples, like the Fijians, who were affected by the Indian diaspora of colonial times. In both cases, Aryan ideas and influence were initially carried by work-seekers and traders, not warmongers. More significantly, exactly the same process probably accounted for the gradual Aryanisation of peninsular India plus much of south-east Asia.
An Aryanised society may be defined as one in which primacy is accorded to a particular language (Sanskrit), to an authoritative priesthood (brahmans) and to a hierarchical social structure (caste). To establish these three ‘pillars’ of Aryanisation in, say, Kerala or Java no sizeable relocation of people would have been necessary. As will be seen, the process appears simply to have been one of gradual acculturation requiring neither mass migration nor enforced concurrence. A small admixture of fortune-seekers, traders or teachers who happened to be in possession of a superior technology and of a persuasive ideology could and did, if prepared to compromise with existing custom, create a convincing and lasting veneer of Aryanisation without apparently antagonising anyone.
Admittedly, indeed on their own admission, the arya cattle-rustlers of the Rig Veda did antagonise the dasa. But they also compromised with them, adopting dasa technology, dasa cults and dasa vocabulary, and inducting dasa clans and leaders into their society. Despite the importance attached to the purity of Sanskrit, there is even a hint of dasa-arya bilingualism. With the horse and the chariot by way of a dazzling new technology, and with the subtleties of ritual sacrifice as a mesmerising ideology, the arya may have secured recognition of their superiority by a process no more deliberate and menacing than social attraction and cultural osmosis; thus the Aryan invasion and conquest of India could be as much a ‘myth’ and a ‘red herring’ as the existence of an Aryan race.
It should, however, be emphasised that in the second millennium BC the familiar traits of Aryanisation, those three pillars of language, priesthood and social hierarchy, were only just beginning to emerge. All are evident in the earliest Vedas, but they are undeveloped. They only assume definition and primacy in the context of contact between the arya and the various indigenous peoples. Quite possibly the latter contributed to, or participated in, the formulation of these ‘pillars’. Arya culture may itself have been a hybrid, and ‘Aryanisation’ may therefore be a misnomer.
NO BAD HYMNS
Such speculation is justifiable because of the unsatisfactory nature of Vedic literature as historical source material. The Rig Veda, earliest (perhaps C1100 BC) of the Vedic compositions, comprises ten mandala or ‘cycles’ of ritual hymns and liturgical directives. Although generally considered the most informative of the Vedic texts, its clues as to the lifestyle, organisation and aspirations of the arya are ‘submerged under a stupendous mass of dry and stereotyped hymnology dating back to the Indo-Iranian era [i.e. before the Aryans reached India], and held as a close preserve by a number of priestly families whose sole object in cherishing those hymns was to utilise them in their sacrificial cult’. Dr B.K. Ghosh of Calcutta University then goes on to cite an example from Mandala I. He calls it ‘the worst in the Rig Veda’; even its brahman composer seems to have had a premonition of failure. Yet in terms of content it is not untypical.
No bad hymns am I offering by exerting my intellect
In praise of Bhavya ruling on the Indus
Who assigned to me a thousand sacrifices,
That incomparable king desirous of fame.
A hundred gold pieces from the fame-seeking king,
Together with a hundred horses as a present have I received,
I, Kakshivant, obtained also a hundred cows from my master
Who exalted thereby his fame immortal up to heaven.
‘This dismal hymn,’ writes Dr Ghosh, ‘ends with two verses notable only for their extreme obscenity.’9 In translation the obscurity is more evident than the obscenity but, by substituting sexual terms for words like ‘bliss’ and ‘creation’, it is just possible to grasp the nub of his objection.
O resplendent lord, with brilliant radiance may you be delighted.
May your own bliss be
consummated. Your delightful creation,
The holder of your bliss, is as exhilarating as the bliss itself.
For you, the vigour, equally envigorating is the bliss,
O mighty, giver of a thousand pleasures.10
Later Vedic collections (Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda) reiterate and supplement such verses from the Rig Veda, but they rarely illuminate them. As for the Brahmanas and Upanisads, the latter explore the mystical and metaphysical meaning of the Vedas and are important for the development of Indian philosophy, but they contain little historical information, while the former, ‘an arid desert of puerile speculation on ritual ceremonies’, again fail to measure up to Dr Ghosh’s exacting standards. Elsewhere he calls them ‘filthy’, ‘repulsive’, ‘of interest only to students of abnormal psychology’ and ‘of sickening prolixity’.
There are also, though, especially in the Rig Veda, some hymns of dazzling lyricism. Most often cited are those dedicated to the delectable Ushas, the goddess of dawn who reveals herself each morning, upright and naked, her body ‘bright from bathing’; or those to Ratri, the spirit of the night, who from the stars that are her eyes keeps watch when men, like birds to roost, go home to rest. Even in excessively literal translations, these pearls of descriptive verse from poetry’s remotest past suggest that there was more to the arya than the earthy obsessions of the stockman and the swagger of the charioteering oppressor. The prerequisites of civilisation – economic surplus, social and functional specialisation, political authority, urbanisation – were still lacking, but already the people of the Vedas had acquired a linguistic mastery of their environment and were beginning to deploy that same remarkable language to explore its logic.