The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  Indo-European is a language group; technically, there are no Indo-Europeans, merely Indo-European speakers. But since European scholars also assumed, quite reasonably, that wherever the languages went, there had to be people to carry them, Indo-European speakers are often called Indo-Europeans. Moreover, we are able to construct some of Indo-European culture, not merely from isolated words and parallel grammar structures but from the more substantial historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. For instance, we know that cattle rustling was the basic trade of all of the Indo-European speakers, from the Celts to the Indians, because closely parallel myths from Greece, India, Iran, northern Europe, the Near East, and Scandinavia allow us to reconstruct a *Proto-Indo-European cattle raiding myth.6

  Who were these cattle rustlers? More broadly, what is the relationship between the language and the geographical origin and ethnic identity of the *PIE people? Or to put it differently and to limit it to the culture that is the subject of this book . . .

  WHERE WERE THE PEOPLE WHO COMPOSED THE VEDAS

  BEFORE THEY COMPOSED THE VEDAS?

  We do not know for sure, but we can guess, and the craze for origins makes us guess. Some guesses make more sense than others. Here are the four most often cited.

  FIRST GUESS: THE ARYANS INVADED INDIA FROM *INDO-EUROPE

  “Once upon a time,” the story goes, “blue-haired, blond-eyed people from the north drove their chariots into India and beat the hell out of the dark-skinned people who lived there.” (The northern element was often taken to the extreme. In 1903, Bal Gangadhar Tilak argued, in his The Arctic Home in the Vedas, that the Aryans had composed the Vedas at the North Pole and, on the journey south, divided into two branches, one of which went to Europe, the other to India.) Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century European scholars, serving colonial powers, favored theories of cultural interaction involving invasions or colonization, and the theory that the Vedic people invaded India still has general currency. Behind this guess lies the assumption of a diffusionist, centrifugal cultural movement; like an airline hub dispersing planes, the political center sends out armies and imposes its rule on the neighboring lands. The paradigm of this model is Latin, which did indeed diffuse outward from Rome to all the lands that the Romans conquered and that therefore speak the so-called Romance languages. Linguists then constructed, on the Roman model, an earlier family tree of languages diverging from the center, in this case not from Rome but from the Caucasus, somewhere east of the southern Urals, in southeastern Russia, perhaps on the shores of the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.7 (This is where, as we will see, someone—probably, though not certainly, the *Indo-European people—probably domesticated horses, an event of great significance for the history of Hinduism.) Therefore, the *Indo-European people were also called Caucasians. The mythical land of their family home, recently rechristened Eurostan,8 might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land East of the Asterisk.

  According to this scenario, one branch of this group traveled down the east side of the Caspian Sea and continued east through Afghanistan, reaching the Punjab before the middle of the second millennium BCE.9 But to say that the languages formed a family is not to say that the people who spoke them formed a race. There is nothing intrinsically racist about this story of linguistic migration. On the contrary, the eighteenth-century discovery of the Indo-European link was, at first, a preracial discovery of brotherhood; these people are our (linguistic) cousins. But then the nineteenth-century Orientalists, who now had a theory of race to color their perceptions, gave it a distinctly racist thrust. Their attitude to the nineteenth-century inhabitants of India came to something like “Well, they are black, but their skin color is irrelevant; they are white inside, Greek inside, just like us.” There were also anti-Semitic implications: One reason why British and German scholars were so happy to discover Sanskrit was that they were delighted to find a language older than Hebrew (which they regarded as, on the one hand, their own language, the language of what they called the Old Testament and, on the other hand, the language of the despised “others,” the Jews, for whom the book was the Hebrew Bible). At last, they thought, Hebrew was no longer the oldest language in the world.

  Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word arya, the word that the Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates a linguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather than demographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language. But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for they may never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguistic community.10 After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in their veins.

  Nevertheless, the Orientalist version of the Aryan hypothesis boasted not only of the purity of Aryan blood but of the quantity of non-Aryan blood that the Aryans spilled, and this myth was certainly racist. The “invasion of the blonds” story took root and prevailed for many reasons, among them that the British found a history of invasions of India a convenient way to justify their own military conquest of India. And of course the story became an even more racist myth when the Nazis got hold of it and made “Aryan” a word that, like “gay,” or “holocaust,” or “adult” (in the sense of “pornographic,” as in “adult books and films, adult viewing”), no longer means what it once meant.az People always think about race when you say “Aryan,” even though you tell them not to; we can’t forget what we now know about the word; we can’t regain our earlier naiveté. “Hindu” is a somewhat tainted word, but there is no other easy alternative; “Aryan,” by contrast, is a deeply tainted word, and there are easy alternatives. It is therefore best to avoid using the A word, and to call the people who spoke Indo-European languages Indo-European speakers (or, less cumbersome, Indo-Europeans, though this implies an ethnic group).

  And since the people who composed the Veda left few archaeological footprints, and all we know for certain about them is that they composed the Veda, let us call its authors, and their community, the Vedic people.

  A frequent corollary to the Indo-European invasion theory is the hypothesis that the Vedic people were responsible for the end of the Indus Valley cities. Invasion implies conquest, and who else was there for them to conquer in India? The advocates of this theory cite statements in the Veda about knocking down the fortresses of the barbarians, for the Indus cities did have massive fortification walls.11 They also cite what they interpret as archaeological evidence of sudden, mass deaths in the Indus Valley, and the verses of the Rig Veda that refer to the Dasas as dark-skinned (7.5.3) or dark (1.130.8, 9.41.1, 9.73.5), though the term in question more often refers to evil than to skin color,12 as well as the one Vedic verse that describes them as snub-nosed (“noseless”ba) (5.29.10). Put these data together and you have blond Vedic people responsible for mass death to dark-skinned people in the Indus Valley.

  But there is no reason to make this connection. The Vedic people had other enemies, and the Indus Valley people had other, more likely sources of destruction, nor is there reliable evidence that their cities were ever sacked.13 Moreover, it is more likely that the Indo-European incursions came in a series of individual or small group movements, rather than the one, big charge of the light(-skinned) brigade scenario imagined by this first guess.

  The smug theory that a cavalcade of Aryans rode roughshod into India, bringing civilization with them, has thus been seriously challenged. The certainty has gone, and new answers have thrown their hats into the ring, just as politically driven as the Aryan invasion theory, and, like most politically driven scholarship (but is there really any other kind?), ranging from plausible (if unsupported) to totally bonkers.

  SEC
OND GUESS: THE CAUCASIANS STROLLED IN FROM THE CAUCASUS

  “Once upon a time,” the story goes, “people from the north brought their families and their agriculture into India and settled among the people who lived there.” The first guess, the Aryan invasion theory, is one of the great testosterone myths: They’re guys, they beat everyone up. This second guess, by replacing the word “invasion” with “migration,” takes the military triumphalism out of the theory but retains the basic mechanism and the basic structures: Migrants may have brought an Indo-European language into India.14 This approach accounts for a gradual cultural linguistic infusion into India, still with all the baggage that linguists load onto languages—the social classes, the mythology—and supported by the same linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence (such as burial customs15) and pottery that support the invasion theory.16 Those who hold by either of these two theories (invasion or migration) have recourse to later Indian history. The two powers that built the greatest empires in India, the forces of Central Asian Turks and of the British Raj, first entered India not as military conquerors but as traders and merchants, but in the end, it took force majeure to establish and maintain the control of the subcontinent.

  Martin West, a leading scholar of Indo-European languages, disdains the idea that the Indo-European speakers came not as conquerors but as peaceful migrants: “In the last fifty years or so there has been a scholarly reaction against the old idea of militant hordes swarming out of Eurostan with battle-axes held high and occupying one territory after another. It has been fashionable to deride this model and to put all the emphasis on peaceful processes of population and language diffuision.”17 But, he continues, both on the analogy with the way that in observable history, other linguistic groups (such as Arabic, Turkic, Latin, Celtic, and German, as well as English and Spanish in the New World, which West does not mention) “grew multitudinous and poured across the length and breadth of Europe,” and considering the fact that “there are constant references to battles and descriptions of fighting” in Indo-European poetic and narrative traditions, it appears “by no means implausible that similar bouts of aggressive migration in earlier eras played a large part in effecting the Indo-European diaspora.” This theory, which is quite plausible, is no longer regarded as PC (in the double sense of “postcolonial” or “politically correct”), because of its political history, and the aptly named Professor West can make it only because he is privileged to belong to a generation of Western (more precisely British) scholars for whom “PC” stands for nothing but “police constable.”

  THIRD GUESS: THE VEDIC PEOPLE ORIGINATED IN INDIA

  “From the dawn of history, *Indo-European speakers lived in India, in the Punjab, where they composed the Rig Veda.” A stronger version of the theory adds: “They emigrated to Iran (where they composed the Avesta), Anatolia (leaving that early Hittite inscription), Greece and Italy (where they incorporated local languages to develop Greek and Latin), and, finally, ancient Britain.” (The most extreme version of this guess adds: “All the languages in the world are derived from Sanskrit.”18) In this view, the Vedic people may have been, rather than invaders (or immigrants) from southern Russia, “indigenous for an unknown period of time in the lower Central Himalayan regions,”19 particularly in the Punjab. A variant of this argument presupposes not the same centrifugal diffusion that underlies the first two guesses (simply radiating from India instead of the Caucasus) but a centripetal convergence, into India rather than from the Caucasus: Separate languages came together in India, influencing their neighbors to produce a family resemblance; the people who spoke those separate languages came together and then took back home, like souvenirs, bits of one another’s languages.

  Why couldn’t it have happened that way? In reaction to the blatantly racist spin and colonial thrust of the first two guesses, which imply that Europeans brought civilization to India, this theory says, “Look, we in India had civilization before you Europeans did!” (This is certainly true; no matter where they came from or what their relationship was, the people of the Indus were building great cities and the people of the Vedas creating a great literature at a time when the British were still swinging in trees.) And then it goes on to say, “You came from us. The people who created Vedic culture did not enter India; they began in India.” As a theory, it is reasonable in itself, but there is considerable evidence against it,20 and both linguistic and archaeological arguments render it even more purely speculative than the Aryan invasion theory.21 It has the additional disadvantage of being susceptible to exploitation by the particular brand of Hindu nationalism that wants the Muslims (and Christians) to get out of India: “We were always here, not even just since the Rig Veda, but much, much earlier. This land was always ours.”

  FOURTH GUESS: THE VEDIC PEOPLE LIVED IN THE INDUS VALLEY

  “Once upon a time, the people of the Indus Valley Civilization composed the Vedas.” The final step is simply to assume that some or all of the inhabitants of the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were themselves Indo-European speakers; that the people who built the cities also composed the Vedas,22 that the Indus civilization itself is the site of the mythological Vedic age.23 In favor of this is the evidence of some continuity between both the space and the time of the Indus and Vedic civilizations,24 which almost certainly shared some of the territory of the greater Punjab during some part of the second millennium BCE, as well as a number of cultural features. One variant of this theory argues that (1) since there are Dravidian (and Munda) loan words in the Vedas (which is true), and (2) since the Harappan script is a form of Sanskrit (which is almost certainly not true, and certainly unproved, though reputable scholars as well as cranks have identified the Indus inscriptions as part of “the Indian/Persian/ Indo-European religious system and Sanskrit language”25), therefore (3) the IVC is a hybrid Sanskrit/Dravidian culture produced by (4) Indo-European speakers who came from Europe to North India to interact with Dravidian speakers from India, starting in the middle of the fourth millennium BCE.26

  This theory still assumes a migration into India from Europe, but one that is met by an earlier Dravidian presence. Some see in the Indus Valley not merely the seeds of later Hinduism but the very religion described in the almost contemporaneous Rig Veda; they argue, for instance, that the brick platforms found in the Indus were used for Vedic sacrifices.27 This hybrid is sometimes called the Sarasvati Valley culture, or the Indus-Sarasvati culture, because there were Indus settlements on the Sarasvati River (though it dried up around 1900 BCE) and the Rig Veda mentions a Sarasvati River.28 But even when we grant that some sort of gradual cultural interaction took place, and not simply an invasion, it is not likely that the same people could have built the Indus cities and also composed the Rig Veda.

  The linguistic and archaeological evidence against this fourth guess is pretty conclusive. It is hard work to fit the ruins of the IVC into the landscape of the Rig Veda.29 The Rig Veda does not know any of the places or artifacts or urban techniques of the Indus Valley.30 None of the things the Veda describes look like the things we see in the archaeology of the Indus. The Rig Veda never mentions inscribed seals or a Great Bath or trade with Mesopotamia, despite the fact that it glories in the stuff of everyday life. It never refers to sculptured representations of the human body.31 It has no words, not even borrowed ones, for scripts or writing, for records, scribes, or letters.32 After the Indus script, writing was not used again in India until the time of Ashoka, in the third century BCE.

  Many of the words that the Rig Veda uses for agricultural implements, such as the plow, as well as words for furrow and threshing floor and, significantly, rice, come from non-Sanskritic languages, suggesting that the Vedic people learned much of their agriculture from communities in place in India before they arrived. But the Indus people, who obviously did have plows and mortar, presumably would have had their own words for them. Even in the Vedic period, there was multilingualism. But how could the Vedic people have forgotten about architectur
e, about bricks, about mortar (let alone about writing)? The answer is simple enough: They had never had them. In the good old days they had always slept on their saddlebags, and once they got to the Punjab they built in wood and straw, like the first two of the three little piggies, not in brick, like the third (and like the Indus people).

  It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Indus people composed the Rig Veda. The final nail in the coffin of this theory comes not from the rather technical linguistic arguments but from the testimony of animals, particularly horses.

  LIONS AND TIGERS AND RHINOS, OH MY!

  Animals in general provide strong clues; they make suggestions, sometimes overwhelmingly persuasive suggestions, if not airtight proofs. The evidence of animals suggests that the civilizations of the Indus Valley and the Vedas were entirely different, though this does not mean that they did not eventually interact. The Rig Veda mentions (here in alphabetical order) ants, antelope, boars, deer, foxes, gazelles, jackals, lions, monkeys, rabbits, rats, quail, and wolves, and other Vedas mention bears, beaver, elk, hares, lynxes, and otters.33 The Rig Veda also mentions lions (10.28.11), though the Vedic people had to invent a word for “lion”34 (and to borrow a word for “peacock”35). (Lions may or may not be depicted in the Indus Valley; there’s a figurine that might be a lion or a tiger.)