by Tony Joseph
It was the 2017 paper ‘A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-biased Dispersals’ that brought attention to this gender disparity in India. The paper said: ‘Genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist Indo-European society.’ The paper also said 70 to 90 per cent of mtDNA lineages of present-day Indian population groups derive from First Indians, while only 10 to 40 per cent of Y-chromosome lineages have similar ancestry. This difference is attributable to the sex bias in the later migrations.
There is one crucial difference between the experiences of western Europe and south Asia with multiple mass migrations. In western Europe, each migration significantly replaced the previous population, while in south Asia, the replacement has been far less on the whole. For example, in many parts of Europe today, the percentage of the original hunter-gatherer ancestry has gone down to single digits, though there are some exceptions in northern Europe. In India, by contrast, the ancestry of the First Indians still constitutes between 50 and 65 per cent for most population groups when you look at the whole genome (as opposed to either Y-chromosome or mtDNA separately).
This difference is also visible in language distribution: 94 per cent of western Europeans today speak an Indo-European language while only about 75 per cent of Indians do so. Dravidian languages are spoken by nearly 20 per cent of Indians, while western Europe has no non-Indo-European language with a similar strong presence.
Interestingly, the only indigenous non-Indo-European language left standing in western Europe today, Basque, is spoken in a region that withstood the massive Steppe migrations into Europe. The Basques draw their ancestry more from the early European farmers – and the hunter-gatherers with whom they mixed – than from the Steppe migrants. Therefore, it is not surprising that they got to retain their pre-Steppe-migration language and culture. (There might be a parallel here with the Dravidian languages of south India in some ways, as both managed to survive in areas that escaped the dominance of the Steppe migrants.)
The ancient DNA evidence for Steppe migrations into Europe took many archaeologists by surprise because after the Second World War they had developed a disdain towards the Nazis and their theories and beliefs, which included the idea that they belonged to the superior and ‘pure race’ of ‘Aryans’, unlike the east Europeans or the Jews; that they had conquered many lands in the past and spread their ‘Corded Ware culture’; and that they had, thus, the natural and inherited right to the lands of others around them. As part of this rejection of Nazi ideas, the archaeologists contested the suggestion that Europe in the past had seen invasions or migrations that had brought about culture change. But the new genetic discoveries have disproved both the archaeologists and the Nazis. Unlike what the archaeologists had believed, we now know that migrations did change the culture of Europe. And unlike what the Nazis had believed, the people they called ‘Aryans’, the Steppe pastoralists, themselves were of mixed ancestry, not a ‘pure race’ by any stretch of the imagination. More poignantly, they came from eastern Europe, a region that the Nazis had deep contempt for.
Apart from the impulse to dismiss Nazi theories, many archaeologists and historians had other reasons too to doubt mass migrations. For example, the archaeologist Colin Renfrew thought that once farming took off and populations exploded, it would have been difficult for any new migrations to happen on a scale large enough to change the demography of these densely populated regions. So how did the Yamnaya manage to beat the odds?
One explanation is that while populations did increase dramatically when agriculture spread, many regions were not densely inhabited. For example, the highest population estimate for the Mature Harappan Civilization, the largest civilization of its time, was five million – spread over a million square kilometres from Shortughai in Afghanistan to Sutkagan Dor on the Makran coast. And that is less than the population of just one city today: Ahmedabad. In the case of Europe, archaeological evidence suggests that the incoming Yamnaya converted large areas not occupied by European Neolithic farmers from forests to grassland, the kind of geography they were familiar with.
But the possibility of another explanation became apparent when a paper co-authored by the geneticist Eske Willerslev and others in 2015 said they had identified DNA sequences resembling Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague, in seven ancient individuals out of the 101 they had analysed, taken from Bronze Age Eurasia. The samples belonged to individuals buried in Yamnaya-linked cultures such as Corded Ware, Afanasievo, Sintashta and Andronovo. The study concluded: ‘It has recently been demonstrated by ancient genomics that the Bronze Age in Europe and Asia was characterised by large-scale population movements, admixture and replacements, which accompanied profound and archaeologically described social and economic changes. In light of our findings, it is plausible that plague outbreaks could have facilitated – or have been facilitated by – these highly dynamic demographic events.’
If diseases carried by the new influx of people from the Steppe played a part in changing the demography of Europe, it wouldn’t be the last time this happened, of course. The diseases carried by the Europeans into the Americas played a significant role in decimating the original population of that continent. Did they play a part in the disappearance of the Harappan Civilization too, which started declining around the same time that the early Steppe migrants reached India? We won’t know until we get direct ancient DNA evidence from cities such as Harappa, Mohenjo-daro or Kalibangan from the Late Harappan period. But even if we discover that diseases did play a part in reducing the Harappan population, it is fairly certain that this was not the cause of the decline of the civilization because there is mounting evidence that it was a long period of drought that brought it down – around the same time that it was wrecking other civilizations such as those in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China.
The most exhaustive, multi-year geological study on the possible reasons for the decline of the Harappan Civilization was published in a 2012 paper titled ‘Fluvial Landscapes of the Harappan Civilization’,5 which identified a clear cause: a prolonged drought that ultimately made monsoonal rivers go dry or become seasonal, affecting habitability along their courses. To quote: ‘Hydroclimatic stress increased the vulnerability of agricultural production supporting Harappan urbanism, leading to settlement downsizing, diversification of crops, and a drastic increase in settlements in the moister monsoon regions of the upper Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.’
This study’s finding was confirmed in the strongest way possible when, in July 2018, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the official keeper of geologic time, introduced a new age called ‘The Meghalayan’ which runs from 2200 BCE to the present and which began with a mega drought that crushed a number of civilizations worldwide – in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and, of course, India. The mega drought was likely triggered by shifts in ocean and atmospheric circulation.
So in hindsight, it looks like the British archaeologist and director general of the Archaeological Survey of India between 1944 and 1948, Sir Robert Eric Mortimer Wheeler, blamed the wrong person for the disappearance of the Harappan Civilization when he wrote, ‘On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused!’ He was suggesting, of course, that ‘invading Aryans’ had destroyed the Harappan Civilization – something for which there is no archaeological evidence. He should have looked more in the direction of Varuna, the Lord of Rain!6
After the decline
It is possible, of course, that the cause for the decline of the Harappan Civilization was not singular, but plural. The long drought may have drained the civilization of its energy and also decimated its trade with Mesopotamia, which was going through its own crisis; the reigning ideology of the Harappan Civilization may have collapsed as a result, leading to the disappearance of the symbols of power and commerce such as the ubiquitous seals and the scri
pt; there may have been internal rebellions; the Harappans may have taken the available option of moving to new fertile regions such as the Ganga valley and starting afresh rather than finding new ways of keeping the old system going; and the influx of a new wave of warrior-like migrants from the Eurasian Steppe might have been just the last straw that broke the system for good. But as we will see later, though the Harappan Civilization may have gone into decline by around 1900 BCE, the people did not disappear and neither did the language nor all of the associated cultural beliefs and practices of the largest civilization of its time.
This is because when the civilization dimmed due to the long drought, the Harappans spread out, to both the east and the south, seeking new fertile land and carrying their language, culture and at least some of their practices with them. (See pp. 195–97 for the continuities from the Harappan Civilization.)
The ‘Aryans’ arrived around this time or a little later with a pastoralist lifestyle, new religious practices such as large sacrificial rituals, a warrior tradition and mastery over the horse and metallurgy. The result was a mixing of populations and the formation of a new power elite that was dominant enough to ultimately force a language shift to Indo-European across northern India. Some of the beliefs and practices of the Harappans reshaped the religious ideology of the ‘Aryans’ while some other practices would have continued as folk religion and culture at a more popular level.
In the south, the migrating Harappans would have found a more congenial atmosphere for their language and culture, partly because the ‘Aryans’ had not yet reached peninsular India and, perhaps, partly because of the presence of earlier migrants who may have spread Dravidian languages, as we saw in chapter 3.
In the language of genetics, the Harappans contributed to the formation of the Ancestral South Indians by moving south and mixing with the First Indians of peninsular India and also to the formation of the Ancestral North Indians by mixing with the incoming ‘Aryans’. Therefore, in many ways, they are the cultural glue that keeps India together – or the sauce on the pizza, to build on a metaphor that we used earlier.
That the newly dominant elite from the Steppe had a clear preference for a non-urban, mobile lifestyle may be part of the reason why India had to wait for more than a millennium after the Harappan Civilization, for its ‘second urbanization’ that began after 500 BCE. As Anthony noted in The Horse, the Wheel and Language, the Yamnaya were a mobile, pastoral people who caused the near disappearance of settlement sites wherever they came to dominate.
Harappans and the Vedas: Disconnect and connect
When the Steppe migrants reached India, they would have come across a culture that already had its own myths, religious beliefs and practices and dominant language or languages, and was coping with a slowly unfolding disaster caused by the long drought. We do not yet know what different routes the people who called themselves ‘Aryans’ may have taken, or how many different and competing groups there might have been. What we do know is that the visible disconnect between the Harappan culture as revealed by its archaeological remains and the Indo-European culture as revealed by the Vedas – starting with the earliest composition, the Rigveda – reduces over time.
Here are a few examples of the early disconnect. The main gods and goddesses of the Rigveda – Indra, Agni, Varuna and the Asvins – find no representation in the vast repertoire of Harappan imagery. The converse is also true: the Rigveda is of no help in trying to interpret the dominant symbols and imagery of the Harappan culture – such as the ubiquitous seals that display a unicorn with what looks like a brazier or manger in front; the script; the Great Bath of Mohenjo-daro and its significance; and so on.
In fact, in one instance, the contrast between the Rigvedic principles and Harappan practice is quite striking. The Rigveda denounces ‘shishna-deva’ (literal meaning: phallus god or phallus worshippers), while Harappan artefacts leave no one in doubt that phallus worship was part of its cultural repertoire. The archaeologist R.S. Bisht, who excavated the most visually stunning Harappan site in India at Dholavira, says there is clear evidence of deliberate destruction of phallic symbols and idols both in Dholavira and other sites after the civilization declined. Book 7, 21.5 of the Rigveda says ‘may not the “shishna-deva” approach our holy worship’, and Book 10, 99.3 describes how Indra slew them. Some authors have used ‘lustful demons’ as the appropriate translation for ‘shishna-deva’ in this context, but the literal meaning of the original text – and, of course, the animosity – is quite clear.
Free-standing phallic columns in Dholavira
R.S. Bisht writes in his report on the Dholavira excavation: ‘At least six examples of free-standing columns were discovered from the excavations. These free-standing columns are tall . . . and with a top resembling a phallus or they are phallic in nature. That is why most of them were found in an intentionally damaged and smashed condition.’
About the Dholavira statue of a seated man the report says:
[It was] perhaps the largest that the Harappans ever attempted . . . It was found upside down as a building block of a wall that was raised by the late Harappans . . . It is made of porous limy sandstone . . . It was in a seating position with a flat base, arms resting on the knees, with both knees drawn up and kept apart as if to show the genitals as the sculpture has shown no feature of clothing.
The statue depicts a male individual and its execution is close to realistic. The belly is shown protruding. The rear portion of the statue also shows evidence of depiction of hair lots falling down, which is also damaged. It was certainly vandalised, possibly just like all the statues, which were found at Mohenjo Daro.
The head portion of this statue is missing now. It seems that its head was intentionally chopped off, elbows and knees are also considerably damaged. The intentional damage caused to this statue may be a clear indication of the paradigm shift in religious belief and ideology, most probably belonging to the Mature Harappan phase [2600–1900 BCE] as this statue is found from a secondary context belonging to Stage VI [1950–1800 BCE]. The manner in which the statue was damaged clearly indicates that the role played by it could no longer be appreciated by Stage VI occupants. The depiction of nicely cut inscriptions on the seals of Stage VI without any motif may also indicate a departure of beliefs and customs.
Top: Statue of a seated man found upside down in the ruins of Dholavira Bottom: Front and side views of the statue, with its genitals intentionally rubbed off and damaged
Stage VI at Dholavira, dated to beween 1950 BCE and 1800 BCE, is the Late Harappan stage, when the Mature phase of the civilization had ended and the site was even deserted for a while. According to the excavation report, ‘Stage VI which appears at the site after a phase of desertion, is equally significant in that it not only brought out many changes of far-reaching consequence in planning, architecture and sigillography [relating to seals] as well as a quantum shift in economic structure, but also witnessed feverish commingling of communities.’
We do not know who or what caused the upheaval in Stage VI at Dholavira; it could have been an internal rebellion during the final stages of the Harappan Civilization for all we know. But the existence of phallic symbols and statues at Harappan sites and the disdain for phallus worship visible in the Rigveda suggest a gap between them.
Bisht is not a proponent of the idea that the Harappan Civilization is not ‘Aryan’ or ‘Vedic’. In fact, he believes that the kind of society that the Rigveda projects is close to what we find at the Harappan sites. However, he also admits that the Vedas looked down upon ‘shishna-devas’ and that the lack of the horse in the Harappan Civilization is a problem in identifying this civilization as Vedic. Until the Harappan script is deciphered, he thinks, the dispute will continue.
The disconnect between the Harappan world and the world of the earliest Veda is apparent in less ideological and more mundane matters too. For example, the rest of the civilized world at the time knew of the Harappan Civilization as Meluhha; the H
arappans were involved in the politics of Mesopotamia, even to the extent of taking sides in their battles; and the economic relationship between Harappa and Mesopotamia was intimate enough for the Harappans to set up colonies in places such as the Oman peninsula to facilitate trading and even mining. But these complex, sophisticated trading activities and urban relationships do not find reflection in the early Vedic corpus. The world of the Rigveda and the world that is revealed by the material culture of Harappa seem two very different universes – and this is without even bringing up the matter of the horse.
Horse sense on Harappa
The problem of the horse is this: the horse is rarely to be found in the Harappan Civilization, neither as skeletal remains nor as images on seals and artefacts, while it is very prominent and ubiquitous in the Rigveda. So much so that two of the main gods, the Asvins, are horsemen. Two other deities, Ushas and Agni, are described as riding horse-drawn chariots. In a hymn, the river Sarasvati is described as ‘created vast for victory like a chariot’. In fact, the presence of the horse in the Rigveda is so prominent that no other animal comes close. There are five hymns about the horse in the Rigveda, but only one about the bull, one about the goat and one about a bird. One of the hymns about the horse (Mandala 1; hymn 162)7 refers to the horse sacrifice as follows:
They who observing that the Horse is ready call out and say, the smell is good; remove it;