Early Indians

by Tony Joseph

  And, craving meat, await the distribution, – may their approving help promote labour.

  The trial-fork of the flesh-cooking cauldron, the vessels out of which the broth is sprinkled,

  The warming-pots, the covers of the dishes, hooks, carving boards, – all these attend the Charger.

  The starting-place, his place of rest and rolling, the ropes wherewith the Chargers feet were fastened,

  The water that he drank, the food he tasted, – among the Gods, too, may all these attend thee.

  Let not the fire, smoke-chanted, make thee crackle, nor glowing cauldron smell and break to pieces.

  Offered, beloved, approved, and consecrated, – such Charger do the Gods accept with favour.

  For those who do not accept the idea of ‘Aryan’ migrations and insist that the ‘Aryans’ were indigenous, it is axiomatic that the Harappan Civilization was ‘Vedic’ – or a creation of the ‘Aryans’ who composed the Vedas. They make three arguments for why the lack of horses or chariots in the Harappan cities should not stand in the way of a Vedic identity for the civilization. One, horse bones are rare even in post-Harappan times, even though nobody doubts that horses were present then. Second, as the archaeologist B.B. Lal, the leading proponent of the Harappans-as-Vedic-Aryans proposition, puts it: ‘A wooden chariot, or anything wooden, is very difficult to find in the hot and humid climate of this country. I have not come across anything wooden, except a piece of grain . . . in Kalibangan.’ Point three is that there has indeed been one internationally verified finding of horse bones – at the Harappan site of Surkotada in Gujarat – dating back to between 2100 BCE and 1700 BCE. These bones were indeed examined by the archaeozoologist Professor Sandor Bokonyi, who had this to say, ‘The occurrence of true horse (Equus caballus) was evidenced by the enamel pattern of the upper and lower cheek and teeth and by the size and form of the incisors and phalanges (toe bones). Since no wild horses lived in India in post-Pleistocene times [i.e., after 9700 BCE], the domestic nature of the Surkotada horse is undoubtful.’

  This statement makes two important points. One, there have been no wild horses in India since Pleistocene (which lasted from 2.58 million years ago to 11,700 years ago). Therefore, the horse found at Surkotada has to be a domesticated one, not a wild one. But the corollary to these two statements is that if there were no wild horses in India in the last 11,700 years, then the horse was clearly not domesticated in India, since horse domestication happened no earlier than 3500 BCE. Therefore, the Surkotada horse is either imported or belongs to a breed that was imported, even by Bokonyi’s own statement.

  Moreover, Bokonyi’s verification of the horse bones has itself been strongly challenged by equally respected archaeozoologists such as Richard Meadow. Even if you assume that Bokonyi was right and Meadow was wrong, it still leaves a large gap between the kind of presence the horse wields in the Rigveda and the near complete absence of horse and horse-related imagery in the Harappan culture, especially in the thousands of seals and sealings that portray everything from mythical unicorns to bulls, buffaloes, peacocks, elephants, tigers and rhinoceroses. The hot, humid climate of the country shouldn’t stop us from finding steatite seals of horses if they existed.

  Theoretically, even the physical presence of a horse or two in the Harappan Civilization should not be surprising since there is historical record of the Harappans exporting Indian animals such as the elephant, water buffalo and the peacock to Mesopotamia, and importing a horse in return from there or elsewhere should raise no eyebrows. But that wouldn’t change the overall picture of the serious disconnect between the role the horse plays in the Rigveda and the role it plays – or rather, does not play – in Harappan archaeological record and imagery.

  The archaeologist M.K. Dhavalikar had this to say on the Rigveda being clearly post-Harappan when he discussed the issue of the horses and the Vedas:

  If you are reading some novel, how will you date it? If there is mention of a mobile there, you will say it was written in the 20th century or later . . . So like that there are two markers in the Rigveda. One is the occurrence of horse. That is very important. Because that is the most favourite animal of the Aryans. It played a role in their religious beliefs also . . . Secondly, the Rigveda also talks about ‘ayas’, which clearly means copper, because when iron was discovered later, they had to coin a new word, ‘krsna ayas’ or black copper.

  Now on pure archaeological evidence, domestic horse starts appearing from 1900 BCE. That is Late Harappan period, which is 1900 to 1500 BCE. So this is one fixed point – about 1900 or 1800. Iron was here in north India by 1400 to 1500 BCE. So you can safely put Rigveda to be somewhere between 2000 BCE and 1400 BCE.

  The earliest Veda, in other words, postdates the Harappan Civilization.8

  Remnants of a civilization

  The Vedic corpus was composed over many centuries, and it is important to remember that the discrepancy between it and the Harappan Civilization reduces over time. The later the Vedic text, the more the likelihood of finding connections to the Harappan cultural heritage. If the Rigveda was antagonistic to, and disdainful of, ‘shishna-deva’, by the time of the Upanishads, composed between 500 BCE and 100 BCE, this was no longer the case. The number of borrowed words from Dravidian languages is also higher in the later Vedic texts than in the earlier ones. There are many Harappan seals, sealings and terracotta figurines that remind one of yoga, but there are no clear references to yoga in the Rigveda. But by the time of the Katha Upanishad, there are explicit references to it. A Harappan seal shows a figure wearing a horned headdress sitting in a yoga-like posture surrounded by animals, and it has been interpreted by some as an early depiction of Siva. Many historians and archaeologists reject this interpretation on the grounds that this is projecting later-day concepts into the distant past. While that may be so, it still leaves open the possibility of a convergence between later-day ideas of an ascetic Siva and the seal images, beliefs and myths of the Harappans.

  This is not surprising because over time incoming cultures often do adopt, adapt to and intermingle with existing cultures, and the Aryans and the Harappans may have done the same to varying degrees across cultural domains and geographic regions. And, of course, a lot of the cultural continuity from the Harappan Civilization is reflected in popular practices rather than in the Vedic corpus.

  The way houses are built around courtyards; the bullock carts; the importance of bangles and the way they are worn; the manner in which trees are worshipped and the sacredness of the peepul tree in particular; the ubiquitous Indian cooking pot and the kulladh; the cultic significance of the buffalo; designs and motifs in jewellery, pottery and seals; games of dice and an early form of chess (dice and chess-like boards have been found at multiple Harappan sites); the humble lota which is used to wash up even today; and even the practice of applying sindoor and some measurement systems – the ways in which we carry on the traditions of the Harappan Civilization are too many to count.

  A vase discovered at the Harappan site of Lothal in Gujarat has a painting that shows a crow standing next to a pitcher with a deer looking back at it, seemingly depicting the tale of the thirsty crow in the Panchatantra. So some of the tales we tell our children may have been the same ones told by the Harappans to their own children.

  What ended around 2000 BCE, therefore, was the power structure that had kept the civilization going for over seven centuries, and with it went the script, the seals, the standardized bricks and some of the ideology as well – such as the unicorn. But many other things that are part and parcel of the common man’s life continued, along with some of the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of south Asia’s first civilization. We may not recognize all of them, but they are the foundation on which our culture, traditions and history stand today.

  At the end of a long process of interaction between the Harappans and the ‘Aryans’, what we see are Indo-European languages replacing the earlier languages across much of northern, western and eastern
India and a new syncretic culture emerging with elements recognizable from both the Harappan culture and the Rigveda. Just as the script and seals of the Harappans disappeared into the mist of prehistory, so did some of the early gods and rituals of the Vedas.

  The scriptural language of the Aryans, Sanskrit – the language in which one would expect to see the least change, as with all scriptural languages – itself changed to some extent due to its interaction with the Harappan languages. Retroflex consonants (to utter which you have to curl your tongue and strike your palate), which are very rare in Indo-European languages but very common in pre-Aryan Indian languages such as those belonging to the Dravidian language family, made their way into Rigvedic Sanskrit itself. Examples would include pushti, gana, varna and purna. Considering that even Old Iranian, the most closely related language to Sanskrit, has no retroflex consonants, their increasing presence in Sanskrit over time is usually seen as the result of the influence of languages that were prevalent in India before Sanskrit arrived. The Rigveda has a limited number of borrowed words from Dravidian languages, but the number goes up steadily in the later Vedas.9

  The Corded Ware example

  The emergence of a new culture from the collision between the Harappans and the incoming ‘Aryans’ is not surprising because that is exactly what happened a thousand years earlier when the Steppe pastoralists streamed into western Europe. The Corded Ware culture in Europe, which is the most striking archaeological signal of the arrival of the Steppe Yamnaya in Europe, was not brought by them from the Steppe. It was the result of the interaction between the Yamnaya and the Neolithic farmers of Europe that they had come into contact with.

  This is how David Anthony explains it in The Horse, the Wheel and Language:

  The material culture of the Corded Ware horizon was mostly native to northern Europe, but the underlying behaviours were very similar to those of the Yamnaya horizon – the broad adoption of a herding economy based on mobility (using ox-drawn wagons and horses), and a corresponding rise in the ritual prestige and value of livestock.

  The defining traits of the Corded Ware horizon were, he writes:

  [A] pastoral, mobile economy that resulted in the near disappearance of settlement sites (much like Yamnaya in the Steppes), the almost universal adoption of funeral rituals involving single graves under mounds (like Yamnaya), the diffusion of stone hammer-axes . . . and the spread of a drinking culture linked to particular kinds of cord-decorated cups and beakers, many of which had local stylistic prototypes . . .

  In a paper published in the journal Antiquity in 2017, Kristian Kristiansen, professor of archaeology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and three co-authors dug deeper into how the Corded Ware culture came about. The paper dwells on what Steppe migrations to Europe involved, apart from massive burning down of forests to create Steppe-like grazing lands for the herds. The authors found systematic evidence from multiple burial sites that showed that ‘Corded Ware males practiced exogamy [marrying outside one’s community], perhaps marriage by abduction’, since many of the women buried in the graves were of non-local origin, and had a different diet during childhood. This is also supported by genetic evidence that showed more varied mtDNA haplogroups among Corded Ware females than among males.

  The study goes on to say:

  Exogamy is a clever, and perhaps necessary, policy if new migrating groups are mainly constituted by males. This is a probable scenario for an expanding pastoral economy, and is supported by archaeological data from the early horizon of the Single Grave/Corded Ware culture in Jutland [in northern Germany and Denmark], where 90 per cent of all burials belonged to males. It gains further support from later historical sources from India to the Baltic and Ireland. They describe, as a typical feature of these societies, the formation of warrior youth bands consisting of boys from 12–13 up to 18–19 years of age, when they were ready to enter the ranks of fully grown warriors. Such youthful war-bands were led by a senior male, and they were often named ‘Black Youth’ or given names of dogs and wolves as part of their initiation rituals.

  According to Kristiansen and his co-authors, pastoral economies that are more warlike and mobile tend to dominate agrarian economies. Organized bands of young males from pastoralist societies go out to settle in new territories, often taking wives from farming cultures forcibly.

  The paper examines how the typical Corded Ware pottery came into being. The authors say the Yamnaya did not have a strong tradition of pottery making because their mobile lifestyle required using things that would not break easily and could be transported without difficulty in their wagons. For example, they usually made containers using leather, wood or the bark of trees.

  So in the burials of the earliest Corded Ware culture, there is no typical Corded Ware pottery. It appeared only later in northern Europe, and the study says the reason for this was that Corded Ware pottery began only after women with ceramic skills married into the incoming Yamnaya culture and then began making ceramic ware that imitates the leather, wooden and woven containers of the Yamnaya. The confirmation of this theory, says the study, comes from the archaeological find of a well-preseved flat bowl with short feet made of wood (which can be used for turning milk into yogurt or other dairy products overnight). The ceramic version of this wooden utensil became a typical example of Corded Ware pottery across Europe.

  The precise ways in which an incoming people and culture engage with an existing people and their culture would, obviously, differ across time and space. However, it would be reasonable to assume that there would be some common threads between the massive Steppe migrations into Europe and India, considering the shared customs and practices of the migrants.

  For example, King Bhoja’s eleventh century CE treatise on the use of Sanskrit for poetic and rhetoric compositions, ‘Sarasvatikantabharana’ (Necklace of Sarasvati) says, ‘the language of the uncultured is not to be (shown as) used at sacrificial rites; one should not (show anyone) speaking anything but Prakrit to women; nor mixed language to high-born people, nor Sanskrit to the uneducated.’10

  The injunction against poetic compositions showing anyone speaking to women in anything other than Prakrit is perhaps a congealed convention that evolved out of a concern for realism, because women may have often belonged to a different, non-‘Aryan’, language culture than the ‘high-born’ or ‘Aryan’ men from the Steppes they were married to in the early period of the migrations.

  A multi-source civilization, not a single-source one

  Both in India and in Europe, the Indo-European-language speakers were the last migrants significant enough to change the demography. India has seen multiple incursions since then – from Alexander’s army in 326 BCE to the Sakas or the Scythians around 150 BCE, the Huns around 450 CE, the Arabs in 710 CE, the Mughals in 1526 CE, and then the Portuguese, the French, the Dutch and the British – but none of them have left more than a delicate and small impression on our demography, although their impact on our culture has often been bigger. This we can say now with certainty thanks to DNA and the science of genetics. And no migration or invasion is likely to change our demography in the future either. Hence the name of this chapter: The Last Migrants. Our common history has been about creating a unique culture that draws its elements from multiple traditions and experiences. We are a multi-source civilization, not a single-source one.

  By the time the last migrants, the ‘Aryans’, arrived sometime after 2000 BCE, Indians in the subcontinent were already one of the largest modern human populations on earth (if not the largest); had already led an agricultural revolution and then an urban revolution leading up to the creation of the largest civilization of its time; and were spearheading an agricultural transition in almost every region, in the north, south, east and west. It would be accurate to say that the very foundation of India as we know it was laid during the period of the Harappan Civilization.

  The millennium or so that followed the dimming of the Harappan Civilization would have been the m
ost tumultuous and turbulent period in the history of the modern human in south Asia. But we have very little record of this and hence very little understanding of it. Look at all that happened: a long-standing civilization, the largest of its kind at the time, fell apart due to the ravages of a long drought, and its most visible symbols of power and prestige slowly disappeared even as urbanism itself did; people migrated to the east and the south in search of a new life; a new set of migrants came in from the north-west, bringing new languages and a different culture that put emphasis on sacrificial rituals and prioritized pastoralism and cattle breeding over urban settlements; another set of migrants came in from the north-east, bringing new languages, new domesticated plants and perhaps wetland farming techniques and a new variety of rice . . . and thus the pot of Indian culture was put on the boil. Four thousand years later, it is still simmering, with new ingredients getting added once in a while, from the Jews to the Syrians to the Parsis.

  1I. Mendizabel, et al., ‘Reconstructing the Indian Origin and Dispersal of the European Roma: A Maternal Genetic Perspective’, PLOS One (January 2011).

  2The presence of mtDNA haplogroup M1 in Africa is thought to be the result of back-migration from Asia.

  3 Michael Witzel, Wales professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University and an authority on the oldest texts of India, dates the Rigveda between 1400 BCE and 1000 BCE (D.N. Jha, ‘Mitanni Indo-Aryan Mazda and the Date of the Rigveda’, in The Complex Heritage of Early India, Essays in Memory of R.S. Sharma [Manohar Publications, 2014]).

  4Indo-Iranians are that branch of Indo-European-language-speaking Steppe pastoralists who called themselves ‘Aryans’ and migrated towards southern Asia, ultimately settling in Iran and India. Their culture and myths, as depicted in the Zend-Avesta, the primary religious text of Zoroastrianism, and the Rigveda, the earliest of the Sanskrit Vedas, are similar in many ways.