Prolog:

Last week, we covered one of Islam’s key contributions to India. There is plenty of material out there to undertstand the bad things done by the Islamists, which is why i wrote about some good things they did. Any discussion on India’s history is not complete without considering the caste system. In this post, i want to cover the caste system using 3 different scholarly viewpoints. Thanks to Aditya and one other contributor who wishes to be anonymous, i came across the works of Nicholas Dirks. Thanks to Senthil for introducing me to Dharampal, the brilliant Gandhian Scholar who decided to look directly into the sources of British wisdom about India – the papers published by British officers on various aspects of India. Thanks to Priya Raju, I came across A.N. Sattanathan’s A Sudra’s Story – Sattanathan was the first Backward Classes Commission Chairman of Tamilnadu, who rose up from a disadvantaged background.

What was the caste system like Pre-British?

It is essential for us to understand whether the caste system existed in India before the British and if so, in what form did it exist? Most of the knowledge about India’s caste system came from British historians like James Mills/William Jones. Or from European Historians like Max Mueller and others who were influenced by the British historians themselves as well as made their own contributions to the discussion and influenced British opinion. It is these opinions that have mattered when it comes to gaining an understanding of India’s caste system. From my readings, it appears there is a lot of distortions in the way the caste system has been understood.

Reading the works of the 3 people i mention above, has given me some clarity on the caste system.

Nicholas Dirks

Dirks’ strategy was to focus on a region of Pudukottai, formerly a Princely State that was ruled by kings from the Kallar martial caste (now part of the Mukkulathor community). His choice is brilliant because as he explains in this paper, British tampering is likely to have been minimal. In that paper, he shows how the pre-British caste system functioned as a socio-political-religious-economic structure.

Colin Mackenzie was the Surveyor General of India, another remarkable man, who collected a lot of material on India’s history as his side-project. It is the Mackenzie collection that formed the basis of later British works about Indian history. Dirks shows in another paper how the whole Colin Mackenzie collection used flawed techniques to collect information on India’s society. Dirks also made the startling observation that there was a ridiculously small number of references to caste in the Mackenzie collection.

Based on these and other observations and extensive field work in South India, Nicholas Dirks published what is seen as a landmark publication on the caste system – Castes of Mind, in which he proves that the caste system as seen in India today is completely a British creation (of course, he doesn’t say the caste system didn’t exist before this). Here is an excellent review of this great book, by Champakalakshmi, a noted Indian historian.

Dharampal

Dharampal, on the other hand, decided to rely upon the various reports published by British collectors and officers about the state of India’s education system, technology etc. Given that these reports were produced by the officers in charge of the territories they were reporting on, Dharampal’s data seems quite reliable. Since the caste system atleast in the modern context is closely tied to the education system, i decided to read The Beautiful Tree – containing Dharampal’s description of the pre-British education system.

This book contains a lot of material including reproductions of the reports of the British officers. i found it extremely useful to understand what the British thought about India. In this book, Dharampal, proves that the the Indian education system was extensive, there was a school in every village which taught the Hindu curriculum and there were also higher institutions somewhat like modern day colleges where more advanced subjects were taught etc. He also proves that there was no real discrimination based on caste in the education system.

Sattanathan

It is when i read Sattanathan that i realized that there is a big mistake that many Indologists make by equating the caste system as practiced in Tamilnadu with other states. The key difference from other states lies in the fact that Brahmins formed just 4% of Tamilnadu’s population and that percentage still holds (i think it is now 3%, citation needed). In other states it is between 15-35% (citation needed).

Let us look at some statistics that Sattanathan reports on Page 185:

It is on record that between 1894 and 1904, in the provincial civil services, out of 16 officers 15 were Brahmans, among 21 Assistant Engineers, 17 were Brahmans, out of 140 Deputy Collectors 77 were Brahmans, and out of 128 district munsiffs, 98 were Brahmans. This was inevitable, as, according to E.F.Irschick, who had made a deep study of this subject, during these years, between 67 percent and 71 percent of the graduates of the Madras University came from a single community: Brahman.

further on page 155 he states:

Towards the end of the 19th century, 80 to 90 percent of all jobs available to Indians were occupied by Brahmans, and they were dominating other professions also. It is needless to quote statistics of the number of Government servants, lawyers etc. of this period, as these are often quoted in other reports and publications.

My inferences

I have read a lot of material on the subject and what i have quoted is the choicest parts of the material i have read. i was able to draw these key inferences when i put all the three pictures together:

1. From Dirks’ writings, it does appear that the British made the caste system into what is today and hence the blame must fall on the head of the British. But if you look at Dharampal’s research, we have to conclude that the caste system did have the foundational aspects of the abominable system we see even today. Though, I agree with Dirks and Dharampal, that because of the British, the caste system became more ossified, i am not able to agree that the evil aspects of the caste system was a British creation.

2. Dharampal, on the other hand, has clearly shown that there was not much discrimination based on the caste in the pre-British education system. But the big problem in Dharampal’s work is this – what did people do after they passed out of the education system? His own research shows that the students went back into their own caste’s professions many a times dropping out of the education system completely.

3. Now, when you look at Sattanathan’s data, the picture gets completed. It is what they did after the education that matters and it appears that is where net effects of the discrimination are seen. The British Macaulay system accentuated this further by first focusing on the Brahmins, handing them an almost monopolistic dominance of the jobs.

Epilog:

It is interesting to note that given the dominance of the Brahmin community, Tamilnadu was faced with the unique situation of having to resort to reservations for the majority community (non-brahmins) to level the playing field. I think this is unprecedented in the history of affirmative action anywhere in the world. When i wrote in support of affirmative action a while ago i was not aware of the extent of the caste system in Tamilnadu. Brahmins used to live in segregated areas – agraharams and also had segregated eateries (Brahmanargal sappidum idam or Brahmins only eatery). It is in this sort of a context that we must look at Periyar. There are people who attack Periyar for his atheistic policies and/or his marriage to a young girl. Everyone has flaws and I am sure Periyar did as well. Without Periyar, this unnatural dominance of a rank minority would have continued forever. Periyar’s contribution to the social reformation of India, especially Tamilnadu is unparalleled, making him one of the greatest sons of India.

Next week, i want to cover some aspects of the Indian education system, as seen by Dharampal because it has some valuable clues into the process of Aryanization.

Updated Apr 15,2008: Rachel Laudan was kind enough to respond to my email to say that she does not have much knowledge of Ethiopian to answer the question. She has however said she knows someone that might be able to answer. Stay tuned.

Prolog:

A key reason I started this series is to debunk ideas that threaten the very fabric of India’s great diverse culture. One of the ideas, that is oft repeated these days, is that the India of pre-moghul, pre-British time was pristine and rich. And that the British and Islamists have spoilt everything India had and have left an abjectly poor country in their wake.

I am 100% sure that the British and Islamist Kings did god-awful unspeakable things to India and its people. No one in their right mind will condone any type of invasion or oppression of this type. Not withstanding the fact that the India of today didn’t exist then. Therefore to speak of “Indian” as a valid term for the region pre-1947 is a historical flaw, but that is besides the point.

We, in India, do one of 2 things these days – either anything that the invaders brought is worthless or the idea is a Hindu idea. The Islamists and the British fall under the former category, whereas Buddha and Mahavira and Parsvanath fall under the latter category. This is how our history is being distorted for political reasons. I would not be this upset, if i didn’t realize that the youth of this country are being fed this poison and they are lapping it up. A culture that is known for its tolerance is quickly becoming bigoted and that is extremely scary.

Roots of North Indian Cuisine

Some background for non-Indian readers – most often, when we come across an Indian restaurant abroad, it serves North Indian cuisine. With the rise of the software industry which is dominated by South Indians, one does find South Indian fare these days. But they are still quite rare.

Myself and Priya Raju love Ethiopian cuisine. Anyone that has had both Indian and Ethiopian food will easily attest to the fact that the spices are quite similar. We used to wonder how this similarity came about, but we could not find the answer. We were also confused by how far Ethiopia is from India, both culturally and geographically.

Couple of days back, I came across this brilliant article by Rachel Laudan that traces the roots of the Mexican Mole. Again, the similarities of Mole to Indian curry is unmistakeable. But then how did this happen? Mexico is so far away from India that anyone connecting these 2 cuisines will be met with a loud snicker. Per Laudan, Octavia Paz, Nobel Laureate and erstwhile Ambassador to India from Mexico, tried to do just that.

Laudan continues on and proves that the Mexican Mole is indeed connected to Indian curry but the connection happened through Persia! When Babur came to India, he brought the cuisine with him which has mesmerized Indians since then. The sherbets, the pilafs (pulao) and the tandoor are all through this Babur connection. And it went to Mexico from Spain which had acquired the cuisine through the Islamic connection as well.

An excerpt from the article:

The influential Persian culinary tradition is yet to be studied in detail. When the Abbasid dynasty established its capital in Baghdad in the eighth century, the Islamic world was able to draw on a sophisticated Persian culinary tradition that stretched back a millennium. The ancient Greeks had been awed by the luxurious cuisine of the Persian emperors Darius and Cyrus. Successive dynasties had continued to refine the cuisine that became the model for fine dining throughout the Islamic world. After the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in the first half of the 13th century, the center of Persian culture and its cuisine shifted back to the Persian heartland. It was here that the Moghuls learned the style of cooking that they took with them to northern India.

If this is not a signal contribution of the Islamists, what is?

The Ethiopian Connection

As for Ethiopian, we still don’t know the answer. But my guess is that it is also from the same Islamic influence. Interestingly, the Ethiopians call their curry powder Berbere. Here is another excerpt from the same Laudan article:

One of the most important was the Iberian Peninsula, whose southern two-thirds came under Arab rule in the eighth century. Watered by five rivers and greener than either their arid homelands or the other lands they had conquered, al-Andalus, as Muslim Spain was called, held out to the Arab and Berber settlers the promise of being a culinary paradise on earth.

Notice the phrase Berber settlers in the last line? Maybe this is why the Ethiopians call it Berbere? Wonder if Rachel Laudan knows the answer. BTW, Rachel Laudan has a blog if you want to read more.

Epilog:

The next one we will tackle is the idea that the evil caste system is a creation of the British! One of the main citations that is used for this idea is, the Gandhian Scholar, Dharampal’s works. Are there any other reliable citations that prove that the caste system is a British creation? If any of you know, please let me know.

Updated again March 16, 2008: Varnam.org includes this post in their History Carnival. Thanks a lot Varnam.org.  We are honored.

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Updated again March 9, 2008: Steve Farmer sent me an email and was kind enough to explain to me why my post was moderated out. I accepted his explanation. But i told Steve that attacking the person and attacking the argument are 2 different things and that untill the comments that attack me are removed from his group forum, i will keep my retort up over here.

Updated March 9, 2008: This post is being discussed by Witzel, Farmer and others. I have got some new labels from this group of highly accomplished academicians – I am now a Nationalist (read Hindutvavadi) and a Parpola Admirer/Deifier. My response to their discussion on their forum doesn’t seem to get posted possibly because they moderate it. I also didn’y store my post by mistake. I am rewriting my post on that forum here and hence some of the words may have changed but the essence is the same:

1. I am the author of the post all of you are discussing. I object to the nationalist label you assigned to me because that is a proxy for unscientific people. I am a proud Indian National, as proud of my nationality as much as you all are about yours. If you call me a Nationalist, i assume you will also carry that same label with the same negative connotations against your names as well. For the record, I am of the view that Aryans came from outside India and Aryanized the local people (its not Aryan Invasion). You will understand my position if you read post #6 of this series.

2. I find it amusing that you all picked one line in the report about Homer’s epics being in Linear B for your discussion and even setting bounties to be hunted for it. That might have been entirely my mistake in representing what Parpola said. Let me point out to you that this entire Parpola rebuttal disproves the Witzel/Farmer/Sproat beyond reasonable doubt. If you still want to stand by your research, please publish your rebuttal in an open forum like you have done with your original paper. Where is the need for obtaining a personal discussion with Parpola?

3. Witzel, i generally respect and admire your research and your arguments. I have read most of your papers available on the public Internet and also the spats you had with Frawley in the pages of the Hindu newspaper. But this paper of yours that tries to prove that IVC was illiterate is one that i don’t agree with at all. Now Parpola has disproved it.

4. I seem to have gotten another label – Parpola Admirer/Deifier. I think Parpola is extraordinary and I am an admirer, yes. He is a man who has spent 4 decades of his life on Indology in a time when what goes by the name of Indology is arguments around Aryan Invasion Theory. I believe that IVC was a great civilization and in some ways better than or at atleast at a par with Sumer and Egypt. IVC deserves its rightful place in the history of humankind. You can dismiss that as my axe to grind. Maybe. But you can easily make me abandon my position with scientific arguments that is accepted as valid by the general Indology community. Just setting bounty money on irrelevant parts of the argument doesn’t behove of an accomplished academic community that all of you represent.

I rest my case.

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Updated March 8, 2008: NK Sreedhar found the link to the powerpoint Parpola used. He also found a more verbose PDF version where Parpola explains his rebuttal. Thanks a lot Sreedhar.

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Prolog:

After covering the Aryan Invasion Theory debate, we get back to the IVC. Saturday, Feb 16, 2008 was a great day in my life. Thanks to Archana Raghuram’s tip off, myself and Priya Raju got to attend a lecture by Asko Parpola at the Indus Research Centre [Roja Muthiah Reference Library] on saturday from 10.30 AM to 12.30 PM. We had reached the venue at 10 am, so that there would be no scope for missing even one word of the great master. I also managed to get his autograph. After about 15 min, we saw Iravatham Mahadevan coming and sitting in the front seat. I got his autograph as well – he signed his name in the Indus Script! If you are really interested in understanding the IVC people and their script, this lecture notes may be a critically important one to read. I have tried my best to capture everything Parpola said. If you find this lecture difficult to grasp, you may want to first orient yourself to his thoughts by reading this recent interview of Parpola which appeared in the Hindu newspaper.

Welcome Address by V.C. Kulandaiswamy, former Vice Chancellor of Anna University, who chaired the meeting:

This center has been setup in Jan 2007 and is one of the newest centers for Indus Research. It is now operating under Iravatham Mahadevan’s tutelage. We have today Asko Parpola, Professor Emeritus of Indology from Univ of Helsinki today. There have been several Indus researchers but AP is unique. He has dedicated almost 4 decades, one could say, his entire life to Indus Research [Wow!]. Not just him, his brother, his wife and his daughter are all engaged in Indus Research. No other person on the planet can claim this sort of dedication to the cause of deciphering Indus – it is a rather unenviable task because many people think the script is undecipherable.

He got started as student of Sama Vedic rituals [is an expert in Sanskrit, Vedas and Upanishads] and later started working on the IVC Script. He started collecting material for his research in the 1960s and has accumulated a monumental amount of material which he has now published in 2 volumes the Indus Corpus [need the exact name] in 1987 and 1991. 2 more volumes are being worked upon.

Asko Parpola

I presented this paper in July 2007 at a Stanford Univ conference criticizing the Farmer/Witzel/Sproat paper that claimed that IVC was illiterate. I also presented this at a Japanese Conference. I am going to present the same paper with some more material to all of you today. This paper is not yet available in the public domain.

For the record, let me start by saying that the IVC script is a logo-syllabic script. I will present their arguments one by one and offer my rebuttal [starting with a "But" - My addition] for each one of them and then conclude with some more thoughts.

1. There are too few symbols compared to Chinese and other such pictographic scripts. At the same time there are signs repeated in the same seal.

But,

a. they agree themselves in the paper that this point alone is not enough to prove that it is not a script.

b. Kimmo Koskienien, a colleague of mine sent an email to Sproat “does this mean you can’t prove or disprove” – Sproat replied “Yes”.

c. Shows the Narmer Inscription from Egypt showing how Cat Fish [Nr] + Awl [Mr] = Narmer.

d. Shows the famous Cleopatra and Ptolemy Cartouches which have repeating signs within a single cartouche. So repeating signs alone don’t prove or disprove anything.

2. Text is too short and there are too many rare signs (or very infrequently used signs)

But,

a. Indus Seals have an average of 5 signs and that is more than sufficient to convey many things. Given the logo-syllabic nature and the fact these seals may represent religious rituals or trade transactions, we cannot expect long sentences.

b. Shows 2 Akkadian Seals from 2200 BC that shows “Adda the Scribe” and another showing a short poem about King of Akkad.

c. Not all signs are short – shows 2 seals having 14 signs each.

c. Sometimes even a single sign can convey a concept and shows the man + 2 concentric circles + tiger seal.

d. Compound signs that are composed of 2 or more individual signs are present. For examples shows the compound sign having a man carrying bow+arrow and also man and bow+arrow as individual signs.

3. Too many singletons

But,

a. Only 25% of the signs occur only once and even that may change with more seal excavations.

b. All logo-syllabic scripts have many rare signs like Chinese for example.

4. No “random-looking” sign repetitions within any text.

But,

a. points to the ptolemy & cleopatra cartouches with sign repetitions highlighted to show what a “random-looking” sign repitition is.

b. Indus also has this pattern and it occurs in the very same “bar seals” that they talk about. they missed it.

c. Shows many examples of sign repititions using seals M-682 A, M-682a, M-682 a bis; M-634-A, 93; K-10A, K-10a;

Also shows 1 sign repeated in 2 places in an 8-sign bar seal.

d. Then shows an example of a repeating sign that has 2 signs signifying “eye” and says that is “kann” [See in tamil] and “Kaan” [To See in Tamil] . So the repetition must be “KannKaani” meaning “Supervise”. [This is f***ing brilliant.]

5. “Lost” long texts never existed. We need text > 50 signs.

But,

a. Maybe we need more excavations.

b. Rongo Rongo signs from Easter Island have greater than 50 signs. Is it writing?

c. Cites Possehl 2002, Cotton was cultivated and it was a main export of IVC. Yet we find only a few fibers of cotton attached to some vessels. Maybe they wrote text on persihable material like cotton.

d. Neachos, Greek, said that thickly woven cloth was being used for writing in India, he said it in 325 BC

e. Sanskrit sources also mention this.

f. Asoka was the first one to write in stone which is dated to 250 BC.

g. Panini mentions the word Lipi meaning script in 400-350BC so he must have known about writing.

h. There are evidences in Central Asia from 2nd cent A.D talking about palm leaf and birch bark manuscripts.

So they might have written their long texts in such perishable material which might have been lost.

6. No cursive variants found, so no possiblity of scribes, so not a script.

But,

a. Egyptian hieroglyphics existed for 3000 years and their Heiratic cursive system doesn’t differ that much from the hieroglyphics.

b. AP’s sign list from 1994 shows 398 signs with quite a few variants of the same sign which means they had scribes.

7. No writing instrument found.

But,

a. We know Tamils used Thin Metal Rods [Ezhuthaani in Tamil] to incise palm leaf. these might have gotten corroded.

b. they may have used a brush. There are evidences in North India to show they used brushes to paint the palm leaf.

8. Indus signs are non-linguistic

But,

a. There are mesopotamian seals with signs that appear near Gods and also longer rows of signs appearing in limited contexts like their stelae and their boundary stones. Deities that protect their boundary stones were found on them. So it is common for ancients to have both linguistic and non-linguistic things in their writing.

9. Why didn’t they adopt writing from Mesopotamia because like the Celtic Druids and Vedic Brahamanas they wanted to keep their things a secret.

But,

a. Adopting writing doesn’t oblige you to divulge secrets. You can always choose to not write down the secret stuff if that is what you want.

b. Literacy was restricted anyway. So just adopting writing doesn’t make everyone literate as we have seen in Egypt and elsewhere.

c. Incas developed a complex civilization without writing [they used some knotting system called Quipu]. So writing is not essential but at the sametime writing offers many advantages that can’t be denied.

At this point he says he is moving onto some additional thoughts:

1. The script must have been used mainly for administration of their trading system and for religious rituals much like the Ancient Sumerian Script.

2. The Neolithic Phase – 7000-4300BC, Chalcolithic Phase – 4300-3200BC.

3. Early Harappan phase – 3200 BC – 2500 BC due to some changes in flood patterns of the Indus, the common granaries dissappeared and they started using Large Urns but in each home. Irrigation systems started appearing because they couldn’t rely on the floods anymore. Cities with Grid patterns appear. Bullock Carts and Boat Trafficking emerge to enable them to have a cultural unification of a vast area. Harappan had one of the largest areas under its domain of its time.

4. Mid Harappan phase – 2800-2500 BC – Indus Script developed, standardized burnt brick of 1:2:4 standard started appearing everywhere.

5. Mature Harappan phase – 2500-1900 BC – the script is standardized across the board.

Standardized weights and measures created. Large building projects are started. In the city of Mohenjadaro, they build a citadel of 20 hectares size on a 12 meter tall artifical platform. One of the largest constructions of its kind for its time. There are 2 storied houses with individual baths that are unparalleled anywhere in the world at that time. They had 700 wells which have not collapsed even after 5000 years.

6. Shows Indus Tags from Umma in Mesopotamia. Almost 100 such clay tags were found in Kalibangan each of them having 4 0r more seals on them.

7. He said they started using Witnesses to record things [didn't completely understand] and they started recording transactions in probably perishable material like cloth, leaves etc.

8. Many seals show a man kneeling in front of a Jar. I know a south indian village in Kerala where each village brings a jar of paddy to offer [i think this is there in Tamilnadu villages also].

okay, finally, is it a script or not?

Farmer/Witzel/Sproat are inconclusive. they couldn’t prove it is not a script. We also know that there were “potter marks” in the neighboring areas of baluchistan, turkmenistan, iranian plateau etc which clearly show what non-linguistic ones are. Indus is clearly a script.

there are 400 standardized signs and seals. most of them read right to left and most of them are arranged in a row neatly unless they had space constraints when they had to cram the signs like M-12A and M-66a

Shows examples of repeating signs that occur in seal endings as well as in the middle. Shows that such sequences were seen in seals collected from 9 different cities including sites as far away as Turkmenistan (Gonur) and Iraq (kish)

Then he shows examples of megalithic makings from Sanur in Tamilnadu where there are script like symbols. the problem is they have things like a 3 sign symbol which occur in different combinations and permutations, clearly indicating a non-linguistic thing.

The script was uniform everywhere – Sindh or Punjab used the same script.

Cites Godd 1932: No. 17 M – a round stamp seal which contains 5 different Indus signs in a unique combination. Concludes that it is a seal representing a foreign word for Indus people to read – perhaps by the traders.

then talks about Meluhha and that it is IVC very briefly.

Principle of Homophony or Puns or Rebus Principle

Shows a Sumerian Arrow sign standing for “Ti” that could mean one of 3 things – Arrow, Mistress of Life, Rib. It is this one that gave rise to the Biblical myth of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib because they mistook Mistress of Life as Rib because it is the same word! There are several such homophone examples in the IVC script – meen=star being a famous example.

Backing Out?

Shows Witzel saying in a paper “IVC script may encode puns” and Farmer saying “It may not be a conventional speech-or-writing-encoding system”. He made a joke of their retraction.

But,

Even short noun-phrases and incomplerte sentences qualify as full writing if it uses the Rebus principle.

Then he answered a few questions:

1. What about Mehrgarh? You didn’t mention that site.

It is an important site because it is one of the few that show the contiunuity from neolthic to chalcolithic to post-Indus covering all the developmental phases.

2. Why do we need to decipher the script?

a. Civilization’s definition includes writing.

b. It is one of the oldest writing systems in the world, so it is important for linguistics.

c. We need to know what religion it encodes because that is important to understand south asian religions.

Then he talked about how the Rig Veda was at first very creative but then when they switched to the mode of preserving it via the oral tradition they made it very rigid so that it can’t be changed at all. He said they same thing happened in Greece after Homerian Poems were written down using Linear B script.

He also mentioned that as the Vedic people moved in, the Brahmans from their society because of their knowledge would have immediately become important people in the IVC due to their knowledge of the Vedas. He said this is much similar to what happened when the British came and the Brahmins took to English quickly and became their key people for administering India.

There were a few more not-so-relevant points, and the meeting got over and we left. There was a mob around AP, thankfully i had gotten my autograph before the meeting.

Epilog:

On the whole it was a mind-blowing experience to listen to the grandmaster of IVC research. I was already in awe of Parpola’s work and after this lecture, i became even more convinced of the greatness of his work. Without knowing any of this, in my own small way, i had hypothesized that the IVC seals must have had a collating sequence . I did that entirely based on Farmer/Sproat/Witzel’s repeated insistence that the average length of the inscriptions on the seals was too small. Even though they said many things in their paper, that is the one assertion of theirs that bothered me the most.

Updated March 4, 2008: Asko Parpola covers the IVC Script & Aryan Invasion Theory debate in his interview in the Hindu newspaper today.

Updated March 3, 2008: Sreedhar said he was not able to access the ODS format spreadsheet. I have uploaded the Excel format as well. Sorry about that.

Prolog:

In this post, we make an attempt to understand the Aryan Invasion Theory further. We already showed in the previous post that it was Aryanization and not Aryan Invasion. Given the nature of this discussion, dates assume critical significance in contrast to the other posts in this series so far.

Happenings in the Central Asian Plate [4000-1700BC]

Domestication of the Horse – It is hard to believe that, what could be termed a routine animal husbandry innovation, the taming of yet another animal – the horse in 4000 BC in the Eurasian Steppes of Ukraine turned out to be a tectonic event in the history of humankind. But what actually made the domestication of the horse a major event, was the tying of the horse to the Chariot in Northern Kazakhastan by the Sintashta and Petrovka culture in 2100 BC. One additional innovation these people made is the Spoked Wheel in place of the solid wheel which gave the chariots the speed and agility by making the wheels much lighter. The Sintashta and Petrovka cultures are a sub-culture of the larger Andronovo Culture . There is evidence of the Andronovo Culture’s continued presence in the Southern Russia/Northern Kazakhstan area till 1000 BC. Interestingly, the Sintashta & Petrovka Sub-Cultures, who buried chariots and gave us the evidence, lasted from 2100-1700 BC. And even more interestingly, the Fedorovo sub-culture show evidence of cremation and fire worship dated 1500-1300 BC.

Modified Kurgan Hypothesis – As I explained before, Marija Gimbutas postulated the Kurgan Hypothesis using which she showed that the Kurgan people, as she called them due to their unique burial customs, spread out as the Indo Europeans across the world with a patriarchal militaristic culture that overran the Mother Goddess culture everywhere. We already know that it wasn’t a simple matristic Mother Goddess culture but a full-fledged proto-trinity. In my readings, there is linguistic evidence to show that elements of Proto-Indo-European language and customs were present in Ukraine from 2500-2000 BC which shows splitting into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian . The Proto-Indo-Iranian arm appearing in the Andronovo culture we spoke about earlier and the Proto-Greek arm appearing in the Catacomb Culture .

Happenings in the Neolithic Plate [5300-539 BC]

First, let us look at a 2000BC map of the world which shows the constituents of the Neolithic Plate very well to orient ourselves. Sumer is represented by Ur III (Southern Mesopotamia) and Hurrians (Northern Mesopotamia).

What i did next is to compile the key dates for all the reference civilizations of the Neolithic Plate – Egyptian, Sumerian, Minoan, IVC, Elamite, Anatolian, Dilmun, Mycenean. I also included Celts but i couldn’t find any key dates for them.

I have included the entire compilation into this open document format spreadsheet Key Historical Events [Excel format: Key Historical Events Excel]. Please open this spreadsheet and take a look at the sheet titled “Bronze Age Dates”. I have included as many references and commentary for all of you to understand some of the key events taking place as I understood them.

As i was compiling the dates, i made some observations:

1. Around 2000 BC, Hittites turned out to be the earliest Indo-European arrival in the Neolithic Plate into the Anatolian area and they become one of the most powerful people in the region. They quickly became literate adopting the Anatolian Hieroglyphics which we covered in our earlier post. By 1800 BC, they borrowed the Akkadian Cuneiform to create the Hittite Cuneiform script. Their key god was the Storm God [equivalent of Indra]. The rest of the pantheon shows amalgamation with the Luwian pantheon. Hittites also introduced their big military innovation – the Triga or the 3-horse chariot which can carry one charioteer plus 2 warriors, in place of the Biga or the 2-horse chariot which could carry only one warrior aside from the charioteer.

2. In every major area, there seems to be evidence of amalgamation of the local people in the Neolithic Plate. Even the most war-like of the new arrivals – the Hittites show a lot of evidence of amalgamating with the previous Luwian culture. This is in stark contrast to Gimbutas’s assertion that the world was completely overrun by the war-like Indo Europeans across the board completely decimating the previous Mother Goddess culture.

At this point I decided to sort the dates in the Bronze Age Dates sheet in descending order to see anything new will pop-up. I made this into another sheet – Bronze Age Dates Sorted in the same spreadsheet file mentioned above. Voila! Many key Bronze Age events jumped out at me by clustering around [I marked these in yellow] 1700 BC:

1. We have already proved that Minoa is Magan . Minoan Crete suffers 2 major destructions (1700 BC and 1400BC) – both times their palaces in Knossos were burnt down. Natural Calamities are suspected – archaeologists looking for a volcanic eruption to explain the destruction and the decline of Minoa. Linear A script appears in Knossos after 1700BC which i observed to be similar to cuneiform [Citation Needed]. After 1400BC, Myceneans take control of Crete. Poseidon becomes a key god in Knossos [Poseidon=Rudra]. Since the horned god Cernunnos was there in Minoa, they connected it to Poseidon like the Aryans tied Rudra to IVC’s Siva.
2. IVC rises to its maturity and the trail of evidence shows that the IVC cities (not the suburbs) were abandoned around 1700 BC. Historians are not able to explain this abandonment and are looking towards Natural Calamities – floods, sudden drying of rivers etc to explain this. We also have evidence of Aryans entering the IVC area.

3. In 1700 BC, The Mitanni – a third splinter group of the Proto-Indo-Iranians invade Hurrians in Northern Mesopotamia [The other 2 are Iranians and Aryans]. We get to see the world’s first written mention of the Proto-Indo-Iranian gods – Indra, Varuna, Nasatya (Ashwini Twins) in the Mitanni-Hittite Treaty of 1380 BC. By then Mitannis have become the Proto-Indo-Iranian super-stratum on top of the Hurrian people. Mitanni also cremate their dead.

4. Elamite-Babylonians take over Southern Mesopotamia. Dilmun collapses in 1600 BC. Middle Kingdom comes to an end in Egypt in 1630 BC.

5. Hittites started a major territorial expansion drive in 1700 BC. They have also adopted the new Cuneiform script by then.

Neolithic Supply Chain Collapses

If you go back and read the Neolithic Supply Chain post you will see that all the events above are affecting all the constituent parts of the pentagonal supply chain – Sumer, IVC (Meluhha), Magan, Dilmun, Anatolia and Egypt. I also proved in that post that the whole raison d’etre for the Supply Chain was the hard to find Tin which was sourced from Celtic UK via the hub at Magan. It is easy to deduce at this point that the Supply Chain was totally disrupted due to a near simulataneous attack on all the major nodes [Egypt there is no attack but somehow the Middle Kingdom ended]. It doesn’t appear that all of these were coordinated even though most of the conquests were done by the Indo-European peoples except the Elamite-Babylonian who don’t seem to be Indo-European.

This collapse triggers a huge shortage of Bronze in the Neolithic Plate and shows up in the historical records as such. A major trade disruption also shows up in the historical record of the Bronze Age. It took nearly 500 years after the collapse of the Neolithic Supply Chain to pave the way for the discovery of Iron which ushered in the Iron Age with an accepted dating of 1200 BC.

Neolithic Plate Subducts Under the Central Asian Plate
When I came up with the Anthropological Plate Tectonics analogy, I had just begun my research. I had no idea that I will land up at the point that I am at now. I used this analogy based upon the fact that the Neolithic world was collaborating extensively and I had read about the Austronesians hiving off from China and overrunning the pacific-oceanic islands thanks to their outrigger canoe – a breakthrough invention. I thought that resembled the Plate Tectonics concept of Subduction – one plate buckling under the other to form a new fused area in the border areas of the plates.

Well, look at what happened in the Neolithic world, by 1000 BC or so the entire Neolithic mother goddess culture had been amalgamated by the Indo European Culture everywhere in the Neolithic world except the Celts and the Eastern and Southern Regions of the Indian subcontinent. Subduction is an useful analogy, because if you look from the top it appears to be Indo European, but when you dig deeper, you clearly see the Neolithic Substratum everywhere.

I believe this is the critical error we are making both in Greece and India, looking just at the most recent layer and coming to a conclusion based on that. Interestingly, if you look at who is driving these erroneous conclusions – it is the Greek Nationalists in Greece and Hindu nationalists in India (Hindutvavadis). In Greece, the revisionist historians are trying hard to find a non-existent Volcanic eruption in Crete so that they can extend the Greek historical record back into the Minoan period because they want to prove that the highly advanced Minoan civlization was Greek. In India, revisionist historians are trying to invent some natural calamity to explain the abandonment of the IVC Cities so that they can extend the Vedic people back into the IVC period to show that the Vedic people are indigenous and that the highly advanced IVC was Vedic!

Epilog:

With this post, we complete our look at the Aryan Invasion Theory. From our next post we will go back to the IVC again. Here are some questions for you to dig deeper into:

1. Who burnt down Knossos in 1700 BC and again in 1400BC?

2 . How come Hittites and Myceneans who we say are Indo Europeans bury their dead, whereas the Indo Iranians and Mitannis cremate their dead?

3. Based on the above, what date would you assign to the Vedas?

Prolog:

Now that we have established the religion that was followed in the IVC, we will take a look at the Aryan Invasion Theory debate. The words “Aryan Invasion” seem to suggest that there was a sudden death for the Dravidians, the words “Aryan Infusion” seem to suggest a benign and gentle influence, the words “Indigenous Aryans” seem to suggest that the IVC was Aryan and they were always indigenous. I believe none of this to be true. We will see why, shortly. I would like to use the term “Aryanization”. It is the only one that explains the modern day Hinduism, which is a clever amalgamation of the Dravidian religion, Jainism and Buddhism, created using a combination of violent incursions/violence, proselytizations, influence and other techniques as appropriate . As a note of caution, the terms Aryans and Dravidians are being used in the historical context. At present, the Indians of India, excluding some racially pure tribals and the people of the North East, are a mix of both the Aryan and Dravidian peoples as well as other peoples like Scythians, Huns, Moghuls, Europeans and others, who had made India their home during the course of history.

The Principle of Concordance

When you want to analyze a book, a linguistic technique called Concordance is very helpful. The Concordance of a book is nothing but a compilation of the frequently used words within the book and their associated frequencies.

For example, take a look at the Concordance for Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code .You will notice that the top most frequently used words (occurrences) are Langdon (1516), Sophie (1103), Teabing (594) and Fache (397) – the most important names in the book. If you look further you will notice that Grail (286), Church (234), Silas (266), Grandfather(222), Collet(176) and Keystone(160) round out the Top 10. If you have read the book, you will know how beautifully the concordance captures the most important elements of the story.

Rig Vedic Concordance

I decided to apply the same principle to the Rig Veda (RV), the holiest of holy Vedic texts. Fortunately, I found the Concordance for the Rig Veda . It uses Griffith’s translation of the Rig Veda Samhita as its base. Griffith’s translation of the RV has come under attack. Since i am only using the concordances of the RV, his supposed translation errors will not affect it. Of course, if someone has the time and has access to a better Concordance Set, we can compare notes and make sure we are on the right track.

Then i went through the RV concordance and noted down the base set of concordances – important words and their frequencies in descending order. Then I derived some concordances by adding concordances of related terms together. For example, i added the frequency for Steeds and Horses together to get the concordance for Steeds. The resultant file is a pdf- Rig Veda Concordance .

The Top 10, in descending order of concordances are – Indra(2819), Agni(1921), Soma(1525), Prithvi(799), Chariot(775), Horses(761), Maruts(714), Asvins(588), Varuna(574) and Mitra(416).

In the previous post, we analyzed the IVC Religion and from that we know that the Sun, the Moon and the Mother Goddess (Earth) were the key gods.  In the RV, the Sun God has 397 occurrences, Moon+Moons have a combined concordance of 29 putting them both way down in the pecking order. Siva is not to be found at all. Yeah, Rudra was mapped to Siva later, but Rudra/Rudras combo concordance is 151 again way down the hierarchy of Gods. Visnu with 107 is ranked even lower than Rudra. As for Brahma, it wasn’t mentioned at all. Someone has interpreted Precem to be Brahma and assuming we accept that interpretation, the keyword Precem has the glorious concordance of 2!

Therefore, Siva (after mapping to Rudra), Vishnu & Brahma, the Vedic trinity that we now worship, was not at all  important to the RV.  That  means  they were made important later  to amalgamate with the IVC’s Proto-Trinity. We also know that cows and bulls were very important to the IVC people, whereas the RV concordance shows that the Horses and Chariots were more important. Both horses and chariots are conspicously absent from the IVC.

Indra Destroys Dravidian Puras

The RV talks of Indra destroying  Puras of the Dasyus (RV term for Dravidians). Western historians committed a critical error by assuming that this term meant the IVC’s beautiful cities. It is an error because the evidence from the IVC city excavations show no evidence of any destruction. So what did Indra destroy, then? I think Puram/Pura is referring to the clay brick village settlements, the people, outside the IVC’s cities, lived in. If you remember the interpretation for Meluhha=Melagam, i had mentioned that Agam also meant inside. Puram in Tamil is the opposite of Agam, which means outside. You can think of melagam as the inner city and the puram as the outer suburbs. Even in today’s modern world, we use the same terminology – inner city and outer suburbs. These destructions, that the RV refers to, must have been the Violent Incursions that the Aryans used. There are also multiple references in the RV to Dasas who were collaborating with the Aryans and adopting their systems [Citation: Romila Thapar's Early India]. Therefore, the Aryans must have used a combination of military power, influencing some powerful Dravidian chiefs with their new religion, to Aryanize the IVC people.

Why RV couldn’t be about a riverine civilization like the IVC?

1. In a riverine agriculture-based civilization, the river would have great significance, as we have seen with Egypt, where even the calendar was fixed according to Nile floodings and the Deities were carried in a Nile Boat (barque) during processions. Whereas in the RV, concordance for Sarasvati is 73 (compare that to 2819 for Indra) and Sindhu has 50.

2. Riverine people use boats extensively. We also know that the IVC people were seafarers. RV Concordance for Boats+Ships = 16. Very insignificant.

3. If the RV was written by/for agriculturists, you will find more mentions of Agricultural elements. That is not the case with the RV – Plough/Ploughs concordance = 4, sickle=2, sowing=2, till=12. Very insignificant. Interestingly, Visnu, the agricultural god ranks way below the other important gods. Compare Visnu=107 with Indra=2819 concordances.

Therefore, saying that the RV represents the IVC [or the Indus-Sarasvati Valley Civilization as the revisionist Hindutvavadis call the IVC] is delusional.

Outside India

At this point, I decided to look at the neighboring areas of the IVC. Thanks to Priya Raju, I became aware of the Avesta . Just going through the various sites referring to the Avesta and its similarities to RV blew my mind away. They had the same Soma/Haomo rituals, they had the same fire worship rituals etc. It is so similar that, today, linguists use Vedic Sanskrit to decipher the Gathan Avesta language! I have compiled the similarities between Avesta and Veda in this PDF with citations – Rig Veda and Avesta Comparison. The only inference you can draw from this is that the Avesta and RV were written by the same people.

But the reference to Daha/Dahyu (RV Dasa/Dasyu) in the Avesta bothered me. The Avestans never came to India and we know that the RV is referring to the IVC people as Dasas, then how come both are talking about the same enemies? I concluded that the Avestan/RV people when they were together must have encountered the same people as well whom they called Dasas/Dahas. When i started looking at the pre-Avestan cultures, i found the same Mother Goddess religion, thereby confirming my inference that the Dasas of RV/Dahas of Avesta were the Mother Goddess worshippers .  That inference started my quest, which eventually led me to the point where i  realized/proved that the entire Neolithic Plate, as I called it, was following the Mother Goddess Religion.

If that is the case, who are these Avestan/Vedic people? Horses and Chariots seem to be very important to them and of course Agni, Varuna, Soma etc.

Epilog:

1. Where are these horse/chariot people from? What is the big deal with horses/chariots?

2. What was happening in the rest of the Neolithic Plate when the Aryans came to the IVC?

3. What about genetic evidence? Is there any?