Hinduism: A Short History (8 page)

The
Ṛgveda
describes a river system in North India that is pre-1900 B.C.E. in the case of the Saraswatī river and pre-2600 B.C.E. in the case of the Drishadvati river. Vedic literature shows a population shift from the Saraswatī
(Ṛgveda)
to the Ganges (Brāhmaṇas and Purāṇas), also evidenced by archeological finds.

The astronomical references in the
Ṛgveda
are based on a Pleiades-Kṛttika (Taurean) calendar of c.2500 B.C.E. Vedic astronomy and mathematics were well-developed sciences (again, these are not features of a nomadic people).

The Indus cities were not destroyed by invaders but deserted by their inhabitants because of desertification of the area. Strabo
(Geography
XVI.19) reports that Aristobulos had seen thousands of villages and towns deserted because the Indus had changed its course.

The battles described in the
Ṛgveda
were not fought between invaders and natives but between people belonging to the same culture.

Excavations in Dwārakā have led to the discovery of a site larger than Mohenjodaro, dated c.1500 B.C., with architectural structures, use of iron, and a script halfway between Harappan and Brāhmī. Dwārakā has been associated with Krishna and the end of the Vedic period.

There is a continuity in the morphology of scripts: Harappan – Brahmi – Devanāgarī.

Vedic
ayas
, formerly translated as “iron,” probably meant copper or bronze. Iron was found in India before 1500 B.C.E. in Kashmir and Dwārakā.

The Purāṇic dynastic lists, with over 120 kings in one Vedic dynasty alone, fit well into the “new chronology.” They date back to the third millennium B.C.E. Greek accounts tell of Indian royal lists going back to the seventh millennium B.C.E.

The
Ṛgveda
itself shows an advanced and sophisticated culture, the product of a long development, “a civilisation that could not have been delivered to India on horseback”
(In Search of the Cradle
, p. 160).

Painted Gray Ware culture in the western Gangetic plains, dated c.1100 B.C.E., has been found connected to (earlier) Black and Red Ware.

As already remarked, there is no hint in the Veda of a migration of the people that considered it its own sacred tradition. It would be strange indeed if the Vedic Indians had lost all recollection of such a momentous event in supposedly relatively recent times – much more recent, for instance, than the migration of Abraham and his people, which is well attested and frequently referred to in the Bible. In addition, as has been established recently through satellite photography and geological investigations, the Saraswatī, the mightiest river known to the Rgvedic Indians, along whose banks they established numerous major settlements, had dried out completely by 1900 B.C.E. – four centuries before the Āryans were supposed to have invaded India. One can hardly argue for the establishment of Āryan villages along a dry river bed.

When the first remnants of the ruins of the so-called Indus civilization came to light in the early part of the twentieth century, the proponents of the Āryan invasion theory believed they had found the missing archeological evidence: here were the “mighty forts” and the “great cities” which the war-like Indra of the
Ṛgveda
was said to have conquered and destroyed. It then emerged that nobody had destroyed these cities and no evidence of wars of conquest came to light: floods and droughts had made it impossible to sustain large populations in the area, and the people of Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and other places had migrated to more hospitable areas. Ongoing archeological research has not only extended the area of the Indus civilization but has also shown a transition of its later phases to the Gangetic culture. Archeo-geographers have established that a drought lasting two to three hundred years devastated a wide belt of land from Anatolia through Mesopotamia to northern India around 2300 B.C.E. to 2000 B.C.E.

Based on this type of evidence and extrapolating from the Vedic texts, a new story of the origins of Hinduism emerges which reflects the self-consciousness of Hindus and which attempts to replace the “colonial-missionary Āryan invasion theory” by a vision of “India as the Cradle of Civilisation.” This new theory considers the Indus civilization as a late Vedic phenomenon and pushes the (inner-Indian) beginnings of the Vedic age back by several thousands of years. One of the reasons for considering the Indus civilization “Vedic” is the evidence of town planning and architectural design, which required a fairly advanced algebraic geometry – of the type preserved in the Vedic
Śulvasūtras
. The widely respected historian of mathematics, A. Seidenberg, concluded, after studying the geometry used in building the Egyptian pyramids and the Mesopotamian citadels, that it reflected a derivative geometry – that is, a geometry derived from the Vedic
Śulva-sūtras
. If that is so, then the knowledge (“Veda”) on which the construction of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro is based cannot be later than that civilization itself.
⁹

While the
Ṛgveda
has always been held to be the oldest literary document of India and was considered to have preserved the oldest form of Sanskrit, Indians have not taken it to be the source for their early history. For them,
Itihāsa-Purāṇa
served that purpose. The language of these works is more recent than that of the Vedas and the time of their final redaction is much later than the fixation of the Vedic canon. However, they contain detailed information about ancient events and personalities that form part of Indian history. The Ancients, like Herodotus, the father of Greek historiography, did not separate story from history. Nor did they question their sources but tended to juxtapose various information without critically sifting it. Thus we cannot read
Itihāsa-Purāṇa
as the equivalent of a modern textbook of Indian history but rather as a storybook containing information with interpretation, facts and fiction. Indians, however, always took genealogies seriously and we can presume that the Purāṇic lists of dynasties, like the lists of
guru-paraṃparās
in the
Upaniṣads
, relate the names of real rulers in the correct sequence. On these assumptions we can tentatively reconstruct Indian history to a time around 4500 B.C.E.

A key element in the revision of Ancient Indian History was the recent discovery of Mehrgarh, a settlement in the Hindukush area, which was continuously inhabited for several thousand years from c.7000 B.C.E. onwards. This discovery has extended Indian history for several thousands of years before the fairly well datable Indus civilisation.
¹⁰

NEW CHRONOLOGIES

Pulling together archeological evidence as it is available today, the American anthropologist James G. Shaffer developed the following chronology of early Indian civilisation:
¹¹

Early food-producing era (c.6500–5000 B.C.E.): no pottery.

Regionalization era (5000–2600 B.C.E.): distinct regional styles of pottery and other artifacts.

Integration era (2600–1900 B.C.E.): cultural homogeneity and emergence of urban centers like Mohenjo Daro and Harappa.

Localization era (1900–1300 B.C.E.); blending of patterns from the integration era with regional ceramic styles.

The Indian archeologist S. P. Gupta proposed the following cultural sequencing:

Pre-ceramic Neolithic (8000–6000 B.C.E.

Ceramic Neolithic (6000–5000 B.C.E.)

Chalcolithic (5000–3000 B.C.E.)

Early Bronze Age (3000–1900 B.C.E.)

Late Bronze Age (1900–1200 B.C.E.)

Early Iron Age (1200–800 B.C.E.)

Late Iron cultures

According to these specialists, there is no break in the cultural development of north-western India from 8000 B.C.E. onwards; similarly there is no indication of a major change, such as a large-scale invasion of another population with a different culture.

N. S. Rajaraman’s
¹²
“New Chronology” of Ancient India, which identifies names of kings and peoples mentioned in the Vedas and Purāṇas, looks somewhat like this:

4500 B.C.E.: Mandhātri’s victory over the Drohyus, alluded to in the Purāṇas.

4000 B.C.E.: Composition of the
Ṛgveda
(excepting books 1 and 10).

3700 B.C.E.: Battle of Ten Kings (referred to in the
Ṛgveda)
. Beginning of Purāṇic dynastic lists: Agastya, the messenger of Vedic religion in the Dravida country. Vasiṣṭha, his younger brother, author of Vedic works Rāma and
Rāmāyaṇa
.

3600 B.C.E.:
Yajur-, Sāma-, Atharvaveda:
Completion of Vedic Canon.

3100 B.C.E.: Age of Kṛṣṇa and Vyāsa. Mahābhārata War. Early
Mahābhārata
.

3000 B.C.E.:
Śatapathabrāhmaṇa, Śulvasūtras, Yajñavālkyasūtra
, Pāṇinī, author of the
Aṣṭādbyayī
, Yāska, author of the
Nirukta
.

2900 B.C.: Rise of the civilizations of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus-Saraswatī doab.
¹³

2200 B.C.E.: Beginning of large-scale drought: Decline of Harappa.

2000 B.C.E.: End of Vedic age.

1900 B.C.E.: Saraswatī completely dried out: End of Harappa.

Texts like the
gveda
, the
Śatapathabrāhmaṇa
and others contain references to eclipses as well as to sidereal markers of the beginning of seasons which allow us, by backward calculation, to determine the time of their composition. Experts assure us that to falsify these dates would have been impossible before the computer age.

OLD VS. NEW, OR SCIENTISTS VS. PHILOLOGISTS?

We are thus left with two widely differing versions of Ancient Indian history, with two radically divergent sets of chronology, and with a great deal of polemic from both sides. Those who defend the Āryan invasion theory and the chronology associated with it accuse the proponents of the “New Chronology” of indulging in Hindu chauvinism. The latter suspect the former of entertaining “colonial-missionary” prejudices and denying originality to the indigenous Indians. The new element that has entered the debate are scientific investigations. While the older theory relied exclusively on philological arguments, the new theory includes astronomical, geological, mathematical, and archeological evidence.
¹⁴
On the whole the “New Chronology” seems to rest on better foundations.

Civilizations, both ancient and contemporary, comprise more than literature. Traditionally trained philologists – i.e. grammarians – are generally not able to understand technical language and the scientific information contained in the texts they study. Consider today’s scientific literature. It abounds with Greek and Latin technical terms, and contains an abundance of formulae composed of Greek and Hebrew letters. If scholars with only a background in the classical languages were to read such works, they might be able to come up with some acceptable translations of technical terms into modern English but they would hardly be able to make sense of most of what they read, and they certainly would not be able to extract the information which the authors of these works wished to convey through their formulas to people trained in their specialties.

The situation is not too different with regard to ancient Indian texts. The admission of some of the top scholars (like Geldner, who in his translation of the
Ṛgveda
– deemed the best so far – declares many passages “darker than the darkest oracle,” or Gonda, who considered the
Ṛgveda
basically untranslatable) of being unable to make sense of a great many texts – and the refusal of most to go beyond a grammatical and etymological analysis of the texts – indicates a deeper problem. The Ancient Indians were not only poets and litterateurs, but they also had their practical sciences and their technical skills, their secrets and their conventions, which are not self-evident to someone who does not share their world. Some progress has been made in deciphering technical Indian medical and astronomical literature of a later age, in reading architectural and arts-related materials. However, much of the technical meaning of the oldest Vedic literature still eludes us.

THE
Ṛ
GVEDA
– A CODE?

The computer scientist/Indologist Subhash Kak believes he has rediscovered the “Vedic Code” on the strength of which he extracts from the structure as well as the words and sentences of the
Ṛgveda
considerable astronomical information which its authors supposedly embedded in it.
¹⁵
The assumption of such encoded scientific knowledge would make it understandable why there was such insistence on the preservation of every letter of the text in precisely the sequence the original author had set down. One can take certain liberties with a story, or even a poem, changing words, transposing lines, adding explanatory matter, shortening it, if necessary – and still communicate the intentions and ideas of the author. However, one has to remember and reproduce a scientific formula in precisely the same way it has been set down by the scientist, or it would make no sense at all. While the scientific community can arbitrarily adopt certain letter equivalents for physical units or processes, once it has agreed on their use, one must obey the conventions for the sake of meaningful communication.