Readings in history (part 4 - Harappans and Aryans)

One of the things that has drawn me to history recently, is really the curiosity about who we (Indians) are as a people and where we came from. Yes, it sounds like a cliched middle-age crisis driven thing, but it is real enough.

I went back to reading John Keay's book, especially the first few chapters that deal with Indian pre-history. Turns out, we only have two major sources to understand our history in the 3000-5000 years before Christ. One is the Sanskrit literary and religious compendium in the form of the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, Brahmanas and the two great epics . The other is the Indus Valley civilization which is one of the three great civilizations from that era (the Egyptian and Sumerian being the other two).

First the Harappans - as Keay calls the folks from the Indus valley civilization. Harappans did not build towering monuments like the Egyptian pyramids. They however built arguably more egalitarian structures (i.e. not monuments for kings' after-life built by slave-laborers) of bricks so advanced that when they were excavated in the 1920's, the presiding archaeologist thought they were merely 200 years old. They also may have invented the proverbial wheel and spread their civilization over an area that spreads more than 600 km.

The thing is, even though these two societies (Harappans and Aryans) lived roughly in the same geographical area there is no link between the two. It is clear that the Harappans did not write the Vedas. The Aryans' arrival in India post-dates the last of the Harappans by at least a few hundred years. Further the Harappan writings look like anything but Sanskrit.

You might have heard that the Harappans' script has been defying proper deciphering by epigraphists. There are two theories on it - the initial hypothesis of links to Aramaic and Iravadam Mahadevan's more recent theory that it is indeed linked to the Tamil-Brahmi script.

As for the Aryans, it is remarkable that we know about a society primarily from their literary and spiritual work and not traditional sources of historians such as inscriptions recording actual events. Unless of course you believe that the events in the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharatha actually happened in some form. Interestingly enough, John Keay seems to suggest exactly that. He even dates the Great Bharatha war at around 1000 BC. Looking at these epics from a purely historical view, Keay however seems to oversimplify them. For instance he condenses all of Ramayana into a single statement that its goal was to institutionalize dynasty based monarchical system in North India (as opposed to the clan-based societies that existed around that time). I was disappointed that he did not delve into the content of the stories to reason about the people who wrote them. Whether the events in Mahabharatha and Ramayana happened or not, the stories at the least give hints to the kind of values that must have existed around that time. The great sacrifice of Bheeshma, and the sense of filial duty and nobility of Rama and Bharatha to just mention a couple of examples. Not to mention the complex interplay of characters and their motivations in the Mahabharatha. May be it is not aligned with the historian's method to do this kind of reasoning.

Keay writes amazingly well and I have yet to see another book that so concisely, dispassionately and readably narrates Indian history, albeit in a cold-blooded western way.

- R. Balaji