Readings in History Part 6 - Back to Indus (-Sarasvati) valley

The Indus valley civilization has been a source of great intrigue for me. I had written about it in two previous posts. In my first post, which was summarizing John Keay's book on Indian History, I had mentioned the common (Western?) view of the Indus valley civilization  that it was distinct from the Vedic Aryan civilization. This was backed partially by the fact that there seemed to be no link between the undeciphered Indus script and the Vedic Sanskrit.

Recently, I have been made aware of a completely different thread of thought wherein the Vedic civilization is nothing but a continuation of the Indus valley people & heritage. This thinking also happens to be contrary to the Aryan Invasion theory according to which the Vedic Aryans "invaded"  India from somewhere in Central Europe or Asia.

An engrossing and scholarly work by Michel Danino titled Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati lays a strong foundation for this line of thinking. The book starts as a hunt for the river Sarasvati that is the most mentioned and praised river in the Rig Veda. One of the Rig Vedic hymns lists a set of rivers  in order : Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Shutudri (Sutlej)...., Sindhu (Indus),.... This order happens to correspond to the modern rivers in the region from east to west (with Sarasvati missing today of course). The rishis of the Rig Veda praise Sarasvati as a gushing river 'breaking through the ridges of the mountains with her strong waves'.

Danino makes a convincing case for Sarasvati to be the antecedent of the current Ghagra-Hakkar river system in Haryana and Punjab which is now a seasonal river that dries up much before it reaches the sea in the Thar desert. This location is in between the Yamuna on the east and the Sutlej on the west and aligns with the east-to-west order mentioned in the Rig Veda. If this was indeed a gushing river with huge flows in Vedic times, how did it get reduced to this seasonal stream? Danino cites various studies that point to a seismic event in the foothills of the Himalayas (close to where the Sutlej and Yamuna rivers originate) that might have happened sometime in the 3rd Millennium BCE. The realignment of the terrain caused by this earthquake caused these two rivers that were then tributaries of Sarasvati to change course radically. The Sutlej got diverted to the west and got captured by the Indus system. The Yamuna, which was then a westward flowing river into the Sarasvati was diverted eastward where it joined the Ganges. The diversion of two of its primary water sources was the primary cause of the Sarasvati drying up.

Now, how is all of this connected to the Harappan civilization? (the reason I start referring to the Indus valley civilization as the Harappan civilization will become clear soon). It turns out that a full cataloging of all the Indus valley sites reveal a close association of the Harappan civilization with the Sarasvati river and its tributaries. Even though the most well known sites of the Indus valley civilization (Harappa and Mohenjadaro) are located along the Indus river, there are hundreds of sites that have since been discovered along the course of what would have been the Sarasvati river and its tributaries at that time.

Further, a classification of Harappan sites as early, mature and late happens to align well with the history of when the river was flowing and when it started shifting course as established by the geological evidence. Mature sites are found along the original course and as it starts drying up, late sites show up further east closer to the Yamuna. Given the association of the Harappan sites with the Sarasvati river's course, Danino (and many other archeologists) argue that if the civilization should be named after any river(s), it should be called the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. Or more neutrally, the Harappan civilization after the first discovered site.

So, we have the Vedic Aryans living close to the Sarasvati witnessing its robust flows and Harappan sites have been found in exactly those locations. If the Vedic Aryans arrived in India 500 years after the decline of the Harappan civilization in the 2nd millennium BCE as per the prior belief, then they could not have seen the Sarasvati in full flow since the geological evidence suggests that it had dried up by then. This is actually the starting point for Danino's elaborate argument that the Vedic society and latter day Indian civilization is nothing but a continuation of the Harappan civilization. The Harappans did not vanish. They just moved eastward as the rivers shifted courses and settled eventually in the Gangetic plain. This makes the Indian civilization the longest running continuous civilization in history as per Danino and others who share this thinking (this may just explain the 1.2 billion).

If the Harappans are closely associated with the Vedic Aryans, that seemingly contradicts the theory put forth by I. Mahadevan and Asko Parpola  that the Harappan script might be a written form of a proto-Dravidian language. Or does it? Only if you equate languages with civilizations. May be there were proto-Dravidian speakers living among the Harappans (Vedic Aryans). There is a lot of other evidence that suggests the Harappans themselves were a very diverse loosely federated society with no central control.

The book continues with an elaborate discussion of the Harappan civilization, and how, many of their traditions show up in modern day cities along the Gangetic plain. More on that later.

- Balaji

Readings in history (part 5) - lecture by Dr. Parpola

During my last visit to Chennai, I attended a lecture by Prof. Asko Parpola, a well-known researcher on the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) and the yet to be deciphered Indus script (see my earlier post on Harappans and Aryans).  Prof. Parpola along with Dr. Iravaddam Mahadevan (another well-known researcher in this area) have hypothesized that the Indus script is a script used to write a proto-Dravidian language. Proto-Dravidian is the hypothetical language that Tamil and other Dravidian languages descended from.

In this specific talk, Prof. Parpola focused on a couple of possible connections between the Indus script and Dravidian languages. One was the preponderance of the "fish" symbol in the Indus script, some of which he claims to indicate a "star". Refering to a star as a fish is of course reminiscent of referring to a star as "Vin meen" in Tamil, where "meen" is Tamil for fish.

The more elaborate discussion was on the occurrence of a symbol that is taken to be the hind-leg of the wild-ass, an inhabitant of the salt-deserts of north-west India (the same area where the Indus valley civilization had spread).

Prof. Parpola hypothesizes that the Tamil word for donkey "kaZhuthai" referred originally to the wild-ass as it can be parsed as "kazh" (salt-desert) + "uthai" (kick), i.e. kicker of salt-desert. He also conjectures that the old Tamil word "taal" (தாள்) which has multiple meanings including leg and star is another possible link.

Okay, if you're like me, you are probably thinking this is a big stretch. However, if there are multiple such tenuous links, I suppose they could add up to a "preponderance of evidence" claim.

In any case, the deciphering is very much incomplete as Profs. Parpola and Mahadevan readily admit and Prof. Parpola says other interpretations of these symbols are possible.

One unfortunate aspect of research like this is that it gets politicians and other people with vested interests and foregone conclusions all excited. The "Dravidians are great" gang understandably grasps at such research feverishly. (Prof. Parpola was an invited speaker at the recently concluded World Tamil Conference at Coimbatore where he was bestowed the 2009 Classical Tamil Award by Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi).

On the other side, the "Aryan supremacists" frown upon anything that gives the Dravidians any kind of legitimacy. For some of them, contesting this hypothesis is not just about denying  the Dravidian connection to the IVC, but to appropriate an Aryan one (although there seems to be no archeological backing for the Aryan connection - there is plenty of evidence against it as John Keay talks about in his book).

There is however another school of thought (this by published scientists) that says that the Indus inscriptions were really not a script (of any language, Dravidian or otherwise), instead just a bunch of random signs (like a set of traffic signs).

The tension between the two sides (or is it three?) was apparent during the Q&A session after the talk.
Dr. Mahadevan alluded to this by asking the audience to limit themselves to "clarifying questions" on the paper. At a different point, Dr. Mahadevan (a Tamilian) also said that Dr. Parpola enjoyed some benefits as an IVC researcher that he himself did not have, because Dr. Parpola could not be labelled a "Tamil Chauvinist".

So, I was all prepared to witness some serious war of words, but it ended up fairly lame but for a couple of skeptical questions which Dr. Parpola answered rather diplomatically. I heard from my friend that an earlier talk by Dr. Parpola engendered a lot more debate.

Anyway, let us hope that this research is conducted solely by objective scientists with as minimal external influence as realistically possible. And I do hope they crack the script. Whether you consider yourself Aryan or Dravidian, the mystery of the IVC carries enough intrigue that you want to know the answers whichever way they point.

- R. Balaji


Related links:
An article in The Hindu on this topic
This blog post follows a robust debate on the merits of Parpola's ideas.