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IndiaStar Review of Books --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANCIENT INDIA IN A NEW LIGHT -- four books --
In Search of the Cradle of Civilization by Georg Feuesrstein, Subhash Kak, & David Frawley Wheaton, Illinois: Quest Books, 1995 341 pages $24.95 Tele: 1-708-665-0123
The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India by David Frawley New Delhi: Voice of India, 1995 (2 / 18 Ansari Road, New Delhi, 110 002)
The Politics of History: Aryan Invasion Theory and the Subversion of Scholarship.
by Navaratna Rajaram
New Delhi: Voice of India, 1995
(2 / 18 Ansari Road, New Delhi, 110 002)
Return of the Aryans by Bhagwan S. Gidwani Penguin-India, 1994 (also Penguin-Canada) 943 page
Reviewed by C. J. S. Wallia
When I first heard about Gidwani's assertion in Return of the Aryans that the Black Sea and Germany's Black Forest were named in memory of dark-skinned Aryans from India, I thought his suggestion preposterous. Now, after reading the above four books, the suggested origin of these names begins to appear in the realm of the plausible.
The "standard" textbooks on India's early history, written by Eurocentric historians, have recently been challenged by postcolonial historians. Several new books question many of the "standard" assertions by presenting convincing evidence -- linguistic, literary, archaeological, geological (including recent Indo-French satellite photography), and astronomical. The postcolonialists call for a thorough rewrite of the erroneous history textbooks used in schools and colleges worldwide, including, sadly, those in India.
There never was any "Aryan" invasion of India, nor any "Aryan"-"Dravidian" war. The term "Arya" meant good, referring to quality of behavior, not race. Likewise "dasyu" referred to misconduct, not another race. The Rig Veda was composed not in 1200 B.C.; it was completed in 3700 B.C. The cradle of civilization is not Sumeria in Mesopotamia, but the Sapta Sindhu, the land of seven rivers, in northwest India. From the densely populated Sapta Sindhu, Sanskrit-speaking people migrated to Iran, Greece, and further West.
Commenting on Rajaram and Frawley, Professor Klaus Klostermaier of the University of Manitoba, writes:
"The facts referred to in this work are incontrovertible. The conclusions drawn have a high degree of plausibility. Consequently, the implications are nothing less than sensational....Rajaram and Frawley are true pioneers blazing new trails."
And so is Subhash Kak, Sanskrit scholar and computer scientist, co-author of In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, who has analyzed the astronomical code of the Rig Veda. Drawing on Kak's work and other evidence, Rajaram has established the period 4000-3700 B.C. for the composition of the Rig Veda.
The "standard" textbooks on early Indian history are an example of the adage that history books are written to reflect the views of the conqueror. In the late eighteenth century, when many Sanskrit classics, were first translated into contemporary European languages, they drew great admiration from Europe's major intellectual luminaries like Voltaire, Goethe, and Hegel. For example, G.W. F. Hegel wrote that India was"the starting-point for the whole Western world." Later, in the nineteenth century, the same Hegel dismissed the Puranas chronologies as fabrications and generally disparaged Indian history. Why this reversal? Nineteenth century European imperialism distorted European perceptions and brought forth racist attitudes. The colonized people and their culture came to be seen as inferior. Hegel's reversal exemplifies this changed perception.
However, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European historians had to contend with a puzzling philological fact: the classical language of India, Sanskrit, and the classical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin, were closely related. In the words of William Jones, one of the earliest to make a systematic study of this resemblance, "... a stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without first believing them to have sprung from some common source...The Sanskrit language is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either." An example of the resemblance: the word for ten is dasha in Sanskrit, deka in Greek, and decem in Latin. Thousands of Sanskrit words such as pitah, brahta, raja have cognates in nearly all European languages. Based on the undeniable resemblance of these languages, philologists termed them Indo-European languages.
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To detoxify yourself from the noxious Eurocentric notions injected by the "standard" history textbooks on India's cultural heritage, peruse these landmark books as soon as possible!
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To account for the common origin of Indo-European languages, several nineteenth- century European scholars hypothesized that in ancient times an invasion of India from Europe, by a people who spoke the original Indo-European language -- an "Aryan" invasion--must have occurred. In typical Eurocentric arrogance, they assumed, without any evidence, that the Aryans came from outside India. Principal among these "scholars" were Max Muller and Monier-Williams, both committed to denigrating India's cultural heritage in order to persuade Indians to convert to Christianity.
In a letter to his wife, Max Muller wrote: "This edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent... the fate of India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years." Muller's purpose was to uproot Hinduism. Monier-Williams, in a speech given at Oxford to the Missionary Congress on 2 May 1877, said: "When the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahminism are encircled, undermined, and finally stormed by the soldiers of the Cross, the victory of Christianity must be signal and complete." Some objective scholars, these!
In picking a date for the supposed Aryan invasion of India by a supposed race of people, Rajaram writes: "Muller was strongly influenced by a current Christian belief that the creation of the world had taken place at 9:00 a.m. on 23 October 4004 BC. Assuming the date of 4004 BC for the creation of the world, as Muller did, leads to 2448 BC for the biblical Flood. If another thousand years is allowed for the waters to subside and for the soil to get dry enough for the Aryans to begin their invasion of India, we are left at around 1400 BC. Adding another two hundred years before they could begin composing the Rig Veda brings us right to Muller's date of 1200.BC...he used a ghost story from Somadeva's Kathasaritasagara to support this date." Some historical research, this!
Reader, to detoxify yourself from the noxious Eurocentric notions injected by the "standard" history textbooks on India's cultural heritage, peruse these two landmark books as soon as possible!
David Frawley, author of many books on Sanskrit literature, including Gods, Sages, and Kings: Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization, sumarizes his views on Vedic history, society, and geography in The Myth of the Aryan Invasion . Referring to the famous Battle of the Ten Kings in the Rig Veda, 3700 B.C., Frawley writes: "The Vedic war is a question of values, not race. It is a conflict between spiritual values and materialistic values, which occurs in all societies. Sometimes arya people become un-arya by a change in values, as indicated in the battle of Sudas....Even names of famous Vedic kings, such as Sudas and Devadasa have the ending of das or dasa meaning 'servant'." Sudas ruled the land of Sapta Sindhu, centered around the mighty Sarasvati river, which flowed from the Himalayas to the Rann of Kutch. After the Battle of the Ten Kings, many Indians migrated westwards into Iran and beyond.
Frawley observes that Max Muller, with his hidden Christian agenda, selectively lifted metaphorical passages from the Rig Veda to buttress his"Aryan invasion from Europe" theory. Taken in its entirety the literary evidence shows the Vedic civilization as an indigenous development.
In articles published in various journals Navaratna Rajaram, author of The Politics of History presents a chronological synthesis of ancient Indian civilization. One of the most interesting sections of his work is on the Sulbasutras, 3000 BC.,-- mathematical manuals for the design and construction of Vedic altars. Rajaram notes that A. Seidenberg, an American historian of science, in his paper entitled "Origin of Mathematics," published in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1978, "established the Sulbasutras as the basis for the mathematics in Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece. This provides a mathematically rigorous foundation for the derivation of the chronology presented in this book."
The principal author of the Sulbasutras, Baudhayana, a South Indian, "discovered the theorem of Pythagoras some two thousand years before Pythagoras. His work was known in Egypt... as early as 2700 BC. He is the first known of the world's mathematicians." This is the civilization that invented mathematics.
Rajaram proposes a chronology of ancient Indian civilization as beginning before the archaeological evidence of the Mehrgarh site in the northwest, circa 6500 BC, the earliest and largest urban site of the period in the world. This site has yielded evidence for the earliest domestication of animals, evolution of agriculture, as well as arts and crafts. The horse was first domesticated here in 6500 BC. Mehrgarh, Harappa and Mohenjodaro are peripheral cities of the great Sarasvati civilization with more than 500 sites along its banks awaiting excavation. In 4500 BC, Mandhatr defeated the people of Druhyus, driving them to the west into Iran. 4000-3700 BC was the Rig Veda period. In 3730 BC occurred the Battle of Ten Kings-- the age of Sudas and his sage advisors, Vasishtha and Visvamitra. 3600 to 3100 BC was the late Vedic age during which Yajur, Sama, and Atharva Vedas were composed. 3100 BC is the date of the Mahabharata, composed by Vyasa. At this time, the Sarasvati river lost Yamuna because of a tectonic plate shift. It was the beginning of Kali Yuga. 3000 BC was the late Brahmanic period during which early Sutras were composed. In 1900 BC, another tectonic plate shift made Sarasvati lose Sutlej. This dried up Sarasvati, causing massive exodus of people to the east -- the Ganga valley, whence arose the classical civilization of India.
With more than 50 maps and illustrations, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization is a comprehensive book. The book's jacket quotes Deepak Chopra: "This is a scholarly masterpiece and belongs in the home and library of every person who wishes to evolve using the wisdom of the ages." One of its best sections is on the relation between the Indus-Sarasvati and the Brahmi scripts: by analyzing statistical computer-concordances, Subhash Kak has shown that"the most frequent letters of the Indus-Sarasvati and the Brahmi scripts look almost identical and share a rather similar frequency of occurrence." Kak also found that "the texts on the steatite seals follow grammatical rules like that of Sanskrit." Although deciphering of the script remains to be done, he suggests that the Brahmi is derived from Indus-Sarasvati.
Another excellent section of this book is "The Dravidian Puzzle": the authors note that "while scholars have identified some twenty Dravidian 'loan words' in the Rig Veda, the Dravidian languages have 'borrowed' at least fifty percent of their vocabulary from (Aryan) Sanskrit." Moreover, many Dravidian scholars credit "the creation of Tamil, the oldest Dravidian tongue, to Agastaya, who figures in the Rig Veda as one of the prominent sages of his era. The Dravidian kings historically have called themselves Aryans and have traced their descent through Manu....northern and southern India share a common culture and religion... God Shiva clearly is synonymous with the Vedic God Rudra." There was no Aryan invasion, no Dravidian invasion, no Aryan-Dravidian war. Sanskrit has been shown to include elements of Munda, the language of the tribals. All three language groups are indigenous developments.
Bhagwan S. Gidwani's Return of the Aryans, (Penguin-India, also distributed by Penguin-Canada) a recently published 943-page novel is a highly readable account of the Sapta Sindhu culture around 5100 BC as well as the migration of the Aryans from India to the West. It is a monumental work with a cast of thousands--among them the hero of mythic birth, Sindhu Putra, the physician-sage Dhanwantar and his wife Dhanwantarti.
In his introduction, the author says, "this novel will give a mosaic of a long-forgotten past to show that the Aryans did not belong to a different species, culture or race. Their cradle-grounds were the Sindhu, Ganga and Dravidian civilizations; and there is an unbroken continuity--spiritual, social and secular--between the pre-ancient civilizations of Bharat Varsha and the Aryans of 5000 BC.... The Aryans who left Bharat Varsha were not warriors or conquerors, not men of genius or madness; they were not adventurers or soldiers of fortune; and certainly, they were not religious zealots, fanatics or crusaders. These travellers simply had a dream that led them on towards the 'unreachable goal of finding a land that was pure and free from evil--and it was a road that led everywhere but finally nowhere' and at last they came to realize that there was no land of pure, except what a man might make of his own efforts."
This prodigiously researched historical novel presents a skillful exposition of the origin of writing, of mathematics, and technology (agriculture, metallurgy, boat-building, weaponry) in pre-ancient India. Particularly engaging are the chapters on the Aryans' journey from India to Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Germany, and futher west. The author gives numerous examples of rivers and places named in Sanskrit language: Hari river and Hari rath (Herat), in Afghanistan, Dana (Danube) river in Europe. The Black Sea, near where they camped for a long time and built boats, and Germany's Black Forest are named in memory of the dark-skinned Aryans from India.
In 1996, Penguin (Canada) issued a press release that this novel had won the "Most Outstanding Book of the Year" award from the historical division of the research and reference center.
I recommend these four books to anyone interested in India's cultural heritage.
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