ARYAN INVASION OF INDIA-MYTH Vs REALITY
Posted by bmhegde on 1
Man has been fighting man all through the history of mankind. It is almost reaching a point where man is ready to eat man. There seems to be some vested interest in all these happenings in our so-called civilized world. We have gone too far from the time we were hanging from the tree branches, to the present when we are hanging about cyber cafes!Alas, on the other front, we seem to have regressed quite a bit in our quest for self-realization from the time of our forefathers of the Vedic Enlightenment period, when we had a great insight into human consciousness. Man spends most of his time, nay all his time, in his own company; but many of us have never tried to understand ourselves. We are not at peace with ourselves.We try to delude ourselves with material pleasures, at the cost of real pleasure of the ever-lasting inner peace.
Indian wisdom of the yore was peerless in its depth and dimensions, to say the least. Obviously, others wanted to belittle this in every way possible. One of the methods was to destroy the Indian wisdom, if possible. This could have been done through cultural and religious invasions of India. Although we have had many such onslaughts on us in the last thousands of years, our ancient culture has remained like a solid rock of Gibraltar. The main reason, I feel, has been the strong bedrock of the ancient Indian wisdom. The latter was called Hindu religion by the British, to try and divide us from our Islamic brothers and sisters, lest India should live happily like a large family, despite its many tribes, regions, castes, religions, languages, and what have you!
There is no organized religion called Hindu religion. Ancient Vedic wisdom is no religion in the true sense of the word, as I have understood it. The original Vedas, the Shrutis were only songs sung in praise of Nature. They sang to praise the sun, the moon, the clouds, and the water, the hills and so on. Next stage came where they thought of propitiating the various parts of Nature by certain rituals, called the Bhramanaas. Following that came the time when the rishis thought of human renunciation and the Aranyakaas came into being. The last stage, the Vedanta, mainly the Upanishads have been the pinnacle of Enlightenment, in that they condensed all the human wisdom into sixty or so documents; the necklace of those pearls is the Bhagavad Gita, the greatest of them all. These are eternal and have no clear beginning or end. They form the Indian Dharma, the Indians’ societal obligations. To say that religion was not a part of this Indian Vedic Wisdom was the evidence that even agnostics and atheists like the Chaarvakaas were venerated as learned men in India, although they propagated mainly materialism in all its pristine glory!
One of the attempts at destroying this legacy has been a concerted effort to show that Indians are not one race, and that they have had a great invasion by nomadic light-skinned Indo-European tribes from Central Asia around 1500-100 BC. They are said to have overthrown an earlier and dark-skinned Dravidian civilization, from which they took most of what later came to be called the Hindu religion. The concept of the war between the powers of the light and darkness in the Vedas was misinterpreted as that between the dark coloured Dravidians and the fair-skinned Aryans; thus turning the great Vedas into primitive poems of the uncivilized plunderers.
Even serious western scholars have now rejected this false idea, the leader amongst them being David Frawley, of the American Institute of Vedic studies in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In his recent book Gods, Sages, and Kings: Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization he argued very effectively against all falsehood and mystery in this field. Unfortunately it is falsehood and mystery that influence more people in this world!It was Aristotle who wrote: “truth might influence half a score of men at a time or in a century, while falsehood and mystery will drag millions by the nose!”
The Indus valley culture was called pre-Aryan, based on the false calculations by many western scholars, led by Max Muller.Like many other western scholars, Max Muller took western chronology into consideration while pronouncing his judgment. They put the beginning of the world at about 400 BC, and the flood around 2500 BC. If one assumes these dates to be correct, it becomes difficult to get the Aryans to India before 1500 BC.Max Muller, therefore, decided that the Aryans came to India around 1500 BC.That, perforce, puts the Indus Valley civilization pre-Aryan. This was very convenient for westerners to divide India into the Aryan North and the Dravidian South, a good divide at that, citing our colour differences to divide us further. It is a pity that they did not understand science at that time, to know that the color changes are basically climatic in origin, like the black Africans and the white Europeans, despite the fact that all mankind was originally derived from a single source!
Muller deduced that the Vedas and the Upanishads were composed in a period of about 200 years before the time of Buddha at 500 BC. This in itself is wrong as the Indian Vedas and the Upanishads could havetogether taken several centuries to be fully formed.They also presumed that the Vedic culture was that of the primitive nomads from Central Asia, hence they could not have created an urban culture like the Indus Valley culture. This was based on a rather crude interpretation of the Rg Veda.Whereas it is true that in the second millennium BC, a number of Indo-European invasions occurred in the Middle East, where Hittites, Mittani, and Kassites conquered and ruled Mesopotamia for some centuries, the Aryan invasion theory could have been an extension of that period.
Another theory of the Aryan invasion was the finds of excavators like Wheeler, of the evidence of a foreign invasion of the Indus valley. The presence of horse-drawn chariots and iron weapons and superior war tactics of the Aryans from Central Asia were cited as important evidence, while Wheeler and others at that time did not find evidence of Iron and the horse in Indus Valley finds. Further excavations, however, showed horses not only in the Indus valley but even in the pre-Indus period in India. The Vedic word Ayas was given as evidence that it meant iron, and that was introduced for the first time around 1500 BC and therefore, the Vedas must be that old. This word ayas has different colours in the Yajur Veda and Atharva Veda showing that it just means the generic term metal and not necessarily iron. Even in other Indo-European languages like Latin and German the word ayas means ore, iron, bronze or copper. It is satisfying to note that the Webster’s Dictionary Foundation now accepts Sanskrit as the mother of all Indo-European languages. The word ayas should mean metal and not necessarily iron.
It is also cited that the Rg Veda, at places, describes Gods as the “destroyers of Cities”; hence the proof to show that the Aryan nomadic invaders destroyed the more developed Indus valley cities. Deeper analysis of the Rg Veda does show that cities were an integral part of the Vedas.Indra, Agni, Saraswati and, Adityas are all praised as being like a city. To say that all those who destroy cities are nomads would make the present day Americans, who destroyed many cities in Iraq lately, as nomadic, if not barbaric. I do not think the western scholars would want to do that!
Further excavatory evidence is accumulating that the Indus Valley civilization was not destroyed by outsiders, but by internal causes, most likely floods. Recently S.R.Rao and colleagues have found new cities in India between those of Indus period and later ancient India (visited by the Greeks); hence there is no question of our having had a Dark Age after the destruction of Indus valley by invading Aryans. Cities have flourished for all times in ancient India. Wheeler also wrote that the religion of the Indus valley was pre-Vedic!This does not hold water, as later discoveries in Indus valley, Lothal in Gujarat, and Kalibangan in Rajasthan have shown large number of vedic alters and many other items used in Vedic Bramhanaas. There is no racial evidence of any such Indo-Aryan invasion.
There are many other evidences to show the Vedic culture in the Indus valley. In the Vedic period the river Saraswati was venerated. The present land studies show river Saraswati to be the largest river in India, which is not seen now. This is supposed to have dried before 1500 BC.How could the Aryan invaders, coming after that, have thought of the river in their literature? Manu is said to have established his treatise on the banks of the rivers Saraswati and Drishadvati.Saraswati is also described in the Rg Veda as the naditama, the main river. This could have had the great floods that destroyed the Indus Valley civilization; the latter was not destroyed by the imaginary invading Aryans.
David Frawley graphically describes the astronomical evidence, in addition, thus: “The Vedic calendar was based upon astronomical sightings of the equinoxes and solstices. “Vedanga Jyothish” speaks of a time when the vernal equinox was in the middle of the Nakshatra Aaslesha (about 23 degrees 20 minutes Cancer). This gives a date of 1300 BC. The yajur and atharva vedas speak of the vernal equinox in the Krittikas (Pleides; early Taurus) and the summer solstice (ayana) in Megha (early Leo). This gives the date as 2400 BC……..This amply proves that the vedic culture existed in those periods and already had a sophisticated system of astronomy. Such references were merely ignored or pronounced unintelligible by western scholars because it yielded very early date for the Vedas than what they presumed, not because such references did not exist.”
According to the prevailing western theory the Vedic people were nomads in Punjab, coming down from Central Asia.Rg Veda alone has more than hundred references to the sea (Call of the Vedas by A.C.Bose), the Vedic God Varuna of the sea and, the Saraswati river as the great river, makes a mockery of the Central Asian origin of the Aryans. If true the Aryans could not have seen the sea at all. Recent French excavations at Mehragarh have shown that all antecedents of the Indus Valley culture could be found within the sub-continent and must have been as old as 6000 BC.
David Frawley makes some more relevant observations:
·The deeper study of the whole suggests that Indo-Europeans and other Aryan people were migrants from India rather than migrants into India.
·Dravidians were early offshoots of the Vedic people through the seer Agasthya, and not un-Aryan people.
·The western concept served the purpose of dividing India into the Northern Aryan and Southern Dravidian culture, which were made hostile to each other.
·This gave the Britishers an excuse to conquer India. They could claim that they were just repeating what their Aryna ancestors did earlier.
·It made Vedic culture later than and possibly derived from, the Middle Eastern culture, thereby showing Indian culture closer to the western religions.
·It allowed the great sciences of India to be given a Greek basis; while the reverse is probably true.( underlined portion is mine)
·It turned great Indian tradition and literature into fantasies and exaggerations.
·This served the social, political, and economic domination, giving superiority to the western culture.
·He calls this the “cultural imperialism”.
Even though Aurobindo, Dayananda Saraswati, and Bala Gangadhar Tilak had rejected the western view earlier, the majority of us have accepted it. Unfortunately, even our great Universities use western textbooks as gospel truth, in all areas of humanities and science.
Even in science the new meaning of the word science derived from the Indo-European Sanskrit root is skei “cut into”. If one cuts into the latest quantum physics, one quickly comes to the Vedic view that all of us are but dancing Lepto-quarks at the sub-cellular level.We can not harm someone, without harming ourselves, in the bargain, and vice-versa. Reductionist science has come to a point of no return. The great science of the “whole” the science of CHAOS, of fractals and non-linear mathematics, is taking over. The latter has been the basis of Vedic science.
All kinds of artificial divisions between man and man must be undone for uniting mankind as one large single family. Vasudaiva Kutumbakam ( the world is but one large family) is our only solution. Religion is a personal matter. God loves everyone and loves those who love their fellowmen. The theme of John Leigh’s poem “Abu Ben Adam” is also the same. If man does not hate man, mankind could exist on this planet for all times to come. Otherwise, we will soon destroy ourselves and also our future, yet to be born, generations as well. This could easily be done by our nuclear, and germ warfare tactics, not to mention the star-war plans, originating in the Jacob-Crutzfeld affected brains of some western politicians. The latter are there to make hay when the sun shines, they do not think of the future generations. George Orwell was dead right when he said: “Politician is one who makes a lie look respectable………..He could even give solidity to pure air”.If Orwell were alive today the Monicagate would not have surprised him.
Let us love one another and live happily. Let us also save our planet for the future generations. We have to suppress our proclivity for comfort and our greed, in the bargain. This could easily be done, if we realize that the only certainty in this world is uncertainty. God should save man!It was Voltaire, an atheist, who lamented: “I do not know if God exists; if He doesn’t, it is time we invented one”!