The Incredible History of India's Geography

by Sanjeev Sanyal

  The Rig Vedic people knew about agriculture and cities—ones where they lived and ones where their enemies lived. They were not wild nomads as has been suggested. It is true that the Rig Veda does not talk about municipal order but why would a religious text talk about sewage systems anyway?

  The other argument is that the Rig Vedic people were iron-wielding ‘Aryans’ who were at constant war with their enemies called ‘Dasas’—either Harappans or aboriginal tribes. The term ‘Arya’ is commonly used in Sanskrit literature but never in the racial sense. ‘Arya’ means a cultured or noble person—which means all groups are likely to refer to themselves as Aryan and to their enemies as non-Aryan. The use of the word in a racial sense occurs in ancient Iran and modern Europe, but not in India. Similarly, we can’t automatically call a non-Aryan enemy a ‘Dasa’ because the greatest of the ‘Aryan’ chieftains mentioned in the Rig Veda is a Dasa himself: Sudasa, son of Divodasa (more on him later).

  What the Rig Veda describes is a sort of mishmash of tribal feuds between clans. These people belonged to the Bronze Age because the mention of iron appears many centuries later. Iron smelting was developed in central India, which was rich in iron ore. How could the Rig Vedic people be iron-wielding Aryans who conquered India when iron technology was probably discovered in India and that too long after the Rig Veda was composed?

  Did you know?

  The Rig Veda frequently mentions the bull and the horse. Harappan art features the bull quite a bit but the horse is missing. However, we do know that the Harappans were aware of the horse. They had a trading outpost in Central Asia where horses were widely used. There are Stone-Age rock paintings and horse bones from the pre-Harappan era which have been discovered in central India. So there must have been horses even earlier in this region. Also, while the Harappan seals don’t have the horse, two terracotta figurines that depict a horse-like creature have been found. The set of chess pieces found in Lothal has a piece that looks like a horse’s head. Some say horse bones have been discovered from Harappan sites, but sceptics say they are of asses and donkeys, not horses.

  It is possible that the Harappans were a multi-ethnic society, just like India today. The Rig Vedic people may have been part of this bubbling mix.

  Let’s now look at the drying up of the Saraswati—the one event that archaeology and the texts categorically agree upon.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SARASWATI?

  We’ve already seen that the Ghaggar is most likely the Saraswati river that the Rig Veda speaks about at great length. Texts of later times repeatedly talk about how the Saraswati dried up. The Panchavamsa Brahmana tells us that the river disappeared into the desert. There are many legends and folktales about the river’s downfall. But what was the cause behind it?

  We know that the Sutlej and the Yamuna were once tributaries of the Saraswati and that the Yamuna seems to have shifted its course because of a major tectonic event. The Sutlej, too, swung west towards the Indus. A Rig Vedic hymn hints at another source of water—was it the Tons river which is today a major tributary of the Yamuna? It may have been one of the original sources of glacial water for the Saraswati and flowed into the plains through the channel of the Markanda.

  Even though the Saraswati dried up eventually, it has not been forgotten. Modern Hindus still worship the Saraswati as the Goddess of Knowledge and the ‘inspirer of hymns’. In Haryana, one of the seasonal tributaries of the Ghaggar is called the Sarsuti. Farther south, a seasonal river called Saraswati rises in the Aravallis and flows into the Rann of Kutch, not far from the estuary of the lost river. In the deserts of Rajasthan, the Pushkar lake recalls many legends about Goddess Saraswati. And where the Yamuna joins the Ganga at Allahabad, legend says that the Saraswati flows underground.

  The shifting of the rivers may explain one of the mysteries of the subcontinent’s wildlife: how the Gangetic and the Indus river dolphins came to belong to the same species. Till the 1990s, they were thought to be different but now, it has been discovered that they are subspecies of the same species. The two river systems are not connected today and, obviously, the dolphins could not have walked from one river to another! They are unlikely to have come by sea because the mouths of the two rivers are very far apart. Besides, the river dolphins are not closely related to the saltwater dolphins of the Indian Ocean. Did the shifting rivers allow the dolphins to move from one river system to another? Both the subspecies are now under severe threat from pollution and the diversion of water into numerous irrigation projects.

  Just as water problems plague our cities in modern times, people in that era must have also found it difficult to cope with the situation. The concern with water is echoed in the Vedas: Indra, king of the gods, is said to have defeated Vritra, a dragon who had held back the river waters behind stone dams. Indra slays Vritra after a great battle, destroys the dams, and sets the rivers free. What’s more, the slaying of Vritra is specifically mentioned in a hymn praising Saraswati!

  LAND OF THE SEVEN RIVERS

  At the core of the Rig Vedic landscape was an area called Sapta-Sindhu (Land of the Seven Rivers). This was the heartland of the Rig Veda but the text does not clearly specify which seven rivers ran through it—as if it were too obvious and required no explanation. The hymns repeatedly describe the Saraswati as being ‘of seven-sisters’, so the sacred river must have been one of the seven but we’re not sure which the others were. The conventional view is that the seven rivers include the Saraswati, the five rivers of Punjab and the Indus. This will mean that the Sapta-Sindhu region included Haryana, all of Punjab (including Pakistani Punjab) and even parts of adjoining provinces. A very large area!

  But if we were to travel this terrain and read the Rig Veda several times, it’s possible to reach another conclusion. The Vedas clearly mention a wider landscape watered by ‘thrice-seven’ rivers. We don’t have to take it literally as referring to twenty-one rivers but it is obvious that the Sapta-Sindhu is only a part of the wider Vedic landscape. It’s not likely that the Indus and its tributaries would have been part of the seven sisters as the Indus has long been considered a ‘male’ river in Indian tradition, after all! Could the Sapta-Sindhu refer only to the Saraswati and its own tributaries? Look at the following stanza:

  Coming together, glorious, loudly roaring —

  Saraswati, Mother of Floods, the seventh —

  With copious milk, with fair streams strongly flowing,

  Fully swelled by the volume of their waters.

  It’s possible to interpret this stanza to mean that the six rivers emptied into Saraswati, the seventh. There are several old river channels in the region, some of which still flow into the Ghaggar during the monsoon season. These include the Chautang (often identified as the Vedic river Drishadvati) and the Sarsuti. The Sutlej and the Yamuna were probably also counted among the Saraswati’s sisters.

  If we’re right, it would mean that the Sapta-Sindhu was a much smaller area covering modern Haryana and a few of the adjoining districts of eastern Punjab and a bit of northern Rajasthan. This is the same area that ancient texts refer to as Brahmavarta—the Holy Land—where Manu is said to have re-established civilization after the flood. Is it a coincidence that the texts say that the Holy Land lay between the Saraswati and the Drishadvati, again roughly Haryana and a bit of north Rajasthan, but excluding most of Punjab?

  But why was this small area given so much importance? The people of the Sapta-Sindhu must have been part of a culture that covered a much larger area. So what was so special about these seven rivers? Could it be because this region was the home of the Bharatas, a tribe that would give Indians the name by which they call themselves?

  THE BATTLE OF THE TEN KINGS

  Although the Rig Veda is concerned mostly with religion, there is one historical event that it mentions. This is often called the ‘Battle of the Ten Kings’, which occurred on the banks of the Ravi river in Punjab. It appears that ten powerful tribes ganged up against the Bharata tribe and its chieftain, Su
dasa. This group appears to have mainly consisted of tribes from what is now western Punjab and the North West Frontier Province (both now in Pakistan). The Bharatas were an ‘eastern’ tribe, from what is now Haryana. Despite the combined strength of the ten powerful tribes, the Bharatas managed to crush them in battle. There are descriptions of how the defeated warriors fled the battlefield or were drowned in the Ravi.

  The Rig Veda tells us that the Bharata warriors would have been dressed in white robes, each with his long hair tied in a knot on his head. There would have been horses neighing, bronze weapons shining in the sun and perhaps the rhythmic sound of Sage Vashishtha’s disciples chanting hymns to the gods. The Saraswati would have been a mighty river then and it is likely that there would have been rafts ferrying men and supplies across the river. Just close your eyes and imagine the scene!

  How did the Bharatas single-handedly defeat these tribes? The intelligence and military tactics of Sudasa and his guru Vashishtha must have played a role but it’s also possible that it had something to do with access to superior weapons. The territory of the Bharatas included India’s best copper mines. Even today, the country’s largest copper mine is situated at Khetri along the Rajasthan-Haryana border. With the superior bronze and good leadership, the Bharatas were a formidable force. A number of ancient copper items from this period, including weapons, have been discovered in recent decades in southern Haryana, northern Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh.

  Soon after this great victory, the Bharatas defeated a chieftain called Bheda on the Yamuna. These victories made them the superpower in the subcontinent with an empire that stretched from Punjab, across to Haryana to the area around Delhi-Meerut. Because of their powerful position, their influence would have extended well outside the lands they directly controlled. They must have strengthened their position even further by initiating the compilation of the Vedas. The Rig Veda is full of praise for the Bharata-Trtsu tribe, its chief, Sudasa, and the sage Vashishtha, in a way suggesting that the book was put together under the encouragement of this tribe, probably over several generations following the great battle.

  However, the Vedas do not confine themselves to singing the praises of the victors alone; they deliberately include those of sages from other tribes, including some of the defeated ones! The hymns of Sage Vishwamitra, the arch-rival of Vashishtha, are given an important place in the compilation. What does this tell us about the Bharatas? We see a culture that accommodates and assimilates differences rather than impose its own on others. This is a powerful idea and in time, it allowed for people from faraway places like Bengal and Kerala to identify with this ancient Haryanvi tribe.

  This is why the Bharatas remain alive in the name by which Indians have called their country since ancient times—Bharat Varsha or the Land of the Bharatas. In time it would come to mean the whole subcontinent. Later texts such as the Puranas would define the land as: ‘The country that lies north of the seas and south of the snowy mountains is called Bharatam, there dwell the descendants of Bharata.’ It remains the official name of India even today.

  Did you know?

  In Malay, ‘Barat’ means west, which is the direction from which Indian merchants came to South East Asia!

  After his victories, Sudasa performed the Ashwamedha or horse sacrifice and was declared a Chakravartin or Universal Monarch. The word ‘chakravartin’ means ‘wheels that can go anywhere’—a monarch whose chariot can roll in any direction. The spokes of the wheel symbolize the various cardinal directions. Over the centuries, the symbolism of the wheel would be applied widely. We see it used in imperial Mauryan symbols, in Buddhist art, and even in the modern Indian nation’s flag.

  Meanwhile, what happened to the defeated tribes? Some of them remained in Punjab, although much weakened. The Druhya tribe was later chased away from Punjab to eastern Afghanistan. Their king Gandhara gave the region its ancient Indian name—still remembered today in the name of the Afghan city of Kandahar. The Puranas also tell us that the Druhyas would later migrate farther north to Central Asia and turn into Mlechhas or foreign barbarians. Nothing more is heard of them. Another tribe called the Purus survived into the Mahabharata epic and probably accounted for King Porus, who fought against Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE.

  Some of the tribes, however, appear to have fled even further after the great battle. Two of them have names that suggest interesting possibilities: the Pakhta and the Parsu. The former are also mentioned by later Greek sources as Pactyians—they could be the ancestors of Pakhtun (or Pashtun) tribes that still live in Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. Genetically, the Pashtuns are related to Indians and not to Central Asians or Arabs as was previously thought! Similarly, the Parsu are probably related to the Persians because this is the name by which the Assyrians refer to the Persians in their inscriptions.

  There is plenty of evidence that links the Rig Vedic Indians to the ancient Persians. The Avesta, the oldest and most sacred text of the Zoroastrians, is written in a language that is almost identical to that of the Rig Veda. The older sections of the Avesta—called the Gathas—are said to have been composed by the prophet Zarathustra himself. They can be read as Rig Vedic Sanskrit by making a minor phonetic change—the ‘h’ in Avestan is the ‘s’ in Sanskrit. A similar phonetic shift survives in the modern Indian language of Assamese!

  The texts are clear that the Avestan people came to Iran from outside. They called themselves the Aryan people. They were aware of the Sapta-Sindhu but not of western Iran, suggesting that they entered the country from outside. Unlike the Vedas, the ancient Persians also talk of an original ‘Aryan’ homeland and even name the river Helmand in Afghanistan after the Saraswati (i.e. Harahvaiti). Indeed, the Persian identity as ‘Aryans’ was so strong that their country would come to be known as Land of the Aryans or Iran. As recently as the late twentieth century, the Shah of Iran used the title ‘Arya-mehr’ or Jewel of the Aryans.

  In the Rig Veda, the terms ‘deva’ and ‘asura’ apply to different sets of deities and do not denote ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The god Varun, for example, is an asura. However, in later Hinduism, the asuras became demons and the devas became gods. But in the Zoroastrian tradition of Persia, devas refer to demons while the word ‘asura’ is transformed into Ahura Mazda—the Great Lord! It looks like the devas and the asuras came to be considered as opposites at a later date. What caused this? Did the Parsu have a religious dispute with the Bharatas? As they moved into the Middle East, were the Persians influenced by the Assyrian culture which called their god Assur? We may never know for sure but these are all interesting possibilities.

  There is lots of evidence of other Vedic-related tribes in the Middle East in the second millennium BCE. In 1380 BCE, the Hittites signed a treaty with a people called the Mittani. This treaty is solemnized in the name of Vedic gods Indra, Varuna, Mitra and Nasatya. The Mittani appear to have been a military elite who ruled over the Hurrian people living in northern Iraq and Syria. There are records of their dealings with Egyptians, Hittites and the Assyrians. From their names and gods, we can tell that the Mittani were outsiders who had entered the region from the east. Once again, we have evidence to show that the Vedic people moved westward rather than the traditional view that they moved south-eastward into India. The peacocks that recur in Mittani art could be telling us that these people remembered not just the gods but also the animals and birds of the Land they had left behind.

  The Yezidi people are a tiny religious group of about 1,50,000 people who live today among the Kurds of northern Iraq, Eastern Turkey and parts of Armenia. Their religion is an ancient one and they were persecuted for centuries for their faith. Like Hindus, the yezidis believe in reincarnation and avatars, they pray facing the sun at dawn and dusk, and have a system of endogamous castes. Their temples, which have conical spires, look a lot like Hindu temples and the peacock plays a central role in their religion. But the peacock is not to be found naturally in their lands! The Yezidi themselves belie
ve that they came to the Middle East from India about 4000 years ago, around the time the Harappan Civilization began to disintegrate or perhaps when the Battle of the Ten Kings took place. Does one of these events explain the spread of the R1a1 gene that we discussed in the previous chapter?

  The world of the Harappans and the Rig Veda dissolved as the Saraswati dried. No matter what one thinks of the Harappan-Vedic debate, two things are clear. First, geography and the forces of nature played an important role in the evolution of Indian history. Second, the subcontinent has seen a great deal of migration and churn. People, ideas and trade have moved in different directions at different points of time and for different reasons. It is very different from the old view that Indian history is only about one-way invasions from the north-west.

  3

  Not Just the King of the Jungle

  Your parents or grandparents may have told you stories from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata when you were growing up. Some believe that these stories are historical, that they are about real people who actually lived in our world. They claim that it’s quite possible that the stories may have been based loosely on real events. Others believe that these stories are fictional and that the characters were not real people but imaginary ones. Whatever the truth about the characters and their history, we can certainly say that the geography described in these epics was based on reality.

  From 1300 to 700 BCE, the period that these epics describe, India was going through the next cycle of urbanization. The epics have undergone many changes over the centuries before they reached their current form, so we cannot take all the information from them too literally. While the geography of the Ramayana is along a North-South axis, the Mahabharata is along an East-West axis. The Vedic people gave a lot of importance to the Sapta-Sindhu region but we see a shift in focus in this period.