The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  CLUES FROM THE LOST RIVER

  Early British administrators were eye-witnesses to the last phase of these changes. The Thar district gazetteer of 1919 describes two absolutely distinct worlds: to the west were the rich alluvial plains of the Indus; to the east, sandy desert. Old gazetteers also give crucial information about the apparent lost river revealed on Sanjiv’s landsat images. The lower course is called the Nara, which empties into the Rann of Kutch and joins up with the line on the satellite images. But the gazetteers also prove that it is not exactly true to say that all the water dried up. The course of the Nara flooded annually, and a century ago a district officer reported ‘a carpet of evergreen grass with a dense tamarisk, kandi and babul jungle interspersed with large deep lakes running miles into sandhills, and having a perennial stream of water running through the valleys’. In the times of seasonal inundations this was almost all water. Of these lakes the greatest was the Maakhi Dhand, the haunt of outlaws and robbers who defied British forces in the 1890s. These lakes disappeared after the introduction of British irrigation works, but the description perhaps gives us an idea of what conditions might have been like here in the Bronze Age. Remarkably, this may find an echo in Indian myth. The earliest Sanskrit poetry, composed in the period after the Indus cities, mentions a big river that joined the sea east of the Indus; later legend says this river disappeared, but today it is still remembered as a goddess in the hierophany of Indian sacred rivers. Her name is Saraswati, ‘river of lakes’.

  So the lost river was real – an important centre of civilization during the Bronze Age. Perhaps it was never one great flowing stream like the rivers of the Punjab, but a series of lakes and channels subject to seasonal floods and periodic contractions throughout history. When sections dried up, or the flow diminished, large tracts of land dried up, and cities and settlements died. The mapping of literally thousands of sites of the Harappan civilization, and the population movement into the Ganges valley at the end of the Bronze Age, strongly suggest that the Indus civilization declined because of the abandonment of the cities, caused by environmental change that led to the shift of the lower courses of the Indus and the Punjab rivers, and the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra.

  Now let’s put the evidence together for the end of India’s first great civilization. There were many causes of its decline, but modern archaeology suggests big changes occurred after some 700 years of stability in the Indus world. Mohenjo-Daro was badly flooded several times between 1900 and 1700 BC; the grand buildings on the citadel were subdivided into small houses and workshops; the great bath was built over. At Dholavira ordinary people moved into the public buildings. At Harappa there was overcrowding on the high mound; the drains were no longer cleared; the streets became clogged with rubbish, including dead animals, and were abandoned. There is also evidence for violence. Skeletons at Mohenjo-Daro were left in the streets; at Harappa reburials of disarticulated skeletons killed by violence suggest that the city had entered a time of uncertainty, as do the hoards of ornaments and jewels buried by their owners who never returned. At Lothal the harbour installations were burnt down; trade fell apart and long-distance commerce vanished altogether: evidence from Mesopotamia too suggests that trade with the Indus region dried up. And, of course, the written script ceased to be used, suggesting that the elite’s structures of power had broken down. Although a population remained in the Indus valley, many were leaving the area and farming new lands on the Jumna and Ganges rivers. It was the end of a great era, but a long, slow decline rather than a cataclysm.

  So the world of the Indus cities collapsed, and a sub-Indus culture emerged, mixing with new elements. But was the fall of cities accompanied by the arrival of newcomers, migrants or invaders? The question of newcomers is one of the biggest issues in Indian history today, massively controversial in recent years, with heavily politicized debates about Indian identity. The next phase of the story centres on one plain and incontrovertible fact: the speakers of the languages spoken across northern India to Bengal, languages that are first traceable after the end of the cities, are closely related to the family of languages across Eurasia known as Indo-European. Everyone agrees on this, but its significance is now bitterly contested. Many aspects of the argument are still shrouded in mystery, and there are many places this tale could begin, but one is Calcutta in the days of the East India Company.

  THE COMING OF THE ARYANS

  In 1786 a British judge in Calcutta, Sir William Jones, made an extraordinary discovery. A Welshman and a brilliant linguist, who knew Greek, Latin and Persian (the last of these essential for a judge and administrator in Mughal India), Jones’s great desire had been to learn Sanskrit, the language of the ancient Hindu texts and laws. Eventually, a Brahmin offered to teach him, and as he worked through the Sanskrit texts, he was fascinated to see close linguistic resemblances with Latin, Greek and modern Western languages. Some were obvious: for example, ‘father’, pater in Greek and Latin, is pitar in Sanskrit; likewise ‘mother’, meter, is matar in Sanskrit. Some links are intriguingly precise: the crucial word for ‘horse’ (asva in Sanskrit) is the same in Lithuanian, far away on the shores of the Baltic Sea. How could this have come about?

  Jones announced his discovery in a lecture to the newly formed Asiatic Society of Bengal on 2 February 1786:

  The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of thema stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs, and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.

  Jones was not, in fact, the first to see the connection. From the sixteenth century earlier visitors, such as the English Jesuit Thomas Stevens, had seen the similarities of Sanskrit to Latin and Greek. What Jones did was to use this as evidence that the languages had a common root. He first speculated that India itself was the mother country, but he later came to believe that the language had come from outside – that Sanskrit was not indigenous to India, but had migrated into the subcontinent. Out of that idea in the nineteenth century came the theory of the coming of the Aryans. This word is used by the early Sanskrit speakers, the Rig-Vedic people, to describe themselves; it means ‘noble ones’, and comes from the same linguistic root as the names Eire and Iran – ‘the land of the Aryans’. But the whole question of the Aryans is now massively controversial in India, leading to the rewriting of school history books under a Hindu nationalist government after 1997.

  Many Indian scholars and polemicists have gone back to the earlier idea that the Aryans were indigenous to India, that the Indo-European languages spread from India westwards into Europe, and hence that the Indus civilization was Aryan and Sanskritic, and the earliest and most sacred texts of the Aryans, the hymns of the Rig-Veda, describe the world of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. It is now claimed by some that the Aryan hypothesis is nothing but a form of orientalism created by the British to justify their rule (even though the theory was actually created by Germans). The question is very complex, but there is one thing on which all competent linguists agree: Jones was right – the languages are connected; and the time depth of the ‘family tree’ of the Indo-European languages precludes the idea of India as the place of origin. The Sanskrit language must have originated outside India. But how far back? And from where? Was it brought by invaders or travellers, by elites or mass migration?

  This is now one of the hottest arguments in modern India, where the battle over history that began under the British in the nineteenth century is now at the heart of politics and education because it bears on central questions of identity. Even DNA evidence has been brought into play, though elites rarely leave much of a mark: it would be hard, for example, to find the British in the DNA of India, despite their tremendous influence on the language a
nd culture. Language, in short, does not necessarily bear on ethnicity. As so often happens, it is all a matter of how to interpret evidence. The answers are likely to involve a combination of textual history, archaeology and linguistics, maybe genetics too. But all the arguments go back to the oldest Indian sacred text – a text composed in the second millennium BC, and, incredibly, transmitted orally from then until the Middle Ages, passed from teacher to pupil, as it still is in the traditional Vedic schools.

  THE RIG-VEDA: THE FIRST TEXT OF INDIAN HISTORY

  ‘Here we are, bundle 14!’ says Professor Biswas, beaming as she unties the packet of manuscripts. Bespectacled, hair in a bun, wearing a light brown sari, she lightens her scholarly gravitas with a delightful smile.

  The library catalogue lists this as the oldest manuscript of the Rig-Veda; it’s written on paper, and the dating in the scribal colophon is the Samvat year 1418, which is 1362 in the Western calendar. ‘Appearance very old’ it says. So here’s a written text from what you would call the Middle Ages, coming at the end of a long period of oral transmission. The composition of the hymns in the Rig-Veda may be spread over several centuries, but the oldest may be from the middle of the second millennium BC, maybe even earlier. Quite an idea, isn’t it?

  We are in the reading room of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Tremendous claps of thunder cause the roof to shudder, and monsoon torrents falling out of an ink-black sky are pouring off the eaves. A plaque on the wall commemorates the founding of the society by Jones. Up the grand, neo-classical staircase are busts and paintings of the great British figures who opened up the study of India during the eighteenth century and who, in the age of independent India, are still admired for their role in reconstructing Indian history. The society is still a major research institute, with a great collection of manuscripts, and around us there are many scholars working away at tables under the gaze of worthies from an earlier age. The professor warms to her story:

  The Rig-Veda comprises about a thousand hymns. They were sung by families of bardic priests in praise of gods and kings. The kings ride chariots or wagons, fight battles, take forts, and drink the sacred soma, which is seen as a kind of elixir of the gods. The gods themselves are not in the main the deities you see today: they represent natural forces – rain, wind, fire and thunder – very like the Greek gods. In fact, William Jones wrote home asking his friends to imagine India as a Greece where Apollo and Zeus were still worshipped, and the sacred books were known only to the priestly class. The texts you see were secret: they were and are passed down only in Brahmin families. For more than 2000 years they were transmitted orally. It was maybe only in the Middle Ages that the first texts were written down on palm leaf, and later, like this one, on paper. Almost miraculous, isn’t it?

  Professor Biswas is right: it’s an extraordinary idea. You might expect textual corruption over such a vast time, but the Rig-Veda has been amazingly well preserved considering that the earliest manuscripts are medieval. All the manuscripts are faithful to one orally transmitted version, the master version of the priestly families who had conserved it orally: and that written version is extremely faithful to the original Bronze Age compositions. Over the generations the families took elaborate steps to make sure it was transmitted correctly, even when parts were no longer understood. Today it still has the same wording, whether in Kashmir, Orissa or Tamil Nadu; a more faithful transmission, then, than of some of the Greek and Roman classics. During the twentieth century the growing reliance on written texts at Vedic schools means that purely oral transmission has probably now died out, and the text taught today derives from written versions. Nonetheless, listening to a present-day recitation is rather like hearing a tape recording of what was first composed between 3000 and 4000 years ago.

  Understanding the Rig-Veda, though, is another matter. It is a collection of notoriously riddling and difficult texts, full of inscrutable allusions, in very archaic language. The majority are hymns of praise and supplication addressed to the gods; many sing the delights of soma, the sacred drink; there are also battle songs that celebrate the crushing of enemies, and verses giving thanks in response to the gifts of chieftains (a well-known genre in Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse poetry too). As for the date, it’s impossible to be exact, but one very important clue was unearthed in the 1920s. In the text of a treaty from the kingdom of Mitanni in northern Syria, datable to around 1380 BC, the names of the rulers, to scholars’ great surprise, could be read perfectly as Sanskrit. The treaty also lists the Vedic gods Indra, Mitra and Varuna, in the very order in which they appear in a formulaic phrase in the Rig-Veda. The text also invokes the Nasdatya or Asvins, the heavenly twins who are very important in Vedic poems. Another Mitanni text, on chariots and horse training, written in the Indo-European language used by the rulers of Mitanni, is so close to Sanskrit in its numerals and technical terms that it is hard to imagine the languages of the Mitanni and the Aryans had been separated for very long. The mysterious Mitanni rulers were probably a warrior elite who came into northern Syria around 1700 BC and ruled what is now the area of Kurdistan. Their texts strongly suggest the early Rig-Vedic hymns came from a similar time, that is, not long before c.1400 BC. Further clues back this up. The Rig-Veda hymns describe a bronze-using world (iron first appears in India around 1200 BC); their authors seem unaware of great cities, such as Mohenjo-Daro, and know only of ruins whose people have fled, ‘driven away by Agni, the god of fire’. All this combines to suggest that the bulk of hymns were composed after the Indus civilization. This gives us a triangulation: the composition of the hymns perhaps spreads over a few centuries, beginning around 1500 BC, though possibly a little earlier.

  THE HOME OF THE ARYANS

  The Khyber Pass, above Peshawar, in the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan. The road twists up into bare brown mountains, past rocky outcrops painted with the regimental honours of British army units who fought grim wars out here in Queen Victoria’s day. From the hilll overlooking the Afghan border at Torkham we can see queues of container lorries on the road between Pakistan and Kabul. Even up to the 1970s, these would still have been immense kafilas (camel caravans), 5 miles long, snaking down the pass twice a week – the drivers with their central Asian and Mongol faces, long plaited hair, gold teeth and brightly coloured clothes, and sporting old guns and daggers, children on their backs, their dogs as big as donkeys. The caravans brought kilims and bukhari rugs, jewels and precious stones from Badakshan, spices, medicines and herbs from the markets of Bukhara. It’s been a crossing-place, a migration route, for thousands of years.

  Looking from here across to the valley of the Kabul river, you can see the snow-capped ridges of the Hindu Kush, its ranges scored with the ancient passes that lead from central Asia down into India. It was from this region, the Rig-Veda says, that the Aryans spread eastwards into India from the fertile lands watered by the Kabul river, the Khurram, the Gomal and the Swat. From here, as it says in a later text, ‘some went east … but some stayed at home in the west’, among them the Gandhari tribe, who gave their name to the whole of what is now known as the Northwest Frontier. Archaeology, linguistics and genetics – plus common sense – are all consonant with the idea of a progressive migration of early Indo-European speakers taking place over several centuries. As we have seen, the world portrayed by the Rig-Vedic poets bears no recognizable relation to that of the Indus civilization; it has no memory of vast cities, except as ruins.

  While the early poems of the Rig-Veda are set in the Punjab and eastern Afghanistan, the valleys of the Kabul river, the Swat and the Upper Indus, there are strong indications in those verses that this was not the Aryans’ original homeland. They were aware that they had migrated from afar: that ‘Indra had carried Yadu and Turvasa across the waters, crossing many rivers’ going through ‘narrow passes’. Remnants of these waves of migration are still traceable by linguists: most famous are the so-called Kaffirs of the Hindu Kush, the pagans of Chitral, descendants of Indo-Aryan peoples who, until the nin
eteenth century, spread over a much wider area of Afghan Nuristan. Encountered by Alexander the Great in about the fourth century BC, they still speak an archaic Indo-European language, and still worship an ancient ‘Aryan’ sky god called Di-Zau, who is cognate with the Greek Zeus (Dia) and the Sanskrit Dyauspitar. Traces of the migration thus survive to this day. But if their folk memory was that they had come from further west, where had the Aryans originated?

  NEW DISCOVERIES IN CENTRAL ASIA

  Gonur Tepe, Turkmenistan. A howling gale has whipped up a sudden dust storm: grit swirls into our eyes and mouths as our jeep approaches an isolated archaeological site south of the Red Desert and the Aral Sea. We’re a few hours along the old road from Askabad in the last days of Turkmanbashi, the idiosyncratic leader who took over this desert state after the fall of the Russian Empire. We have followed the old Silk Route across the plain north of the Elburz mountains to Mary, the ancient city of Merv in the Murghab oasis. Now a vast ruin field destroyed by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, the oasis had been a centre of civilization since prehistory. Finally, with sunset coming on, a low mound rises to the north: near it we see a mud-brick dig hut and a cluster of tents, flaps snapping in the wind. Under an awning Russian and Turkmen archaeologists are examining dramatic finds from a horse sacrifice buried around 1900 BC.

  Victor Sarianidi is there to greet us. He can only be described as a living legend. Burly and charismatic, with a mane of white hair, his skin is burnt a deep brown by the desert sun, and his voice rumbles like a camel clearing its throat. Sarianidi already has many great discoveries to his credit: it was he who dug up the amazing hoard of Bactrian gold at Tilya Tepe in northern Afghanistan. Great archaeologists have that unquantifiable gift, that nose for the right place to dig, and here he has hit gold again: a hitherto unknown culture. Sarianidi had mapped more than 2000 Bronze Age sites in the area of the Murghab oasis, sites that seem to have suffered a dramatic collapse due to climate change in the same period as the decline of the Indus cities. Here, he thought, might be the biggest. Sure enough, out in the open desert, he found a huge defended area, plus a separate enclosed space that he interprets as a temenos (sacred enclosure).