Aryans are Hindu

Pioneer: By Sandhya Jain

Even as political parties debate whether India is "shining," a momentous-though unreported- international academic consensus has established that there was no Aryan invasion of India. This intellectual breakthrough has staggering implications for us as a nation. Not only has a colonial falsehood been overturned, but the origins of a corrosive divide in our political, cultural and emotional life stand exposed.

Hopefully, our Leftist (read anti-Hindu) historians will accept the truth and help in re-writing true history for new generations, so they may enjoy legitimate pride in their heritage. The Aryan invasion theory (modified to Aryan migration theory) did grave damage to the Hindu psyche and to national unity.

As Hindus are both the native and the majority community of India, this colonial canard wrought terrible havoc upon the nation. Its foremost manifestation was the North-South divide, engineered by Sir William Jones when he invented the fair-skinned Aryan "race" that drove native dark-skinned Dravidians southwards after seizing their lands. The archaeological evidence for this claim was sketchy even at the time, and was challenged by qualified Indians, but colonial intellectual monopoly triumphed. This mischief, many will remember, triggered Tamil separatism, even though Tamil Nadu has long been an outstanding centre of classical Hindu erudition and cultural accomplishment.

Sadly, the post-Independence intellectual tradition fostered by Jawaharlal Nehru was obdurately anti-Hindu. The Aligarh School took advantage of this environment to forge an alliance with Leftist historians and promote a supercilious history wherein India was ever subjected to foreign rule and conquest; that this was its true historical tradition; that contemporary Indians (read Hindus) had no right to regard Arab-Turk-Afghan rule as foreign; or currently, to object to the possible reign of Ms Sonia Gandhi! The British were outsiders because they disrupted the glory of India's Islamic rulers.

Naturally, this school of history did not permit a true account of the horrors perpetrated by Muslim armies and rulers upon native Hindus to be disseminated in public. The meticulous recording of these atrocities by contemporary chroniclers was downplayed. A corollary of this whitewash job entailed distorting the glories of India's pre-Islamic past. The Aryan invasion theory helped "prove" that the Hindu people and the Vedic civilisational ethos were themselves alien grafts on the Indian landscape.

Five decades of academic absolutism by Left-Aligarh historians have bequeathed what Prof Shiva G.Bajpai, University of Wisconsin, USA, calls "the burden of bad ideas". Mercifully, these lies will now wither away. A little background to the rebuttal of the invented invasion may be in order. In October 2003, California State University, (CA), USA, held a conference on "The Rise of Civilisation in the Greater Indus Valley and Saraswati: Recent Interpretations."

The participants included Prof BB Lal, former Director-General, ASI; Mr Iravatham Mahad evan, expert on Harappan and Tamil Brahmi scripts; Left academic Dr Shireen Ratnakar; Dr Vasant Shinde and Dr Gregory Possehl who are excavating Gilund in Rajasthan; anthropologists Dr Steve Farmer and Dr Brian Hemphill who have worked on archaeological evidence through skeletal remains; Prof Jonathan Mark Kenoyer and Dr Richard Meadow who have worked extensively on Harappa sites; Prof DR Sar Desai, University of California, Los Angeles; Prof Ihsan Ali, University of Peshawar, Pakistan; and Prof Kaminsky.

The conference proved to be epochal as academics arrived at a consensus on the "End of the Aryan invasion theory". Its moderator, Dr Sar Desai, declared that future writings on Indian history would assert that there was no Aryan invasion of India. The organiser, Prof Kaminsky, was authorised to get in touch with authors of Indian history textbooks and introduce this consensus at the secondary and high school level, where falsehoods are still being perpetuated.

Prof Kenoyer contacted publishers of school textbooks in New York to revise the issue of the Aryans and Vedic-Harappan culture in American school textbooks. In fact, the conference organisers have written to school level educational institutions all over the world, including the NCERT in India.

The belated dismissal of the Aryan invasion theory is no small triumph of the Hindu civilisational memory of a continuous spiritual-cultural tradition beginning with the Vedas and centred round the region of the once mighty river, Saraswati. Hindus have no memory of a pre-Vedic past, and have always maintained that the term "Arya" simply meant "noble", and denoted adherence to an elevated culture with no ethnic connotations. It was Sir William Jones who misrepresented Vedic allegories and conjured up the Aryan race by Immaculate Conception-a seedless parenthood, that is to say, one without any foundation. Yet his colonial brethren embraced the spurious offspring with the fervour of new converts; the rest is history.

Personally, it gives me great pleasure to witness this international vindication of Prof BB Lal, who has been villified and hounded by the Leftist-Aligarh oligarchy and its media consorts for daring to establish our civilisational veracity through archaeology. Prof. Lal and scholars like Prof Bajpai have been asserting the unity of Harappan and Vedic cultures, as their geo-cultural areas are historically overlapping and identical.

Indeed, there is no credible evidence of a difference between the two, barring the highly suspect discipline of linguistics, upon which the likes of Prof Romila Thapar are now trying to make some dubious claims. What is of critical importance is the fact that the finding and mapping of the Saraswati riverbed archaeologically establishes the identity of Harappan and Vedic culture, and puts the lower chronology of the Rig Veda at about 2000 BCE. Professor Bajpai traces the Sapta-Saindhava and Saraswati country from Kubha (Kabul) river (Hindukush range) to the Ganga river (western Ganga plain), and claims this was the cultural and geopolitical realm of the Vedic Aryans.

He believes that the core area of the Rig Vedic culture, as noted in two different places in the Rig Veda itself, was the doab of the Saraswati and Drishadvati rivers. As for the antiquity of the Rig Veda, it must be dated before circa 2000 BCE when the Saraswati dried up, for it is the Saraswati, and not the Indus, that is the most celebrated river of the Rig Veda. Actually, the fallacies in the Aryan invasion theory had long been apparent, and scholars had diligently traced a plethora of inconsistencies between the empirical data and literary sources vis-`-vis the theories of committed historians.

For instance, there was simply no archaeological evidence to substantiate the hypothesis of an invasion or even a massive migration from Eurasia in the Vedic period. Then, the geographical descriptions in the Rig Veda match the topography of north India in the fourth millennium BC, as does the climate. The flora and fauna mentioned in Vedic literature, especially those found in sacred symbols, are tropical and sub-tropical varieties not found in temperate zones or in the steppes.

But the crux of the matter was chronology. Pro-invasion theorists claimed the Aryans entered after 2000 BC. In that case, they would hardly compose hymns praising the bountiful Saraswati flowing from mountain to sea.

Alternately, if the Vedas were composed by people living in the Saraswati basin when she was truly a mighty river, then those people were progenitors of a civilisation that has continued unbroken up to the present-despite some wrenching historical encounters. Arya is then original, authentic Hindu. It is now time to deconstruct that other great colonial artifice-caste.