New Delhi, 15
August 2003
On
the occasion of the 56th anniversary of India’s
Independence, Mohan Guruswamy has sent us this indepth analysis of
who we really are. A detailed study of migration into India and the
languages that we speak, has revealed that the only true natives of
this country are the Adivasis!
We
wish all our visitors a happy and prosperous Independence Day.
Who
Are We and Why?
By
Mohan Guryswamy
The
question “who are we?” has intrigued historians, linguists and
geneticists as much as it does the common Indian. In the recent
years it has become fashionable to debunk scientifically derived
theories about the origin of the Indian nation, because there is a
new ultra-nationalism about. History is mostly about the genealogy
of people and peoples, and genealogies we know can often be
manufactured to suit the ambitions of the powerful. In 1674 when the
great Shivaji decided to elevate himself to kingship, the Brahmin
priests in Pune refused to perform the patabhishekham, as he
was not a Kshatriya. But Shivaji solved this with
characteristic dexterity by employing a prominent Brahmin purohit
from Varanasi, Gagabhatt, who for the payment of one and half lakh
rupees fabricated a genealogy linking his Bhonsla forefathers with
the Sisodia kings of Mewar.
The
Sisodia’s were of Scythian origin and historians derive their name
from Sassanian, just as Jat derives from Gatae, Ahir from Avar,
Gujar from Khazar, Thakur from Tukharian. The Scythian or Saka
tribes were the last pre-Islamic migrants into India. Some entered
the plains through the Bolan Pass, and settled in Rajasthan which is
why some Rajput, Gujar and Jat clans such as Pawar, Chauhan, Rathi,
Sial etc. now claim descent from there, whereas others like Mann,
Gill, Bajwa, Bhullar, Sandhu etc. who came via the Khyber Pass claim
descent from Afghanistan. Some of the clans acquired kingships and
were readily granted genealogies by the Brahmin priesthood, who were
ever willing to be imaginative as long as their status was assured
and for suitable monetary rewards.
Some
of the genealogies given are quite extravagant. Thus the Suryavanshis
can claim to have descended from the Sun god, while the Chandravanshis
can claim descent from the lunar god, and some claim even more
specifically to be Raghuvanshis, the clan of Lord Rama. Not
that to be a Scythian is something to be ashamed of. Herodotus
reveals that even way back in the 5th century BC, the
Scythians had political control over much of Central Asia and even
as far as the Gangetic plain. Alexander the Great took a Bactran
princess, Roxanne (Rukhshana), as his bride as he had to buy peace
with and gain Scythian allies.
Political
maps of India of early periods clearly suggest an Indian polity
heavily weighted in the northwestern part of South Asia. Even
Emperor Ashoka’s kingdom while centered in Pataliputra (Patna)
extended mostly westward, as far as Bamian and Herat now in
Afghanistan. This seems to have been so even way back between
2800-2600 BC, when the Indus valley civilization existed. This
civilization is estimated to have included over 1500 settlements
over an area the size of Western Europe in present day Pakistan and
western India. Excavations, not just in Mohenjo Daro, Harappa, Kot
Dijian and Dholavira, very clearly suggest that these were Dravidian
settlements and were so till about 1600 BC. Archeologists have
concluded that during this period Harappa, despite the seeming lack
of an army, was one of the largest and most powerful economic and
political centers in the region (see Scientific American, July
2003). Archeologists also believe that the decline of this
civilization coincided with the shifting of the course of the
Ghaggar-Hakra River (Saraswathi), then a major river of the Indus
Valley. The collapse of the agricultural economy largely due to
this, led to the overcrowding of cities like Mohenjo Daro and
Harappa leading to civic disorder. Thus when the Aryans made their
appearance around 1300 BC these cities were ready to fall. By 1000
BC a new and distinctive ideology and language began to emerge in
this region. The Vedic period had arrived.
Quiet
clearly, both, the Aryans and Dravidians were migrant races that
traveled eastwards in search of pastures for their cattle and
fertile land for agriculture. This is where we run into ideological
problems with the ultra-nationalist and conservative Hindu
gerontocracy that, like Gagabhatt did for Shivaji, are foisting a
new genealogy upon our nation. The word out now is that we, Indians
of today, are an indigenous people. Nothing can be further from the
truth. The only indigenous people in India are the Adivasis,
who Nihar Ranjan Ray described as “the original autochthonous
people of India.” The rest, be they Dravidian or Aryan, Hindu or
Muslim, Rajput or Jat, are migrants with as much or as little claim
as the European settlers in the new world have to be known as
Americans. It is true that the colonizing people in the Americas
have managed to forge a distinct new identity, just as the European
Jew has managed to become the modern Israeli, and the world
acknowledges them as that, but to believe them to be an indigenous
people would be akin to the patently bogus Afrikaner claim to be an
indigenous African people.
There
are scientific ways to discover who we are? The recent advances in
genetics have made it possible to draw linkages between peoples of
different regions. Studies here in India have not only confirmed
that Nihar Ranjan Ray was right when he said that the Adivasi of
Central India was the only real native of this country. A recent
study conducted by Andhra University has found the southern Indian
to be quite distinct to the northern Indian, in terms of genetic
make up at least. The northern Indian is actually much closer to the
European, which makes the hankering for “fair” brides evidenced
in the matrimonial columns of New Delhi newspapers quite
understandable! And whenever I hear a Punjabi intellectual speak of
Indians and Pakistanis as being one people, I am tempted to
interject: “Speak for yourself.”
Despite
the divergent trails of genetic markers, Aryans and Dravidians may
not be that far removed from each other. Linguists have for long
been agreed that “English, Dutch, German, and Russian are each
branches of the vast Indo-European language family, which includes
Germanic, Slavic, Celtic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian and other languages,
-- all descendants of more ancient languages like Greek, Latin and
Sanskrit. Digging down another level, linguists have reconstructed
an earlier language from which the latter were derived. They call it
proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.” Dr. Alexis Manaster Ramer
of Wayne State University, USA digs even deeper and finds common
roots between PIE and two other language groups: Uralic, which
includes Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian; and Altaic that includes
Turkish and Mongolian. All these three groups, Dr. Ramer argues,
find their roots in an older language called Nostratic. If he is
right then all Indian languages, Sanskritic or Dravidian are
descended from Nostratic, spoken about 12000 years ago.
Dr.
Vitaly Shevoroshkin at the Institute of Linguistics at Moscow, and
another Russian scholar, Dr. Aaron Dogopolsky now at the University
of Haifa, did pioneering work in establishing the Nostratic language
in the 1960’s, and this today is the inspiration to younger
linguists like Ramer. Incidentally the word “Nostratic” means
“our language”. This study of language is really the study of
the evolution of the human race after the advent of the anatomically
modern human being, a relatively recent 120,000 years ago. Language,
as linguists see it, is more just the heard word and the spoken for
we can even communicate with gestures and signs. According to Dr.
Derek Bickerton of the University of Hawaii, “the essence of
language is words and syntax, each generated by a combinational
system in the brain.”
An
Indian scholar, Gopi Nathan (geenath@geocities.com), has recently
published a paper on the similarities of words and syntax between
the Dravidian languages, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu,
and the Finno-Ugrian languages such as Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian
and Lapp languages. Gopi Nathan concedes that while the modern
versions of these Dravidian languages are considerably influenced by
Sanskrit words, the old writings “do not contain a single Sanskrit
word.” On the other hand, he argues, a number of Dravidian
“loanwords” appear in the Rig Veda.
Not
only Sanskrit but languages like Latin and Greek too have a number
of loanwords from Dravidian. For instance, the proto-Dravidian word
for rice, arici is similar to oryza in Latin and
Greek, and ginger is inciver in Tamil while it is ingwer
in German, zinziberis in Greek. This lends much credence to
the theory that the original Dravidians were of Mediterranean and
Armenoid stock, who in 4th millennium BC and settled in
the Indus Valley to create one of the four early Old World
state-cultures along with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China’s Yellow
River civilization. The continued presence of a Dravidian language,
Brahui, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province still spoken by more
than half a million people, further suggests that the Dravidians
moved eastwards and southwards under Aryan pressure. The struggle
between these two ancient races is captured vividly in the mythology
of the ages which depicts a great struggle between the light skinned
devas and the dark skinned asuras.
Sanskrit
was the language of a light skinned elite and was replaced by
Persian, another Indo-European language of another light skinned
elite. In northern India, these languages of the elites combined
with regional dialects to produce a patois called Hindawi or Urdu.
Santosh Kumar Khare on the origin of Hindi in “Truth about
Language in India” (EPW, December 14, 2002) writes: “the notion
of Hindi and Urdu as two distinct languages crystallized at Fort
William College in the first half of the 19th century.”
He adds: “their linguistic and literary repertoires were built up
accordingly, Urdu borrowing from Persian/Arabic and Hindi from
Sanskrit.” They came to represent the narrow competing interests
of emergent middle class urban Hindu and Muslim/Kayastha groups.
But
the real sting is in the conclusion that “modern Hindi (or Khari
boli) was an artificial construct which, while preserving the
grammar and diction of Urdu, cleansed it of ‘foreign and rustic’
words and substituted them with Sanskrit synonyms.” So what’s
the word on who are we?
Disclaimer Copyright |