From the introduction to Great Bharata: The Invasion Begins, Volume 1
The Indo-European problem
Before discussing what archeology, archeoastronomy, comparative linguistics, DNA analysis and other fields can, or cannot, tell us about the historicity, the historical accuracy, of the Mahā-bhārata, we must briefly consider the Indo-European problem.
This problem burst upon Western consciousness in 1788, when Sir William Jones drew widespread attention to Sanskrit’s deep relation to most European languages, including the prestigious languages of classical antiquity, Greek and Latin, along with ancient Persian etc.
As early as the 16th century, European visitors to India noticed this connection. But Jones’ 1786 speech (published in 1788) before the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, which he founded, is often credited with inspiring the creation of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies as academic fields.
Here are the most famous words of Sir William Jones:
“The Sanskrit language, whatever may 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 them a 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…”[1]
This linguistic connection between European and Indian languages was a serious problem for many Europeans for the following reasons:
1. Europeans asserted a divine right to colonize non-white people based on the divinely endowed cultural superiority of the white race.
2. Like other people, Europeans associated linguistic sophistication with high culture, as we see in Shaw’s Pygmalion (My Fair Lady).
3. Jones, however, revealed that the non-white Indians possessed a sacred language more sophisticated than all known white languages.
4. If this were not bad enough, Sanskrit was shown to be cognate with (in the same language family as) almost all European languages, including English, showing a family tie through language.
5. Further, Western scholars largely agreed that a family of cognate languages indicated an original proto-language spoken by members of an original proto-culture. This meant that the earliest speakers of an original, now extinct Indo-European language inhabited a roughly common geographic area.
6. Most Europeans accepted the Old Testament’s Book of Genesis as authoritative ancient history. Sanskrit literature gave a far more ancient timeline that contradicted the Old Testament.
Suddenly Europe’s history, indeed Biblical history, was intertwined with that of India. At this time, and even after, for most Europeans, the Book of Genesis of the Old Testament was the default history of planet Earth.
Europe attempted to mitigate this problem by asserting that the original Indo-European homeland was outside of India, and much closer to Europe, both geographically and racially. Thus it was the white ancestors of modern Europeans who brought the advanced Sanskrit language to North India. Thus, through nineteenth European colonization of India, white Europeans were coming to the aid of their ancient ancestors, restoring the natural order of white domination. But this time they would not interbreed and thus forfeit their natural right to rule.
Hitler exploited this idea, by adopting the Indian symbol of good fortune, the swastika, claiming that the Germanic people were the true, original Aryans. No one in Europe seemed terribly interested to know how native Indians felt about this sudden appropriation and reconfiguration of their sacred tradition.
But European reactions were not monolithic. As science and secularism advanced, progressive thinkers used the discovery of ancient Indian wisdom as a blunt instrument to break down the Christian grip on Europe. The rising class of educated secularists in Europe, eager to be free from the constraints of Christianity, celebrated the discovery of ancient Sanskrit literature, and saw India as a positive alternative.
However, once this was achieved, the hammer was turned on India itself, lest its Eastern religion become a new metaphysical cage to contain the burgeoning triumvirate of secularism, science, and, Western racial triumphalism. Despite, or in opposition to, the voices of occasional Western Indophiles, all competitors of the triumvirate had to be eliminated. Thus for quite some time, Western scholars, and others adhering to their view, have interpreted the Indo-European issue in a way that essentially demolishes the sacred world view of nearly all Hindus today. And they do so despite a striking lack of conclusive, definitive evidence. I have mentioned above but a tiny sample of such cases.
In any case, if the original Aryans did not come from India, as Indians had always believed, scholars must convincingly show from where they actually came.
In his seminal study of this Indo-European problem, Edwin Bryant states, “The solution to the Indo-European problem has been one of the most consuming intellectual projects of the last two centuries. It has captivated the imagination and dedication of generations of archaeologists, linguists, philologists, anthropologists, historians, and all manner of scholarly, and not so scholarly, dilettantes. Predicated on the deduction that cognate languages necessitate an original proto[language] spoken by a group of people inhabiting a reasonably delineated geographic area, the problem has resulted in a massive amount of scholarship attempting to reconstruct this protolanguage, locate the original homeland where it was spoken, and conjecture on the social and cultural life of the protospeakers. Although the endeavor has very much been a preoccupation of European scholars, the belief in and pursuit of the origins of European civilization have required scholars to attempt to reconstruct and reconfigure the prehistory and protohistories of other civilizations whose languages happen to belong to the Indo-European language family.”[2]
This secular scholarship provided highly learned theories, but no final evidence, regarding the original homeland of Sanskrit speakers, nor the historicity of events depicted in the Mahā-bhārata. But these Western attempts to dictate Aryan history have often deeply offended, for very understandable reasons, the sentiments of Hindus.
After all, most Western theoretical reconstructions of Sanskritic culture, including the Mahā-bhārata, pointedly refuse to seriously consider that India’s sacred culture comes from India. Thus, Western scholars have busily constructed and reconstructed the history of people who once suffered under Western colonial rule. And usually, these Western attempts effectively destroy the sacred history, as it is understood by its adherents.
One might argue that this is all most unfortunate, but that scholars must follow the trail of evidence, wherever it leads. The problem here is that the evidence does not clearly, much less inexorably, lead to the Western conclusions. Learned Indian scholars have interpreted the very same evidence in ways that favor their view — that the authors of ancient Sanskrit texts lived, and always lived, in India. And the events those texts described also took place in South Asia.
The evidence itself is insufficient to resolve the debate. As Bryant puts it, “That two such diametrically opposed viewpoints can both claim interpretative jurisdiction over the data demonstrates the extreme malleability of the ‘evidence’ involved.”[3] [my emphasis]
This paucity of hard evidence cuts across disciples. “Philology and linguistics can actually offer surprisingly little to compel…Indian scholars to modify their suspicions of the ability of these disciplines to make authoritative pronouncements on the origins of the Indo-Aryan-speaking peoples in prehistory.”[4]
Thus Bryant concludes, “I am one of a long list of people who do not believe that the available data are sufficient to establish anything very conclusive about an Indo-European homeland, culture, or people.”[5]
J.P. Mallory, a leading Indo-European scholar, eloquently confirms this. First, a word on Mallory’s qualifications. In a Times Literary Supplement review, John Greppin called Mallory’s In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth, “…one of the most reliable and well-balanced monographs on the Indo-Europeans to have appeared in many years…[Mallory] takes no odd stance, pleads no special cause, champions no unique view; instead, he lays out the evidence from linguistics, from comparative mythology, and most important, from archaeology…[Mallory’s] conclusion is startling…in view of the enormously contradictory evidence which we possess, it is impossible to assign a particular place or time of origin for the Proto-Indo-Europeans; if we should insist on a precise location, we would have to suppress incompatible evidence, of which, as Mallory shows, we have plenty.”
Mallory concluded that regarding the Indo-European question, “it is evident that we still have a very long way to go.”
The Mahā-bhārata describes a most ancient culture centered in South Asia. But the claim of an original Indo-European homeland outside of India would require that hundreds and thousands of Hindu holy places associated with the Mahā-bhārata and many other sacred texts, are not holy places at all. Thus, pilgrimages to these places, undertaken by countless of millions of Indians, are but delusional exercises in blind faith, since the sacred events never took place at all, and certainly not in India. Clearly many Indian scholars were not delighted with these speculative conclusions.
The Indus Valley Civilization [IVS]
Within the broad contours of the Indo-European problem, the extraordinary Indus Valley Civilization [IVS] figures prominently. Although the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt are well known, we know much less about the equally ancient, and far more widespread Indus Valley Civilization, which extended to much of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, along with Northwest and West India. Indeed it covered an area as large as western Europe and twice that of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia.
This Bronze Age culture flourished from roughly 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE. But some sites in this region, such as Mehrgarh, go back as far as 7000 BCE, thousands of years before the oldest dating of Mahā-bhārata events.
The IVS is celebrated for its urban planning, baked brick houses, ingenious drainage systems, and water supply systems, as well as its innovative handicraft and metallurgy. Indeed IVC cities like Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and Rakhigarhi provide the first evidence in world history of urban sanitation. More than 1,000 cities and villages have been found.
As far back as 4,600 years ago, we find evidence of large, well organized urban centers, and long-distance trade, hallmarks of what archeology recognizes as a developed civilization.
Naturally, both Western and Indian factions were eager to claim this prize of the IVS for their respective theories of Indo-European history. Indian scholars tend to declare that the IVS is indigenous and Vedic, indeed that it confirms the descriptions in ancient North Indian scriptures like the Mahā-bhārata of advanced civilization thousands of years ago.
Western scholars tend to claim the opposite, that the IVS came from anywhere but Northern India, which is curious since the IVS is situated in Northwest India. Thus a fierce academic battle has been waged for some time. The simple truth is that secular scholarship cannot definitely tell us who built and inhabited the Indus Valley world, for this impressive civilization left us no written texts that we can decipher and understand. We have no Rosetta Stone, no bilingual text.
We have only a trove of small, square, steatite seals, whose sides range from two to four centimeters. These seals depict varieties of humans and animals, and even hybrid images, along with a number of symbols referred to as the Indus script.
A Rosetta Stone, a bilingual text, is exactly what we do not have for the Indus script. Scholars cannot agree on whether the Indus language was written from right to left, or left to right; nor if it even is a language at all. Some prominent scholars, like Michael Witzel of Harvard, have argued that the Indus script is not a language at all, but rather a series of symbols similar to those elements of a coat of arms, or a totem pole.
According to Witzel, the renowned South Asian archeologist G. Possel collected and discussed “50-odd examples of failed attempts” to decipher the Indus seals. Conclusion: we don’t know the identity, nor the beliefs, of the Indus Valley people.
But, do we have final, scholarly proof that events described in the Mahā-bhārata and the Bhāgavatam did or did not take place in India roughly 5,000 years ago? We do not. As in the case of text critical studies, so in the field of Indo-European studies, secular scholarship cannot reveal the historical truth, and far less the metaphysical status, of the Mahā-bhārata.
I will repeat here the words of two prominent scholars who have minutely studied the Indo-European debate.
Bryant states, “I am one of a long list of people who do not believe that the available data are sufficient to establish anything very conclusive about an Indo-European homeland, culture, or people.”[6]
Mallory concluded that regarding the Indo-European question, “it is evident that we still have a very long way to go.” [my emphasis]
Endnotes
[1] Jones 1788, cited in Quest p15
[2] Quest p3
[3] Bryant 303
[4] Bryant 300
[5] Bryant 11
[6] Bryant 11