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Vedic-Indus debate: save Indian civilisation today
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If the BJP and the VHP want to ensure that modern Indian civilisation is creative and dynamic, it will not be through historical debate. They should call for an immediate halt to English-medium education at all levels and the insidious class division it creates, and promote dynamic modern civilisational creativity in the Indian people's languages.
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The Open Page discussion on Indus and Vedic society by N. S. Rajaram (January 22) and Michael Witzel (January 29) is not finished. Rajaram's main thesis seems to be that the Indus Civilisation was a direct linear antecedent to Vedic society and classical Indian civilisation. Witzel is correct that this is too facile and appears to be an argument driven by ideology.
But neither Rajaram nor Witzel discusses language much, except that Rajaram ridicules the claim that the Indus Civilisation had a Dravidian-type language saying that it is strange that the people would have lost their script. He suggests, without evidence, that it was Indo-Aryan speaking. Witzel is correct in saying that the population of the Indus Valley lost their language and script and took over an Indo-Aryan language which has now developed into Punjabi, Sindhi, etc.
Scholars who have devoted many years to the study of the Indus script mostly agree that all indications are that it was Dravidian-like. This is the conclusion of scholars in Finland, Russia, England, Czech Republic, the U.S., Pakistan and India. Some earlier ones, like Father Heras, and recently Finnish scholars, have spent decades studying the 600 script symbols, their possible grammatical positions, and the cultural associations. It is a minority of people who are themselves speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, who assert that the Indus people must have spoken a language like that of their own!
Linguistic evidence
The evidence that the Indus language was Dravidian-like is overwhelming, both circumstantial and linguistic. First, there are the Brahui people, over a million who live in east-central Baluchistan. This writer has looked into the matter himself while in Baluchistan; the language is certainly Dravidian at its core. How did it get there? Nobody has seriously suggested that the Brahuis moved there from peninsular India; rather Brahui language and culture got isolated in those hills while major changes took place in Sindh and Punjab plains.
And we should note the place names of Dravidian origin over Pakistan and western and central India. Many place names have the ending aar (river), or include the words mala (mountain), kandh (hill), kotta (wall or fort), besides of course uur, pura and others. Rajaram would do well to study the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary which compiles the vocabularies of some 20 Dravidian languages, and note the geographic implications.
The word uur (town) almost certainly goes back to the earliest civilisations in Mesopotamia — one of the numerous indications that the basic features of civilisation (i.e. urban life) in the Indus region diffused there from what are now Iraq and Iran. Probably Dravidian languages also had antecedents to some extent in those regions. This is the thesis of a book Dravidians and the West (Lahovery), and though it makes bolder assumptions than would be allowed by the strict procedures of many historical linguists, nevertheless it presents overwhelming suggestions. If it is accepted that the hundreds of native American languages branched off from three main stems (Greenberg), and if similar efforts showing that all the languages of North Asia and Europe could have branched off from a few prototype languages, then the above suggestions about the origin of Dravidian languages should also be accepted.
Rajaram thought it was strange that the Indus people lost their script. There is nothing historically strange in that — the script was already weakened as the Indus Civilisation people established their many settlements in Gujarat about 2000 BC. But several of the symbols, such as swastika, fish and trident, were retained in culture and scratched onto pottery. It is absolutely clear (F. Southworth) that Marathi, though classified now as an Indo-Aryan language, is built on a Dravidian-underlying stratum. This is true to some extent for Gujarati and Sindhi also, and for that matter Punjabi and all western Indo-Aryan languages, which are universally acknowledged by historical linguists to have considerable Dravidian influence in phonetics, vocabulary and syntax.
It is clear also that Dravidian languages diffused over much of Madhya Pradesh — there are the place names, besides many ("tribal") peoples who still speak Dravidian languages and whose historical traditions say they moved from western to central and east-central India. Dravidian languages diffused from Maharashtra through Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, while Telugu had branched off the language tree somewhat earlier.
Language displacement
It is nothing unusual in history that Indo-Aryan speech overwhelmed Dravidian in western South Asia. Such tendencies are everywhere. Semitic languages overwhelmed other language groups over much of the Near East about 2000 BC, but this doesn't mean that the pre-Semitic people were killed off; rather they were often absorbed into different political-economic systems. Semitic speech later overwhelmed Egypt, then most of North Africa, because it was thought to be the vehicle of advancement. This is the usual stuff of history.
In Pakistan, the Burushaski language is related to none other, isolated in the high Hunza valley. It might be a relic of both pre-Dravidian and pre-Indo-Aryan speech in Punjab. The Dardic languages, including Kashmiri, are apparently descended from the first wave of Indo-European speech to enter South Asia, but these then got isolated in the Himalayas during the diffusion of Indo-Aryan. Indo-Aryan itself got overwhelmed in western Pakistan by the later arriving Persian-related languages such as Pashto and Baluchi. These changes may happen by invasion, but also by dribbles of more mobile or more politically powerful people moving in or by their cultures being considered so modernising that the existing inhabitants lose their language.
A different language displacement was going on in eastern India. Underlying Bengali is a Munda-type language, of which Bengali today retains many linguistic and cultural evidences. There is absolutely no evidence that Dravidian speech underlies Bengali, Oriya, or Assamese (Grierson, writing on this a century ago, was wrong). The Munda languages (Mon-Khmer group) reflect diffusion of cultures from Southeast Asia thousands of years BC which had mastered horticulture (rice, bananas, turmeric, taro, etc.) and therefore enabled humans to proliferate and diffuse into eastern and central Ganga plains and east-central India — with all their cultigens — prior to the diffusion there of both Dravidian and Indo-Aryan.
And in Southeast Asia, it was only a thousand or so years ago that Burmese, Thai and Lao languages from South China overwhelmed the Mon-Khmer languages in most of Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, not to speak of Vietnam where it happened in the south only a couple centuries ago. And before diffusion of the Mon-Khmer, the Malay languages had been more widespread. Most Southeast Asian people today accept that various underlying streams have formed their cultures and languages.
So the people of India today should gladly acknowledge, as Witzel says, that Dravidian, Munda and Indo-Aryan are distinct underlying streams — and the 4th one is the Tibeto-Burmese stream in the north and east. Classical Indian Civilisation had creative achievements, which are remarkable enough, without a bogus claim that it is exclusively descended from the Indus Civilisation.
The real issue
The real issue now is not rewriting history, but how to reinvigorate Indian civilisational creativity in modern concepts. What is to be done about the fact that six Indian languages have more native speakers than French, but in these languages there is hardly anything produced that makes a worldwide mark in modern concepts and science.
I want to emphasise that practically no people in world history have made a lasting civilisational mark using the language of a minority elite; either the language of the people develops as the vehicle of modernisation (like all of the languages of Europe when they threw off Latin, and like Korean in recent decades) or that language fades as a minority elite and then the bulk of the people adopt an outside language for modernisation.
The people of India should have made the choice 50 years ago. A firm decision then should have been taken that the people's languages are the vehicles of modernisation, and to be used as the medium of modern education at all levels. Then all modern currents of thought, science, and creativity would flow through the whole population — as happens in all the European and East Asian languages today. The genius of civilisation would flow from the whole population, with far less class division.
If the BJP and the VHP want to ensure that modern Indian civilisation is creative and dynamic, it will not be through historical debate. They should call for an immediate halt to English-medium education at all levels and the insidious class division it creates, and promote dynamic modern civilisational creativity in the Indian people's languages.
CLARENCE MALONEY
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