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Ecology, rhetoric or dumbing down? — I
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As long as the scholarly world has not agreed on any of the many dozens of "decipherments" of the Indus seals, much of the prehistory of the subcontinent remains steeped in mystery, in spite of ever-expanding archaeological data.
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WE ALL are now well aware, in many parts of the world, of the ongoing cultural wars, the protracted fight for the "soul" of India. Much of this is concerned with the early history of the subcontinent, and the interpretation that is given to one and the same body of known facts. Analysis should proceed according to well-established internationally adhered norms, otherwise we get local mythology, perpetuated as "history" — just as the Bible, Homer and some Greek records served as early European "history" before we could read the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian inscriptions. Obviously, as long as the scholarly world has not agreed on any of the many dozens of "decipherments" of the Indus seals, much of the prehistory of the subcontinent remains steeped in mystery, in spite of ever-expanding archaeological data.
The recent article by Frawley (Open Page, January 21) had the stated aim of adding something new to this discussion, an ecological dimension. Frawley is, of course, neither a biologist nor a geographer nor a historian or textual scholar by training, but a spiritualist and "Vedic" astrologist. As we will soon find out, his article is but a new way to say the same old things, while using the currently fashionable term "ecology." As could be expected, after reading the series of articles in last year's Open Pages, all his hobby horses show up (more below).
New ecology?
To begin with, it is a platitude that "society arises out of an ecological basis" and that "most civilisations... reflect how people manage the ecosystems in which they live along with their natural resources." Frawley bitterly complains about the lack of such ecological discussion of India's (pre)history. This completely overlooks the attention paid to it in past works on Indian history.
One may open any recent books on Indian archaeology or history and one will find quite a lot of discussion of the ecological, geographical and climatic phenomena that have shaped the subcontinent. For example, Kulke & Rothermund (1986, new German ed. 1998, "ecology and history" p.10-24) extensively discuss and stress the various regional features of the subcontinent and the several nuclear centres depending on it. Allchin's et al. (1995) chapter 2 is called "The environmental context"; Kenoyer (1998: 27-30) has "The Environmental Setting" and "Climate," and B.B. Lal has a more vaguely termed section "The face of the land" (1997, 6-14); even the somewhat dated classic by A.L. Basham (The Wonder That Was India, 1954) starts with "The Land of India" (with p. 1-4).
Clearly, Frawley is pushing in open doors, while it is not clear whether he has read or just selectively forgotten such books. Ecology is but a pretext: he aims at something else, for example at the linguistic materials used, in part, to reconstruct Indian prehistory. These are complex, specialised topics that Frawley is clearly uncomfortable with as they impinge on his "spiritual" and "yogic" and "astronomical" understanding of the Veda and of early Indian culture. Frawley's real aim are some previous approaches to the Vedic and Harappan (Indus) period: "It is time to take a new ecological look at the Vedas, which so far have not been examined adequately ecologically but have been approached mainly according to linguistic, Marxist or Freudian concerns that easily miss the obvious geography or ecology of the text."
Again, we must disappoint him. Scholars have done so since the beginnings of modern Indology (C. Lassen 1847). Not quite unexpectedly, due to their materialistic theories, some Marxist Indologists have paid special attention to the economic basis and its factual, ecological underpinnings. For example, the East German K. Mylius — with two doctorates, in the sciences and in philosophy — has written on the homeland of the Shatapatha Brahmana and of Middle Vedic Literature according to text-internal observations of nature and geography. And the undersigned, now often mistaken as a Marxist, too, has stressed, from this thesis onwards, the geographical and related aspects of the Vedas. His small book on Old Indian history (March 2003) therefore has an introductory chapter called "Die Umwelt: Regionen, Klima und Wirtschaft" (ecology: regions, climate, economy).
But, as indicated, Frawley really is up to something else: "we will discover that even the oldest Vedic text, the Rigveda, clearly describes a region of many vast rivers flowing to the sea, the most important of which was the Sarasvati." Finally, we are back to last Summer's discussion... Frawley repeats the same hackneyed, but unproved theories.
I will use this occasion to pick up briefly the thread of August 20, when I was travelling to several conferences in Asia and Europe and could not answer his article. Frawley, clearly angered about my repeated debunking of his writings, has of late taken to selective quotation, out of context — the oldest trick in the book of any politician — or to simple falsification: I did not deny, as F. says, that samudra can (very) occasionally mean the Arabian Sea; I have not placed the "real Sarasvati as a "small [sic!] runoff stream in Afghanistan," rather said that the Haryana Sarasvati has an (older) sister there; I did not say that the RV does not know the monsoon, rather that most of the Rigvedic Gandhara-Panjab does not have it, just as today.
Frawley also tries to make fun of linguistic investigations which he cannot carry out himself: he does not know that parent languages have successfully been reconstructed — even 5000 years after the fact. And verified by inscriptions (Hittite, Mycenean) found much later. Much worse, he belittles the modern Munda/Santali populations of Jharkhand and surroundings as jungle tribes who could not have had a higher state of material civilisation than that found in recent, premodern times. Has he forgotten people like the Chiapas or Quiche Maya subsistence farmers who have little or no idea about the great civilisation their ancestors had just 500 years ago? According to Frawley, I maintain that "the aborigines that produced the great civilisation of ancient India and both the Aryans and Dravidians were later uncivilised immigrants from Central Asia who conquered them, stole their culture, replaced their languages and gave them no credit!" Can one be more polemical? Yes: he quotes, again out of context, my reference (EJVS 1999) to India as "the cultural diffusion cul-de-sac of Asia," an idea that has "kept me occupied on and off over the past few years." This quote, stemming from a colleague, referred not to the later great civilisations of India but to the early Stone Age settlement and to the remnant languages of the subcontinent. I had added: "we may have missed the lower strata of prehistory after all!" — a fact which is now, just four years later, indicated by one genetic discovery after another.
And, of course, I have never said nor will I say that "(India) is the cultural backwater and dead end of Asia, where wandering nomads can go no further, with no real civilisation of its own." That is Frawley's fantasising about me... How does he know that "You would never find Witzel chanting Om, practising Yoga or in any other way honouring the great traditions of the region?" One does not need to "chant Om" all the time to honour India's culture; there are many other ways to do so, including the setting right of fantasies of the many Frawleys that abound now. His parting shot: "Witzel is mainly honoured by Marxists in India." I suppose that was meant as the death knell (in America)? — Leaving aside this purely polemical, if not political, rubbish, I return to his account of "Indian ecology."
Frawley's "ecology"
Unfortunately, Frawley gets the facts about his new hobby horse wrong several times. Clearly, ecology or even basic geography is a recently acquired, non-spiritual taste with him. For example, he maintains that the "north Indian river plain is a specific geographical region and ecosystem," which overlooks the many distinguishing factors commonly stressed by geographers. Even though many plants and animals are found all over the vast area between Peshawar and Dacca, the rain-starved and winter-cold upper Indus area has quite another ecology than the wet and frequently flooded Bihar and Bengal; the areas close to the Himalayas have one different from those close to the Vindhyas; the upper Doab is different from the lower Gangetic plains, and so on. South Asia is quite diverse, just as any other subcontinent of Asia — such as the European or the S.E. Asian one.
Or, he repeats the certainly patriotic but thoroughly indigenist misconception that this area was an "ideal place to live," a sentiment certainly not shared by those who flee the Delhi sandstorms and summer heat to the Himalayas, as did some of the ancient Vedic Brahmins (Yaska Gairiksita), the Moghuls, or even the present Kashmir Government with its two capitals. As the East Iranians put it in their Videvdad (Avesta): "as the fifteenth (of 16 Aryan lands) Ahura Mazda created the Seven Rivers (Hapta Hendu)... (with) untimely illnesses and untimely heat." But, Frawley does not deal with geographical, ecological realities, rather with imagined and idealised conceits of a golden past.
He continues that the "largest and most ideal river region in the world for developing civilisation is India" and follows this up by vague, incorrect generalisations about ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, "(which was) was centred in a cold northern region, with a limited growing season." He overlooks that exactly the same has happened in South Asia: the rain-starved Indus area had wheat as its staple and double cropping arose only later, in the post-Harappan period, and towards the east of the Indus plain — just as in China rice was added to the fare in the more southern areas.
(To be concluded)
MICHAEL WITZEL
Harvard University
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/witzel/mwpage.htm
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