How Old Is India?
When
archaeology, archaeogenetics, anthropology and palaeontology are introduced to
the discourse, we hardly find an era where there was no such thing as an Indian
society
The recent reports that say Varanasi in
particular and India as a
land in general are at least 8,000 years old have led to some consternation
in the community of historians. While the Marxists among them are deliberately
looking the other way, as though no such revelation has taken place, even those
who are anti-left find the Times of India stories “sensational” [details
in Swarajya’s July issue in print].
Historians, geologists, archaeologists, evolutionary
anthropologists and palaeontologists follow different paths to establish the
past of a place under study. Ideally, the historian must emerge at the end of
the process when the others have reached their respective conclusions. But most
in the profession narrate the past as told by their predecessors through
published books. For a scientist, on the contrary, a research project must be
approached with no pre-conceived notions; the past is at best an indicator, not
a binding rule. The reader may walk along with us in all these explorations to
draw his own inferences.
If Varanasi has been found to be as old as the Harappa
civilisation, can the oldest relics unearthed from the area by IIT-Kharagpur’s
scientists be dismissed as Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), Neolithic (New Stone
Age) or Chalcolithic (Copper or pre-Bronze Age)? Can we pooh-pooh the Times
of India reports as sensationalist, saying that it’s no big deal as fossils
of even hominids have been found in different parts of the country dating 2
million years ago? It is difficult to believe that the human-like creatures
that walked on the soil of Varanasi 8,000 years ago were hominids and not Homo
sapiens. If even Marxists agree that we were here 5,500 years ago, we could
not have evolved from hominids in a matter of just 2,500 years while, in the
same time span, we might have learnt how to make alloys. That is, Varanasi
8,000 years ago has got to be Bronze Age, not Stone Age.
We are certainly not considering the Hindu right wing that claims
India has existed since Satya Yuga, as human beings like us did not even
surface on the face of the earth so early. The Vishnu Puarana says
that the Satya Yuga lasted 17,28,000 years and that came
before 12,96,000 years of Treta Yuga, 8,64,000 years of Dwapara
Yuga, and 3,000 odd years of the 4,32,000 years of Kali Yuga that
we have already lived.
Other opponents of Marxists argue that this nation must be
older than Harappa and Mohenjodaro, if not as old as the Satya Yuga. It is this
group that will be excited by the finding that we are older than the Indus
Valley Civilisation by at least 2,500 odd years.
Archaeology
This is not the first time we are looking for further
antiquity of our land and its people. A group of marine scientists had, way back in
2002, told us that an archaeological site off the west coast of
India could be 9,000 years old. Pottery and wooden blocks from the Gulf of
Cambay were too advanced to be Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age). The 7,000 year
old Nandeeshwara Temple at Malleswaram in Karnataka and evidence
from genome sequencing that revealed that farmers from
India moved to Iran 7,000-8,000 years ago certainly point towards a
way of living—namely farming—far more advanced than the cave dwelling prevalent
in the Stone Ages. And that the stories dated 2016 cannot be sensationalist! Is
it anybody’s case that the BBC, as much as the ToI, is
sensationalist?
Then, an ancient urban settlement of about 25,000 people was
discovered in the same year of UPA rule in Sisupalgarh
near Bhubaneswar, which dated back 2,500 years. Beyond the
present Indian territory, Afghanistan
yielded square coins with icons of Vasudeva Krishna and Balarama Samkarshana engraved in
them—believed to belong to a civilisation dated 180 BC when found in 2008. That
very year, the Wadagokgre
site near Guwahati came up with findings of remains of an octagonal temple of
the 4th century. Once again in 2008, they found a 30-ft high mound in
Moghalmari, a village 5 km away from Dantan in West Midnapore of West Bengal. The
Times of India reported, “Archaeologists believe it is one of the missing
monasteries mentioned in Hiuen Tsang’s memoirs that was yet to be found.”
The list above is not exhaustive; we have left out more
instances of archaeological findings of the UPA period than we could enlist
here. But the drift is clear. Whether a relic was of Stone Age, Bronze Age or
Iron Age is only of academic import to the lay. Putting all these findings of
artefacts belonging to different centuries and millennia together, we are led
to an irrefutable conclusion that social life never ceased to exist in the
region that is now divided between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Anthropology
Let’s begin with prehistory. The claim that south Indians
migrated from Africa is disputed. Even if the Marxist theory of Aryan-Dravidian
divide is accepted, Homo dravida as
identified by Edgar Thurston were not Africans; they resembled
Australian aboriginals to a greater degree. But this too was at best a
hypothesis—derived from the warring traditions of Kallar and Maravar regions
and tree climbers of the Anamalai hills. No DNA profiling of this group was
done and matched with Australian natives to establish this story. There was
another hypothesis by ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel that said Dravidians had a
genetic affinity with Tibetan Mongoloids [The History of Mankind by Ratzel,
1898].
The story that was certainly politically motivated was the
British Martial Races Theory. As some Indian communities sided with the East
India Company or were conspicuous by their absence among the Indian armies that
rebelled during the Mutiny of 1857, a Briton called Heather
Streets, in his Martial Races: The military, race and masculinity in
British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914, hypothesised that Dogras, Gurkhas,
Garhwalis, Sikhs, Jats and Pakhtuns or Pathans were “martial races” while other
Indians were not quite valorous. Bogus! That followed equally phony theories by
some officers of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) like Herbert Hope Risley (1908)
and William Crooke (1915) in the form of a repeatedly revised book titled The
People of India.
Subsequently, another Briton, Susan Bayly, Professor
of Historical Anthropology in the Cambridge University Division of Social
Anthropology and a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, dismissed Thurston
and Risley as “disciples of the French race theorist Topinard and his European
followers” who, she said, had “subsumed discussions of caste into theories of
biologically determined race essences”. She dismissed Crooke not only as a “material
or occupational theorist” but also as a “folklorist”.
When real science was introduced to the history of human
beings in the subcontinent, the historian’s narrative stood discredited.
Anthropologist Joseph
Deniker found that while some Indians living to the south of the
Vindhyas resembled both Indonesian and Australian natives, these people
inhabited a big area leading up to the Ganga basin in the north—“into the
middle valley of the Ganges,” he wrote. Physical anthropologist Carleton Stevens
Coon then further decimated the theory of Aryan-Dravidian divide when he found
that the so-called Dravidians resembled the Caucasoids of Europe too—going by
the structure of their skulls! [Source: The Living Races of Man, On Greater
India] It is to be noted that this Harvard scholar did not study India
specifically; instead, while studying Caucasoids of Europe, he found that some
of them lived in the region that is now called India. Therefore, the question
of a political motivation—to disprove Marxist historians—behind his theory does
not arise.
But when Marxist historians had to cling to a semblance of
science, they latched on to the basis of languages that somewhat endorsed the “Caucasoid”
view. Some present Indian languages were found to have descended from the lingo
of the Sintashta culture of the European steppes that travelled to India via
the Bactria-Margiana culture of Central Asia. [Source: DW Anthony’s The
Horse, the Wheel, and Language] One can see why Marxists love this story.
It supports their pet Aryan migration theory!
However, language cannot be a stronger scientific base than
skull shapes and other biological traits to establish the roots of a people of
a land.
Digging deeper into the basis of languages, the
Indians-came-from-Central-Asia theory stands exposed, too. The Ancestral North
Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) began mixing genetically in
2,200 BC. [Source: “Genetic evidence for recent population mixture in India” by
P Moorjani, K Thangaraj, N Patterson, M Lipson, PR Loh, P Govindaraj, and L Singh
in The American Journal of Human Genetics] And they were not all Central
Asians; there were also
Ancestral Tibeto-Burmese and Ancestral Austro-Asiatic peoples in the mix.
Since this theory says they all became endogamous—marrying within an ethnicity
or clan—at a later stage, how did the biological differences between them blur?
It is an undeniable fact today that the people of India, except a few tribes in
the Northeast, show no remarkable genetic differences among them.
This wing of anthropology makes another Marxist theory
doubtful—that the immigrants from Central Asia pushed the natives down south.
For, proto-Dravidians themselves are supposed to have been brought in by
farmers of Iran. If high-resolution
analysis of Y-chromosomal polymorphisms reveals signatures of population
movements from Central Asia to south India—rather than from Central
Asia to present-day Pakistan that housed the Indus Valley Civilisation—do
Marxists mean that one group of Central Asians pushed another group of Central
Asians down south?
This, and the theory mentioned earlier that Dravidians might
have Tibetan genes, too, together implies that the Aryan migration theory is
not adding up.
Finally, since anthropology in India is not a matured or
advanced science, we move on to the next parameter to know how old and how
continuously we have been living here.
Animal husbandry and palaeontology
The Geological Survey of India officiates over this field of
studies involving exploration of extinct (and some living) animals and plants of
the land. The fossil parks that the GSI maintains should tell us what living
things accompanied human beings through the millennia, but they don’t. So, we
study such an animal that still lives. The originally
Indian cow Zebu or Bos indicus, inseparable from the Hindu
faith, has several breeds.
The Gir (referred to as Gyr by some Americans) cattle, which
produces the largest volume of milk among all breeds, originated in Gujarat.
The Sahiwal originated in Punjab on the present India-Pakistan border. The Red
Sindhi originated in Sindh, the Rathi in Rajasthan, the Deoni and the Khillari
in Maharashtra, the Kankrej in Bhuj of Gujarat, the Ongole in Guntur of Andhra
Pradesh, the Amritmahal and the Hallikar in Karnataka, the Kangayam in
Coimbatore of Tamil Nadu, the Vechur in Kerala, among 17 other native breeds,
are some of the other varieties. The Gir has also been taken from India and
bred in Brazil and the United States.
According to the Marxist migration theory, the “Aryans” came
into India, herding their cattle. If so, how come the European breed reared in
Central and West Asia, which is Bos taurus, so few and far between
in India? If the so-called immigrants dominated and occupied the whole of north
India and settled here with their livestock, as Marxists claim, most of our
cows should be of the Bos taurus breed. They aren’t. Most of
them are indigenous species mentioned in the previous paragraph.
 |
| Hariana breed of Zebu cattle in north India; they are indigenous; they did not come from Central Asia |
These were domesticated, not wild, horses—meaning that they
were part of a human civilisation. Edwin Bryant and Edwin Francis Bryant write
in their book, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan
Migration Debate, “… the supply of horses… has been a preoccupation of the
rulers of India from nearly one end of its recorded history to the other…” quoting
Thomas R Trautmann [page 119]. And the Bryants are talking about Equus ferus
caballus Linn.
Man had, of course, learnt to tame horses as early as in
3,500 BC as evidenced from fossils in Kazakhstan. [Source: The Horse, the
Wheel, and Language: How Bronze Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the
Modern World by David W Anthony] Thereafter, wherever they have been
located as born and bred in captivity—marked by reduction in average size due
to limited diet and restricted space in stables—it can be undeniably deduced
that these were domesticated horses, thus proving the existence of civilisation
in that epoch [ibidem].
Another piece of evidence of domestication lies in the fact
that the breeds that were not domesticated turned extinct. The Equidae,
for example, were all dead in the western hemisphere towards the end of the Ice
Age [Stephen Budiansky’s The Nature of Horses]. Even in the wild, horses
used to live in groups. Therefore, they naturally took to herding, making them
more comfortable in human company, which extended their life expectancy.
Importantly, the horses written about in this article are not
those that were propagated by some Hindutva websites and debunked by a Harvard
University Indologist and a comparative historian commissioned by Frontline
for its 13 October 2000 issue. The horses this article speaks about were
discovered as fossils and not imagined or theorised out of Indus Valley seals.
Archaeogenetics
Going by the nature of this discipline, one could have
included this in the section on anthropology (evolutionary, not sociological).
However, we are going by the category that the scientific community has decided
for it. Arguably the real “breaking news” that we received under this classification
was a Nature story dated
23 September 2009. It said conclusively that most present-day
Indians shared a DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) pattern, which also happens to be
indigenous. Bringing together the studies of the Broad Institute in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India,
the International HapMap Project and the Human Genome Diversity Cell Line Panel
of 51 global populations, the magazine said that, while there were two genetic
streams that made Indians historically, there has been too much of a
cross-breeding between the two and, therefore, now the gene pool is wholly
Indian. That is because, about 50,000
years ago, the ancestral node of the phylogenetic tree of all
the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) types—among the South Asian strain and
a mix of Central, West Asian and European strains—not only converged but many
of the strains from Central Asia, West Asia and Europe were also
found in the South Asian variety, thus proving that even the “foreign”
component was not, or might not have been, entirely foreign [“Archaeogenetics: DNA
and the Population Prehistory of Europe” edited by Colin Renfrew and Katie
Boyle].
As the report in Nature says, if the DNA strains of
South Asian and Central/West Asian and European Caucasoid groups are similar,
we cannot say for sure that the component that was European was actually, wholly
and originally European. Maybe it was South Asian, too! In all likelihood,
thus, people were moving in and out of India and the theory that Indians—or at
least the ANI—came in wholly as a group from some other place is at best
facile.
Mitochondrial DNA, being inherited by a human individual
solely from the mother, is a good indicator of ancestry although 16,569 base
pairs of it constitute merely 37 human genes. There is genetic unity in Indian
sub-populations’ mtDNA. This was reported by the study, “The Place of the
Indian Mitochondrial DNA Variants in the Global Network of Maternal Lineages
and the Peopling of the Old World” in Genomic Diversity, “Mitochondrial
DNA Diversity in Tribal and Caste Groups of Maharashtra (India) and its Implication
on Their Genetic Origins” in the Annals of Human Genetics, and “Trends
in Molecular Anthropological Studies in India” in the International
Journal of Human Genetics.
Conclusion
The timeline of Indian history, beginning with the
prehistoric period of 2000000 BC – 100000 BC, Early Neolithic Age of 9000 BC,
beginning and end of the Indus Valley Civilisation in the period 3300-2600 BC,
cultures of less duration in between, Mauryan Empire (321-232 BC), Gupta Empire
(320-554 AD), etc, has several gaps. But when archaeology, anthropology and
palaeontology are introduced to the discourse, we hardly find an era pertaining
to which fossils indicating social living, including human-animal cohabitation,
have not been discovered. Finally, when archaeogenetic findings are included in
the study, we find the Indian population to have biologically (or genetically)
united about 50,000 ago.
Comments