Hymns of Harappa : A New Paradigm on Traditional Histories

by Sai Papineni

A century has passed since Pargiter had analyzed the Puranic king-lists and tried to extract some historical truth from them. But the timelines he had arrived at did not match the prevailing Aryan Invasion Theory, leading probably to the rejection of their authenticity by the scholars then and later.

Understandably, due to the mythopoeic extrapolations and later inclusions, the available Puranic texts fail to provide any undisputable information on the historical events and persons. However, by rejecting the Indian traditional histories completely, we are ignoring one of the most important sources to understand the past.

Based on the chronology of the king-lists thus arrived at, I have compared the findings of archaeology, palæo-environmental studies, geography, archaeogenetics, historical linguistics and evidence from contemporary urban civilizations with the legends and stories of the persons and events. At every instance, I was surprised by the historicity in the traditional lore.

This book is an attempt to bring out a historically truthful narrative of the proto-historic civilization of the subcontinent by combining the traditional knowledge left to us by our forebears with the available knowledge from other fields including the insights from the recent developments in science and technology, and to an extent, I feel I have succeeded in my effort.

Majority of the historians agree that there was a gap in the memories of Indians that cannot be filled. But I believe differently, that the itihāsa-purāṇa tradition has some truth in it, some truth that pertains to those ancient cities, their names and the cultural contexts.

Kāncī It’s a city with many temples, a few miles west of Madras, in South India. From 300 CE it has been a major cultural center. Urbanization had not begun in South India before 300 BCE.

Kāśī On the banks of the Ganga, in eastern Uttar Pradesh is the most venerated city of the Hindus, considered by many as the oldest living city. However, there aren’t any signs of urbanization in this general region dated to before 800 BCE.

For over thirty years he worked, digging deep and comparing texts, diligently separating the grains of truth from the chaff. He began publishing his results about the historicity of the Indian tradition in the journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

Finally, the summary of his findings were brought out by the Oxford University Press as a book, ANCIENT INDIAN HISTORIC TRADITION in 1922.

It is believed that Veda Vyāsa had narrated the first Purana to a bardic seer called Lōmaharṣaṇa.

They said that the cycle of creation, destruction and recreation, the lineages of Manu and the relevant stories are the five essential characters of a Purana.

In the course of time, the Puranas became the encyclopedias of religion and the original purpose was lost in them.

Puranas state that Veda Vyāsa had collected the old histories from the sūtas and māgadhas, and compiled them into a text called the Ādipurāṇa or the original history.

All the various Puranic texts have detailed king-lists of several ancient lineages and dynasties. The names and sequence from these sources is largely the same. It may be reckoned that they were all acquired from an original Purana presumably the so-called Ādipurāṇa of Veda Vyāsa. But Ādipurāṇa is not available to us. However, reasonable reconstruction of the original lists is possible from the latter sources.

There are 90 kings of Ayōdhya in an uninterrupted line from Manu to the Mahabharata war.

Based on the Puranic king-lists, if we work backwards from Candragupta Maurya for 138 terms we have Manu, the founding father. If we give 18 years to each term, Manu will be 2484 years before Candragupta. We know from the Greek sources that Candragupta came to power around 320 BCE. Therefore, the first kings of the Puranic tradition belonged to 2800 BCE or earlier.

The Mahabharata war is the most important chronological marker in the Puranic tradition, a temporal milestone. It is at the end of the Puranic tradition and the beginning of the current traditional era.

But we have nothing in our hands that is intelligible and belonged to times earlier than the 3rd Century BCE. There wasn’t a single king or emperor before Asoka who had inscribed his grandiose deeds in stone. Therefore, it is not possible to validate the information of the ancestors preserved in the ancient tradition based on contemporary writings.

It was only later that a fourth Veda called Atharvaṇa was added to the original three books. In due course, Brāhmaṇās, Āraṇyakās, Upaniṣads and the various appendices were attached completing the Vedic literature as it exists today. This process went on for a few centuries at the least.

If you look closely, all the kingdoms of the protagonists and those who had primary matrimonial relationships with their families can be placed geographically within the Late-Harappan sphere.Map II-B Hence a strong reason to believe that Mahabharata took place towards the end of the Late-Harappan Age in the 15th century BCE or thereabouts.

This could have been the age of discontinuity as claimed by some historians but for the efforts of those seers and bards, who had taken custody of the memories and traditions of a glorious past and preserved them for the later generations. To those seers living in forests and subsisting on food foraged from nature and a few cattle, the stories of the ancients appeared like miracles and their achievements superhuman. In retrospect, their circumstance looked utterly grim and deteriorated. They christened it Kaliyuga. Even the progress that had arrived a few centuries later had not fared favorably against the memories of the previous ages preserved and glorified in their tradition.

Therefore, it is reasonable to hypothesize 1461 BCE, a date indicated in the Puranas, as it compares well with the archaeological data and their geographical and cultural milieu.

The dates from the Dwarka explorations and the huge proliferation of the Late-Harappan sites in the Sarasvati Yamuna basin and Gujarat strengthen our view. Most importantly, the historical linguists’ date of the Ṛgvēda matches perfectly with our proposed date of Veda Vyāsa and the codification of Vedas.

Similarly, the interlude between Rama and Hariścandra is 32 terms and places the beginning of Trētāyuga around 2600 BCE. The archaeological phase between 2600 and 2000 BCE is called the Mature-Harappan Age and it matches well with the Puranic Trētāyuga. The Trētāyuga remembered fondly as Rāmarājya echoes a highly prosperous period in tradition and it is an astounding coincidence that it corresponds with the most advanced archaeological layer in the proto-history of India, and this rather reinforces our view on the historicity of Itihāsapurāṇa tradition.

Jambul (Syzygium cumini) is a tall tree, known for its bluish black berries with a mildly acidic taste, native to the subcontinent. Jambu Dvīpa is translated as the Island of Jambul Trees.

Another geographical landmark to locate the seven Dvīpas of the Puranas is Kṣīrsāgar or the Sea of Milk. We may not confirm the historicity of the myth, ‘The Churning of the Ocean’. But its plot, imagery and the environmental conditions of the early Bronze Age suggest the Gulf of Kutch as the sea of milk. Certain archaeological finds also support this view.

Today we know that before 2000 BCE a large river flowed parallel to the Indus, carrying the headwaters of the Yamuna and the Sutlej into the Rann of Kutch. The Vedas hailed it as ‘Dēvitamā Nadītamā Sarasvati’ – The Greatest Goddess, The Greatest River, Sarasvati.

was suggested that the Churning Myth was a mythopoeic depiction of the struggle for control of ocean-trade between the Asuras and the Devas. With many ancient port cities, the region had been the source of a variety of luxury goods shown in the myth as rising from the sea.

We may reasonably conclude that Jambu Dvīpa was the homeland of the Harappans and the Puranic descriptions of Jambu Dvīpa could throw some light on the ecocultural backdrop of the civilization.

Therefore it is generally agreed today that the word ‘Aryan’ points to a cultural complex and not a race.

The ‘Vasu’ of Meru became the Vaiśya in this new rural structure around sedentary cultivation. The etymology of the words Vasu and Viś is the same and means ‘wealth’. The farmer became the lord of the surplus produce. ‘Ar’ means plough. Many words of agrarian origin like Area, Acre, Agrarian, Arable are derived from the root ‘Ar’. The ploughman who wielded ‘Ar’ was called the ‘Arya’. In due course, the word Arya became synonymous with ‘Lord’.

Vaiśya became Viśpati - the Landlord and Gṛihapati - the Lord of the Manor. To protect his wealth he had to depend on two other professions – the priest and warrior – Brahmin who guarded him against the wrath of nature and the unknown, and Rājanya who kept at bay the greed and envy of neighbors. Others who helped the landlord with skilled and unskilled services found themselves in a class called Śūdra. The seed of the caste hierarchy found in the Puruṣasūkta hymn of the Ṛgvēda became manifest.

More than a thousand ruined mounds of rural and urban settlements of the Harappan Era were unearthed by archaeologists on its course – a proof that the river was the Greatest Mother of that civilization, after all.

Based on our chronology, the Puranic Trētāyuga belongs to the Mature-Harappan Era (2600-2000 BCE). The kings of the Aikṣvāku line of Ayōdhya appear prominently in the Trētāyuga. To comprehend the origins of the Harappan Civilization, we need to have a clear identification of their capital. Identification of the Sarayu in the Indus system is critical to locate Ayōdhya in the Harappan milieu and let’s see if there is anything in tradition to tip us off.

On the other hand, we know that the region around the controversial site of Ayōdhya in Uttar Pradesh has no signs of civilization to show before 1000 BCE. And so the evidence is sufficient to say that the complex of the ruins of Harappa, on the old bank of the Ravi, in the Punjab province of Pakistan, is none other than the ancient city that was once called Ayōdhya.

The language of the Ṛgvēda called ‘Vāk’, an early form of Sanskrit, and Zend have a strong and fundamental likeness. The themes and the stories are common to both traditions, suggesting a shared historical background. However, there is an essential difference in the perspectives from which they viewed their common antecedents. Asuras in the Avesta are superior beings. Their supreme God Ahura Mazda is a form of Varuṇa, a prominent deity in the early chapters of the Ṛgvēda but loses his importance in the later tradition. And, the Daêvas in Avesta are portrayed as inferior and evil beings that are opposed to ‘Asha’ an equivalent of Ṛta or Dharma in the Indian religious traditions. Daêvas are called malevolent, deceitful and nonbelievers. The war between the followers of Ahura Mazda and the Daêvas is a prominent theme in the Avesta.

For instance, the early Asura kings like Vajrānga, Bali and Prahlāda were never depicted as malevolent or evil. Even today Bali is worshipped in South India. The names Vajrānga and Bali are still hidden in ‘Jai Bajrang Bali’ a salutation of the Hindu god Hanuman in popular folk culture.

In the Indian tradition, a detailed account of the Deluge appears first in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and is repeated later in the Matśyapurāṇa. Viṣṇu appears as a fish to Manu, son of Vivasvat (Sun) and warns him about the impending deluge. Manu builds a boat and boards it with the seven ancestral seers and the Vedas. Viṣṇu in the form of ‘Jhaṣa’, a cosmic fish, guides the boat through the infinite dark and swirling waters of destruction to land Manu safely on top of a mountain called Malaya. Manu’s children come to be known as ‘Men’ (Mānava) and the people the earth. Manu becomes the progenitor of both the Solar Aikṣvāku and the Lunar Aila lines of kings.

The descendants of the Ikṣvāku belong to the most prominent and unbroken lineage of the Puranas that had 95 generations of kings in a continuous sequence from the founder Manu to the Mahabharata war. The Buddhist text Mahāvaṁśa claims Ikṣvāku descent for the Śākya tribe and even calls Buddha by the name Okkāka (Prakrit for Ikṣvāku). Jaina literature claims association with them through Ṛṣaba the first tīrthaṁkara. Curiously though very few orthodox Kṣatriya lineages claimed direct descent from them despite their distinction in the traditional histories. The most prominent of those are the Ikṣvākus of Śri Parvata from the Krishna valley, known patrons of heterodox Buddhism

The priestly lines of Vaśiṣṭha, Agastya and Śukrācārya are collectively addressed as Bhārgavas in the Itihāsapurāṇa tradition. Bhārgavas are descendants of Bhṛgu.

Pṛthu is the first king to be ritually consecrated under Vedic tradition. A sūtra in the Ṛgvēda calls the river Paruṣṇi a cow, the descendants of Manu a calf and the earth a bowl of milk. It is Pṛthu who milks the cow and fills the bowl to feed the calf. And, it is said that he had conjured agriculture and different grains in that very bowl. The earth thus nurtured by Pṛthu becomes Pṛthvi and he in turn becomes the first emperor of all earth.

Under the auspices of Vaśiṣṭha, Pṛthu performs 99 horse-sacrifices to expand his empire. In this task, even the Āngiras priests lend their hand and stand on his side. At his hundredth sacrifice, Indra abducts the sacrificial horse to oppose him and in the subsequent battle, Pṛthu emerges victorious. The consequences of this incident are more apparent in the history of the Aila line of kings.

The histories of the early descendants of Manu portray the Harappan Civilization in its infancy. The changes in the archaeological strata of the Early-Harappan Civilization reflect such processes like Asura presence (Amri Culture), Aikṣvāku expansion (Rapid Spread of Kot-Diji Culture) and the decline of Aila power (Shrinking of Hakra Culture). The growth of the Aikṣvākus at the expense of the Ailas was aided by the local orthodoxy.

Even though the theory of Aryan Invasion is far from fact, there seems to be a certain amount of truth in their suggestion. There is no denying that literature is certain about the annihilation of Dāsas and Daśyus in the hands of Deva armies under the generalship of Indra.

The rise of the Aikṣvākus following the decimation of Haihēyas heralds the most prosperous phase in the civilization. Trētāyuga in tradition and the Mature-Harappan phase in archaeology (2600-2000 BCE) mirror the improved living standards of the common X-C Synchronisms in King-lists (Table-3) - c 2650-2550 BCE citizens, pointing to the end of the iniquitous Asura regime and the improved ratio of remuneration to produce under the native powers.

The Deva-Asura conflicts in the Itihāsapurāṇa tradition resemble the various native revolts against colonial powers in modern times.

Probably the headwaters of the Dṛṣadvati have changed course eastwards and joined the Yamuna. Viṣṇupurāṇa says that when the family of Viśvāmitra reached Ayōdhya, destitute and hungry, it was Triśanku and later his son Hariścandra who fed them and gave them shelter. The enmity between Viśvāmitra with their chief priest Vaśiṣṭha also belongs to the same period. Mārkanḍēya Purāṇa tells us about the battle that took place between them during Hariścandra’s reign.

The classical poem attributed to Vālmīki as available to us today, in terms of maturity of style, grammar and lexicon, belongs to the early Christian era. A plethora of myths, local legends and religious discourses entered the text in due course, with an aim to take advantage of its appeal to the common folk. Geographically speaking, the main story suggests the spread of Puranic ideology to peninsular India. The geographical information in the text corresponds to the early historical period and the knowledge of the world at the time of writing, and not to the times when the actual events took place. The narrative also portrays the cultural and social milieu of early historical India, but not the original civilizational backdrop of the events.

The name Rama appears for the first time in written form as a name phrase ‘Rāmadote’ in an inscription of the early Mauryan period in the Taxila region. The Ṛgvēda has no mention of Rama. Due to the lack of evidence, the historians have taken the view that the Story of Rama is a piece of fiction and even if it had some historical basis it must be an insignificant political event that could have occurred in the Gogra basin and later exaggerated by the poets.

Based on the king-lists, the event should have occurred around 2000 BCE towards the end of the Mature-Harappan Era, whereas it had taken the literary form in the early historical period. The original memories of the legend had lasted in an unwritten form for over two millennia. The man, the king and his kingdom remained in the minds of people as the ideals when one looked at the past.