Hymns of Harappa : A New Paradigm on Traditional Histories

by Sai Papineni

So the cultural and geographical backdrop as seen in the epic today belongs to the day when the epic was put to writing and not to the times when the events had actually taken place.

Traditionally, Pancavaṭi is identified with a place near Nasik at the source of the Godavari, and Kiṣkinda with Hampi in Karnataka on the banks of the Tungabhadra. The distance between these two is over 800 kilometers, at the standard 11 kilometers a day that would have taken more than two months on foot with no river to guide their path. If we consider Rama as a normal human being and the story a fact, it is hard to agree with these locations.

By 3000-2500 BCE, the migrations of the Bronze Age peoples became more widespread. The groups that moved west became the forerunners of the Germanic, Celtic and Gaelic peoples of Europe. In the east, the roots of the Indian and Iranian languages began to take shape, first in the Sintashta cultures in the Volga basin and later in the Andro-Novo cultures in the Aral Sea region.

The new findings in various fields were evaluated from this perspective and force-fitted to suit this framework, and those findings in opposition were rejected as unreliable. The theory had solidified as the only truth in the academia worldwide, passionately adhered to by some influential thinkers, making it unattractive for the scientists to propose independent and alternative theories, due to the fear of losing academic positions and patronage, even when they had sufficient grounds to do so.

In 2003 a group of linguists (Atkinson, Ryder et al.) have examined 2500 lexical items from 87 different languages and concluded that the main branches of the Indo-European stock had divided between 7800-5800 BCE. Other research conducted in 2011 on these separate branches independently have also arrived at the same conclusion with a suggestion that the Asian and European branches split around 6400 BCE.

The Indian tradition recorded by Megasthenes places the arrival in India of the ruddy agrarian god, Dionysus in 6363 BCE, and the date astoundingly matches with this conclusion.

Therefore, we must admit that the Indo-Aryan speakers who had entered the subcontinent were not the nomadic pastoralists as it is believed by many, but were the carriers of a superior agrarian culture. After studying the PIE lexicon, the mainstream linguists have arrived at the dates for the appearance of words related to the various professions and subsistence systems.Table

set of people or a population showing a unique mutation is called a haplogroup. Based on the order of these mutations, the haplogroups are named in a sequence of capital letters A to Z. The subgroups based on further mutations are designated with Arabic numerals 1-2-3, and again the groups within by the small alphabets a-b-c and thereon. For example, all haplogroups of ‘C’ like C1, C2 etc., will have a common mutation marker. The groups D E and F which come later may also have the same marker, whereas in C1 and C2 the first mutation is common and a second marker unique. With the discovery of each mutation, the number of haplogroups multiplies.

Coming to the problem at hand, a haplogroup R1a1 is recognized as the prominent marker in all Indo-European speaking populations before modern times. The marker of this haplogroup is a mutation XIII-C Origins of Technical Lexical Items in PIE called M-17, with high proportions in Eastern Europe, and in India in the Hindi speaking populations of North India and in the upper castes of the South.

Another paper published in the same journal in 2006 by Sengupta et.al. after examining the Y-DNA R1, R2 haplogroups of 36 castes and 17 tribal populations in India with 8 in Pakistan, 175 in East Asia, had concluded that the influence of Central Asia on the genetic pool of the Indian population is insignificant. They have even claimed that the genetic complexity of the Indian populations had already been stabilized between 13000-8000 BCE and therefore, they said that there is no evidence of Aryan Migrations to have happened in the 2nd Millennium BCE.

By 3100 BCE we can say that the Indo-Aryan speakers were an inseparable part of the native populace and had even established themselves among the political elite. More importantly, the Indian tradition is silent about their origins outside India. Therefore, it is logical to say that they were a significant part of the architects of the Harappan Civilization.

Since Veda Vyāsa is a participant in the original event, the Jaya of 8800 slokas is probably told by him. So the original history is limited to less than 9 percent of the epic as it is available to us.

The transformations in the civilization, in the social, political, spiritual and economic spheres, in a period spanning over three millennia have left a mark on the epic in the form of extrapolations, making it impossible to discern between the original and the adds-on.

While recounting the troops under Bhima’s command, Bhīṣma-Parva defines an akṣauhiṇi more realistically as around 25,000 men. The numbers of elephant and horse in the table appear a little out of place. In Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, the smallest unit of an ancient army is a company of ten fighting men, and it matches the unit, Patti in the epic. If we take only the numbers of men as a fact, the number of non-fighting men shrinks a little.

In any case, based on the images of Kauṭilya and the chroniclers of Alexander’s campaign, we can estimate the number of soldiers in the epic war at a maximum of around seven hundred thousand.

Setting aside the Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages spoken among the eastern hill tribes and in the Himalayan foothills which are a result of relatively recent migrations and contacts with East Asia, the predominant populations of the subcontinent had no evidence of a major event of genetic influx after the Mid-Holocene, that is 4500 BCE.

These Āśramas of different lineages of seers became the links between the bygone eras and the generations next. They appear to be the main agency in which the Indo-Aryan linguistic tradition was preserved and later transmitted to the civilized areas of the northern plains. The Painted Gray Ware (PGW) culture which appears in the region at the end of the Late-Harappan can be identified with these people.

It was supposed that the Pre-Harappan Hakra level (4500 BCE and earlier) consisted of the agrarian elite of the Proto Indo-Aryan speakers while the native rural and tribal folk, who came from the pre-historic linguistic strata, was steadily absorbed into its fold.

At the onset of the Early-Harappan civilization (circa 3100 BCE) an influx of Asuras, a mercantile elite from West Asia brought the seed of the Elamo-Dravidian languages to the coastal regions and the lower basin of the civilization.

Since both the Indo-Aryan and the Elamo-Dravidian languages belonged to the agrarian and the mercantile elite respectively with a higher cultural base and technological skills, they had steadily replaced the native tongues and absorbed them into their folds. Even today the mainstream languages spoken in the developed regions of the subcontinen...

David McAlpin had suggested the date of 3000 BCE and thereabouts for the roots of Dravidian to have arrived in Sind and Gujarat from the Elam-Mesopotamia region, and the same is supported by F C Southworth and others of the Pennsylvania University in their recent paper. The date tallies with our traditional date for the arrival of the Asuras into Divi, and the scaling up of cultural and trade links with West Asia in the Early-Harappan Amri culture.

Unfortunately, Caldwell had christened the South Indian language group as Dravidian. The word Dravida appears in Sanskrit-Prakrit literature only from the 7th century CE as an alternative for the speakers of Tamil. This has given rise to the conceptual overreach of linguistic chauvinists and a misconception in the common readers that Tamil is the root of all Dravidian tongues.