The Sarasvati-Sindhu Civilisation – More Distortions, More Un-Truths

Excerpts from Saraswati flows on in ASI records by Rajesh Singh:

While it is only now that the Union Government has admitted to the existence of the Vedic river Saraswati after being in a denial mode for five years, the Archaeological Survey of India’s National Museum in New Delhi has all along displayed for visitors maps and written text highlighting not only the river’s existence but also its crucial role in sustaining what we know as the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Not only does the Museum endorse the river’s existence before it dried up, it also refers to the Indus Valley Civilisation as Indus-Saraswati Civilisation.

…This is what a text put up in the Harappan Gallery of the Museum says: “Slowly and gradually these people evolved a civilisation called variously as the ‘Harappan civilisation’, the ‘Indus civilisation’, the ‘Indus Valley civilisation’ and the ‘Indus-Saraswati civilisation.” After all, experts have pointed out that nearly 2,000 of the 3,000 excavated sites are located outside the Indus belt and along the Saraswati course.

The text further elaborates the important role of the river: “It is now clear that the Harappan civilisation was the gift of two rivers — the Indus and the Saraswati — and not the Indus alone.” It is clear, yes, but not to the Government that only now has rather reluctantly accepted the river’s existence.

…The Museum thus emphasises the following: One, there was a river Saraswati; two, it existed in the Vedic period; and three, since the Indus Valley civilisation was nurtured by the Saraswati as well, the civilisation must be referred to as Indus-Saraswati civilisation.

But even in the face of these assertions, backed by years of research and mounting new evidence, the official response has been status quoist, preferring not to tamper with old beliefs handed over to us by early Western academics and eagerly adopted by home-grown experts. ASI director BB Lal writes in the preface of his acclaimed book The Saraswati flows on, about the “persistent assertion by Western linguists and historians and their more vociferous, Indian counterparts that the Rig Vedic Saraswati was the Helmand of Afghanistan.”

Calling the assumption “completely baseless”, he pointed out that the Rig Veda (10.75.5) clearly stated the river Saraswati lay between the Yamuna and the Sutlej – none of which existed in Afghanistan! Since the Rig Veda incidentally mentions the Saraswati as many as sixty times, and on many occasions in detail, it should be clear to all but the supremely blinkered that the river did indeed exist in the Vedic period.

The establishment of this fact then leads us to a bone of contention: Did the civilisation end due to an Aryan invasion or the drying up of the river?

NS Rajaram in his excellent book Saraswati River and the Vedic Civilisation notes that the discovery of the river ‘dealt a severe blow” to the theory that Aryans invaded India which then had the Harappan Civilisation. The theory supposes that the Harappans were non-Vedic since the Vedic age began with the coming of Aryans.

…Rajaram says in his book that the Harappan civilisation “was none other than the great river (Saraswati) described in the Rig Veda. This means that the Harappans were Vedic.”

So, if the Harappans were Vedic and thus ‘Aryan’, who invaded the civilisation and caused its demise? Experts have pointed out that there is no evidence through the excavation in the Indus-Saraswati region that an invasion had ever happened, much less from Aryans who “came from outside”. Rajaram, like many others, believe that the Saraswati’s drying up was the principal cause for the civilisation’s decline. This fits in well with the National Museum’s contention that the Saraswati was a major lifeline of the Indus-Saraswati civilisation.

Rajaram adds his voice to the theory. He notes in the book, “It is beginning to be recognised that what ended the Vedic Age (the Harappan era) was not any invasion but the drying up of the Saraswati – an event that was first placed at 1900 BC but which may have been pushed back beyond 2000BC for the date of ‘complete’ drying up of the Saraswati river.”

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Also read: Government finally admits: Research says Saraswati river existed

Somewhat related, from Indus Valley 2,000 years older than thought:
The beginning of India’s history has been pushed back by more than 2,000 years, making it older than that of Egypt and Babylon.
Latest research has put the date of the origin of the Indus Valley Civilisation at 6,000 years before Christ, which contests the current theory that the settlements around the Indus began around 3750 BC.
…
The finding was announced at the “International Conference on Harappan Archaeology”, recently organised by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in Chandigarh.

Based on their research, BR Mani, ASI joint director general, and KN Dikshit, former ASI joint director general, said in a presentation: “The preliminary results of the data from early sites of the Indo-Pak subcontinent suggest that the Indian civilisation emerged in the 8th millennium BC in the Ghaggar-Hakra and Baluchistan area.”
“On the basis of radio-metric dates from Bhirrana (Haryana), the cultural remains of the pre-early Harappan horizon go back to 7380 BC to 6201 BC.”

From A Pakistani in search of a homeland by Koenraad Elst, some excerpts:

A Pakistani in search of a homeland
In Eurasia Review on 25 December 2012, Khan A. Sufyan published a paper titled: “Pakistan: The True Heir Of Indus Valley Civilization – Analysis”. (Appended). In it, he argues that Pakistan is not just the state for South-Asian Muslims created by Mohammed Ali Jinnah in 1947, but was in fact delineated already by the Harappan civilization. After all, its extent coincided roughly with that of modern Pakistan, and not for nothing it is called the “Indus civilization”, after Pakistan’s main river. He is the typical Pakistani Hindu-hater who pretends that Pakistan was necessary for fear of “Hindu domination”, as if Hindus were not extremely benevolent towards their minorities. His aim is to give body to the official Pakistani propaganda of “five thousand years of Pakistan”. Let us evaluate the case he makes.
First of all, the extent of the Harappan civilization. An important number of cities lie outside Pakistan, from the Afghan colony of Shortugai to a large number is Gujarat, including the port of Lothal, and another large number in India, including the metropolis of Rakhigarhi. Many of these cities are near the bed of the Saraswati in Haryana, which is why Indian archeologists are entitled to speak of “Sindhu-Saraswati civilization”. The emphasis on the Indus is the result of the first discoveries, viz. of Mohenjo Daro on and Harappa near the Indus, but is now dated. Note that this civilization was much larger than the contemporary Mesopotamian civilization. If we don’t look too closely on the map, with a Martian’s glance, we might say that its borders very roughly coincide with those of Pakistan.
Sufyan’s thesis is that Pakistan “was an outcome of thousands of years of historical, geographical and genetic distinction between the peoples of Indus Valley Civilization and those occupying the Gangetic plains”. Here we see a logical implication of the doctrine behind the Partition, stemming from the Indian Muslims’ immediate interests assuming a continuation of the Westminster democracy in which numbers are important: they could achieve safety and power only in a state where they would form the majority. That state would then, like other states, have to endow itself with a proper history, justifying the state’s continued existence.
This conflicts with the orthodox Islamic calculation, upheld at the time of Partition by Maulana Azad, that (1) democracy is un-Islamic so that, like for the medieval Muslim invaders, power can just as well be obtained by a strong-headed minority, and that (2) in the longer run, the Muslims would obtain the majority in united India anyway, by means of conversions and a higher demographic growth. From the Islamic viewpoint, the history of Pakistan is not important because Pakistan is not important: it can only be a temporary tactic (and not even the best) on the way to the ultimate goal, viz. the Islamization of India. But in a confrontation with the infidels, anything un-Islamic becomes Islamic by being useful in the confrontation. Thus, suicide is strictly un-Islamic, but before silly secularist or Western commentators say that therefore suicide-bombing must be un-Islamic, let us realize that before an Islamic court, any would-be (or failed) suicide-bomber can successfully plead that in this case, his suicide was the way to inflict terror on the infidels, hence Islamically correct. Pakistan, therefore, is the fruit of a hybrid ideology, mainly consisting of Islam but adding un-Islamic elements from modern majority rule and nationalism because these were deemed necessary for the Indian Muslims in the then-prevailing circumstances. In particular, the attempt to streamline a country’s history in the service of the present state’s continued existence is not Islamic but nationalist; however, it is Islamic in so far as the state of Pakistan is a useful instrument in the Islamization of the whole of South Asia.
As a real Pakistani patriot, Sufyan lists Harappan cities found in the four provinces of his country. Nothing against that, but we repeat that he could also have listed cities from Afghanistan, Gujarat, East Panjab and Haryana. Here is his main argument: “The South Asian subcontinent is principally divided into two major geographical regions; the Indus Valley and its westerly inclined tributaries, and the Ganges Valley with its easterly inclined tributaries. In his book, The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan, Aitzaz Ahsan identifies the geographical divide between these two regions as the Gurdaspur-Kathiawar salient, a watershed which is southwesterly inclined down to the Arabian Sea. This watershed also depicted the dividing line between the peoples of Indus Valley Civilization and those of Gangetic plains and also corresponds almost exactly with the current day Pakistan-India border. Historically, only the Mauryas, Muslims and the British amalgamated these two regions as a unified state. For most of the remaining history, when one empire did not rule both the regions as a unified state, the Indus Valley Civilizational domain was always governed as one separate political entity.”
As a historical claim, his thesis is largely untrue. For instance, the Gupta and Sikh empires clearly saddled this border, and one looks in vain for a historical kingdom coinciding with the Indus territory or with modern-day Pakistan. But the geological claim is of better quality. East Panjab and Kashmir constitute Indian parts of the Indus region (or is this a veiled Pakistani claim to these regions?), but further downstream, the border does roughly coincide with the watershed defining the Indus area. But is this watershed of political or civilizational relevance? The Aegean Sea separated Greece from Ionia, the Greek area of coastal Anatolia, yet the two areas were one in language and culture. Jinnah also didn’t base his Pakistan on this watershed: he would gladly have included the Nizam’s Hyderabad and did include East Bengal, part of the supposedly un-Pakistani Ganga plain.
Sufyan has the usual swearwords for the Indian archeologists, whom he accuses off-hand of “distorting” and “manipulating” their findings, and even of “forging” a straight line between Harappan and later Hindu civilization. He bases himself predictably on the Aryan invasion chronology, which puts the Vedic age after the Harappan age: “However, the later identification of emergence of Vedic Hindu cultural traditions between 1500 – 600 BC, discounted such linkages.” In reality, the low Western chronology of the Vedas is anything but proven.
He is, however, right to identify the southern Pakistani province of Sindh with the Sumerian-attested name Meluhha. That this name is the origin of the word Mleccha indicates that its people were not embraced or held in high esteem in Vedic circles. And here we run into a phenomenon that Sufyan doesn’t realize yet, but that would certainly serve him well: the areas now constituting Pakistan and Afghanistan were considered inauspicious by the Vedic people. In his book The Rigveda and the Avesta (Delhi 2009), Shrikant Talageri describes how the Northwest was held in suspicion and taken to be the home of people who brought misfortune. In the Ramayana, exile and misery are visited upon Rama and Sita by the hand of Rama’s father’s second wife Kaikeyi, who hailed from the Northwest. In the Mahabharata, the war between the Pandava and Kaurava branches of the Bharata lineage is triggered by Pandu’s death, caused by his being enamoured of Madri, again a wife of Northwestern provenance. Talageri testifies how his own Brahmin family fasted by refraining from consuming Gangetic rice, while Panjab-grown grain was not deemed real food and hence was permitted. This information would marvelously fit in with Sufyan’s project.
So, let us assume that the Vedic people did indeed frown upon the areas now constituting Pakistan. Unfortunately, the quarrel between the Vedic people and the Mlecchas or Dasas from the Northwest has nothing to do with the present state of Pakistan. Both parties were perhaps ethnically or culturally a bit different, but both were Pagans, unwelcome in today’s Pakistan. It is against the Pagans of Sindh (formerly Meluhha) that Mohammed bin Qasim, revered as the ultimate founder of Pakistan, waged the first successful Jihad on South-Asian soil. Come 1947, it was the West-Panjabi Hindus and Sikhs, straight descendants of the Harappans, who were driven out of West Panjab to make way for the new state of Pakistan. This Islamic state usurps the territory of the Harappans but otherwise wants to have nothing to do with them.
The contrast between Harappa and Pakistan, or the fundamental Hinduness of the Harappans, is perhaps best illustrated with the three most famous artifacts from the Harappan civilization. The “priest-king” was probably a practitioner of the stellar cult suggested on many Harappan seal. The Quran emphatically forbids the Pagan worship of sun, moon and stars. At any rate, he was not a Muslim but a propagator of Paganism, the same kind against whom Mohammed made war. So, according to Islam, the state religion of Pakistan, the priest-king has been burning in hell for four thousand years. As for the “dancing-girl”, she exudes self-confidence and is stark naked. In today’s Pakistan, there would be no room for her. In fact, she would be stoned to death. Finally, the “Pashupati seal” may or may not depict Shiva as Lord of the Animals, but the character depicted would certainly feel more at home in a Hindu temple than in a mosque. A figure in a yoga posture clearly belongs in India more than in Pakistan. There is nothing Islamic and therefore nothing Pakistani about these three faces of the Indus civilization.
Most Pakistanis are biological descendants of the Harappans, as are many Indians. So what? Is Khan Sufyan sneakingly revalorizing the un-Islamic notion of ancestry? The Pagan Arabs of Mohammed’s time were his own relatives, yet he chose to fight them. He located his own mother in hell because she was a Pagan. Similarly, the state religion of Pakistan situates the Harappans in hell, eventhough they are the ancestors of today’s Pakistanis. So, the state of Pakistan is estranged from its Harappan heritage, while the Hindus have a far more profound claim on the Sindhu-Saraswati civilization. However, every Pakistani can do something about this. Yes, he can turn Pakistan into the successor-state of Harappa. To do this, he must only do one thing: renounce Islam and reconvert to Harappan Paganism. Paki, come home!
Koenraad Elst July 2, 2013
(1) The Sanskrit term ‘jangala’ (cognate with modern English ‘jungle’) means a deserted or a long abandoned land. Jangala also designates arid lands, meaning the total opposite of what ‘jungle’ means in English today. Jangala is opposed to anupa or paludal lands, which represent the hydrophilic vegetation. This contrast between jangala and anupa draws a strong polarity in cosmology, which is used in that sense in ayurveda and in the Indic taxonomy of plants and animals (see Francis Zimmermann–The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats: An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).

Shrinivas Tilak July 2, 2013