The first few lectures of Introduction to Asian Civilizations: History of India a course taught at UCLA and which has Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India love mandatory reading talks about the Harappan Civilization. 

In Lecture 2 the instructor mentions a list of animals that were domesticated in the Indus region and adds that the horse bones were never found before 2000 B.C.E; carbon dating found horses of much later date. This for him suggests that Aryans came with their horses from the steppes behind 2000 B.C.E and subdued the natives.

The story about horses is not that simple. As we have seen horse bones definitely were present in Harappa probably before 2000 B.C.E. What the instructor conveniently left out was the fact that there were not a entire lot of horse bones even after the alleged Aryan arrival. The symbolism of asva is left out as well as well as the fact that there was no massive migration from the steppes since 7000 years back.

The instructor then talks about Sarasvati in the context of Harappan culture and dismisses it as the job of Hindu nationalists. He  mentions that this theory is not believed by any serious scholar of Indian history and goes on to add that the irony for Hindu nationalists is that the beginnings of their civilization is outside India.

He is right about the fact the Hindu nationalists mostly trust that Ghaggar-Hakra is Sarasvati. The whole truth is that it is not just Hindu nationalists who believe that. The following text is from a response given in the Rajya Sabha just two weeks back by a minister belonging to the Congress Party.

ription and magnanimity of these channels also matches with the River Sarasvati described in the Vedic literature. From the prominence and width of the palaeo channels on the satellite data supported with data from archaeological finds age and quality of ground water sediment type etc. it is confirmed that river Sarasvati had its major course through present day river Ghaggar and further passing through parts of Jaisalmer and adjoining region in Pakistan and finally discharging into the Rann of Kachchh. A major palaeo channel of the river passes through Jaisalmer district while a considerable part of the river drained further inside Pakistan. [Detection of subway water]

Also early this year just few miles away from UCLA there was a conference titled International Conference on the Sindhu-Sarasvati Valley Civilization: A Reappraisal. Those who attended were Jonathan Mark Kenoyer (University of Wisconsin) Jim G. Shaffer (Case Western Reserve University) Carl C. Lamberg-Karlovsky (Harvard University) Edwin Bryant (Rutgers University) Maurizio Tosi (University of Bologna Italy) and Nicholas Kazanas (Omilos Meleton Cultural Institute Athens). Are they Hindu nationalists?

Also in attendance were professors of Indian origin like Subash Kak (Oklahoma State) Ashoka Aklujkar (University of British Columbia) who have been living abroad for decades. How do we understand these professors are serene guided by the politics of the homeland and not pure research.

In fact what is wrong in studying Sarasvati-Sindhu?

Scholars may disagree about the identity of Sarasvati with a specific modern river about the exact course the river followed about whether the name “Sarasvati” is borrowed from a region to the northwest of pre-partition India about the number of sites actually close to the accepted course about the number of sites in the north and the south of the course about whether the river had its origin in the Himalayas about whether the river was glacier-fed about how closely or exactly the newly discovered sites are related to the Indus-Harappa sites and so on. However no scholar worth the appellation has as far as I can determine taken the position that the new sites cannot at all be related to the Indus-Harappa sites or are beyond the area associable with Sarasvati. If in this state of research some scholars wish to study the Sindhu-Sarasvati area together what is so objectionable about it? Why should the inclusion of Sarasvati be an anathema?[Response to S. Farmer]

We have seen this pattern before: charge anyone who holds a different point of view of being a Hindu nationalist. Hopefully UCLA students of Indian History will go beyond Nehru and  Doniger and read more balanced books like Edwin Bryant’s The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press USA 2004) or Klaus K. Klostermaier’s A Survey of Hinduism 3rd ed. (State University of New York Press 2007) to understand India.

Related posts:

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