Our obsession with roots

M Rajivlochan

The idea of swayambhu Indians, self-born, in this land is the sort of straw in the wind that is the basis of this book. Were Indians people who came in from across the Himalayas? Did Indians come from the steppes of Central Asia? Or are they of Persian origins? Or could they be Iraqis? It is one of those questions whose answer, one way or the other, is not going to make any difference to the history of India. It did not bother Indians of pre-British times either. Yet this question became of obsessive importance once the Indian mind became enslaved to British racist thought in the 19th century and tried to assert itself to be as good if not better than the British. 

‘Which of us are Aryans?’ the book asks and then refuses to answer the question except in one flip essay by a journalist who reports on the researches of Vasant Shinde and confidently makes some broad assertions about population migration patterns into India, from across the mountains. Had Vasant Shinde, the Pune scholar who is leading an investigation into the Rakhigarhi site in Haryana, said this himself, the assertions would have carried greater conviction.

The other four essays in this book are more balanced. Thapar’s essay restates her previous constructions of the use of the word ‘Aryan’ in different contexts. She also provides a quick commentary on the obsession with Aryan identity among politically minded Indians. Michael Witzel revisits his own writings on the matter of people migrating into India and requests that the subject be examined further with patience and without any bias as he notices the “free admixture” between the new migrants and those populating the Indus civilisation.

Jaya Menon’s essay makes a pitch for a deeper study of the late Harappan site at Sanauli to better understand the transition that happened from the Harappan to the Vedic culture, especially because, she says, of the discovery of a chariot at Sanauli. “Small raiding groups using horse-drawn chariots moving… from the Iranian region towards the Indian subcontinent”, she imagines. Razib Khan’s essay notes the importance of genetic studies in providing us with some insight into the migration of people into India. 

All scholars take great care to highlight the extremely tentative nature of research on the ancestry of Indians, insist that more research is needed to understand the origins of Indians, and caution the reader about those who are prone to making strong assertions about the ancestry of Indians. “Problematic to attempt a single uniformly applicable answer”, says Thapar as she makes a plea “to stay with the evidence”. “Highly conjectural”, says Khan. “Only patient and unbiased study can reveal” the secrets of ancient times, points out Witzel. 

Both Witzel and Thapar underline the fact of people migrating into India continuously. Witzel points out that by the time of the Rig Veda, the Harappan culture had disintegrated into sparsely populated village settlements. The incoming Indo-Aryans now no longer merged their identity into that of the Harappans. Yet, the Rig Veda carried in it almost 300 loan words from the earlier civilisation. He also points out that some of the elite of the local Harappan culture were incorporated into the new culture as was evident by the non-Indo-Aryan names for chiefs such as Balbutha and vedic poets such as Kanva. With the establishment of the system of four varnas, the non-Indo-Aryans, he suggests, came to be Shudras, excluded from Aryan religious practise. That assertion, of course, is an entirely baseless assertion which none of the evidence in any of the essays in this book supports. Such is the attraction for the historian to make wild, baseless speculations!