chhotemianinshallah
2010-01-06 00:27:28 UTC
Horseplay In Harappa - The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax
Author: Michael Witzel, Steve Farmer
Publication: Frontline
Date: October 13, 2000
MICHAEL WITZEL, a Harvard University Indologist, and STEVE FARMER, a
comparative historian, report on media hype, faked data, and Hindutva
propaganda in recent claims that the Indus Valley script has been
decoded.
Last summer the Indian press carried sensational stories announcing
the final decipherment of the Harappan or Indus Valley script. A
United News of India dispatch on July 11, 1999, picked up throughout
South Asia, reported on new research by "noted histo rian, N.S.
Rajaram, who along with palaeographist Dr. Natwar Jha, has read and
deciphered the messages on more than 2,000 Harappan seals." Discussion
of the messages was promised in Rajaram and Jha's upcoming book, The
Deciphered Indus Script. For nearly a year, the Internet was abuzz
with reports that Rajaram and Jha had decoded the full corpus of Indus
Valley texts.
This was not the first claim that the writing of the Indus Valley
Civilisation (fl. c. 2600-1900 BCE) had been cracked. In a 1996
book, American archaeologist Gregory Possehl reviewed thirty-five
attempted decipherments, perhaps one-third the actual numb er. But
the claims of Rajaram and Jha went far beyond those of any recent
historians. Not only had the principles of decipherment been
discovered, but the entire corpus of texts could now be read. Even
more remarkable were the historical conclusions that Rajaram and his
collaborator said were backed by the decoded messages.
The UNI story was triggered by announcements that Rajaram and Jha had
not only deciphered the Indus Valley seals but had read "pre-Harappan"
texts dating to the mid-fourth millennium BCE. If confirmed, this
meant that they had decoded mankind's earliest literary message. The
"texts" were a handful of symbols scratched on a pottery tablet
recently discovered by Harvard University archaeologist Richard
Meadow. The oldest of these, Rajaram told the UNI, was a text that
could be translated "Ila surrounds th e blessed land" - an oblique but
unmistakable reference to the Rigveda's Saraswati river. The
suggestion was that man's earliest message was linked to India's
oldest religious text.1 The claim was hardly trivial, since this was
over 2,000 year s before Indologists date the Rigveda - and more than
1,000 years before Harappan culture itself reached maturity.
Rajaram's World
After months of media hype, Rajaram and Jha's The Deciphered Indus
Script2 made it to print in New Delhi early this year. By midsummer
the book had reached the West and was being heatedly discussed via the
Internet in Europe, India, and the United States. The book gave
credit for the decipherment method to Jha, a provincial religious
scholar, previously unknown, from Farakka, in West Bengal. The book's
publicity hails him as "one of the world's foremost Vedic scholars and
palaeographer s." Jha had reportedly worked in isolation for twenty
years, publishing a curious 60-page English pamphlet on his work in
1996. Jha's study caught the eye of Rajaram, who was already
notorious in Indological circles. Rajaram took credit for writing
most of the book, which heavily politicised Jha's largely apolitical
message. Rajaram's online biography claims that their joint effort is
"the most important breakthrough of our time in the history of Indian
history and culture."
Boasts like this do not surprise battle-scarred Indologists familiar
with Rajaram's work. A U.S. engineering professor in the 1980s,
Rajaram re-invented himself in the 1990s as a fiery Hindutva
propagandist and "revisionist" historian. By the mid-1990s, he could
claim a following in India and in �migr� circles in the U.S. In
manufacturing his public image, Rajaram traded heavily on claims, not
justified by his modest research career, that before turning to
history "he was one of America's best-known wor kers in artificial
intelligence and robotics." Hyperbole abounds in his online biography,
posted at the ironically named "Sword of Truth" website. The Hindutva
propaganda site, located in the United States, pictures Rajaram as a
"world-renowned" expert o n "Vedic mathematics" and an "authority on
the history of Christianity." The last claim is supported by violently
anti-Christian works carrying titles like Christianity's Collapsing
Empire and Its Designs in India. Rajaram's papers include his "Se
arch for the historical Krishna" (found in the Indus Valley c. 3100
BCE); attack a long list of Hindutva "enemies" including Christian
missionaries, Marxist academics, leftist politicians, Indian Muslims,
and Western Indologists; and glorify the mob dest ruction of the Babri
Mosque in 1992 as a symbol of India's emergence from "the grip of
alien imperialistic forces and their surrogates." All Indian history,
Rajaram writes, can be pictured as a struggle between nationalistic
and imperialistic forces.
In Indology, the imperialistic enemy is the "colonial-missionary
creation known as the Aryan invasion model," which Rajaram ascribes to
Indologists long after crude invasion theories have been replaced by
more sophisticated acculturation models by seriou s researchers.
Rajaram's cartoon image of Indology is to be replaced by "a path of
study that combines ancient learning and modern science." What Rajaram
means by "science" is suggested in one of his papers describing the
knowledge of the Rigveda poets. The Rigveda rishis, we find, packed
their hymns with occult allusions to high-energy physics, anti-matter,
the inflational theory of the universe, calculations of the speed of
light, and gamma-ray bursts striking the earth three times a day. The
l atter is shown in three Rigveda verses (3.56.6, 7.11.3, 9.86.18)
addressed to the god Agni. The second Rajaram translates: "O Agni! We
know you have wealth to give three times a day to mortals."
One of Rajaram's early Hindutva pieces was written in 1995 with David
Frawley, a Western "New Age" writer who likes to find allusions to
American Indians in the Rigveda. Frawley is transformed via the
"Sword of Truth" into a "famous American Vedic scholar and historian."
The book by Rajaram and Frawley proposes the curious thesis that the
Rigveda was the product of a complex urban and maritime civilisation,
not the primitive horse-and-chariot culture seen in the text. The
goal is to link the Rigv eda to the earlier Indus Valley Civilisation,
undercutting any possibility of later "Aryan" migrations or
relocations of the Rigveda to "foreign" soil. Ancient India, working
through a massive (but lost) Harappan literature, was a prime source
of civilis ation to the West.
The Deciphered Indus Script makes similar claims with different
weapons. The Indus-Saraswati Valley again becomes the home of the
Rigveda and a font of higher civilisation: Babylonian and Greek
mathematics, all alphabetical scripts, and even Roman numerals flow
out to the world from the Indus Valley's infinitely fertile cultural
womb. Press releases praise the work for not only "solving the most
significant technical problem in historical research of our time" -
deciphering the Indus script - but for demonstrating as well that "if
any 'cradle of civilisation' existed, it was located not in
Mesopotamia but in the Saraswati Valley." The decoded messages of
Harappa thus confirm the Hindutva propagandist's wildest nationalistic
dreams.
Rajaram's 'Piltdown Horse'
Not unexpectedly, Indologists followed the pre-press publicity for
Rajaram's book with a mix of curiosity and scepticism. Just as the
book hit the West, a lively Internet debate was under way over whether
any substantial texts existed in Harappa - let alone the massive lost
literature claimed by Rajaram. Indus Valley texts are cryptic to
extremes, and the script shows few signs of evolutionary change. Most
inscriptions are no more than four or five characters long; many
contain only two or three characters. Moreover, character shapes in
mature Harappan appear to be strangely "frozen," unlike anything seen
in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt or China. This suggests that expected
"scribal pressures" for simplifying the script, arising out of the
repeate d copying of long texts, was lacking. And if this is true,
the Indus script may have never evolved beyond a simple proto-writing
system.
Once Rajaram's book could actually be read, the initial scepticism of
Indologists turned to howls of disbelief - followed by charges of
fraud. It was quickly shown that the methods of Jha and Rajaram were
so flexible that virtually any desired message co uld be read into the
texts. One Indologist claimed that using methods like these he could
show that the inscriptions were written in Old Norse or Old English.
Others pointed to the fact that the decoded messages repeatedly turned
up "missing links" betwe en Harappan and Vedic cultures - supporting
Rajaram's Hindutva revisions of history. The language of Harappa was
declared to be "late Vedic" Sanskrit, some 2,000 years before the
language itself existed. Through the decoded messages, the horseless
Indus Valley Civilisation - distinguishing it sharply from the culture
of the Rigveda - was awash with horses, horse keepers, and even horse
rustlers. To support his claims, Rajaram pointed to a blurry image of
a "horse seal" - the first pictorial evidence eve r claimed of
Harappan horses.
Chaos followed. Within weeks, the two of us demonstrated that
Rajaram's "horse seal" was a fraud, created from a computer distortion
of a broken "unicorn bull" seal. This led Indologist wags to dub it
the Indus Valley "Piltdown horse" - a comic allusion to the "Piltdown
man" hoax of the early twentieth century. The comparison was, in
fact, apt, since the "Piltdown man" was created to fill the missing
link between ape and man - just as Rajaram's "horse seal" was intended
to fill a gap between Harappa and Vedic cultures.
Once the hoax was uncovered, $1000 was offered to anyone who could
find one Harappan researcher who endorsed Rajaram's "horse seal." The
offer found no takers.
The "Piltdown horse" story has its comic side, but it touches on a
central problem in Indian history. Horses were critical to Vedic
civilisation, as we see in Vedic texts describing horse sacrifices,
horse raids, and warfare using horse-drawn chariots. I f Rigvedic
culture (normally dated to the last half of the second millennium BCE)
is identified with Harappa, it is critical to find evidence of
extensive use of domesticated horses in India in the third millennium
BCE. In the case of Hindutva "revisioni sts" like Rajaram, who push
the Rigveda to the fourth or even fifth millennium, the problem is
worse. They must find domesticated horses and chariots in South Asia
thousands of years before either existed anywhere on the planet.
Evidence suggests that the horse (Equus caballus) was absent from
India before around 2000 BCE, or even as late as 1700 BCE, when
archaeology first attests its presence in the Indus plains below the
Bolan pass. The horse, a steppe animal from the semi-temperate zone,
was not referred to in the Middle East until the end of the third
millennium, when it first shows up in Sumerian as anshe.kur (mountain
ass) or anshe.zi.zi (speedy ass). Before horses, the only equids in
the Near East w ere the donkey and the half-ass (hemione, onager).
The nearly untrainable hemiones look a bit like horses and can
interbreed with them, as can donkeys. In India, the hemione or khor
(Equus hemionus khur) was the only equid known before the horse; a few
specimens still survive in the Rann of Kutch.
As shown by their identical archaeological field numbers (DK-6664),
M-772A (published in Vol. II of Corpus of Indus Seals and
Inscriptions, 1991) is the original seal that seven decades ago
created the seal impression (Mackay 453) that Rajaram claims is a
'horse seal.'
The appearance of domesticated horses in the Old World was closely
linked to the development of lightweight chariots, which play a
central role in the Rigveda. The oldest archaeological remains of
chariots are from east and west of the Ural mountains, wh ere they
appear c. 2000 BCE. In the Near East, their use is attested in
pictures and writing a little later. A superb fifteenth-century
Egyptian example survives intact (in Florence, Italy); others show up
in twelfth-century Chinese tombs.
Chariots like these were high-tech creations: the poles of the
Egyptian example were made of elm, the wheels' felloes (outer rim) of
ash, its axles and spokes of evergreen oak, and its spoke lashings of
birch bark. None of these trees are found in the Ne ar East south of
Armenia, implying that these materials were imported from the north.
The Egyptian example weighs only 30 kg or so, a tiny fraction of slow
and heavy oxen-drawn wagons, weighing 500 kg or more, which earlier
served as the main wheeled tra nsport. These wagons, known since
around 3000 BCE, are similar to those still seen in parts of the
Indian countryside.
The result of all this is that the claim that horses or chariots were
found in the Indus Valley of the third millennium BCE is quite a
stretch. The problem is impossible for writers like Rajaram who
imagine the Rigveda early in the fourth or even fifth m illennium,
which is long before any wheeled transport - let alone chariots -
existed. Even the late Hungarian palaeontologist S. Bokonyi, who
thought that he recognised horses' bones at one Indus site, Surkotada,
denied that these were indigenous to South Asia. He writes that
"horses reached the Indian subcontinent in an already domesticated
form coming from the Inner Asiatic hors e domestication centres."
Harvard's Richard Meadow, who discovered the earliest known Harappan
text (which Rajaram claims to have deciphered), disputes even the
Surkotada evidence. In a paper written with the young Indian scholar,
Ajita K. Patel, Meadow argues that not one clear example of horse
bones exists in Indus excavations or elsewhere in North India before
c. 2000 BCE.3 All contrary claims arise from evidence from ditches,
erosional deposits, pits or horse graves originating hun dreds or even
thousands of years later than Harappan civilisation. Remains of
"horses" claimed by early Harappan archaeologists in the 1930s were
not documented well enough to let us distinguish between horses,
hemiones, or asses.
All this explains the need for Rajaram's horse inscriptions and "horse
seal." If this evidence were genuine, it would trigger a major
rethinking of all Old World history. Rajaram writes, in his
accustomed polemical style:
The 'horse seal' goes to show that the oft repeated claim of "No horse
at Harappa" is entirely baseless. Horse bones have been found at all
levels at Harappan sites. Also... the word 'as'va' (horse) is a
commonly occuring (sic) word on the seals. The sup posed
'horselessness' of the Harappans is a dogma that has been exploded by
evidence. But like its cousin the Aryan invasion, it persists for
reasons having little to do with evidence or scholarship.
Rajaram's "horse," which looks something like a deer to most people,
is a badly distorted image printed next to an "artist's reproduction"
of a horse, located below a Harappan inscription.4 The original source
of the image, Mackay 453, is a ti ny photo on Plate XCV of Vol. II of
Ernest Mackay's Further Excavations of Mohenjo-Daro (New Delhi,
1937-38). The photo was surprisingly difficult to track down, since
Rajaram's book does not tell you in which of Mackay's archaeological
works, whi ch contain thousands of images, the photo is located.
Finding it and others related to it required coordinating resources in
two of the world's best research libraries, located 3,000 miles apart
in the United States.
Once the original was found, and compared over the Internet with his
distorted image, Rajaram let it slip that the "horse seal" was a
"computer enhancement" that he and Jha introduced to "facilitate our
reading." Even now, however, he claims that the sea l depicts a
"horse." To deny it would be disastrous, since to do so would require
rejection of his decipherment of the seal inscription - which
supposedly includes the word "horse."
Once you see Mackay's original photo, it is clear that Rajaram's
"horse seal" is simply a broken "unicorn bull" seal, the most common
seal type found in Mohenjo-daro. In context, its identity is obvious,
since the same page contains photos of more than two dozen unicorn
bulls - any one of which would make a good "horse seal" if it were
cracked in the right place.
What in Rajaram's "computer enhancement" looks like the "neck" and
"head" of a deer is a Rorschach illusion created by distortion of the
crack and top-right part of the inscription. Any suggestion that the
seal represents a whole animal evaporates as soo n as you see the
original. The fact that the seal is broken is not mentioned in
Rajaram's book. You certainly cannot tell it is broken from the
"computer enhancement."
While Rajaram's bogus "horse seal" is crude, because of the relative
rarity of the volume containing the original, which is not properly
referenced in Rajaram's book, only a handful of researchers lucky
enough to have the right sources at hand could trac k it down.
Rajaram's evidence could not be checked by his typical reader in
Ahmedabad, say - or even by Indologists using most university
libraries.
The character of the original seal becomes clearer when you look more
closely at the evidence. Mackay 453, it turns out, is not the photo
of a seal at all, as Rajaram claims, but of a modern clay impression
of a seal (field number DK-6664) dug up in Mohe njo-daro during the
1927-31 excavations. We have located a superb photograph of the
original seal that made the impression (identified again by field
number DK-6664) in the indispensable Corpus of Indus Seals and
Inscriptions (Vol. II: Helsinki 19 91, p. 63). The work was
produced by archaeologists from India and Pakistan, coordinated by the
renowned Indologist Asko Parpola. According to a personal
communication from Dr. Parpola, the original seal was photographed in
Pakistan by Jyrki Lyytikk� spe cifically for the 1991 publication.
Like everyone else looking at the original, Parpola notes that
Rajaram's "horse seal" is simply a broken "unicorn bull" seal, one of
numerous examples found at Mohenjo-daro. Rajaram has also apparently
been told this by Iravatham Mahadevan, the leading I ndian expert on
the Indus script. Mahadevan is quoted, without name, in Rajaram's
book as a "well known 'Dravidianist"' who pointed out to him the
obvious. But, Rajaram insists, a "comparison of the two creatures
[unicorns and horses], especially in [the ] genital area, shows this
to be fallacious." Rajaram has also claimed on the Internet that the
animal's "bushy tail" shows that it is a horse.
Below, on the left, we have reproduced Lyytikk�'s crisp photo of the
original seal, compared (on the right) with the seven-decade-old photo
(Mackay 453) of the impression Rajaram claims is a "horse seal." We
have flipped the image of the original horizon tally to simplify
comparison of the seal and impression. The tail of the animal is the
typical "rope" tail associated with unicorn bull seals at Mohenjo-daro
(seen in more images below). It is clearly not the "bushy tail" that
Rajaram imagines - although Rajaram's story is certainly a "bushy
horse tale."
Checking Rajaram's claims about the "genital area," we find no
genitals at all in M-772A or Mackay 453 - for the simple reason that
genitals on unicorn bulls are typically located right where the seal
is cracked! This is clear when we look at other unico rn seals or
their impressions. One seal impression, Parpola M-1034a (on the
right), has a lot in common with Rajaram's "horse seal," including the
two characters on the lefthand side of the inscription. The seal is
broken in a different place, wiping out the righthand side of the
inscription but leaving the genitals intact. On this seal impression
we see the distinctive "unicorn" genitals, identified by the long
"tuft" hanging straight down. The genitals are located where we would
find them on Rajaram's "horse seal," if the latter were not broken.
Other unicorn bull seal impressions, like the one seen in Parpola
M-595a, could make terrific "horse seals" if cracked in the same
place. Unfortunately, Parpola M-595a is not broken, revealing the
fact (true of most Harappan seals) that it represents not a real but a
mythological animal. (And, of course, neither this nor any other
unicorn has a bushy tail.)
Rajaram's 'computer enhancement' of Mackay 453 on the left; the arrow
points to an object apparently stuck into the original image. On the
right, pictures of Mohenjo-daro copper plates showing similar
telephone-like 'feeding troughs.'
A Russian Indologist, Yaroslav Vassilkov, has pointed to a suspicious
detail in Rajaram's "computer enhancement" that is not found on any
photo of the seal or impression. Just in front of the animal, we find
a small object that looks like a partia l image of a common icon in
animal seals: a "feeding trough" that looks a little like an old-style
telephone. Who inserted it into the distorted image of the "horse
seal" is not known. Rajaram has not responded to questions about it.
Below, we show Rajaram's "computer enhancement" next to pictures of
Mohenjo-daro copper plates that contain several versions of the
object.
'Late Vedic' Sanskrit - 2000 Years Before Schedule
The horse seal is only one case of bogus data in Rajaram's book.
Knowledge of Vedic Sanskrit is needed to uncover those involving his
decipherments. That is not knowledge that Rajaram would expect in his
average reader, since (despite its pretensions) th e book is not aimed
at scholars but at a lay Indian audience. The pretence that the book
is addressed to researchers (to whom the fraud is obvious) is a
smokescreen to convince lay readers that Rajaram is a serious
historical scholar.
The decipherment issue explains why Rajaram continues to defend his
"horse seal" long after his own supporters have called on him to
repudiate it. He has little choice, since he has permanently wedded
his "Piltdown horse" to his decipherment method. The inscription over
the horse, he tells us, reads (a bit ungrammatically) "arko-hasva or
arko ha as'va" - "Sun indeed like the horse (sic)." The reading
clearly would be pointless if the image represented a unicorn bull.
Rajaram claims that there are links between this "deciphered" text and
a later Vedic religious document, the Shukla Yajurveda. This again
pushes the Rigveda, which is linguistically much earlier than that
text, to an absurdly early period.
As we have seen, Rajaram claims that the language of Harappa was "late
Vedic" Sanskrit. This conflicts with countless facts from
archaeology, linguistics, and other fields. Indeed, "late Vedic" did
not exist until some two thousand years after the start of mature
Harappan culture!
Let us look at a little linguistic evidence. Some of it is a bit
technical, but it is useful since it shows how dates are assigned to
parts of ancient Indian history.
The Rigveda is full of descriptions of horses (as'va), horse races,
and the swift spoke-wheeled chariot (ratha). We have already seen
that none of these existed anywhere in the Old World until around 2000
BCE or so. In most places, they did not appear until much later. The
introduction of chariots and horses is one marker for the earliest
possible dates of the Rigveda.
Linguistic evidence provides other markers. In both ancient Iran and
Vedic India, the chariot is called a ratha, from the prehistoric
(reconstructed) Indo-European word for wheel *roth2o- (Latin rota,
German Rad). ( A chariot = "wheels," just as in the modern slang
expression "my wheels" = "my automobile.") We also have shared Iranian
and Vedic words for charioteer - the Vedic ratheSTha or old Iranian
rathaeshta, meaning "standing on the chariot." Indo -European, on the
other hand - the ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit and most European
languages - does not have a word for chariot. This is shown by the
fact that many European languages use different words for the
vehicle. In the case of Greek, for example, a chariot is harmat(-
os).
The implication is that the ancient Iranian and Vedic word for chariot
was coined sometime around 2000 BCE - about when chariots first
appeared - but before those languages split into two. A good guess is
that this occurred in the steppe belt of Russia a nd Kazakhstan, which
is where we find the first remains of chariots. That area remained
Iranian-speaking well into the classical period, a fact reflected even
today in northern river names - all the way from the Danube, Don,
Dnyestr, Dnyepr and the Ural (Rahaa = Vedic Rasaa) rivers to the Oxus
(Vakhsh).
These are only a few pieces of evidence confirming what linguists have
known for 150 years: that Vedic Sanskrit was not native to South Asia
but an import, like closely related old Iranian. Their usual assumed
origins are located in the steppe belt to th e north of Iran and
northwest of India.
This view is supported by recent linguistic discoveries. One is that
approximately 4 per cent of the words in the Rigveda do not fit Indo-
Aryan (Sanskrit) word patterns but appear to be loans from a local
language in the Greater Panjab. That language is close to, but not
identical with, the Munda languages of Central and East India and to
Khasi in Meghalaya. A second finding pertains to shared loan words in
the Rigveda and Zoroastrian texts referring to agricultural products,
animals, and domestic goods that we know from archaeology first
appeared in Bactria-Margiana c. 2100-1700 BCE. These include, among
others, words for camel (uSTra/ushtra), donkey (khara/xara), and
bricks (iSTakaa/ishtiia, ishtuua). The evidence suggests that b oth
the Iranians and Indo-Aryans borrowed these words when they migrated
through this region towards their later homelands.5 A third find
relates to Indo-Aryan loan words that show up in the non-Aryan Mitanni
of northern Iraq and Syria c.1400 BCE. These loanwords reflect
slightly older Indo-Aryan forms than those found in the Rigveda. This
evidence is on e reason why Indologists place the composition of the
Rigveda in the last half of the second millennium.
This evidence, and much more like it, shows that the claim by Rajaram
that mature Harappans spoke "late Vedic" Sanskrit - the language of
the Vedic sutras (dating to the second half of the first millennium) -
is off by at least two thousand years! At bes t, a few adventurous
speakers may have existed in Harappa of some early ancestor of old
Vedic Sanskrit - the much later language of the Rigveda - trickling
into the Greater Panjab from migrant "Aryan" tribes. These early Indo-
Aryan speakers could have mi ngled with others in the towns and cities
of Harappan civilisation, which were conceivably just as multilingual
as any modern city in India. (Indeed, Rigvedic loan words seem to
suggest several substrate languages.) But to have all, or even part,
of Hara ppans speaking "late Vedic" is patently absurd.
But this evidence pertains to what Rajaram represents as "the petty
conjectural pseudo-science" called linguistics. By rejecting the
science wholesale, he gives himself the freedom to invent Indian
history at his whim.
Consonants Count Little, Vowels Nothing!
According to Rajaram and Jha, the Indus writing system was a proto-
alphabetical system, supposedly derived from a complex (now lost)
system of pre-Indus "pictorial" signs. Faced with a multitude of
Harappan characters, variously numbered between 400 and 800, they
select a much smaller subset of characters and read them as
alphabetical signs. Their adoption of these signs follows from the
alleged resemblances of these signs to characters in Brahmi, the
ancestor of later Indian scripts. (This was the scri pt adopted c.
250 BCE by Asoka, whom Jha's 1996 book assigns to c. 1500 BCE!)
Unlike Brahmi, which lets you write Indian words phonetically, the
alphabet imagined by Jha and Rajaram is highly defective, made up only
of consonants, a few numbers, and some special-purpose signs. The
hundreds of left-over "pictorial" signs normally stand for single
words. Whenever needed, however - and this goes for numbers as well -
they can also be tapped for their supposed sound values, giving
Rajaram and Jha extraordin ary freedom in making their readings. The
only true "vowel" that Jha and Rajaram allow is a single wildcard sign
that stands for any initial vowel - as in A-gni or I-ndra - or
sometimes for semi-vowels. Vowels inside words can be imagine d at
whim.
Vowels were lacking in some early Semitic scripts, but far fewer
vowels are required in Semitic languages than in vowel-rich Indian
languages like Sanskrit or Munda. In Vedic Sanskrit, any writing
system lacking vowels would be so ambiguous that it would be useless.
In the fictional system invented by Jha and Rajaram, for example, the
supposed Indus ka sign can be read kaa, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc., or can
also represent the isolated consonant k. A script like this opens the
door to an enormou s number of alternate readings.
Supposing with Jha and Rajaram that the language of Harappa was "late
Vedic", we would find that the simple two-letter inscription mn might
be read:
mana "ornament"; manaH"mind" (since Rajaram lets us add the
Visarjaniya or final -H at will); manaa "zeal" or "a weight"; manu
"Manu"; maana "opinion" or "building" or "thinker"; miina "fish"; mi
ine "in a fish"; miinau "two fish"; miinaiH "with fish"; muni "Muni",
"Rishi", "ascetic"; mRn- "made of clay"; menaa "wife"; meni "revenge";
mene "he has thought"; mauna "silence"; and so on.
There are dozens of other possibilities. How is the poor reader,
presented with our two-character seal, supposed to decide if it refers
to revenge, a sage, the great Manu, a fish, or his wife? The lords of
Harappa or Dholavira, instead of using the scrip t on their seals,
would have undoubtedly sent its inventor off to finish his short and
nasty life in the copper mines of the Aravallis!
If all of this were not enough to drive any reader mad, Rajaram and
Jha introduce a host of other devices that permit even freer readings
of inscriptions. The most ridiculous involves their claim that the
direction of individual inscriptions "follows no hard and fast rules."
This means that if tossing in vowels at will in our mn inscription
does not give you the reading you want, you can restart your reading
(again, with unlimited vowel wildcards) from the opposite direction -
yielding further al ternatives like namaH or namo "honour to...,"
naama "name," and so on.
There are other "principles" like this. A number of signs represent
the same sound, while - conversely - the same sign can represent
different sounds. With some 400-800 signs to choose from, this gives
you unlimited creative freedom. As Raj aram puts it deadpan, Harappan
is a "rough and ready script." Principles like this "gave its scribes
several ways in which to express the same sounds, and write words in
different ways." All this is stated in such a matter-of-fact and
"scientific" manner that the non-specialist gets hardly a clue that he
is being had.
In other words, figure out what reading you want and fill in the
blanks! As Voltaire supposedly said of similar linguistic tricks:
"Consonants count little, and vowels nothing."
A little guidance on writing direction comes from the wildcard vowel
sign, which Rajaram tells us usually comes at the start of
inscriptions. This is "why such a large number of messages on the
Indus seals have this vowel symbol as the first letter." Wha t Jha and
Rajaram refer to as a vowel (or semi-vowel) sign is the Harappan
"rimmed vessel" or U-shaped symbol. This is the most common sign in
the script, occurring by some counts some 1,400 times in known texts.
It is most commonly seen on the left side of inscriptions.
Back in the 1960s, B.B. Lal, former Director-General of the
Archaeological Survey of India, convincingly showed, partly by
studying how overlapping characters were inscribed on pottery, that
the Harappan script was normally read from right to left. Much other
hard evidence confirming this view has been known since the early
1930s. This means that in the vast majority of cases the U-sign is
the last sign of an inscription. But here, as so often elsewhere,
Rajaram and Jha simply ignore well-establi shed facts, since they are
intent on reading Harappan left to right to conform to "late Vedic"
Sanskrit. (In times of interpretive need, however, any direction goes
- including reading inscriptions vertically or in zig-zag fashion on
alternate lines.)
The remarkable flexibility of their system is summarised in statements
like this:
First, if the word begins with a vowel then the genetic sign has to be
given the proper vowel value. Next the intermediate consonants have
to be shaped properly by assigning the correct vowel combinations.
Finally, the terminal letter may also have to be modified according to
context. In the last case, a missing visarga or anusvaara may have to
be supplied, though this is often indicated.
How, the sceptic might ask, can you choose the right words from the
infinite possibilities? The problem calls for a little Vedic
ingenuity:
In resolving ambiguities, one is forced to fall back on one's
knowledge of the Vedic language and the literary context. For
example: when the common composite letter r + k is employed, the
context determines if it is to be pronounced as rka (as in arka) or as
kra as in kruura.
The context Rajaram wants you to use to fill in the blanks is the one
that he wants to prove: any reading is proper that illustrates the
(imaginary) links between "late Vedic" culture and Indus
Civilisation. Once you toss in wildcard vowels, for example, any rk
or kr combination provides instant Harappan horseplay - giving you a
Vedic-Harappan horse (recalling their equation that arka "sun" =
"horse") long before the word (or animal) appeared in India.
Why did the Indus genius who invented the alphabet not include all
basic vowel signs - like those in Asoka's script - which would have
made things unambiguous? It certainly could not be because of a lack
of linguistic knowledge, since Rajaram claims that the Harappans had
an "advanced state of knowledge of grammar, phonetics, and etymology,"
just as they had modern scientific knowledge of all other kinds. But
vowels, of course, would rob Rajaram of his chances to find Vedic
treasure in Harappan inscript ions - where he discovers everything
from horse thieves to Rigvedic kings and advanced mathematical
formulae.
Peculiarly, in contrast to the lack of vowel signs, Jha and Rajaram
give us a profusion of special signs that stand for fine grammatical
details including word-final -H and -M (Visarjaniya and Anusvaara; if
these are missing, you can just toss them in); special verb endings
like -te; and noun endings such as -su. All of these are derived from
Paninian grammar more than two thousand years before Panini! They even
find special phonological signs for Paninian gu Na and vRddhi (that
is, u becomes o or au) and for Vedic pitch accents (svara).
Although the scribes lacked vowels, they thus had signs applicable
only to vowel combination (sandhi) - which is remarkable indeed, given
the absence of the vowels themselves.
A Hundred Noisy Crows
It is clear that the method of Rajaram and Jha is so flexible that you
can squeeze some pseudo-Vedic reading out of any inscription. But,
with all this freedom, what a motley set of readings they hand us!
Moreover, few of their readings have anything to do with Harappan
civilisation.
What were Indus seals used for? We know that some (a minority) were
stamped on bales of merchandise; many were carried around on strings,
perhaps as amulets or ID cards. Many of them were lost in the street
or were thrown out as rubbish when no longer ne eded. Sometimes a
whole set of identical inscriptions has been found tossed over
Harappan embankment walls.
In their usual cavalier way, Rajaram and Jha ignore all the well-known
archaeological evidence and claim that the inscriptions represent
repositories of Vedic works like the ancient Nighantu word lists, or
even the mathematical formulae of the Shulbasutras. The main object
of Harappan seals, they tell us, was the "preservation of Vedic
knowledge and related subjects."
How many merchants in the 5000-odd year history of writing would have
thought to put mathematical formulae or geometric slogans on their
seals and tokens? Or who would be likely to wear slogans like the
following around their necks?
"It is the rainy season"; "House in the grip of cold"; "A dog that
stays home and does nothing is useless" - which Rajaram and Jha
alternately read as: "There is raw meat on the face of the dog";
"Birds of the eastern country"; "One who drinks barley wat er"; "A
hundred noisy crows"; "Mosquito"; "The breathing of an angry person";
"Rama threatened to use agni-vaaNa (a fire missile)"; "A short
tempered mother-in-law"; "Those about to kill themselves with
sinfulness say"; or, best of all, the refreshingly populist: "O!
Moneylender, eat (your interest)!"
By now, we expect lots of horse readings, and we are not
disappointed. What use, we wonder, would the Harappans have for seal
inscriptions like these?
"Water fit for drinking by horses"; "A keeper of horses (paidva) by
name of VarSaraata"; "A horsekeeper by name of As'ra-gaura wishes to
groom the horses"; "Food for the owner of two horses"; "Arci who
brought under control eight loose horses"; an d so on.
The most elaborate horse reading shows up in the most famous of Indus
inscriptions - the giant "signboard" hung on the walls of the Harappan
city of Dholavira. The "deciphered" inscription is another attack on
the "no horse in Harappa" argument:
"I was a thousand times victorious over avaricious raiders desirous of
my wealth of horses!"
In the end, readers of Jha and Rajaram are likely to agree with only
one "deciphered" message in the whole book: apa-yas'o ha mahaat "A
great disgrace indeed!"
Vedic Sanskrit?
Before concluding, we would like to point out that the line we just
quoted contains an elementary grammatical error - a reading of mahaat
for mahat. The frequency of mistakes like this says a lot about the
level of Vedic knowledge (or lack thereof) of the authors. A few
examples at random:
- on p. 227 of their book we find adma "eat!" But what form is adma?
admaH "we eat? At best, adma "food," not "eat!"
- on p. 235, we find tuurNa ugra s'vasruuH. No feminine adjectives
appear in the expression (tuurNaa, ugraa), as required by the angry
"mother-in-law" (read: s'vas'ruuH!).
- on p. 230, we read apvaa-hataa-tmaahuH, where hataatma might mean
"one whose self is slain," or the "self of a slain (person)," but not
"those about to kill themselves." In the same sentence, apvaa does not
mean "sinfulness" (whic h is, in any case, a non-Vedic concept) but
"mortal fear."
- on p. 232, we have amas'aityaarpaa, supposedly meaning "House in
the grip of cold." But amaa (apparently what they want, not ama
"force") is not a word for "house," but an adverb meaning "at home."
The word s'aitya "cold" is not "late Vedic" but post-Vedic, making the
reading even more anachronistic than the other readings in the book.
- on p. 226, we find paidva for "horses," in a passage referring to
horse keepers. But in Vedic literature this word does not refer to an
ordinary but a mythological horse.
Many similar errors are found in the 1996 pamphlet by Jha, billed by
Rajaram as "one of the world's foremost Vedic scholars and
palaeographers."
None of those errors can be blamed on ignorant Harappan scribes.
History and Hindutva Propaganda
It might be tempting to laugh off the Indus script hoax as the
harmless fantasy of an ex-engineer who pretends to be a world expert
on everything from artificial intelligence to Christianity to Harappan
culture.
What belies this reading is the ugly subtext of Rajaram's message,
which is aimed at millions of Indian readers. That message is anti-
Muslim, anti-Christian, anti-Indological, and (despite claims to the
opposite) intensely anti-scientific. Those views pr esent twisted
images of India's past capable of inflicting severe damage in the
present.
Rajaram's work is only one example of a broader reactionary trend in
Indian history. Movements like this can sometimes be seen more
clearly from afar than nearby, and we conclude with a few comments on
it from our outside but interested perspective.
In the past few decades, a new kind of history has been propagated by
a vocal group of Indian writers, few of them trained historians, who
lavishly praise and support each other's works. Their aim is to
rewrite Indian history from a nationalistic and rel igious point of
view. Their writings have special appeal to a new middle class
confused by modern threats to traditional values. With alarming
frequency their movement is backed by powerful political forces,
lending it a mask of respectability that it do es not deserve.
Unquestionably, all sides of Indian history must be repeatedly re-
examined. But any massive revisions must arise from the discovery of
new evidence, not from desires to boost national or sectarian pride at
any cost. Any new historical models must be cons istent with all
available data judged apart from parochial concerns.
The current "revisionist" models contradict well-known facts: they
introduce horse-drawn chariots thousands of years before their
invention; imagine massive lost literatures filled with "scientific"
knowledge unimaginable anywhere in the ancient world; p roject the
Rigveda into impossibly distant eras, compiled in urban or maritime
settings suggested nowhere in the text; and imagine Vedic Sanskrit or
even Proto Indo-European rising in the Panjab or elsewhere in northern
India, ignoring 150 years of evide nce fixing their origins to the
northwest. Extreme "out-of-India" proponents even fanaticise an India
that is the cradle of all civilisation, angrily rejecting all
suggestions that peoples, languages, or technologies ever entered
prehistoric India from f oreign soil - as if modern concepts of
"foreign" had any meaning in prehistoric times.
Ironically, many of those expressing these anti-migrational views are
emigrants themselves, engineers or technocrats like N.S. Rajaram, S.
Kak, and S. Kalyanaraman, who ship their ideas to India from U.S.
shores. They find allies in a broader assortment of home-grown
nationalists including university professors, bank employees, and
politicians (S. S. Misra, S. Talageri, K.D. Sethna, S.P. Gupta,
Bh. Singh, M. Shendge, Bh. Gidwani, P. Chaudhuri, A. Shourie,
S.R. Goel). They have even gained a small but vo cal following in
the West among "New Age" writers or researchers outside mainstream
scholarship, including D. Frawley, G. Feuerstein, K. Klostermaier,
and K. Elst. Whole publishing firms, such as the Voice of India and
Aditya Prakashan, are devoted to pr opagating their ideas.
There are admittedly no universal standards for rewriting history.
But a few demands must be made of anyone expecting his or her
scholarship to be taken seriously. A short list might include: (1)
openness in the use of evidence; (2) a respect for well-es tablished
facts; (3) a willingness to confront data in all relevant fields; and
(4) independence in making conclusions from religious and political
agendas.
N.S. Rajaram typifies the worst of the "revisionist" movement, and
obviously fails on all counts. The Deciphered Indus Script is based
on blatantly fake data (the "horse seal," the free-form
"decipherments"); disregards numerous well-known facts ( the dates of
horses and chariots, the uses of Harappan seals, etc.); rejects
evidence from whole scientific fields, including linguistics (a
strange exclusion for a would-be decipherer!); and is driven by
obvious religious and political motives in claimi ng impossible links
between Harappan and Vedic cultures.
Whatever their pretensions, Hindutva propagandists like Rajaram do not
belong to the realm of legitimate historical discourse. They
perpetuate, in twisted half-modern ways, medieval tendencies to use
every means possible to support the authority of relig ious texts. In
the political sphere, they falsify history to bolster national pride.
In the ethnic realm, they glorify one sector of India to the detriment
of others.
It is the responsibility of every serious researcher to oppose these
tendencies with the only sure weapon available - hard evidence. If
reactionary trends in Indian history find further political support,
we risk seeing violent repeats in the coming deca des of the fascist
extremes of the past.
The historical fantasies of writers like Rajaram must be exposed for
what they are: propaganda issuing from the ugliest corners of the pre-
scientific mind. The fact that many of the most unbelievable of these
fantasies are the product of highly trained e ngineers should give
Indian educational planners deep concern.
In a recent online exchange, Rajaram dismissed criticisms of his faked
"horse seal" and pointed to political friends in high places, boasting
that the Union government had recently "advised" the "National Book
Trust to bring out my popular book, From Sarasvati River to the Indus
Script, in English and thirteen other languages."
We fear for India and for objective scholarship. To quote Rajaram's
Harappan-Vedic one last time: "A great disgrace indeed!"
(Michael Witzel is Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University
and the author of many publications, including the recent monograph
Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages, Boston: ASLIP/
Mother Tongue 1999. A collecti on of his Vedic studies will be
published in India by Orient Longman later this year. He is also
editor of The Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, accessible through
his home page at
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm.
Steve Farmer, who received his doctorate from Stanford University, has
held a number of academic posts in premodern history and the history
of science. Among his recent works is his book Syncretism in the
West, which develops a cross-cultural m odel of the evolution of
traditional religious and philosophical systems. He is currently
finishing a new book on brain and the evolution of culture. He can be
contacted at ***@safarmer.com.)
http://www.hvk.org/articles/1000/12.html
...and I am Sid Harth
Author: Michael Witzel, Steve Farmer
Publication: Frontline
Date: October 13, 2000
MICHAEL WITZEL, a Harvard University Indologist, and STEVE FARMER, a
comparative historian, report on media hype, faked data, and Hindutva
propaganda in recent claims that the Indus Valley script has been
decoded.
Last summer the Indian press carried sensational stories announcing
the final decipherment of the Harappan or Indus Valley script. A
United News of India dispatch on July 11, 1999, picked up throughout
South Asia, reported on new research by "noted histo rian, N.S.
Rajaram, who along with palaeographist Dr. Natwar Jha, has read and
deciphered the messages on more than 2,000 Harappan seals." Discussion
of the messages was promised in Rajaram and Jha's upcoming book, The
Deciphered Indus Script. For nearly a year, the Internet was abuzz
with reports that Rajaram and Jha had decoded the full corpus of Indus
Valley texts.
This was not the first claim that the writing of the Indus Valley
Civilisation (fl. c. 2600-1900 BCE) had been cracked. In a 1996
book, American archaeologist Gregory Possehl reviewed thirty-five
attempted decipherments, perhaps one-third the actual numb er. But
the claims of Rajaram and Jha went far beyond those of any recent
historians. Not only had the principles of decipherment been
discovered, but the entire corpus of texts could now be read. Even
more remarkable were the historical conclusions that Rajaram and his
collaborator said were backed by the decoded messages.
The UNI story was triggered by announcements that Rajaram and Jha had
not only deciphered the Indus Valley seals but had read "pre-Harappan"
texts dating to the mid-fourth millennium BCE. If confirmed, this
meant that they had decoded mankind's earliest literary message. The
"texts" were a handful of symbols scratched on a pottery tablet
recently discovered by Harvard University archaeologist Richard
Meadow. The oldest of these, Rajaram told the UNI, was a text that
could be translated "Ila surrounds th e blessed land" - an oblique but
unmistakable reference to the Rigveda's Saraswati river. The
suggestion was that man's earliest message was linked to India's
oldest religious text.1 The claim was hardly trivial, since this was
over 2,000 year s before Indologists date the Rigveda - and more than
1,000 years before Harappan culture itself reached maturity.
Rajaram's World
After months of media hype, Rajaram and Jha's The Deciphered Indus
Script2 made it to print in New Delhi early this year. By midsummer
the book had reached the West and was being heatedly discussed via the
Internet in Europe, India, and the United States. The book gave
credit for the decipherment method to Jha, a provincial religious
scholar, previously unknown, from Farakka, in West Bengal. The book's
publicity hails him as "one of the world's foremost Vedic scholars and
palaeographer s." Jha had reportedly worked in isolation for twenty
years, publishing a curious 60-page English pamphlet on his work in
1996. Jha's study caught the eye of Rajaram, who was already
notorious in Indological circles. Rajaram took credit for writing
most of the book, which heavily politicised Jha's largely apolitical
message. Rajaram's online biography claims that their joint effort is
"the most important breakthrough of our time in the history of Indian
history and culture."
Boasts like this do not surprise battle-scarred Indologists familiar
with Rajaram's work. A U.S. engineering professor in the 1980s,
Rajaram re-invented himself in the 1990s as a fiery Hindutva
propagandist and "revisionist" historian. By the mid-1990s, he could
claim a following in India and in �migr� circles in the U.S. In
manufacturing his public image, Rajaram traded heavily on claims, not
justified by his modest research career, that before turning to
history "he was one of America's best-known wor kers in artificial
intelligence and robotics." Hyperbole abounds in his online biography,
posted at the ironically named "Sword of Truth" website. The Hindutva
propaganda site, located in the United States, pictures Rajaram as a
"world-renowned" expert o n "Vedic mathematics" and an "authority on
the history of Christianity." The last claim is supported by violently
anti-Christian works carrying titles like Christianity's Collapsing
Empire and Its Designs in India. Rajaram's papers include his "Se
arch for the historical Krishna" (found in the Indus Valley c. 3100
BCE); attack a long list of Hindutva "enemies" including Christian
missionaries, Marxist academics, leftist politicians, Indian Muslims,
and Western Indologists; and glorify the mob dest ruction of the Babri
Mosque in 1992 as a symbol of India's emergence from "the grip of
alien imperialistic forces and their surrogates." All Indian history,
Rajaram writes, can be pictured as a struggle between nationalistic
and imperialistic forces.
In Indology, the imperialistic enemy is the "colonial-missionary
creation known as the Aryan invasion model," which Rajaram ascribes to
Indologists long after crude invasion theories have been replaced by
more sophisticated acculturation models by seriou s researchers.
Rajaram's cartoon image of Indology is to be replaced by "a path of
study that combines ancient learning and modern science." What Rajaram
means by "science" is suggested in one of his papers describing the
knowledge of the Rigveda poets. The Rigveda rishis, we find, packed
their hymns with occult allusions to high-energy physics, anti-matter,
the inflational theory of the universe, calculations of the speed of
light, and gamma-ray bursts striking the earth three times a day. The
l atter is shown in three Rigveda verses (3.56.6, 7.11.3, 9.86.18)
addressed to the god Agni. The second Rajaram translates: "O Agni! We
know you have wealth to give three times a day to mortals."
One of Rajaram's early Hindutva pieces was written in 1995 with David
Frawley, a Western "New Age" writer who likes to find allusions to
American Indians in the Rigveda. Frawley is transformed via the
"Sword of Truth" into a "famous American Vedic scholar and historian."
The book by Rajaram and Frawley proposes the curious thesis that the
Rigveda was the product of a complex urban and maritime civilisation,
not the primitive horse-and-chariot culture seen in the text. The
goal is to link the Rigv eda to the earlier Indus Valley Civilisation,
undercutting any possibility of later "Aryan" migrations or
relocations of the Rigveda to "foreign" soil. Ancient India, working
through a massive (but lost) Harappan literature, was a prime source
of civilis ation to the West.
The Deciphered Indus Script makes similar claims with different
weapons. The Indus-Saraswati Valley again becomes the home of the
Rigveda and a font of higher civilisation: Babylonian and Greek
mathematics, all alphabetical scripts, and even Roman numerals flow
out to the world from the Indus Valley's infinitely fertile cultural
womb. Press releases praise the work for not only "solving the most
significant technical problem in historical research of our time" -
deciphering the Indus script - but for demonstrating as well that "if
any 'cradle of civilisation' existed, it was located not in
Mesopotamia but in the Saraswati Valley." The decoded messages of
Harappa thus confirm the Hindutva propagandist's wildest nationalistic
dreams.
Rajaram's 'Piltdown Horse'
Not unexpectedly, Indologists followed the pre-press publicity for
Rajaram's book with a mix of curiosity and scepticism. Just as the
book hit the West, a lively Internet debate was under way over whether
any substantial texts existed in Harappa - let alone the massive lost
literature claimed by Rajaram. Indus Valley texts are cryptic to
extremes, and the script shows few signs of evolutionary change. Most
inscriptions are no more than four or five characters long; many
contain only two or three characters. Moreover, character shapes in
mature Harappan appear to be strangely "frozen," unlike anything seen
in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt or China. This suggests that expected
"scribal pressures" for simplifying the script, arising out of the
repeate d copying of long texts, was lacking. And if this is true,
the Indus script may have never evolved beyond a simple proto-writing
system.
Once Rajaram's book could actually be read, the initial scepticism of
Indologists turned to howls of disbelief - followed by charges of
fraud. It was quickly shown that the methods of Jha and Rajaram were
so flexible that virtually any desired message co uld be read into the
texts. One Indologist claimed that using methods like these he could
show that the inscriptions were written in Old Norse or Old English.
Others pointed to the fact that the decoded messages repeatedly turned
up "missing links" betwe en Harappan and Vedic cultures - supporting
Rajaram's Hindutva revisions of history. The language of Harappa was
declared to be "late Vedic" Sanskrit, some 2,000 years before the
language itself existed. Through the decoded messages, the horseless
Indus Valley Civilisation - distinguishing it sharply from the culture
of the Rigveda - was awash with horses, horse keepers, and even horse
rustlers. To support his claims, Rajaram pointed to a blurry image of
a "horse seal" - the first pictorial evidence eve r claimed of
Harappan horses.
Chaos followed. Within weeks, the two of us demonstrated that
Rajaram's "horse seal" was a fraud, created from a computer distortion
of a broken "unicorn bull" seal. This led Indologist wags to dub it
the Indus Valley "Piltdown horse" - a comic allusion to the "Piltdown
man" hoax of the early twentieth century. The comparison was, in
fact, apt, since the "Piltdown man" was created to fill the missing
link between ape and man - just as Rajaram's "horse seal" was intended
to fill a gap between Harappa and Vedic cultures.
Once the hoax was uncovered, $1000 was offered to anyone who could
find one Harappan researcher who endorsed Rajaram's "horse seal." The
offer found no takers.
The "Piltdown horse" story has its comic side, but it touches on a
central problem in Indian history. Horses were critical to Vedic
civilisation, as we see in Vedic texts describing horse sacrifices,
horse raids, and warfare using horse-drawn chariots. I f Rigvedic
culture (normally dated to the last half of the second millennium BCE)
is identified with Harappa, it is critical to find evidence of
extensive use of domesticated horses in India in the third millennium
BCE. In the case of Hindutva "revisioni sts" like Rajaram, who push
the Rigveda to the fourth or even fifth millennium, the problem is
worse. They must find domesticated horses and chariots in South Asia
thousands of years before either existed anywhere on the planet.
Evidence suggests that the horse (Equus caballus) was absent from
India before around 2000 BCE, or even as late as 1700 BCE, when
archaeology first attests its presence in the Indus plains below the
Bolan pass. The horse, a steppe animal from the semi-temperate zone,
was not referred to in the Middle East until the end of the third
millennium, when it first shows up in Sumerian as anshe.kur (mountain
ass) or anshe.zi.zi (speedy ass). Before horses, the only equids in
the Near East w ere the donkey and the half-ass (hemione, onager).
The nearly untrainable hemiones look a bit like horses and can
interbreed with them, as can donkeys. In India, the hemione or khor
(Equus hemionus khur) was the only equid known before the horse; a few
specimens still survive in the Rann of Kutch.
As shown by their identical archaeological field numbers (DK-6664),
M-772A (published in Vol. II of Corpus of Indus Seals and
Inscriptions, 1991) is the original seal that seven decades ago
created the seal impression (Mackay 453) that Rajaram claims is a
'horse seal.'
The appearance of domesticated horses in the Old World was closely
linked to the development of lightweight chariots, which play a
central role in the Rigveda. The oldest archaeological remains of
chariots are from east and west of the Ural mountains, wh ere they
appear c. 2000 BCE. In the Near East, their use is attested in
pictures and writing a little later. A superb fifteenth-century
Egyptian example survives intact (in Florence, Italy); others show up
in twelfth-century Chinese tombs.
Chariots like these were high-tech creations: the poles of the
Egyptian example were made of elm, the wheels' felloes (outer rim) of
ash, its axles and spokes of evergreen oak, and its spoke lashings of
birch bark. None of these trees are found in the Ne ar East south of
Armenia, implying that these materials were imported from the north.
The Egyptian example weighs only 30 kg or so, a tiny fraction of slow
and heavy oxen-drawn wagons, weighing 500 kg or more, which earlier
served as the main wheeled tra nsport. These wagons, known since
around 3000 BCE, are similar to those still seen in parts of the
Indian countryside.
The result of all this is that the claim that horses or chariots were
found in the Indus Valley of the third millennium BCE is quite a
stretch. The problem is impossible for writers like Rajaram who
imagine the Rigveda early in the fourth or even fifth m illennium,
which is long before any wheeled transport - let alone chariots -
existed. Even the late Hungarian palaeontologist S. Bokonyi, who
thought that he recognised horses' bones at one Indus site, Surkotada,
denied that these were indigenous to South Asia. He writes that
"horses reached the Indian subcontinent in an already domesticated
form coming from the Inner Asiatic hors e domestication centres."
Harvard's Richard Meadow, who discovered the earliest known Harappan
text (which Rajaram claims to have deciphered), disputes even the
Surkotada evidence. In a paper written with the young Indian scholar,
Ajita K. Patel, Meadow argues that not one clear example of horse
bones exists in Indus excavations or elsewhere in North India before
c. 2000 BCE.3 All contrary claims arise from evidence from ditches,
erosional deposits, pits or horse graves originating hun dreds or even
thousands of years later than Harappan civilisation. Remains of
"horses" claimed by early Harappan archaeologists in the 1930s were
not documented well enough to let us distinguish between horses,
hemiones, or asses.
All this explains the need for Rajaram's horse inscriptions and "horse
seal." If this evidence were genuine, it would trigger a major
rethinking of all Old World history. Rajaram writes, in his
accustomed polemical style:
The 'horse seal' goes to show that the oft repeated claim of "No horse
at Harappa" is entirely baseless. Horse bones have been found at all
levels at Harappan sites. Also... the word 'as'va' (horse) is a
commonly occuring (sic) word on the seals. The sup posed
'horselessness' of the Harappans is a dogma that has been exploded by
evidence. But like its cousin the Aryan invasion, it persists for
reasons having little to do with evidence or scholarship.
Rajaram's "horse," which looks something like a deer to most people,
is a badly distorted image printed next to an "artist's reproduction"
of a horse, located below a Harappan inscription.4 The original source
of the image, Mackay 453, is a ti ny photo on Plate XCV of Vol. II of
Ernest Mackay's Further Excavations of Mohenjo-Daro (New Delhi,
1937-38). The photo was surprisingly difficult to track down, since
Rajaram's book does not tell you in which of Mackay's archaeological
works, whi ch contain thousands of images, the photo is located.
Finding it and others related to it required coordinating resources in
two of the world's best research libraries, located 3,000 miles apart
in the United States.
Once the original was found, and compared over the Internet with his
distorted image, Rajaram let it slip that the "horse seal" was a
"computer enhancement" that he and Jha introduced to "facilitate our
reading." Even now, however, he claims that the sea l depicts a
"horse." To deny it would be disastrous, since to do so would require
rejection of his decipherment of the seal inscription - which
supposedly includes the word "horse."
Once you see Mackay's original photo, it is clear that Rajaram's
"horse seal" is simply a broken "unicorn bull" seal, the most common
seal type found in Mohenjo-daro. In context, its identity is obvious,
since the same page contains photos of more than two dozen unicorn
bulls - any one of which would make a good "horse seal" if it were
cracked in the right place.
What in Rajaram's "computer enhancement" looks like the "neck" and
"head" of a deer is a Rorschach illusion created by distortion of the
crack and top-right part of the inscription. Any suggestion that the
seal represents a whole animal evaporates as soo n as you see the
original. The fact that the seal is broken is not mentioned in
Rajaram's book. You certainly cannot tell it is broken from the
"computer enhancement."
While Rajaram's bogus "horse seal" is crude, because of the relative
rarity of the volume containing the original, which is not properly
referenced in Rajaram's book, only a handful of researchers lucky
enough to have the right sources at hand could trac k it down.
Rajaram's evidence could not be checked by his typical reader in
Ahmedabad, say - or even by Indologists using most university
libraries.
The character of the original seal becomes clearer when you look more
closely at the evidence. Mackay 453, it turns out, is not the photo
of a seal at all, as Rajaram claims, but of a modern clay impression
of a seal (field number DK-6664) dug up in Mohe njo-daro during the
1927-31 excavations. We have located a superb photograph of the
original seal that made the impression (identified again by field
number DK-6664) in the indispensable Corpus of Indus Seals and
Inscriptions (Vol. II: Helsinki 19 91, p. 63). The work was
produced by archaeologists from India and Pakistan, coordinated by the
renowned Indologist Asko Parpola. According to a personal
communication from Dr. Parpola, the original seal was photographed in
Pakistan by Jyrki Lyytikk� spe cifically for the 1991 publication.
Like everyone else looking at the original, Parpola notes that
Rajaram's "horse seal" is simply a broken "unicorn bull" seal, one of
numerous examples found at Mohenjo-daro. Rajaram has also apparently
been told this by Iravatham Mahadevan, the leading I ndian expert on
the Indus script. Mahadevan is quoted, without name, in Rajaram's
book as a "well known 'Dravidianist"' who pointed out to him the
obvious. But, Rajaram insists, a "comparison of the two creatures
[unicorns and horses], especially in [the ] genital area, shows this
to be fallacious." Rajaram has also claimed on the Internet that the
animal's "bushy tail" shows that it is a horse.
Below, on the left, we have reproduced Lyytikk�'s crisp photo of the
original seal, compared (on the right) with the seven-decade-old photo
(Mackay 453) of the impression Rajaram claims is a "horse seal." We
have flipped the image of the original horizon tally to simplify
comparison of the seal and impression. The tail of the animal is the
typical "rope" tail associated with unicorn bull seals at Mohenjo-daro
(seen in more images below). It is clearly not the "bushy tail" that
Rajaram imagines - although Rajaram's story is certainly a "bushy
horse tale."
Checking Rajaram's claims about the "genital area," we find no
genitals at all in M-772A or Mackay 453 - for the simple reason that
genitals on unicorn bulls are typically located right where the seal
is cracked! This is clear when we look at other unico rn seals or
their impressions. One seal impression, Parpola M-1034a (on the
right), has a lot in common with Rajaram's "horse seal," including the
two characters on the lefthand side of the inscription. The seal is
broken in a different place, wiping out the righthand side of the
inscription but leaving the genitals intact. On this seal impression
we see the distinctive "unicorn" genitals, identified by the long
"tuft" hanging straight down. The genitals are located where we would
find them on Rajaram's "horse seal," if the latter were not broken.
Other unicorn bull seal impressions, like the one seen in Parpola
M-595a, could make terrific "horse seals" if cracked in the same
place. Unfortunately, Parpola M-595a is not broken, revealing the
fact (true of most Harappan seals) that it represents not a real but a
mythological animal. (And, of course, neither this nor any other
unicorn has a bushy tail.)
Rajaram's 'computer enhancement' of Mackay 453 on the left; the arrow
points to an object apparently stuck into the original image. On the
right, pictures of Mohenjo-daro copper plates showing similar
telephone-like 'feeding troughs.'
A Russian Indologist, Yaroslav Vassilkov, has pointed to a suspicious
detail in Rajaram's "computer enhancement" that is not found on any
photo of the seal or impression. Just in front of the animal, we find
a small object that looks like a partia l image of a common icon in
animal seals: a "feeding trough" that looks a little like an old-style
telephone. Who inserted it into the distorted image of the "horse
seal" is not known. Rajaram has not responded to questions about it.
Below, we show Rajaram's "computer enhancement" next to pictures of
Mohenjo-daro copper plates that contain several versions of the
object.
'Late Vedic' Sanskrit - 2000 Years Before Schedule
The horse seal is only one case of bogus data in Rajaram's book.
Knowledge of Vedic Sanskrit is needed to uncover those involving his
decipherments. That is not knowledge that Rajaram would expect in his
average reader, since (despite its pretensions) th e book is not aimed
at scholars but at a lay Indian audience. The pretence that the book
is addressed to researchers (to whom the fraud is obvious) is a
smokescreen to convince lay readers that Rajaram is a serious
historical scholar.
The decipherment issue explains why Rajaram continues to defend his
"horse seal" long after his own supporters have called on him to
repudiate it. He has little choice, since he has permanently wedded
his "Piltdown horse" to his decipherment method. The inscription over
the horse, he tells us, reads (a bit ungrammatically) "arko-hasva or
arko ha as'va" - "Sun indeed like the horse (sic)." The reading
clearly would be pointless if the image represented a unicorn bull.
Rajaram claims that there are links between this "deciphered" text and
a later Vedic religious document, the Shukla Yajurveda. This again
pushes the Rigveda, which is linguistically much earlier than that
text, to an absurdly early period.
As we have seen, Rajaram claims that the language of Harappa was "late
Vedic" Sanskrit. This conflicts with countless facts from
archaeology, linguistics, and other fields. Indeed, "late Vedic" did
not exist until some two thousand years after the start of mature
Harappan culture!
Let us look at a little linguistic evidence. Some of it is a bit
technical, but it is useful since it shows how dates are assigned to
parts of ancient Indian history.
The Rigveda is full of descriptions of horses (as'va), horse races,
and the swift spoke-wheeled chariot (ratha). We have already seen
that none of these existed anywhere in the Old World until around 2000
BCE or so. In most places, they did not appear until much later. The
introduction of chariots and horses is one marker for the earliest
possible dates of the Rigveda.
Linguistic evidence provides other markers. In both ancient Iran and
Vedic India, the chariot is called a ratha, from the prehistoric
(reconstructed) Indo-European word for wheel *roth2o- (Latin rota,
German Rad). ( A chariot = "wheels," just as in the modern slang
expression "my wheels" = "my automobile.") We also have shared Iranian
and Vedic words for charioteer - the Vedic ratheSTha or old Iranian
rathaeshta, meaning "standing on the chariot." Indo -European, on the
other hand - the ancestor of Vedic Sanskrit and most European
languages - does not have a word for chariot. This is shown by the
fact that many European languages use different words for the
vehicle. In the case of Greek, for example, a chariot is harmat(-
os).
The implication is that the ancient Iranian and Vedic word for chariot
was coined sometime around 2000 BCE - about when chariots first
appeared - but before those languages split into two. A good guess is
that this occurred in the steppe belt of Russia a nd Kazakhstan, which
is where we find the first remains of chariots. That area remained
Iranian-speaking well into the classical period, a fact reflected even
today in northern river names - all the way from the Danube, Don,
Dnyestr, Dnyepr and the Ural (Rahaa = Vedic Rasaa) rivers to the Oxus
(Vakhsh).
These are only a few pieces of evidence confirming what linguists have
known for 150 years: that Vedic Sanskrit was not native to South Asia
but an import, like closely related old Iranian. Their usual assumed
origins are located in the steppe belt to th e north of Iran and
northwest of India.
This view is supported by recent linguistic discoveries. One is that
approximately 4 per cent of the words in the Rigveda do not fit Indo-
Aryan (Sanskrit) word patterns but appear to be loans from a local
language in the Greater Panjab. That language is close to, but not
identical with, the Munda languages of Central and East India and to
Khasi in Meghalaya. A second finding pertains to shared loan words in
the Rigveda and Zoroastrian texts referring to agricultural products,
animals, and domestic goods that we know from archaeology first
appeared in Bactria-Margiana c. 2100-1700 BCE. These include, among
others, words for camel (uSTra/ushtra), donkey (khara/xara), and
bricks (iSTakaa/ishtiia, ishtuua). The evidence suggests that b oth
the Iranians and Indo-Aryans borrowed these words when they migrated
through this region towards their later homelands.5 A third find
relates to Indo-Aryan loan words that show up in the non-Aryan Mitanni
of northern Iraq and Syria c.1400 BCE. These loanwords reflect
slightly older Indo-Aryan forms than those found in the Rigveda. This
evidence is on e reason why Indologists place the composition of the
Rigveda in the last half of the second millennium.
This evidence, and much more like it, shows that the claim by Rajaram
that mature Harappans spoke "late Vedic" Sanskrit - the language of
the Vedic sutras (dating to the second half of the first millennium) -
is off by at least two thousand years! At bes t, a few adventurous
speakers may have existed in Harappa of some early ancestor of old
Vedic Sanskrit - the much later language of the Rigveda - trickling
into the Greater Panjab from migrant "Aryan" tribes. These early Indo-
Aryan speakers could have mi ngled with others in the towns and cities
of Harappan civilisation, which were conceivably just as multilingual
as any modern city in India. (Indeed, Rigvedic loan words seem to
suggest several substrate languages.) But to have all, or even part,
of Hara ppans speaking "late Vedic" is patently absurd.
But this evidence pertains to what Rajaram represents as "the petty
conjectural pseudo-science" called linguistics. By rejecting the
science wholesale, he gives himself the freedom to invent Indian
history at his whim.
Consonants Count Little, Vowels Nothing!
According to Rajaram and Jha, the Indus writing system was a proto-
alphabetical system, supposedly derived from a complex (now lost)
system of pre-Indus "pictorial" signs. Faced with a multitude of
Harappan characters, variously numbered between 400 and 800, they
select a much smaller subset of characters and read them as
alphabetical signs. Their adoption of these signs follows from the
alleged resemblances of these signs to characters in Brahmi, the
ancestor of later Indian scripts. (This was the scri pt adopted c.
250 BCE by Asoka, whom Jha's 1996 book assigns to c. 1500 BCE!)
Unlike Brahmi, which lets you write Indian words phonetically, the
alphabet imagined by Jha and Rajaram is highly defective, made up only
of consonants, a few numbers, and some special-purpose signs. The
hundreds of left-over "pictorial" signs normally stand for single
words. Whenever needed, however - and this goes for numbers as well -
they can also be tapped for their supposed sound values, giving
Rajaram and Jha extraordin ary freedom in making their readings. The
only true "vowel" that Jha and Rajaram allow is a single wildcard sign
that stands for any initial vowel - as in A-gni or I-ndra - or
sometimes for semi-vowels. Vowels inside words can be imagine d at
whim.
Vowels were lacking in some early Semitic scripts, but far fewer
vowels are required in Semitic languages than in vowel-rich Indian
languages like Sanskrit or Munda. In Vedic Sanskrit, any writing
system lacking vowels would be so ambiguous that it would be useless.
In the fictional system invented by Jha and Rajaram, for example, the
supposed Indus ka sign can be read kaa, ki, ku, ke, ko, etc., or can
also represent the isolated consonant k. A script like this opens the
door to an enormou s number of alternate readings.
Supposing with Jha and Rajaram that the language of Harappa was "late
Vedic", we would find that the simple two-letter inscription mn might
be read:
mana "ornament"; manaH"mind" (since Rajaram lets us add the
Visarjaniya or final -H at will); manaa "zeal" or "a weight"; manu
"Manu"; maana "opinion" or "building" or "thinker"; miina "fish"; mi
ine "in a fish"; miinau "two fish"; miinaiH "with fish"; muni "Muni",
"Rishi", "ascetic"; mRn- "made of clay"; menaa "wife"; meni "revenge";
mene "he has thought"; mauna "silence"; and so on.
There are dozens of other possibilities. How is the poor reader,
presented with our two-character seal, supposed to decide if it refers
to revenge, a sage, the great Manu, a fish, or his wife? The lords of
Harappa or Dholavira, instead of using the scrip t on their seals,
would have undoubtedly sent its inventor off to finish his short and
nasty life in the copper mines of the Aravallis!
If all of this were not enough to drive any reader mad, Rajaram and
Jha introduce a host of other devices that permit even freer readings
of inscriptions. The most ridiculous involves their claim that the
direction of individual inscriptions "follows no hard and fast rules."
This means that if tossing in vowels at will in our mn inscription
does not give you the reading you want, you can restart your reading
(again, with unlimited vowel wildcards) from the opposite direction -
yielding further al ternatives like namaH or namo "honour to...,"
naama "name," and so on.
There are other "principles" like this. A number of signs represent
the same sound, while - conversely - the same sign can represent
different sounds. With some 400-800 signs to choose from, this gives
you unlimited creative freedom. As Raj aram puts it deadpan, Harappan
is a "rough and ready script." Principles like this "gave its scribes
several ways in which to express the same sounds, and write words in
different ways." All this is stated in such a matter-of-fact and
"scientific" manner that the non-specialist gets hardly a clue that he
is being had.
In other words, figure out what reading you want and fill in the
blanks! As Voltaire supposedly said of similar linguistic tricks:
"Consonants count little, and vowels nothing."
A little guidance on writing direction comes from the wildcard vowel
sign, which Rajaram tells us usually comes at the start of
inscriptions. This is "why such a large number of messages on the
Indus seals have this vowel symbol as the first letter." Wha t Jha and
Rajaram refer to as a vowel (or semi-vowel) sign is the Harappan
"rimmed vessel" or U-shaped symbol. This is the most common sign in
the script, occurring by some counts some 1,400 times in known texts.
It is most commonly seen on the left side of inscriptions.
Back in the 1960s, B.B. Lal, former Director-General of the
Archaeological Survey of India, convincingly showed, partly by
studying how overlapping characters were inscribed on pottery, that
the Harappan script was normally read from right to left. Much other
hard evidence confirming this view has been known since the early
1930s. This means that in the vast majority of cases the U-sign is
the last sign of an inscription. But here, as so often elsewhere,
Rajaram and Jha simply ignore well-establi shed facts, since they are
intent on reading Harappan left to right to conform to "late Vedic"
Sanskrit. (In times of interpretive need, however, any direction goes
- including reading inscriptions vertically or in zig-zag fashion on
alternate lines.)
The remarkable flexibility of their system is summarised in statements
like this:
First, if the word begins with a vowel then the genetic sign has to be
given the proper vowel value. Next the intermediate consonants have
to be shaped properly by assigning the correct vowel combinations.
Finally, the terminal letter may also have to be modified according to
context. In the last case, a missing visarga or anusvaara may have to
be supplied, though this is often indicated.
How, the sceptic might ask, can you choose the right words from the
infinite possibilities? The problem calls for a little Vedic
ingenuity:
In resolving ambiguities, one is forced to fall back on one's
knowledge of the Vedic language and the literary context. For
example: when the common composite letter r + k is employed, the
context determines if it is to be pronounced as rka (as in arka) or as
kra as in kruura.
The context Rajaram wants you to use to fill in the blanks is the one
that he wants to prove: any reading is proper that illustrates the
(imaginary) links between "late Vedic" culture and Indus
Civilisation. Once you toss in wildcard vowels, for example, any rk
or kr combination provides instant Harappan horseplay - giving you a
Vedic-Harappan horse (recalling their equation that arka "sun" =
"horse") long before the word (or animal) appeared in India.
Why did the Indus genius who invented the alphabet not include all
basic vowel signs - like those in Asoka's script - which would have
made things unambiguous? It certainly could not be because of a lack
of linguistic knowledge, since Rajaram claims that the Harappans had
an "advanced state of knowledge of grammar, phonetics, and etymology,"
just as they had modern scientific knowledge of all other kinds. But
vowels, of course, would rob Rajaram of his chances to find Vedic
treasure in Harappan inscript ions - where he discovers everything
from horse thieves to Rigvedic kings and advanced mathematical
formulae.
Peculiarly, in contrast to the lack of vowel signs, Jha and Rajaram
give us a profusion of special signs that stand for fine grammatical
details including word-final -H and -M (Visarjaniya and Anusvaara; if
these are missing, you can just toss them in); special verb endings
like -te; and noun endings such as -su. All of these are derived from
Paninian grammar more than two thousand years before Panini! They even
find special phonological signs for Paninian gu Na and vRddhi (that
is, u becomes o or au) and for Vedic pitch accents (svara).
Although the scribes lacked vowels, they thus had signs applicable
only to vowel combination (sandhi) - which is remarkable indeed, given
the absence of the vowels themselves.
A Hundred Noisy Crows
It is clear that the method of Rajaram and Jha is so flexible that you
can squeeze some pseudo-Vedic reading out of any inscription. But,
with all this freedom, what a motley set of readings they hand us!
Moreover, few of their readings have anything to do with Harappan
civilisation.
What were Indus seals used for? We know that some (a minority) were
stamped on bales of merchandise; many were carried around on strings,
perhaps as amulets or ID cards. Many of them were lost in the street
or were thrown out as rubbish when no longer ne eded. Sometimes a
whole set of identical inscriptions has been found tossed over
Harappan embankment walls.
In their usual cavalier way, Rajaram and Jha ignore all the well-known
archaeological evidence and claim that the inscriptions represent
repositories of Vedic works like the ancient Nighantu word lists, or
even the mathematical formulae of the Shulbasutras. The main object
of Harappan seals, they tell us, was the "preservation of Vedic
knowledge and related subjects."
How many merchants in the 5000-odd year history of writing would have
thought to put mathematical formulae or geometric slogans on their
seals and tokens? Or who would be likely to wear slogans like the
following around their necks?
"It is the rainy season"; "House in the grip of cold"; "A dog that
stays home and does nothing is useless" - which Rajaram and Jha
alternately read as: "There is raw meat on the face of the dog";
"Birds of the eastern country"; "One who drinks barley wat er"; "A
hundred noisy crows"; "Mosquito"; "The breathing of an angry person";
"Rama threatened to use agni-vaaNa (a fire missile)"; "A short
tempered mother-in-law"; "Those about to kill themselves with
sinfulness say"; or, best of all, the refreshingly populist: "O!
Moneylender, eat (your interest)!"
By now, we expect lots of horse readings, and we are not
disappointed. What use, we wonder, would the Harappans have for seal
inscriptions like these?
"Water fit for drinking by horses"; "A keeper of horses (paidva) by
name of VarSaraata"; "A horsekeeper by name of As'ra-gaura wishes to
groom the horses"; "Food for the owner of two horses"; "Arci who
brought under control eight loose horses"; an d so on.
The most elaborate horse reading shows up in the most famous of Indus
inscriptions - the giant "signboard" hung on the walls of the Harappan
city of Dholavira. The "deciphered" inscription is another attack on
the "no horse in Harappa" argument:
"I was a thousand times victorious over avaricious raiders desirous of
my wealth of horses!"
In the end, readers of Jha and Rajaram are likely to agree with only
one "deciphered" message in the whole book: apa-yas'o ha mahaat "A
great disgrace indeed!"
Vedic Sanskrit?
Before concluding, we would like to point out that the line we just
quoted contains an elementary grammatical error - a reading of mahaat
for mahat. The frequency of mistakes like this says a lot about the
level of Vedic knowledge (or lack thereof) of the authors. A few
examples at random:
- on p. 227 of their book we find adma "eat!" But what form is adma?
admaH "we eat? At best, adma "food," not "eat!"
- on p. 235, we find tuurNa ugra s'vasruuH. No feminine adjectives
appear in the expression (tuurNaa, ugraa), as required by the angry
"mother-in-law" (read: s'vas'ruuH!).
- on p. 230, we read apvaa-hataa-tmaahuH, where hataatma might mean
"one whose self is slain," or the "self of a slain (person)," but not
"those about to kill themselves." In the same sentence, apvaa does not
mean "sinfulness" (whic h is, in any case, a non-Vedic concept) but
"mortal fear."
- on p. 232, we have amas'aityaarpaa, supposedly meaning "House in
the grip of cold." But amaa (apparently what they want, not ama
"force") is not a word for "house," but an adverb meaning "at home."
The word s'aitya "cold" is not "late Vedic" but post-Vedic, making the
reading even more anachronistic than the other readings in the book.
- on p. 226, we find paidva for "horses," in a passage referring to
horse keepers. But in Vedic literature this word does not refer to an
ordinary but a mythological horse.
Many similar errors are found in the 1996 pamphlet by Jha, billed by
Rajaram as "one of the world's foremost Vedic scholars and
palaeographers."
None of those errors can be blamed on ignorant Harappan scribes.
History and Hindutva Propaganda
It might be tempting to laugh off the Indus script hoax as the
harmless fantasy of an ex-engineer who pretends to be a world expert
on everything from artificial intelligence to Christianity to Harappan
culture.
What belies this reading is the ugly subtext of Rajaram's message,
which is aimed at millions of Indian readers. That message is anti-
Muslim, anti-Christian, anti-Indological, and (despite claims to the
opposite) intensely anti-scientific. Those views pr esent twisted
images of India's past capable of inflicting severe damage in the
present.
Rajaram's work is only one example of a broader reactionary trend in
Indian history. Movements like this can sometimes be seen more
clearly from afar than nearby, and we conclude with a few comments on
it from our outside but interested perspective.
In the past few decades, a new kind of history has been propagated by
a vocal group of Indian writers, few of them trained historians, who
lavishly praise and support each other's works. Their aim is to
rewrite Indian history from a nationalistic and rel igious point of
view. Their writings have special appeal to a new middle class
confused by modern threats to traditional values. With alarming
frequency their movement is backed by powerful political forces,
lending it a mask of respectability that it do es not deserve.
Unquestionably, all sides of Indian history must be repeatedly re-
examined. But any massive revisions must arise from the discovery of
new evidence, not from desires to boost national or sectarian pride at
any cost. Any new historical models must be cons istent with all
available data judged apart from parochial concerns.
The current "revisionist" models contradict well-known facts: they
introduce horse-drawn chariots thousands of years before their
invention; imagine massive lost literatures filled with "scientific"
knowledge unimaginable anywhere in the ancient world; p roject the
Rigveda into impossibly distant eras, compiled in urban or maritime
settings suggested nowhere in the text; and imagine Vedic Sanskrit or
even Proto Indo-European rising in the Panjab or elsewhere in northern
India, ignoring 150 years of evide nce fixing their origins to the
northwest. Extreme "out-of-India" proponents even fanaticise an India
that is the cradle of all civilisation, angrily rejecting all
suggestions that peoples, languages, or technologies ever entered
prehistoric India from f oreign soil - as if modern concepts of
"foreign" had any meaning in prehistoric times.
Ironically, many of those expressing these anti-migrational views are
emigrants themselves, engineers or technocrats like N.S. Rajaram, S.
Kak, and S. Kalyanaraman, who ship their ideas to India from U.S.
shores. They find allies in a broader assortment of home-grown
nationalists including university professors, bank employees, and
politicians (S. S. Misra, S. Talageri, K.D. Sethna, S.P. Gupta,
Bh. Singh, M. Shendge, Bh. Gidwani, P. Chaudhuri, A. Shourie,
S.R. Goel). They have even gained a small but vo cal following in
the West among "New Age" writers or researchers outside mainstream
scholarship, including D. Frawley, G. Feuerstein, K. Klostermaier,
and K. Elst. Whole publishing firms, such as the Voice of India and
Aditya Prakashan, are devoted to pr opagating their ideas.
There are admittedly no universal standards for rewriting history.
But a few demands must be made of anyone expecting his or her
scholarship to be taken seriously. A short list might include: (1)
openness in the use of evidence; (2) a respect for well-es tablished
facts; (3) a willingness to confront data in all relevant fields; and
(4) independence in making conclusions from religious and political
agendas.
N.S. Rajaram typifies the worst of the "revisionist" movement, and
obviously fails on all counts. The Deciphered Indus Script is based
on blatantly fake data (the "horse seal," the free-form
"decipherments"); disregards numerous well-known facts ( the dates of
horses and chariots, the uses of Harappan seals, etc.); rejects
evidence from whole scientific fields, including linguistics (a
strange exclusion for a would-be decipherer!); and is driven by
obvious religious and political motives in claimi ng impossible links
between Harappan and Vedic cultures.
Whatever their pretensions, Hindutva propagandists like Rajaram do not
belong to the realm of legitimate historical discourse. They
perpetuate, in twisted half-modern ways, medieval tendencies to use
every means possible to support the authority of relig ious texts. In
the political sphere, they falsify history to bolster national pride.
In the ethnic realm, they glorify one sector of India to the detriment
of others.
It is the responsibility of every serious researcher to oppose these
tendencies with the only sure weapon available - hard evidence. If
reactionary trends in Indian history find further political support,
we risk seeing violent repeats in the coming deca des of the fascist
extremes of the past.
The historical fantasies of writers like Rajaram must be exposed for
what they are: propaganda issuing from the ugliest corners of the pre-
scientific mind. The fact that many of the most unbelievable of these
fantasies are the product of highly trained e ngineers should give
Indian educational planners deep concern.
In a recent online exchange, Rajaram dismissed criticisms of his faked
"horse seal" and pointed to political friends in high places, boasting
that the Union government had recently "advised" the "National Book
Trust to bring out my popular book, From Sarasvati River to the Indus
Script, in English and thirteen other languages."
We fear for India and for objective scholarship. To quote Rajaram's
Harappan-Vedic one last time: "A great disgrace indeed!"
(Michael Witzel is Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University
and the author of many publications, including the recent monograph
Early Sources for South Asian Substrate Languages, Boston: ASLIP/
Mother Tongue 1999. A collecti on of his Vedic studies will be
published in India by Orient Longman later this year. He is also
editor of The Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, accessible through
his home page at
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~witzel/mwpage.htm.
Steve Farmer, who received his doctorate from Stanford University, has
held a number of academic posts in premodern history and the history
of science. Among his recent works is his book Syncretism in the
West, which develops a cross-cultural m odel of the evolution of
traditional religious and philosophical systems. He is currently
finishing a new book on brain and the evolution of culture. He can be
contacted at ***@safarmer.com.)
http://www.hvk.org/articles/1000/12.html
...and I am Sid Harth
