CHAPTER 4
CHRONOLOGY (ALL DATES BCE)
c. 4000-3000 *Indo-European breaks up into separate languages
c. 2100-2000 Light-spoked chariots are invented
c. 2000-1500 Indus civilization declines
c. 1900 Sarasvati River dries up
c. 1700-1500 Nomads in the Punjab compose the Rig Veda; horses arrive in Northwest India
c. 1350 Hittite inscriptions speak about horses and gods
c. 900 The Vedic people move down into the Ganges Valley
VISHNU AND BRAHMA CREATE EACH OTHER
When the three worlds were in darkness, Vishnu slept in the middle of the
cosmic ocean. A lotus grew out of his navel. Brahma came to him and said, “Tell
me, who are you?” Vishnu replied, “I am Vishnu, creator of the universe. All the
worlds, and you yourself, are inside me. And who are you?” Brahma replied, “I
am the creator, self-created, and everything is inside me.” Vishnu then entered
Brahma’s body and saw all three worlds in his belly. Astonished, he came out of
Brahma’s mouth and said, “Now, you must enter my belly in the same way and
see the worlds.” And so Brahma entered Vishnu’s belly and saw all the worlds.
Then, since Vishnu had shut all the openings, Brahma came out of Vishnu’s navel
and rested on the lotus.
—Kurma Purana (500-800 CE)1
THE PROBLEM: THINGS WITHOUT WORDS,
WORDS WITHOUT THINGS
What was the relationship between the people who composed the Vedas (the ancient Sanskrit texts beginning with the Rig Veda, in around 1500 BCE) and the people who lived in the Indus River Valley? Where were the people of the Indus Valley Civilization after the end of the IVC? The myth of the mutual creation of the gods Brahma (the creator) and Vishnu (one of the great male gods of Hinduism) provides us with a basic metaphor with which to consider the connections between Vedic and non-Vedic aspects of Hinduism. It is a third way of dealing with false dichotomies: Where the image of the man/rabbit in the moon represented two simultaneous paradigms, and the image of one woman’s head on another’s body represented the fusion of one culture with another, the mutual creation of Brahma and Vishnu represents such a fusion in which neither can claim priority.
The non-Veda, if I may call it that, has been a largely uncredited partner of Hinduism, for we have heard it only at those relatively late historical moments when it crashed the Sanskrit club. The only way we can tell the story of the literature of the Hindus is to begin with those texts that survived—the Sanskrit texts—but at the same time we must acknowledge, right from the start, from the time of the Rig Veda, the presence of something else in these texts, something that is non-Vedic.
Between about 2000 and 1500 BCE, one culture in Northwest India was dying and another was beginning to preserve its poetry. Fade out: Indus Valley Civilization (IVC). Fade in: the Vedas. Each of these cultures may have been in some way a prequel to Hinduism. The objects of the IVC, things without words, give us a certain kind of information about the people who lived there, but no evidence of where the people of the IVC went after the death of their cities (and, presumably, their texts). With the Vedas we have the opposite problem, words without (most) things (just a few pots and an altar or two), and many words about things, but without much physical evidence about the daily life of the people who first spoke those words or, again, about where they came from. Before we can begin to talk about people, however, we need to say a word about words, about language, and about the prehistory of the people who composed the Rig Veda.
*INDO-EUROPE, THE LAND EAST OF THE ASTERISK
Nineteenth-century German and British linguists, building on some seventeenth-and eighteenth-century hunches,ay demonstrated that Vedic Sanskrit was one of the oldest recorded forms of a language family that included ancient Greek and Latin, Hittite (in ancient Anatolia), the Celtic and Norse-Germanic languages, and, ultimately, French, German, Italian, Spanish, English, and all their friends and relations.2 All these languages are alleged to have run away from the home of a single parent language sometime in the fourth millennium BCE,3 a language that linguists call Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic or Indo-Aryan—more about the overtones of this word, below), more precisely, *Indo-European. We have no attested examples of that language before the breakup; the *Indo-European speakers almost certainly had no knowledge of writing,4 and the earliest example of an Indo-European language that we have is a fourteenth-century BCE Anatolian treaty in Hittite that calls on the Hittite version of several Vedic gods: Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and the Ashvins [Nasatyas]). Therefore, an apologetic or apotropaic asterisk usually hovers over the reconstructed, hypothetical (nowadays we would say virtual) forms of Indo-European (or *Proto-Indo-European, as it is usually called, as easy as *PIE) to indicate the absence of any actual occurrences of the word. For instance, linguists use the Latin equus, Gallic epos, Greek hippos, Sanskritashsva, old English eoh, French cheval, and so forth, to reconstruct the *PIE word for “horse”: ayHekwo-, or ayekwos to its pals in the linguists’ club. And *deiwos develops into deus in Latin, deva in Sanskrit, divo in Russian, and, eventually, our English “Tues[day]” as well as “divine.” Sanskrit and Iranian (or Avestan) formed one of the oldest subfamilies, Indo-Iranian, within this larger group.
How are we to explain the fact (and it is a fact) that people speak one form or another of Indo-European languages from India to Ireland? The hypothesis that a single parent language was the historical source of all the known Indo-European languages is not an observable fact, but linguists regard it as an “inescapable hypothesis.”5 The Indo-European map is linguistic, linking languages together in a family (a rather dysfunctional family, but a family) that is distinct from, for instance, Chinese or the Semitic languages (Hebrew, Arabic) or, more significantly for Hinduism, Tamil and the other South Indian languages in the group called Dravidian. The majority of people in India speak an Indo-European language (76 percent), with Dravidian-language speakers accounting for 22 percent, and the remaining 2 percent taken up by Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman, and tribal languages.
The evidence that the Indo-European languages are related lies primarily in their grammar and vocabulary. Thus the Sanskrit agni (“fire”) is cognate with Latin ignis, English “ignite”; “foot” is pada in Sanskrit, pes, pedis in Latin, pied in French, Fuss in German,foot in English; and so forth. Many Sanskrit words have English cognates: for example, the Sanskrit pashu (“cattle”), preserved in the Latin pecus, is embedded in the English “impecunious” (“out of cattle, or low on cash”).
But the temptation to draw simple conclusions about nonverbal facts from such verbal correspondences must be resisted; the fact that the word for “hand” is different in most of these languages should not be taken to mean that the Indo-European speakers had feet but not hands. So too, people change while words remain the same; words are often, as the French say, “false friends” (faux amis), the same word meaning something different in two different languages, often the very opposite thing. Meanings change in time even within a single culture. Antigods, Asuras (whose name incorporates the word asu, “breath”), are the equal and morally indistinguishable elder brothers and rivals of the gods in the Indo-European or at least Indo-Iranian period (when Ahura Mazda, the “great Asura,” is the chief god of the Avesta), but they later become totally demonic demons. (“Demons,” for that matter, were once benevolent daimons in Greek, before the Christians demonized them, as it were). Sanskrit then created a back formation, taking Asura to mean “non-Sura” (splitting off the initial a of asu to make an a in its privative sense, as in “a-theist”) and inventing the word “Suras” (now said to derive from sura, “wine”) to apply to the wine-drinking gods, the anti-antigods. Although this sort of reasoning might be called etymologic, certainly not logic, people persist in using lexicons as the basis of history and in building elaborate theories about social systems and homelands on this flimsy Indo-European linguistic scaffolding.
Indo-European is a language group; technically, there are no Indo-Europeans, merely Indo-European speakers. But since European scholars also assumed, quite reasonably, that wherever the languages went, there had to be people to carry them, Indo-European speakers are often called Indo-Europeans. Moreover, we are able to construct some of Indo-European culture, not merely from isolated words and parallel grammar structures but from the more substantial historical, linguistic, and archaeological evidence. For instance, we know that cattle rustling was the basic trade of all of the Indo-European speakers, from the Celts to the Indians, because closely parallel myths from Greece, India, Iran, northern Europe, the Near East, and Scandinavia allow us to reconstruct a *Proto-Indo-European cattle raiding myth.6
Who were these cattle rustlers? More broadly, what is the relationship between the language and the geographical origin and ethnic identity of the *PIE people? Or to put it differently and to limit it to the culture that is the subject of this book . . .
WHERE WERE THE PEOPLE WHO COMPOSED THE VEDAS
BEFORE THEY COMPOSED THE VEDAS?
We do not know for sure, but we can guess, and the craze for origins makes us guess. Some guesses make more sense than others. Here are the four most often cited.
FIRST GUESS: THE ARYANS INVADED INDIA FROM *INDO-EUROPE
“Once upon a time,” the story goes, “blue-haired, blond-eyed people from the north drove their chariots into India and beat the hell out of the dark-skinned people who lived there.” (The northern element was often taken to the extreme. In 1903, Bal Gangadhar Tilak argued, in his The Arctic Home in the Vedas, that the Aryans had composed the Vedas at the North Pole and, on the journey south, divided into two branches, one of which went to Europe, the other to India.) Not surprisingly, nineteenth-century European scholars, serving colonial powers, favored theories of cultural interaction involving invasions or colonization, and the theory that the Vedic people invaded India still has general currency. Behind this guess lies the assumption of a diffusionist, centrifugal cultural movement; like an airline hub dispersing planes, the political center sends out armies and imposes its rule on the neighboring lands. The paradigm of this model is Latin, which did indeed diffuse outward from Rome to all the lands that the Romans conquered and that therefore speak the so-called Romance languages. Linguists then constructed, on the Roman model, an earlier family tree of languages diverging from the center, in this case not from Rome but from the Caucasus, somewhere east of the southern Urals, in southeastern Russia, perhaps on the shores of the northern Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.7 (This is where, as we will see, someone—probably, though not certainly, the *Indo-European people—probably domesticated horses, an event of great significance for the history of Hinduism.) Therefore, the *Indo-European people were also called Caucasians. The mythical land of their family home, recently rechristened Eurostan,8 might just as well be thought of as *Indo-Europe, the land East of the Asterisk.
According to this scenario, one branch of this group traveled down the east side of the Caspian Sea and continued east through Afghanistan, reaching the Punjab before the middle of the second millennium BCE.9 But to say that the languages formed a family isnot to say that the people who spoke them formed a race. There is nothing intrinsically racist about this story of linguistic migration. On the contrary, the eighteenth-century discovery of the Indo-European link was, at first, a preracial discovery of brotherhood; these people are our (linguistic) cousins. But then the nineteenth-century Orientalists, who now had a theory of race to color their perceptions, gave it a distinctly racist thrust. Their attitude to the nineteenth-century inhabitants of India came to something like “Well, they are black, but their skin color is irrelevant; they are white inside, Greek inside, just like us.” There were also anti-Semitic implications: One reason why British and German scholars were so happy to discover Sanskrit was that they were delighted to find a language older than Hebrew (which they regarded as, on the one hand, their own language, the language of what they called the Old Testament and, on the other hand, the language of the despised “others,” the Jews, for whom the book was the Hebrew Bible). At last, they thought, Hebrew was no longer the oldest language in the world.
Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word arya, the word that the Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates a linguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather than demographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language. But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for they may never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguistic community.10 After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in their veins.
Nevertheless, the Orientalist version of the Aryan hypothesis boasted not only of the purity of Aryan blood but of the quantity of non-Aryan blood that the Aryans spilled, and this myth was certainly racist. The “invasion of the blonds” story took root and prevailed for many reasons, among them that the British found a history of invasions of India a convenient way to justify their own military conquest of India. And of course the story became an even more racist myth when the Nazis got hold of it and made “Aryan” a word that, like “gay,” or “holocaust,” or “adult” (in the sense of “pornographic,” as in “adult books and films, adult viewing”), no longer means what it once meant.az People always think about race when you say “Aryan,” even though you tell them not to; we can’t forget what we now know about the word; we can’t regain our earlier naiveté. “Hindu” is a somewhat tainted word, but there is no other easy alternative; “Aryan,” by contrast, is a deeply tainted word, and there are easy alternatives. It is therefore best to avoid using the A word, and to call the people who spoke Indo-European languages Indo-European speakers (or, less cumbersome, Indo-Europeans, though this implies an ethnic group).
And since the people who composed the Veda left few archaeological footprints, and all we know for certain about them is that they composed the Veda, let us call its authors, and their community, the Vedic people.
A frequent corollary to the Indo-European invasion theory is the hypothesis that the Vedic people were responsible for the end of the Indus Valley cities. Invasion implies conquest, and who else was there for them to conquer in India? The advocates of this theory cite statements in the Veda about knocking down the fortresses of the barbarians, for the Indus cities did have massive fortification walls.11 They also cite what they interpret as archaeological evidence of sudden, mass deaths in the Indus Valley, and the verses of the Rig Veda that refer to the Dasas as dark-skinned (7.5.3) or dark (1.130.8, 9.41.1, 9.73.5), though the term in question more often refers to evil than to skin color,12 as well as the one Vedic verse that describes them as snub-nosed (“noseless”ba) (5.29.10). Put these data together and you have blond Vedic people responsible for mass death to dark-skinned people in the Indus Valley.
But there is no reason to make this connection. The Vedic people had other enemies, and the Indus Valley people had other, more likely sources of destruction, nor is there reliable evidence that their cities were ever sacked.13 Moreover, it is more likely that the Indo-European incursions came in a series of individual or small group movements, rather than the one, big charge of the light(-skinned) brigade scenario imagined by this first guess.
The smug theory that a cavalcade of Aryans rode roughshod into India, bringing civilization with them, has thus been seriously challenged. The certainty has gone, and new answers have thrown their hats into the ring, just as politically driven as the Aryan invasion theory, and, like most politically driven scholarship (but is there really any other kind?), ranging from plausible (if unsupported) to totally bonkers.
SECOND GUESS: THE CAUCASIANS STROLLED IN FROM THE CAUCASUS
“Once upon a time,” the story goes, “people from the north brought their families and their agriculture into India and settled among the people who lived there.” The first guess, the Aryan invasion theory, is one of the great testosterone myths: They’re guys, they beat everyone up. This second guess, by replacing the word “invasion” with “migration,” takes the military triumphalism out of the theory but retains the basic mechanism and the basic structures: Migrants may have brought an Indo-European language into India.14This approach accounts for a gradual cultural linguistic infusion into India, still with all the baggage that linguists load onto languages—the social classes, the mythology—and supported by the same linguistic evidence, archaeological evidence (such as burial customs15) and pottery that support the invasion theory.16 Those who hold by either of these two theories (invasion or migration) have recourse to later Indian history. The two powers that built the greatest empires in India, the forces of Central Asian Turks and of the British Raj, first entered India not as military conquerors but as traders and merchants, but in the end, it took force majeure to establish and maintain the control of the subcontinent.
Martin West, a leading scholar of Indo-European languages, disdains the idea that the Indo-European speakers came not as conquerors but as peaceful migrants: “In the last fifty years or so there has been a scholarly reaction against the old idea of militant hordes swarming out of Eurostan with battle-axes held high and occupying one territory after another. It has been fashionable to deride this model and to put all the emphasis on peaceful processes of population and language diffuision.”17 But, he continues, both on the analogy with the way that in observable history, other linguistic groups (such as Arabic, Turkic, Latin, Celtic, and German, as well as English and Spanish in the New World, which West does not mention) “grew multitudinous and poured across the length and breadth of Europe,” and considering the fact that “there are constant references to battles and descriptions of fighting” in Indo-European poetic and narrative traditions, it appears “by no means implausible that similar bouts of aggressive migration in earlier eras played a large part in effecting the Indo-European diaspora.” This theory, which is quite plausible, is no longer regarded as PC (in the double sense of “postcolonial” or “politically correct”), because of its political history, and the aptly named Professor West can make it only because he is privileged to belong to a generation of Western (more precisely British) scholars for whom “PC” stands for nothing but “police constable.”
THIRD GUESS: THE VEDIC PEOPLE ORIGINATED IN INDIA
“From the dawn of history, *Indo-European speakers lived in India, in the Punjab, where they composed the Rig Veda.” A stronger version of the theory adds: “They emigrated to Iran (where they composed the Avesta), Anatolia (leaving that early Hittite inscription), Greece and Italy (where they incorporated local languages to develop Greek and Latin), and, finally, ancient Britain.” (The most extreme version of this guess adds: “All the languages in the world are derived from Sanskrit.”18) In this view, the Vedic people may have been, rather than invaders (or immigrants) from southern Russia, “indigenous for an unknown period of time in the lower Central Himalayan regions,”19 particularly in the Punjab. A variant of this argument presupposes not the same centrifugal diffusion that underlies the first two guesses (simply radiating from India instead of the Caucasus) but a centripetal convergence, into India rather than from the Caucasus: Separate languages came together in India, influencing their neighbors to produce a family resemblance; the people who spoke those separate languages came together and then took back home, like souvenirs, bits of one another’s languages.
Why couldn’t it have happened that way? In reaction to the blatantly racist spin and colonial thrust of the first two guesses, which imply that Europeans brought civilization to India, this theory says, “Look, we in India had civilization before you Europeans did!” (This is certainly true; no matter where they came from or what their relationship was, the people of the Indus were building great cities and the people of the Vedas creating a great literature at a time when the British were still swinging in trees.) And then it goes on to say, “You came from us. The people who created Vedic culture did not enter India; they began in India.” As a theory, it is reasonable in itself, but there is considerable evidence against it,20 and both linguistic and archaeological arguments render it even more purely speculative than the Aryan invasion theory.21 It has the additional disadvantage of being susceptible to exploitation by the particular brand of Hindu nationalism that wants the Muslims (and Christians) to get out of India: “We were always here, not even just since the Rig Veda, but much, much earlier. This land was always ours.”
FOURTH GUESS: THE VEDIC PEOPLE LIVED IN THE INDUS VALLEY
“Once upon a time, the people of the Indus Valley Civilization composed the Vedas.” The final step is simply to assume that some or all of the inhabitants of the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were themselves Indo-European speakers; that the people who built the cities also composed the Vedas,22 that the Indus civilization itself is the site of the mythological Vedic age.23 In favor of this is the evidence of some continuity between both the space and the time of the Indus and Vedic civilizations,24 which almost certainly shared some of the territory of the greater Punjab during some part of the second millennium BCE, as well as a number of cultural features. One variant of this theory argues that (1) since there are Dravidian (and Munda) loan words in the Vedas (which is true), and (2) since the Harappan script is a form of Sanskrit (which is almost certainly not true, and certainly unproved, though reputable scholars as well as cranks have identified the Indus inscriptions as part of “the Indian/Persian/ Indo-European religious system and Sanskrit language”25), therefore (3) the IVC is a hybrid Sanskrit/Dravidian culture produced by (4) Indo-European speakers who came from Europe to North India to interact with Dravidian speakers from India, starting in the middle of the fourth millennium BCE.26
This theory still assumes a migration into India from Europe, but one that is met by an earlier Dravidian presence. Some see in the Indus Valley not merely the seeds of later Hinduism but the very religion described in the almost contemporaneous Rig Veda; they argue, for instance, that the brick platforms found in the Indus were used for Vedic sacrifices.27 This hybrid is sometimes called the Sarasvati Valley culture, or the Indus-Sarasvati culture, because there were Indus settlements on the Sarasvati River (though it dried up around 1900 BCE) and the Rig Veda mentions a Sarasvati River.28 But even when we grant that some sort of gradual cultural interaction took place, and not simply an invasion, it is not likely that the same people could have built the Indus cities and also composed the Rig Veda.
The linguistic and archaeological evidence against this fourth guess is pretty conclusive. It is hard work to fit the ruins of the IVC into the landscape of the Rig Veda.29 The Rig Veda does not know any of the places or artifacts or urban techniques of the Indus Valley.30 None of the things the Veda describes look like the things we see in the archaeology of the Indus. The Rig Veda never mentions inscribed seals or a Great Bath or trade with Mesopotamia, despite the fact that it glories in the stuff of everyday life. It never refers to sculptured representations of the human body.31 It has no words, not even borrowed ones, for scripts or writing, for records, scribes, or letters.32 After the Indus script, writing was not used again in India until the time of Ashoka, in the third century BCE.
Many of the words that the Rig Veda uses for agricultural implements, such as the plow, as well as words for furrow and threshing floor and, significantly, rice, come from non-Sanskritic languages, suggesting that the Vedic people learned much of their agriculture from communities in place in India before they arrived. But the Indus people, who obviously did have plows and mortar, presumably would have had their own words for them. Even in the Vedic period, there was multilingualism. But how could the Vedic people have forgotten about architecture, about bricks, about mortar (let alone about writing)? The answer is simple enough: They had never had them. In the good old days they had always slept on their saddlebags, and once they got to the Punjab they built in wood and straw, like the first two of the three little piggies, not in brick, like the third (and like the Indus people).
It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Indus people composed the Rig Veda. The final nail in the coffin of this theory comes not from the rather technical linguistic arguments but from the testimony of animals, particularly horses.
LIONS AND TIGERS AND RHINOS, OH MY!
Animals in general provide strong clues; they make suggestions, sometimes overwhelmingly persuasive suggestions, if not airtight proofs. The evidence of animals suggests that the civilizations of the Indus Valley and the Vedas were entirely different, though this does not mean that they did not eventually interact. The Rig Veda mentions (here in alphabetical order) ants, antelope, boars, deer, foxes, gazelles, jackals, lions, monkeys, rabbits, rats, quail, and wolves, and other Vedas mention bears, beaver, elk, hares, lynxes, and otters.33 The Rig Veda also mentions lions (10.28.11), though the Vedic people had to invent a word for “lion”34 (and to borrow a word for “peacock”35). (Lions may or may not be depicted in the Indus Valley; there’s a figurine that might be a lion or a tiger.)
The Vedic people knew the elephant but regarded it as a curiosity; they had to make up a word for it and called it “the wild animal with a hand” (mrigahastin ). But they do not mention tigers or rhinoceroses, animals familiar from the Harappan seals. Nor are there any references to unicorns, mythical or real.36 The zoological argument from silence (“the lion that didn’t roar in the night”) is never conclusive (beware the false negative; the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence), but all this suggests that the Vedic people originally lived north of the land where the tiger and the elephant roam, and generally north of the Indus rhinoceroses, on the nonfalsifiable assumption that people who had seen an animal as weird as a rhinoceros would have mentioned it.
TALKING HORSES
Cattle are central to both cultures—though the Indus Valley Civilization favored bulls, the Vedas cows—as well as to many other ancient cultures and therefore of little use as differentiating markers. But the IVC does not seem to know, or care about, the horse, who speaks loudly and clearly in the Vedas (as horses are said to do, beginning in the Vedic tale of the Ashvins—twin horse-headed gods). Let us consider first the possible existence and then the symbolic importance of the horse in each of the two cultures.
On the one hand, wherever Indo-European-speaking cultures have been identified, evidence of horses has been found.37 This does not in itself prove that an ancient culture with no horses is not Indo-European,38 nor does it follow that wherever people had horses, they spoke Indo-European languages. Indo-European culture is contained within the broader range of ancient horse-having cultures, such as China and Egypt. For one thing, the ancestor of the horse, the so-called Dawn Horse, or Eohippus, much smaller than the modern horse, lived throughout Europe as well as North America in the Eocene age (“the dawn of time”), some sixty to forty million years ago. The horse was probably domesticated in several places, and it didn’t happen all at once even in Central Asia.
Nevertheless, the spread of the Central Asian horse (and, after around 2000 BCE, the chariot, for people rode astride for a long time before they began to drive horses) suggests that in general, when Indo-Aryan speakers arrived somewhere, horses trotted in at the same time, and the archaeological record supports the hypothesis that Indo-European speakers did in fact ride and/or drive, rather than walk, into India. For the horse is not indigenous to India. There is archaeological evidence of many horses in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent only in the second millennium BCE, after the decline of the IVC. Horse bits and copper and iron objects were used in Maharashtra, and horse paraphernalia (such as bits) south of the Narmada during or after this period suggest an extensive network of horse traders from northwestern India.39
By contrast, the absence of a thriving horse population in the IVC, the fact that even adamant opponents of Guesses One and Two must admit that the horse seems not to have played a significant role in the Harappan economy,40 supports the hypothesis that the Indus Valley people were not Indo-European speakers.41 Yet the ink was scarcely dry on such statements when people started racing around trying to find horse skeletons in the Indus Valley closet. Now, though it has been asserted with some confidence that no remains of horses have been found anywhere in the Indus Valley culture42 or, somewhat more tentatively, that “the horse was probably unknown” to the Indus people,43 there is archaeological evidence for the possible existence of some horses in the IVC, if very few. From time to time people have come up with what appear to be the bones of quasihorses, protohorses like the donkey, or the Dawn Horse, or the ass or onager; but horse bones are hard to decipher, and these are much disputed. All in all, there may well have been, here or there in the Indus Valley, a horse that loped in from Central Asia or even West Asia.
But such horses were probably imported, like so many other items, in the course of the vigorous IVC international trade.44 India’s notorious lack of native bloodstock may have been, already in the Indus Valley, as ever after, “the Achilles heel of its ambitious empire-builders.”45 For from the time of the settlements in the Punjab, the Indian love of horses—perhaps imprinted by the early experience of the Indo-Europeans in lands north of India, where horses thrived—was challenged by the simple fact that horses do not thrive on the Indian subcontinent and therefore need to be imported constantly. The evidence for the importing of horses can be used to support Guess One (or at least to counter Guesses Three and Four): The IVC had no horses of its own, so could not have been Indo-European speakers. And so the IVC could have played no part in the most ancient Hindu text, the Rig Veda, which is intensely horsey.
But in fact the existence of trade in horses at this time, which seems very likely indeed, can be used to undercut rather than support the argument that the Indo-Aryans invaded India on horseback (Guess One), for one could argue that the Vedic people too imported their horses rather than rode (or drove) them in. Assuming that the Indo-Europeans began in India, one can argue that they eventually emigrated to the Caspian and Black Sea coasts and domesticated the horse there, perhaps learning the trick from the natives; then they sent both the horses and the horse-taming knowledge back to their Indian homeland, and that’s how horses got into the Vedas.46 According to this scenario, it was the horses, not the Indo-European-speaking peoples, that were imported. By separating the entrance into India of the people and their horses, hypothesizing that the people came quite early and only later began to import their horses from the Caucasus, once someone else had domesticated them,47 one might still argue for Guess Three (Indo-Europeans first began in India and, later, imported horses) or even for Guess Four (Indo-Europeans began in the IVC and, later, imported horses).
So much for the rather iffy archaeological record of real horses. The cultural use of the horses of the imagination, however, makes a more persuasive argument against Guess Four.
Talking horses, like real horses, are Indo-European but not only Indo-European. Tales of intimate relationships between heroes and their horses are, like the historical mastery of the horse, the common property of Indo-Europeans and the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.48 A specific historical tradition from Indo-European prehistory is strongly suggested by parallel epithets and other predicates applied to horses in the Greek and Indo-Iranian texts.49 A fourteenth-century BCE Hittite text on the training of horses uses words of Indo-European provenance. Horses, observed in affectionate, minute, often gory, detail, pervade the poetry of the Rig Veda. The Vedic people not only had horses but were crazy about horses.
But horses are not depicted at all in the extensive Indus art that celebrates so many other animals. The Indus people were crazy about animals, but not about horses. So widely accepted is the “horse = Indo-European” equation that even when one or two clay figurines that appear to depict horses were found at a few Indus sites, these were said to “reflect foreign travel or imports,” though the same arguments for the importing of horses applies to the importing of images of horses and disqualify these figurines as evidence one way or another. But more tellingly, “The horse, the animal central to the Rig Veda, is absent from the Harappan seals”50 and “unimportant, ritually and symbolically, to the Indus civilization.”51 Such statements too have acted as a gauntlet to provoke rebuttal. Recently an animal on an Indus seal was identified as a horse,52 but it soon appeared that the seal was upside down, and the animal wasn’t a horse at all, but a fabrication, a unicorn bull made to look like a horse—that is, a (real) unicorn masquerading as a (mythical) horse.53 In Europe, people constructed unicorns by sticking a horn on a horse, either tying a horn onto a real horse or drawing a horn onto a picture of a horse. Only in India does it work the other way around, for on Indus seals, unicorns are real and horses nonexistent.
The absence of representations of horses in the IVC does not mean that they did not have real horses; they might have had them without regarding them as any more worthy of representation than the cows that we know they had and did not depict. Arguments from silence, it will be recalled, may prove to be false negatives, though this particular argument is somewhat supported by the archaeological evidence that there were few, if any, horses. The absence of equine imagery therefore neither proves nor disproves the first three guesses. It does, however, argue strongly against Guess Four, for it is very hard to believe that the hippophiles who composed the Veda would exclude the horse from the stable of animals that they depicted on their seals.
Thus horses do furnish a key to the Indus/Vedic mystery: No Indus horse whinnied in the night. Knowing how important horses are in the Vedas, we may deduce that there was little or no Vedic input into the civilization of the Indus Valley or, correspondingly, that there was little input from the IVC into the civilization of the Rig Veda. This does not mean, of course, that the IVC did not contribute in a major way to other, later developments of Hinduism.
AN ALTERNATIVE ANSWER: FUSION AND BRICOLAGE
It is therefore unlikely that both the Vedas and Harappa were “a product of the civilization of these two peoples,”54 but it is more than likely that later Hinduism was a product of both of them, a linguistic and cultural combination of Vedic words and Indus images, as well as other contributions from other cultures. In some areas this combination was a fusion, a melting pot, a hybrid, while in others the elements kept their original shape and behaved more like a tossed salad, a multiplicity. This is of course quite different from saying that the Veda was composed in the Indus Valley cities. But even if the languages and cultures were distinct, as surely they were, people from the two cultures must have met. Ideas already current in India before the entry of the Vedic people or arising outside the Vedic world after that entry may have eventually filtered into Vedic and then post-Vedic Sanskrit literature.55 (These ideas may have come not only from the IVC but also from the so-called Adivisis or “Original Inhabitants” of India, or from the Munda speakers and Dravidian speakers whose words are already incorporated in the Rig Veda, though that is another story.) Survivors of the Indus cities may have taught something of their culture to the descendants of the poets who composed the Vedas. The people of Harappa may have migrated south, so that their culture could have found its way into the strand of Hinduism that arose there.56 Some elements of pre-Vedic Indo-European civilization may have been taken up by the last inhabitants of the Indus Valley. Some elements of the Indus civilization may have been adopted by the authors of later Vedic literature. Some combination of all of the above seems extremely likely.
A good example of this possible fusion is the case of bricks. The authors of the Rig Veda did not know about bricks; their rituals required only small mud altars, not large brick altars. But later, around 600 BCE, when the Vedic people had moved down into the Ganges Valley and their rituals had become more elaborate, they began to build large brick altars. The size of the mud bricks was a multiple or fraction of the height of the patron of the sacrifice, and a fairly sophisticated geometry was developed to work out the proportions.57 We know that the Indus people had mastered the art of calculating the precise size of bricks, within a system of uniform and proportionate measurement. The use of bricks and the calculations in the Vedic ritual may therefore have come from a Harappan tradition, bypassed the Rig Vedic period, and resurfaced later.58 This hypothesis must be qualified by the realization that kiln-fired (in contrast with sun-fired) brickwork does not reappear until the last centuries BCE,59 a long time for that secret to lie dormant. But other aspects of brickmaking, and other ideas, may have been transmitted earlier.
Though the Vedic people told the story of their early life in India, and their descendants controlled the narrative for a very long time, most of what Hindus have written about and talked about and done, from the Mahabharata on, has not come from the Veda. In part because of the intertextuality and interpracticality of Hinduism, one text or ritual building on another through the centuries, right back to the Veda, scholars looking at the history of transmission have assumed that the Veda was the base onto which other things were added in the course of Indian history, just as Central Asia was the base that absorbed the impact of that interloping piece of Africa so long ago. And in the textual tradition, at least, this is true enough of the form in which the ideas were preserved, the chain of memorized texts. But from the standpoint of the ideas themselves, it was quite the opposite: The Veda was the newcomer that, like the African island fusing onto a preexisting continental base, combined with a preexisting cultural world consisting perhaps of the Indus Valley, perhaps of any of several other, more widely dispersed non-Vedic cultures.
The non-Veda is the fons et origo of Hinduism; new ideas, new narratives, new practices arose in the non-Sanskrit world, found their way into the Sanskrit world, and, often, left it again, to have a second or third or fourth life among the great vernacular traditions of India. These new narratives and practices fitted into the interstices between the plot lines of the great Sanskrit texts, as stories told in response to the protagonists’ questions about places encountered on their travels or to illustrate a relevant moral point, or any other reason why. The non-Veda is not one thing but so many things. We have noted, briefly, and can rank in the order that their records appear in history, the existence of at least five cultures: (1) Stone Age cultures in India long before the Indus are the foundation on which all later cultures built. (2) At some point, impossible to fit into a chronology or even an archaeology, come the Adivasis, the “Original Inhabitants” of India, who spoke a variety of languages and contributed words and practices to various strands of Hinduism. Many of them were there long before the IVC and may have been a part of it; many of them have never been assimilated to Hinduism. Next come (3) the Indus civilization and (4) the village traditions that preceded, accompanied, and followed it, and after that (5) the culture of the Vedic people. Along the way, other language groups too, such as (6) the Tamils and other Dravidian speakers,60 who may or may not have been a part of the IVC, added pieces to the puzzle.
Hinduism, like all cultures, is a bricoleur, a rag-and-bones man, building new things out of the scraps of other things. We’ve seen how the British used the stones of Mohenjo-Daro as ballast for their railway before (and after) they realized what those stones were and that a Buddhist stupa stands over some of the ruins there. So too Hindus built their temples on (and out of) Buddhist stupas as well as on other Hindu temples, and Muslims their mosques on Hindu temples (and Buddhist stupas), often reusing the original stones, new wine in old bottles, palimpsest architecture. In the realm of ideas as well as things, one religion would take up a word or image from another religion as a kind of objet trouvé. There are no copyrights there; all is in the public domain. This is not the hodgepodge that the Hindus and the early Orientalists regarded as dirt, matter out of place, evidence of an inferior status but, rather, the interaction of various different strains that is an inevitable factor in all cultures and traditions, and a Good Thing.
MUTUAL CREATION
A good metaphor for the mutual interconnections between Vedic and non-Vedic aspects of Hinduism is provided by the myth with which this chapter began, “Vishnu and Brahma Create Each Other.” Each says to the other, “You were born from me,” and both of them are right. Each god sees all the worlds and their inhabitants (including both himself and the other god) inside the belly of the other god. Each claims to be the creator of the universe, yet each contains the other creator. In other versions of this myth, each one calls the other tata, a two-way word that a young man can use to call an older man Grandpa, while an older man can use it to call a younger man Sonny Boy; the word actually designates the relationship between young and old.
The myth of Vishnu and Brahma is set at the liminal, in-between moment when the universe has been reduced to a cosmic ocean (dissolution) and is about to undergo a new creation, which in turn will be followed by another dissolution, then another creation, and so on ad infinitum—another series of mutual creations. Vedic and non-Vedic cultures create and become one another like this too throughout the history of Hinduism. This accounts for a number of the tensions that haunt Hinduism throughout its history, as well as for its extraordinary diversity.