ANCIENT INDIA IN A NEW LIGHT A review of Four Books   In Search of The Cradle of Civilization by: Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, & David Frawley Publisher: Quest Books, Wheaton, Illinois, , Price: $24.95 , Pages: 341 Return of the Aryans by: Bhagwan S. Gidwani Publisher: Penguin-India, 1995 , Pages: 943 The Politics of History Aryan Invasion Theory and the Subversion of Scholarship by: Navaratna Rajaram Publisher: Voice of India, New Delhi, 1995 , Pages: 244 The Myth of the Aryan Invasion of India by: David Frawley Voice of India, New Delhi, 1995 , Pages: 58 Reviewed by: C.J.S.Wallia, Ph.D.cjwallia@indiastar.com The "standard" textbooks on India's early history are all wrong! Several new books challenge many of the assertions of Eurocentric historians by presenting abundant evidence--linguistic, literary, archeological, geological, and astronomical. These new books call for a thorough rewrite of the history textbooks used in schools and colleges worldwide, including, sadly, those in India. There never was any "Aryan" invasion of India, nor any "Aryan"-"Dravidian" war. The term "Arya" meant good, referring to quality of behavior, not race. Likewise "dasyu" referred to misconduct, not another race. The Rig Veda was composed not in 1200 B.C.; it was completed in 3700 B.C. The cradle of civilization is not Sumeria in Mesopotamia,but the Sapta Sindhu, the land of seven rivers, in northwest India. From the densely populated Sapta Sindhu, Sanskrit-speaking people migrated to Iran, Greece, and further West. Commenting on the writings of Rajaram and Frawley, Klaus Klostermaier, professor of religion at the University of Manitoba, writes, "The facts referred to in this work are incontrovertible. The conclusions drawn have a high degree of plausibility. Consequently, the implications are nothing less than sensational....Rajaram and Frawley are true pioneers blazing new trails." And so is Subhash Kak, professor of computer science at Louisiana State University, and co-author of In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, who has analyzed the astronomical code of the Rig Veda. Drawing on Kak's work and other evidence, Rajaram has established the period 4000-3700 B.C. for the composition of the Rig Veda. The "standard" textbooks on early Indian history are an example of the adage that history books are written to reflect the views of the conqueror. At first, in the late eighteenth century, when many Sanskrit classics, were translated into contemporary European languages, they drew great admiration from European intellectual luminaries like Voltaire, Goethe, and Hegel. For example, Hegel wrote that India was "the starting-point for the whole Western world." Later, in the nineteenth century, the same G.W.F. Hegel dismissed the Puranas chronologies as fabrications and was generally disparaging of Indian history. Why this reversal? Nineteenth century brought the rise of European imperialism, and with it racist attitudes began to distort European perceptions. The conquered people came to be seen as inferior, and their cultures were devalued. Hegel exemplifies this changed perception. However, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European historians had to contend with a puzzling philological fact: the classical language of India, Sanskrit, and the classical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin, were closely related. In the words of William Jones, one of the earliest to make a systematic study of this resemblance, "... a stronger affinity than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without first believing them to have sprung from some common source...the Sanskrit language is of wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than either." An example of the resemblance: the word for ten is dasha in Sanskrit, deka in Greek, and decem in Latin. Thousands of Sanskrit words such as pitah, brahta, raja have cognates in nearly all European languages, which the philologists started calling Indo-European languages. To account for the common origin of Indo-European languages, several nineteenth century European scholars hypothesized that in ancient times an invasion of India from Europe, by a people who spoke the early Indo-European language -- an "Aryan" invasion--must have occurred. In typical Eurocentric arrogance, they assumed, without any evidence, the direction of the invasion. Principal among these scholars were Max Muller and Monier-Williams, both committed to denigrating India's cultural heritage in order to persuade Indians to convert to Christianity. Max Muller in a letter to his wife wrote: "this edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent... the fate of India, and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3000 years." Monier-Williams, in a speech given at Oxford to the Missionary Congress on 2 May 1877, said that "when the walls of the mighty fortress of Brahminism are encircled, undermined, and finally stormed by the soldiers of the Cross, the victory of Christianity must be signal and complete." Some objective scholars, these! In picking a date for the supposed Aryan invasion of India by a supposed race of people, Muller, writes Rajaram,was "strongly influenced by a current Christian belief that the creation of the world had taken place at 9:00 a.m. on 23 October 4004 B.C.E. Assuming the date of 4004 for the creation of the world, as Muller did, leads to 2448 for the biblical Flood. If another thousand years is allowed for the waters to subside and for the soil to get dry enough for the Aryans to begin their invasion of India, we are left at around 1400. Adding another two hundred years before they could begin composing the Rig Veda brings us right to Muller's date of 1200....he used a ghost story from Somadeva's Kathasaritasagara to support this date." Some historical research, this! David Frawley, author of many books on Sanskrit literature, most notably, Gods, Sages, and Kings: Vedic Secrets of Ancient Civilization , sumarizes his views on Vedic history, society, and geography in The Myth of the Aryan Invasion . Referring to the famous Battle of the Ten Kings in the Rig Veda, 3700 B.C., Frawley writes "The Vedic war is a question of values, not race. It is a conflict between spiritual values and materialistic values, which occurs in all societies. Sometimes arya people become un-arya by a change in values, as indicated in the battle of Sudas....Even names of famous Vedic kings, such as Sudas and Divodasa have the ending of das or dasa meaning 'servant'." Sudas ruled the land of Sapta Sindhu, centered around the mighty Sarasvati river, which flowed from the Himalayas to the Rann of Kutch. After the Battle of the Ten Kings, many Indians migrated westwards into Iran and beyond. Max Muller, with his hidden agenda, charges Frawley, lifted metaphorical passages from the Rig Veda to buttress his"Aryan-invasion-from-Europe" theory. The literary evidence taken in its entirety shows that the Vedic civilization was an indigenous development. Rajaram presents a highly plausible chronological synthesis for ancient Indian civilization. One of the most interesting sections of his book is on the Sulbusutras, 3000 B.C.,-- mathematical manuals for the design and construction of Vedic altars. Rajaram, himself a mathematician, notes that A. Seidenberg, an American historian of science, in his paper entitled Origin of Mathematics, published in the journal Archive for History of Exact Sciences, 1978, "established the Sulbasutras as the basis for the mathematics in Egypt, Babylonia, and Greece. This provides a mathematically rigorous foundation for the derivation of the chronology presented in this book." The principal author of the Sulbasutras, Baudhayana, a South Indian, "discovered the theorem of Pythagoras some two thousand years before Pythagoras. His work was known in Egypt... as early as 2700. He is the first known of the world's mathematicians." This is the civilization that invented mathematics. Rajaram proposes a chronlogy of ancient Indian civilization as beginning with the Mehrgarh site in the northwest, circa 6500 B.C., the earliest and largest urban site of the period in the world. This site has yielded evidence for the earliest domestication of animals, evolution of agriculture, as well as arts and crafts. The horse was first domesticated here in 6500 B.C. Mehrgarh, Harappa and Mohenjodaro are peripheral cities of the great Sarasvati civilization with more than 500 sites along its banks awaiting excavation. 4500 B.C. marks Mandhatr's defeat of Druhyus, driving them to the west into Iran. 4000-3700 B.C. was the Rig Veda period. In 3730 B.C. occurred the Battle of Ten Kings -- the age of Sudas and his sage advisors, Vasistha and Visvamitra. 3600 to 3100 B.C. was the late Vedic age during which Yajur, Sama, and Atharva Vedas were composed. 3100 B.C. is the date of the Mahabharata, composed by Vyasa. At this time, the Sarasvati river lost Yamuna because of a tectonic plate shift. It was the beginning of Kali Yuga. 3000 B.C. was the late Brahmanic period during which early Sutras were composed. In 1900 B.C., another tectonic plate shift made Sarasvati lose Sutlej. This dried up Sarasvati, causing massive exodus of people to the east -- the Ganga valley, whence arose the classical civilization of India. With more than 50 maps and illustrations, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization is a comprehensive book. One of its best sections is on the relation between the Indus-Sarasvati and the Brahmi scripts: Subhash Kak has shown that, in analyzing statistical computer-concordances, "the most frequent letters of the Indus-Sarasvati and the Brahmi scripts look almost identical andshare a rather similar frequency of occurrence" suggesting that the Brahmi is derived from Indus-Sarasvati. He found that "the texts on the steatite seals follow grammatical rules like that of Sanskrit." However, deciphering of the script remains to be done. Another excellent section of this book is "The Dravidian Puzzle": the authors note that "while scholars have identified some twenty Dravidian 'loan words' in the Rig Veda, the Dravidian languages have 'borrowed' at least fifty percent of their vocabulary from (Aryan) Sanskrit." Moreover, many Dravidian scholars credit "the creation of Tamil, the oldest Dravidian tongue, to Agastaya, who figures in the Rig Veda as one of the prominent sages of his era. The Dravidian kings historically have called themselves Aryans and have traced their descent through Manu....northern and southern India share a common culture and religion... God Shiva clearly is synonymous with the Vedic God Rudra." There was no Aryan invasion, no Dravidian invasion, no Aryan-Dravidian war. Sanskrit has been shown to include elements of Munda, the language of the tribals. All three languages are indigenous developments. Bhagwan S. Gidwani's The Return of the Aryans, (Penguin-India, also distributed by Penguin-Canada) a recently published 943-page novel is a highly readable account of the Sapta Sindhu culture around 5100 B.C. as well as the migration of the Aryans from India to the West. In 1996, this novel won the Most Outstanding Book of the Year award from the research and reference center of the historical division. Return of the Aryans is a monumental work with a cast of thousands --among them the hero of mythic birth, Sindhu Putra, the physician-sage Dhanwantar and his wife Dhanwantarti. In his introduction, the author says, "this novel will give a mosaic of a long-forgotten past to show that the Aryans did not belong to a different species, culutre or race. Their cradle-grounds were the Sindhu, Ganga and Dravidian civilizations; and there is an unbroken continuity--spiritual, social and secular--between the pre-ancient civilizations of Bharat Varsha and the Aryans of 5000 BC. ... The Aryans who left Bharat Varsha were not warriors or conquerors, not men of genius or madness; they were not adventurers or soldiers of fortune; and certainly, they were not religious zealots, fanatics or crusaders. These travellers simply had a dream that led them on towards the 'unreachable goal of finding a land that was pure and free form evil-- and it was a road that led everywhere but finally nowhere' and at last they came to realize that there was no land of pure, except what a man might make of his own efforts." This great historical novel presents a skillful exposition of the origin of writing, of mathematics, and technology (agriculture, metallurgy, boat-building, weaponry) in pre-ancient India. Particularly engaging are the chapters on the Aryans' journey from India to Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, Germany, and futher west. The author gives numerous examples of rivers and places named by them: Hari river and Hari rath (Herat), in Afghanistan, Dana (Danube) river in Europe. The Black Sea, near where they camped for a long time and built boats, and Germany's Black Forest are named in memory of the dark-skinned Aryans from India. (In the new novel, the author has made up for the lack of historical authenticity of his earlier novel, The Sword of Tipu Sultan. That "historical" novel was a total fabrication, portraying the bigoted Islamic tyrant as a national hero fighting the British. See Tipu Sultan:Villain or Hero ? published by the Bombay Malayalee Samajam, detailing historical evidence of Tipu Sultan's forced Islamic conversions of thousands of Malayalee Christians and Hindus.) I strongly recommend the four books reviewed here to anyone interested in India's cultural heritage. Dr. C.J.S. Wallia teaches in the Writing Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Phone: 510-848-8200 Address: P.O. Box 5580, Berkeley, CA 94705, U.S.A.