Flaws in Arya-Dravid Theory
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Transcript of Flaws in Arya-Dravid Theory
N
N.S. Rajaram
Origins Of The Aryan Dravidian Divide
"Aryan-Dravidian divide is a modern political creation with no
scientific or historical support."
Science on Aryan and Dravidians
Even fifty years after independence, it is unfortunate but true that
Indians continue to view themselves and their history through
colonial glasses. The education system for the most part continues to
be based on the Macaulayite model. This is especially so in subjects
like history, which include long discredited theories like the Aryan
invasion and the Aryan-Dravidian conflicts. What is the truth? Here
is what science has to say.
A recently published study comparing the genetic composition of
Western Eurasian and Indian populations shows that the supposed Aryan
invasion of India 3000 to 4000 years ago postulated by historians in
the nineteenth century, and still found in many textbooks is
contradicted by genetics. In articles that appeared in the British
journal Current Biology, T.R. Disotell, T. Kivisild and their
coworkers observe that the "supposed Aryan invasion of India 3000 -
4000 years ago was much less significant than is generally believed."
A key mitochondrial DNA of the Western Eurasian strain accounts for
at most 5.2 percent in Indian populations as compared to 70 percent
in Europe. This rules out a recent common origin as postulated by
the 'Aryan invasion'. Any split that occurred from a common
population must have taken place more than 50,000 years ago,
according to the study. This is in agreement with other genetic data,
showing that there were major migrations out of Africa into Southeast
Asia at approximately the same time. It is worth noting that
according to a widely accepted theory, humans evolved in Africa and
spread into other parts of the world beginning about 100,000 years
ago. This was during the last Ice Age, when much of the Northern
Hemisphere was uninhabitable due to extreme cold. The Puranas also
record that during an extended cold period, people from all parts of
the world sought shelter in India in caves and rock shelters. This
goes to explain the presence of ancient cave- and rock art at places
like Bhimbetka in Central India.
Here is something really interesting. The authors of the genetic
study note that this West Eurasian strain is not only insignificant,
but also present in roughly the same proportions in North and South
India. This means that there is no correlation between the languages
of the population and their supposed Eurasian origin. The 'Aryan
invasion' theory holds that ancestors of speakers of 'Aryan'
languages like Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and others were Eurasian
invaders, whereas speakers of 'Dravidian' languages of South India
were the original inhabitants of India. The genetic study contradicts
this by showing both to have the same insignificant proportion of the
West Eurasian DNA strain. So, according to science, there is no Aryan-
Dravidian divide.
The recent decipherment of the Indus script shows that these findings
are in agreement with findings from archaeology. Jha and I have read
more than 2000 Harappan seals and they show that the Vedic literature
already existed by 3000 BC. The literary evidence of the Rigveda also
contradicts any invasion from Eurasia. Some recent attempts to place
the Rigvedic land in Afghanistan are seriously misguided. The Rigveda
describes an established maritime society in which references to the
ocean, ships and navigation are very common. It is not easy to see
how such a society could flourish in land-locked Afghanistan. All in
all both science and literature shatter the notion of any Aryan
invasion. It is one of the aberrations of scholarship that belongs to
what Millikan called 'pathological science'. Let us next look at its
history and politics.
Aryans according themselves
The first point to note is that the idea of Aryans and Dravidians as
separate, even mutually hostile people is of very recent origin. It
is a creation of European scholars of the colonial era, having no
basis in Indian history or literature. The Amarakosha, the
authoritative lexicon of the Sanskrit language (5th century AD)
defines Arya as mahakula kulinarya sabhya sajjana sadhavah. This
means that an Arya is one who hails from a distinguished family, and
conducts himself with decency and gentleness. According to the
Rigveda the "children of Arya follow the light", meaning they seek
enlightenment. It has nothing to do with race, language or
nationality. (Sanskrit has no word for race.)
This fact - that the Aryan-Dravidian theory was of recent origin -
was noted by Dr. Ambedkar also. As he wrote: "All the princes,
whether they belonged to the so-called Aryan race or the so-called
Dravidian race, were Aryas. Whether a tribe or a family was racially
Aryan or Dravidian was a question that never troubled the people of
India, until foreign scholars came in and began to draw the line."
This is supported also by the Manusmriti, another ancient authority.
It tells us that Dravidians (in the geographic sense) are also Aryans
who at one time had fallen from the Aryan fold when they stopped
following certain Vedic practices and rituals. (Was this the reason
that Sage Agastya went south of the Vindhyas, taking Vedic knowledge
with him?) The Manusmriti has been revised many times to reflect
changes in society and practices. In one particular place it
describes Arya Desha as: "The land bounded by the mountain of Reva
(Narmada), the Eastern Sea (Bay of Bengal) and the Western Sea
(Arabian Sea) is Arya Desha. This is the land where black-skinned
deer roam freely." That is to say, the Manusmriti identifies Arya
Desha as none other than Peninsular India, which includes Dravidians.
It also tells us that the inhabitants of this country are exemplary
Aryans, worthy of emulation by all.
What this means is that the terms 'Arya' and 'Aryadesha' were
assigned to people and their habitat depending on their conduct and
culture - and not race or language. This also means that the
assignment could change depending on whether the people had lapsed
from their expected standards of behavior. So at the time when this
passage in the Manusmriti was composed, the people of Peninsular
India were considered exemplary Aryans. And this was because of their
conduct - not language or race.
'Race science': Colonial-missionary politics
The notion of Aryan and Dravidian as separate races, though a
colonial European imposition continues to influence intellectual
discourse in India. This is unfortunate because it rests on
scientifically discredited beliefs. Writing as far back as 1939, Sir
Julian Huxley, one of the great natural scientists of the century,
observed: "In England and America the phrase 'Aryan race' has quite
ceased to be used by writers with scientific knowledge, though it
appears occasionally in political and propagandist literature. In
Germany, the idea of the 'Aryan' race received no more scientific
support than in England. Nevertheless, it found able and very
persistent literary advocates who made it appear very flattering to
local vanity. It therefore steadily spread, fostered by special
conditions."
Huxley was referring of course to the rise of Nazism around the
notion of the Aryan race. It should make one suspicious of the
motives of the English, who, while denouncing racial theories in
Europe, continued to classify their Indian subjects along racial
lines. It was simply a politically convenient tool in their 'divide
and rule' strategy. They appealed to the vanity of one group to make
them feel superior to others (but still inferior to the English).
They knew well that it had no scientific basis, but found it a
convenient tool for use in India!
British were by no means the only colonists to indulge in such
propaganda in the name of 'science'. This idea of dividing a
conquered people in the name of 'race science' was a standard ploy of
colonial officials and Christian missionaries. Much of the
bloodletting in ethnic conflicts in Africa today is due to such
mischief. Speaking of the recent Hutu-Tutsi conflicts, the French
anthropologist Jean-Pierre Langellier wrote: "The idea that the Hutus
and the Tutsis were physically different was first aired in the 1860s
by the British explorer John Speke The history of Rwanda [like that
of much of Africa] has been distorted by Pere Blancs [White Fathers]
missionaries, academics and colonial administrators. They made the
Tutsis out to be a superior race, which had conquered the region and
enslaved the Hutus. Missionaries taught the Hutus that historical
fallacy, which was the result of racist European concepts being
applied to an African reality. At the end of the fifties, the Hutus
used that discourse to react against the Tutsis."
Sound familiar? The Aryan-Dravidian conflicts are a carbon copy of
the same racist divide, convert and conquer policy. Fortunately that
there is enough indigenous scholarship in India to fight and refute
such political charlatanism, though it did succeed in dividing the
people into mutually hostile camps. This was mainly due to the
patronage extended to them by the ruling authorities - first the
British and then the Marxist dominated Congress. Better sense is now
beginning to prevail. But to their eternal disgrace, the 'Secularist'
and Marxist historians of India continue to peddle this racist
nonsense. They shall live in infamy.
The basic problem with these race theories is that they are based not
on any laws of nature, but man-made classifications that use
externally observable features. As one scholar put it: "The race
concept has no scientific basis. Given any two individuals one can
regard them as belonging to the same race by taking their common
genetic characteristics, or, on the contrary, as belonging to
different races by emphasizing the genetic characteristic in which
they differ." As an illustration, instead of choosing skin- and eye
color as defining parameters, if one were to choose height and
weight, one would end up with African Zulus and Scandinavians as
belonging to the same race. Noting such anomalies, Luigi Cavalli-
Sforza, widely regarded as the world's foremost human geneticist,
observed that such external features simply indicate changes due to
adaptation to the environment. He points out that the rest of the
genetic makeup of the human family hardly differs at all.
There are similar misconceptions about Aryan and Dravidan languages.
The idea that different languages of a 'family' branched off from a
single root language - sometimes called a proto-language - can be
traced to the story of the Tower of Babel found in the Bible.
Biblical beliefs like the creation of the world on October 23, 4004
BC have had great influence on the interpretation of Indian history
and culture by nineteenth century Europeans. The great Max Muller
himself admitted this Biblical belief was the reason why he used 1500
BC as the date of the Aryan invasion. W.W. Hunter, another well-known
Indologist from the same period was even more candid when he
wrote: "... scholarship is warmed with the holy flame of Christian
zeal."
To take an example, Murray Emeneau, a prominent Dravidianist, wrote
as recently as 1954: "At some time in the second millennium BC,
probably comparatively early in the millennium, a band or bands of
speakers of an Indo-European language, later to be called Sanskrit,
entered India over the northwest passes. This is our linguistic
doctrine, which has been held now for more than a century and a half.
There seems to be no reason to distrust the arguments for it, in
spite of the traditional Hindu ignorance of any such invasion." This
is a statement based on faith that has no place in science.
Cultural differences
Culturally the differences that we find between North and South
Indian temples can be attributed to the historical experience of the
last few centuries. The Islamic onslaught destroyed centers of
learning in North India. Alberuni who accompanied Mahmud of Ghazni on
his campaigns in India wrote: "Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity
of the country, and performed there, wonderful exploits, by which the
Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions. ...
Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate
aversion of all the Muslims. This is the reason, too, why Hindu
sciences have retired far away from those parts of the country
conquered by us, and have fled to places, which our hand cannot yet
reach."
A historical fact worth noting that the last great school of Indian
mathematics flourished in far away Kerala in the 14-15th century,
where Madhava and his students worked on problems of Calculus and
Infinite Series more than two centuries before Newton and Gregory.
India before the coming of Islam had many great centers of learning.
Taxila, Nalanda, Vikramashila, Sarnath and many more used to attract
students from all over the world. Following the establishment of the
Delhi Sultanate, for the next six hundred years, not a center of
learning worth the name was established. (I leave out Islamic
theological centers.) It was only in the nineteenth century that
universities began to reappear.
As a result, the influence of Islam has been much greater in the
North than the South. This resulted in a loss of tradition and
skills, which had to be more or less re-acquired beginning in the
18th century. The main influence in the north has been of the Moghul
Empire, while in the south it has been that of the Vijayanagar Empire
and its successors like the kingdoms of Mysore, Travancore and
Tanjavur. It would be a serious error to project this back into early
history - something like projecting back the Portuguese influence on
Goa into the remote past.
At the same time, the differences should not be exaggerated. For
instance, in Kashmir, priests are recruited from Karnataka, while
temples in Nepal have priests from Kerala. The very fact that
Shakaracharya established centers in all corners of India shows that
he was not considered an outsider by North Indians even in those days.
All this brings us back to politics as the main contributor to the
Aryan-Dravidian divide including linguistics. The originator of the
Dravidian language theory was Bishop Caldwell, the author of the
highly influential Comparative Grammar of Dravidian Languages (1856,
1875). He placed Dravidian languages in what he called the Scythian
Language Family. When another linguist (Gover) criticized Caldwell
for his unsound theories about the Scythian family and Dravidian
languages, it drew the following response: "It would have been well,
if Mr. Gover had made himself sure of perfectly apprehending Dr.
Caldwell's Scythic theory before regarding its refutation ... as not
only of considerable moment from a philological point of view but of
vast moral and political importance."
By 'moral and political' he obviously meant Christian missionary and
British colonial interests. To the disgrace of Indian education
authorities and secularist scholars, this is still the version of
history taught in Indian schools.
References
The Politics of History by N.S. Rajaram (1995), New Delhi: Voice of
India. 'The Vedic Dravidians' in A Hindu View of the World by N.S.
Rajaram (1998), New Delhi: Voice of India.