Aryan-Dravidian Divide or Kinship?

by Michel Danino Published in Thamizhaga Anthannar Varalaaru (History of Tamilnadu Brahmins), Brahmin Research Centre, Chennai, 2004, Chennai pp. 92438

For a century and a half, Indian children have learned in their history classes that an Aryan people entered India around 1500 BC and subjugated the native Dravidians, driving them to the South of the peninsula. Everything about those two peoples, originally referred to as races, was said to be different: their skin colour, noses, temperament, languages, literatures, and of course cultures. Thus a deep divide was sought to be institutionalized between so-called Aryans and so-called Dravidians. Textbooks, scholarly literature, dictionaries and encyclopaedias relayed this new knowledge new, because Indians had never defined themselves as Aryans or Dravidians in any racial or ethnical sense, until nineteenth-century European scholars decided otherwise. The issue generously spilt over beyond the scholarly field, as politicians seized on it, especially in Tamil Nadu, and turned it into an ideology which declared that North Indians were descendants of the Aryan invaders, their Sanskrit language (and its offshoot, Hindi) was a foreign import and imposition, and Vedic culture was out to suppress the older Dravidian culture. The motive was clear: encourage division, create imaginary frustrations and promote rejection of anything perceived as Aryan, including Sanskrit, Vedic culture and Hinduism, and of course the Brahmin caste. A divisive colonial theory was thus readily accepted and amplified to foster an equally divisive political agenda, whose objective was to rid their State of all forms of Aryan imposition. With no solid evidence, everything South Indian was projected as being separate; the result inevitably led to a separatist movement. That it failed to gather momentum among the masses is only a testimony to the stronger cultural bonds that unite Indians. Still, a sense of separateness has been created among some South Indians, Tamilians especially, through distorted textbooks and propaganda. In recent years, a growing number of scholars, archaeologists and historians have come to dispute the very occurrence of an Aryan invasion of India; they have done so on several grounds, a few of which we will briefly examine.1 If they are right, that

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would naturally sap the very foundations of the Aryan-Dravidian divide. Let us first summarize the evidence. No Archaeological Evidence of an Aryan Invasion An invasion by Aryans or any other people from Central Asia, moving across the plains of the Indus and its tributaries, would have left some physical traces. It so happens that this region has been rather well explored, as it was one of the two heartlands of the Indus Valley (or Harappan) civilization the other being the Sarasvati river, which is why this civilization is now increasingly named the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. By whatever name, it developed a remarkably advanced urban phase from about 2600 BC, which came to an end around 1900 or 1800 BC. For decades after its discovery in 1921-22, archaeologists hunted for evidence of an invasion by Aryans, who at first were assumed to have destroyed this civilization. However, they could not come up with the smallest bit of evidence relatable to any invading group; as a result, today, they all agree that there is no physical sign of any invasion of the subcontinent towards the end of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization or for several centuries thereafter. We find no sudden appearance of any artefacts denoting an incoming culture anywhere in the North-West no new type or style of pottery, weapon, tool, art or building. Renowned archaeologists such as G. F. Dales, Jim Shaffer, J.-F. Jarrige, B. B. Lal, S. R. Rao, S. P. Gupta, Dilip K. Chakrabarti, J. M. Kenoyer and many others can be quoted to that effect. Let us give just one example from the last:
There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass migrations into the Indus Valley between the end of the Harappan Phase about 1900 BC and the beginning of the Early Historic period around 600 BC.2

Kenoyer calls the Aryan invasion theory an absurd theory. Let us note, moreover, that there is no sign whatsoever of any man-made destruction in the entire Indus-Sarasvati civilization; it was possibly the most peaceful in the ancient world, and the end of its urban phase was most likely caused by environmental cataclysms such as earthquakes and the consequent diversion and drying up of the Sarasvati river, its main lifeline. The Sarasvati River In fact, the Sarasvati river provides us with the strongest evidence against the Aryan invasion theory. The existence of the vanished river has been demonstrated by considerable data from field surveys by geologists and archaeologists, and from satellite

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photography.3 What has come to light is the dry bed of a once huge river which flowed through the Ghaggar-Hakra valley in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Pakistans Cholistan desert, and followed a course south of the Indus to finally reach the Arabian sea north of the Rann of Kutch. Along this dry bed, at least 1,000 Harappan settlements have been listed by Pakistani and Indian archaeologists. Most archaeologists, even conservative ones such as Gregory Possehl or Raymond and Bridget Allchin, accept the identification of the Ghaggar-Hakra river with the ancient Sarasvati repeatedly praised in the Rig-Veda. Because the Rig-Veda describes the Sarasvati as a mighty river (VI.61.13) flowing from the mountain to the sea (VII.95.2), the Rishis who composed the Vedic hymns must have lived near the Sarasvati while it still flowed, therefore in matureHarappan times at the latest, around 2500 BC or earlier. This contradicts the conventional view that the invading Aryans composed the Vedic hymns around 1500 or even 1200 BC how could they have praised the mighty Sarasvati when it had disappeared centuries earlier? Cultural Continuity In reality, what emerges from the archaeological record is a remarkable continuity in Indias prehistory right from 7000 BC (e.g. at Mehrgarh in Baluchistan) up to the historic period. After the collapse of the Indus-Sarasvati urban administration, the Harappan legacy lived on in the villages, and many of its contributions resurfaced a millennium later in the second urbanization which started around the eighth century BC. Examples of such survivals have been documented in various fields from agriculture to technology and from town-planning to governance.4 In the Harappan cultural and religious life in particular, we may mention depictions of the swastika, the trishul, the presence of fire altars, the use of conches for libations as well as for blowing, the sacredness of the pipal and other trees, or the use of pigment at the parting of the hair (found on a few female statuettes). In addition, symbols depicted on the seals or other artefacts, such as the bull or a mother-goddess, evoke Vedic themes; one seal from Chanhu-daro symbolically depicts the marriage of Heaven and Earth, a theme central to the Rig-Veda. We also see numerous deities seated or standing in yogic postures, the socalled priest king in deep contemplation, and figurines in various yoga asanas (e.g. at Lothal), all of which shows that yoga was a Harappan tradition. It is therefore not surprising that John Marshall, one of Mohenjo-daros first excavators, remarked in 1931:

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[The Harappan] religion is so characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still living Hinduism.5

More recently, Colin Renfrew, a well-known British archaeologist, went further and asserted:
It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley civilization.6

Final proof of a Vedic background to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization will only come with the decipherment of the Indus script, but the high degree of cultural continuity between Harappan and later times strongly militates against the cultural break that the Aryan invasion theory postulated. Biological Continuity The Aryan invasion theory also assumed that a new people entered India, taller and fairer than the natives. This myth was the outcome of nineteenth-century European politics supported by spurious scholarship.7 In recent decades, many sites of different epochs throughout India have yielded skeletons, and experts examining them have tried to see if the dead men might tell a tale of Aryan invasion: this would have been the case if a distinct human type could be shown to have appeared in India in the centuries that followed the disintegration of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. However, U. S. anthropologist K.A.R. Kennedy, who studied many skeletons at Harappan sites, is categorical:
Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.... In short, there is no evidence of demographic disruptions in the north-western sector of the subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture.8

Previous studies by Indian experts had reached exactly the same conclusion. Kennedy also refers to a biological continuum [... with] the modern populations of Punjab and Sind,9 which rules out any invasion or large-scale migration into the subcontinent. Let us note here that we in India are not sufficiently aware that race as a concept has lost all scientific validity. To quote Gregory Possehl:
Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been totally discredited as a useful concept in human biology.... There is no reason to believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European languages and was possessed with a coherent and well-defined set of Aryan or Indo-European cultural features.10

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In other words, to speak of an Aryan or a Dravidian race is absurd. Human types vary all over India, and no one can say where one type begins or ends. Biological evidence rules out any substantial difference between the Harappans and todays inhabitants of the same region (Sindhis, Punjabis, Gujaratis, Rajasthanis etc.). This also means that the Harappans cannot have been Dravidians or the ancestors of todays South Indians. The Harappans Were Not Dravidians Archaeological evidence equally rejects the possibility that the Harappans might have migrated to South India en masse under some Aryan onslaught. If they had, we should expect to find at least a few late-Harappan settlements on the way to the South there are none beyond the Vindhyas. We would also expect some survival or Harappan artefacts in the South again, there is none. And let us not forget that the earliest signs of an urban civilization (in Tamil Nadu) go no further back than the third or fourth century BC, i.e. 1,500 years after the end of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization! Assuming Dravidians had been its creators, what happened to them during that lengthy interval? Why did they forget all their Harappan achievements, including writing, town-planning and building techniques? When neither the supposed Aryan migration into India nor the supposed Dravidian migration to the South receive the smallest scrap of confirmation from archaeology and anthropology, why insist on them at all? Brahui Self-styled pro-Dravidian scholars are content with brushing aside the above evidence, and often point to what they think to be a linguistic proof: the presence of Brahui, a Dravidian dialect in Baluchistan. Brahui, they argue, shows that Dravidian languages were once widespread in the Indus region and therefore that Harappans were Dravidians. There are many gaps and fallacies in the argument, but the worst of all is that several linguists who have studied Brahui (for instance Jules Bloch, Joseph Elfenbein and H. H. Hock11) have concluded that far from being an ancient relic in the region, it is a fairly recent import from central India. Thus the whole argument has actually no basis, leave alone that using a dialect of today to draw conclusions on the languages spoken in the same region 5,000 years ago is reckless, to say the least.

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Literary Evidence It is now clear that the Aryan invasion of India never took place. Long before archaeological findings established this, many Indians, including Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, B. R. Ambedkar, noted that Indian literature and tradition carries no memory of an Aryan invasion of the subcontinent, much less of a clash between supposed Aryans and supposed Dravidians. Sri Aurobindo,12 and more recently scholars such as George Erdosy13 and Thomas T. Trautmann,14 have effectively repudiated the nineteenth-century misreadings of the Rig-Veda, which sought to portray the wars between Aryas and Dasyus as conflicts between Aryans and Dravidians. The last scholar, for instance, stated:
That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a miracle of faith. Is it not time we did away with it?... The concept of race does nothing to illuminate our understanding of the ancient sources of Indian history and, on the contrary, has only served to corrupt our reading of them.15

If Sanskritic scriptures and traditions are silent about an Aryan-Dravidian conflict, so is Tamil tradition. There is no record, no recollection of any physical or cultural clash between Aryan and Dravidian. This means that if we were to accept the old invasion theory, we would also have to assume that both Aryans and Dravidians were struck with complete amnesia shortly thereafter! Still, the question remains: What kind of culture does the Sangam literature, Indias oldest non-Sanskritic literature, point to? Is there any truth in the claim of Dravidian activists that it depicts a non-Vedic culture? An objective examination of the Sangam literature points exactly to the opposite. No doubt, Tamil poetry has a stamp and genius of its own, but from its earliest layers it integrates Hindu gods and goddesses, the caste system, references to the Mahabharata and Ramayana, to many Puranic legends and concepts, as well as Buddhist and Jain elements. A wealth of examples can be and has been given.16 We will only mention a few briefly here. The Tolkappiyam refers to Vedic mantras as the exalted expression of great sages. In its well-known fivefold division of the Tamil land (the five tinai), each tinai is associated not only with one poetical mood, but also with one deity: Cheyon (Murugan), Korravai (Durga), Mayon (Vishnu-Krishna), Varuna and Ventan (Indra), a fine synthesis of non-Vedic, Vedic and Puranic gods. The Eight Anthologies (ettuttokai) abound in references to many gods: Shiva, Uma, Murugan, Vishnu, Lakshmi (Tiru) and several other Saktis.18 The Paripadal, for instance, consists almost entirely of
17

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devotional poetry to Vishnu. The Purananuru,19 whose poems stress human heroism and sentiments more than religious feelings, still refers to Lord Shiva as the source of the four Vedas (166) and describes Lord Vishnu as blue-hued (174) and Garudabannered (56). Similarly, a poem (360) of a third anthology, the Akananuru, declares that Shiva and Vishnu are the greatest of gods. Deities apart, landmarks sacred in the North, such as the Himalayas or Ganga, also become objects of great veneration in Tamil poetry. Court poets praised Chera kings for conquering North Indian kingdoms and carving their emblem onto the Himalayas. India was seen as one entity; thus the Purananuru says they ruled over
the whole land With regions of hills, mountains, Forests and inhabited lands Having the Southern Kumari And the great Northern Mount [the Himalayas] And the Eastern and Western seas As their borders....20

The Kural follows the traditional Sanskritic four objects of human life: dharma (aram in Tamil), artha (porul), kama (inbam) the last (moksha) being implied rather than explicit. It has references to Bhagavan (1), Indra (25), Vishnus avatar of Vamana (610), also to Lakshmi (167, 179, 920), and to concepts such as rebirth (10). Far from being the atheistic text it is sometimes said to be, the Kural reflects much the same values we find in the Gita and other scriptures.21 Of course, later texts such as the two epics, the Shilappadikaram and the Manimekhalai, are even more replete with Vedic, Buddhist, Jain and Puranic inputs. Quoting from various Sangam texts, P. S. Subrahmanya Sastri demonstrated how a knowledge of Sanskrit literature from the Vedic period to the Classical period is essential to understand and appreciate a large number of passages scattered among the poems of Tamil literature.22 Others have added to the long list of such examples.23 Thus the most ancient culture of the Tamil land known to us is inextricably related to Vedic culture. This picture is confirmed by findings from archaeology and epigraphy.24 Aryan-Dravidian Kinship Let us always keep in mind that culture, ethnicity and language are three different, unrelated notions. One language may be a vehicle for several cultures, just as several languages may give voice to one culture. As regards ethnicity, we would do well to forget about it in the Indian context: is the peasant of north Karnataka (a Dravidian, we are told) genetically closer to his Aryan counterpart across the Karnataka-

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Maharashtra border, or to a Tamilian of Kanyakumari? We remain obsessed by words like Aryan and Dravidian, forgetting that their racial meaning has no validity. Archaeologist S. P. Gupta correctly states,
There was neither an Aryan race nor a Dravidian Race. The concept of race itself is a myth.25

Those much-abused words of Aryan and Dravidian are therefore acceptable only in a geographical sense, as they were used in the ancient texts: dravida referred to South India in Sanskrit texts, while arya referred to North India in the Sangam literature. In addition, the Vedas gave arya has a primary cultural meaning: an Arya is one who fights for the truth and upholds Vedic culture. But a racial meaning such as the one imposed by nineteenth-century European scholars was never intended. To insist on divisive theories that receive support neither from archaeology nor from Indian literature or tradition is irrational as well as irresponsible. Whatever regional variations we may note between South and North India, the underlying picture is one of kinship. Without it, India could not have been regarded as one land and one nation, as it has been for millennia. We often read about India as a land of unity in diversity; diversity is certainly there to a very high degree, and has greatly enriched Indian culture, but let us not lose sight of what made unity possible.

References
More detailed studies include: Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate by Koenraad Elst (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 1999), The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate by Edwin Bryant (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), and The Invasion That Never Was by Michel Danino (Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2nd ed., 2000).
2 1

J. M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Karachi & Islamabad: Oxford University Press & American Institute of Pakistan Studies, 1998), p. 174.

See Vedic Sarasvati Evolutionary History of a Lost River of Northwestern India, edited by B. P. Radhakrishnan & S. S. Merh (Bangalore: Geological Society of India, 1999) and Sarasvati, the River that Disappeared by K. S. Valdiya (Hyderabad: Universities Press, 2002).

In addition to J. M. Kenoyers comprehensive book (see note 2), see B. B. Lals India 1947-1997: New

Light on the Indus Civilization and The Sarasvati Flows On: the Continuity of Indian Culture (New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 1998 & 2002).

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5 6

John Marshall, Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization (London: 1931), vol. I, p. vi-viii. Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language the Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (London: Penguin

Books, 1989), p. 190.

7 8

For more details, see chapter 1 of The Invasion That Never Was by Michel Danino.

Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South Asia? in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, ed. George Erdosy (Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), p. 60, 54.

Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, Skulls, Aryans and Flowing Drains, in Harappan Civilization a

Contemporary Perspective, ed. Gregory L. Possehl (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH, 1st ed., 1982), p. 291.
10 11

Gregory L. Possehl, The Indus Age: The Beginnings (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH, 1999), p. 42

See Hans Heinrich Hock, Convergence of Subversion? The Issue of Pre-Vedic Retroflexion Reexamined. Pp.73-115 in Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, vol. 23.2 (Fall 1993). See also a discussion

of the question of Brahui in The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate by Edwin Bryant, op. cit., p. 83.
12

Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Centenary Edition (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972), vol. 10.

See George Erdosy, The meaning of Rgvedic pur: Notes on the Vedic landscape, in From Sumer to Meluhha, ed. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1994).
14 15 16

13

See T. R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997). Ibid., p. 215.

See for instance K. V. Sarma, Spread of Vedic Culture in Ancient South India in The Adyar Library Bulletin, 1983, 43:1. See also Vedic Roots of Early Tamil Culture by Michel Danino, available online

at http://www.bharatvani.org/michel_danino/tamil_cult01.html .
17

Tolkappiyam, Porul 166, 176, quoted by K. V. Sarma, Spread of Vedic Culture in Ancient South

India, op. cit., p. 5.

18

See K. V. Raman, Sakti Cult in Tamil Nadua Historical Perspective (paper presented at a seminar on

Sakti Cult, 9th session of the Indian Art History Congress at Hyderabad, in November 2000).
19 20

Purananuru, 2, 93, etc. See also invocatory verse.

Purananuru, 17 as translated in Tamil Poetry Through the Ages, vol. I, Ettuttokai: the Eight Anthologies, ed. Shu Hikosaka and G. John Samuel (Chennai: Institute of Asian Studies, 1997), p. 311.
21

For more details on Tiruvalluvars indebtedness to Sanskrit texts, see V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitars study of the Kural, as quoted by P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar in History of the Tamils (Madras: reprinted Asian

Educational Services, 1995), p. 589-595.

22

P. S. Subrahmanya Sastri, An Enquiry into the Relationship of Sanskrit and Tamil (Trivandrum:

University of Travancore, 1946), chapter 3.

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See for instance: K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, Sanskrit Elements in Early Tamil Literature, in Essays in Indian Art, Religion and Society, ed. Krishna Mohan Shrimali (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1987); K. V. Sarma, Spread of Vedic Culture in Ancient South India, op. cit.; Rangarajan, Aryan Dravidian Racial Dispute from the Point of View of Sangam Literature, in The Aryan Problem, eds. S. B. Deo & Suryanath Kamath (Pune: Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti, 1993), p. 81-83.
24 25

23

See Vedic Roots of Early Tamil Culture by Michel Danino, op. cit. S. P. Gupta, Paleo-Anthropology and Archaeology of the Vedic Aryans, in The Aryan Problem, eds.

S. B. Deo and S. Kamath, op. cit., p. 157 (emphasis in the original).