The Indo-European Cloudland

THE INDO-EUROPEAN CLOUDLAND Paper presented at a seminar on “the Homeland of Indo-European Languages and Culture” organized by the Indian Council of Historical Research in New Delhi on January 7-9, 2002. Published in A Discourse on Indo–European Languages and Culture, D.N. Tripathi, (ed.), Indian Council of Historical Research, New Delhi, 2005, pp. 42-53. Although the Indo-European (IE) homeland theory has taken many forms and colours, it rests on the central assumption of an isolated, single proto-language in an isolated, single homeland, from which, at some point in time, Proto-Indo-European (PIE) people burst out in almost every direction to sow their linguistic seeds. But no one knows for sure where, when, why or how: after two centuries of intensive studies and often acrimonious debates, Indo-Europeanists cannot agree on the particular homeland or the date of the great dispersal, and we still have theoretical Urheimats ranging from Northern Europe (Lothar Kilian) to Bactria (Johanna Nichols), with, on the way, Central Europe (Igor Diakonov, Pedro Bosch-Gimpera), the Uralic-Volgan steppes of Southern Russia (Marijas Gimbutas, J. P. Mallory) and various parts of Anatolia (Colin Renfrew, Aron Dolgopolsky, Thomas V. Gamkrelidze, Vjaceslav V. Ivanov), among other overlapping possibilities. Edwin Bryant (2001: 140) neatly sums up the situation: “The minute one tries to further narrow this vast Indo-European-speaking area, one enters the quagmire of speculation and disagreement that has been characteristic of the IndoEuropean homeland quest since its inception.” In addition to this persisting lack of consensus, a number of inconsistencies on linguistic, archaeological, anthropological and cultural fronts have so far baffled attempts at a wide-ranging synthesis. In fact, some Indo-Europeanists are honest enough to speak of “an endless series of cul de sacs,” “a remarkably unsatisfactory sets of choices,” and admit that “the issue is by no means resolved.” (Mallory, 1989: 257). This paper attempts a brief survey of some of these inconsistencies, with emphasis on the Indian point of view, which generally receives little more than a cursory look based on outdated evidence or models.1 Linguistic Inconsistencies Since its birth in the nineteenth century, linguistics has been the backbone of the IE homeland theory. Despite important advances, it remains largely based on the “tree model” (or genetic model), even though many linguists have exposed its limitations, pointing out that it does not even work for the historical period: for instance, the model The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 2 shows English as originating from Germanic (through West Germanic and Low German), but does not account for the very considerable influence of Latin on it, largely through French. Attempts to include such real-life complexities (e.g. in the “wave model”) have not been very successful, and we still find much IE literature taking the linear genetic model for granted and coming up with questions such as, “When did language A separate from language B?”, thus assuming that languages A and B had no further point of contact after “branching off,” and none too with any other language! Moreover, linguists have been unable to make “areal linguistics,” based on geographic distribution, fit with genetic linguistics. Edward Sapir, N. S. Trubetzkoy, Antonio Tovar, Joseph Greenberg, Georges Mounin and others have criticized such shortcomings of conventional linguistics, including its claim to reconstruct hypothetical languages of the distant past. Edmund Leach (1990: 243) was rather scathing: “The origin myth of the Indo-European philologists calls for a lineage of wholly imaginary ancestral ‘protolanguages.’ ” The question of model apart, “linguistic paleontology” was once the great hope of the new science: linguists claimed they were able to re-create the Indo-Europeans’ original environment, down to its flora and fauna. However this field is now largely discredited: depending on the approach followed, one can equally well arrive at a warm or a cold climate, the plains of Central Europe or the mountains of the Caucasus; the PIE people can be portrayed as aggressive nomads or as peaceful sedentary agriculturists, etc. Similar disagreement has dogged the date of the supposed dispersal, which ranges from 7000 to 3000 BC (Herbert Kühn and Lothar Kilian go even beyond 10000 BC). Clearly, linguistics has no reliable way to date the speed with which languages evolve. While the existence of families and groups of languages is undeniable, structural linguistics often produces results inconsistent with the family approach. Thus C. Massica showed how, choosing thirty structural parameters for Hindi, the only language that meets all of them is Telugu (a Dravidian language), followed by Bengali (Japanese comes fourth and Turkish seventh, ahead of IE languages such as German or English). Many have highlighted characteristics that IE languages share with supposedly separate families, for instance the Finno-Ugric and the Semitic, or even with language families of America and Africa (Edward Sapir, Joseph Greenberg, John Bengtson, Merritt Ruhlen). Such researches militate against the watertight models of PIE dispersal and suggest much more ancient and extensive contacts between the various families. Coming to India, while comparisons between the IE family and American, African or Asian languages have been treated as a legitimate field of inquiry, pioneering The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 3 studies2 exploring commonalities between Indo-Aryan languages (especially Sanskrit and Prakrit) and the Dravidian family have not received the attention they deserve. This is partly due to the prevailing but unproven assumption that the first point of contact between the two families occurred fairly recently, in the context of the so-called Aryan invasion of India. If a more ancient connection were established, this linguistic pillar of the Aryan invasion theory (AIT) would collapse. Thus a linguistic argument put forth in support of AIT is the presence in Sanskrit of a few possible Dravidian loan words (a point still debated by experts, though). This is assumed to prove a linguistic “substratum” — the relics of Dravidian languages in the Northwest of the subcontinent before the Indo-Aryans supposedly swept the region. But such relics can equally be explained by a prolonged contact between two linguistic groups native to India. In the same line, Brahui (a Dravidian dialect in Baluchistan) was first brandished as proof of such a Dravidian presence in the Northwest of the subcontinent — until several linguists (Bloch, more recently H. H. Hock and Joseph Elfenbein) showed it could only be the relic of a recent northward migration of Dravidian-speaking groups. In other words, the Brahui argument, still misused today to establish that the authors of the Indus Valley civilization were “Dravidians,” has no linguistic validity. The big question therefore is whether anything in linguistics precludes an “Out of India Theory” (OIT), an Indian origin for a Proto-Indo-European language — assuming such a language ever existed. The late Indian linguist S. S. Misra (1992) was one of the first to defend such a possibility. The Belgian linguist Koenraad Elst, while accepting the essentials of IE linguistics, reaches this conclusion: “The oft-invoked linguistic evidence for a European Urheimat and for an Aryan invasion of India is completely wanting. One after another, the classical proofs of the European Urheimat theory have been discredited.” (1999: 158) Covering the same ground, H. H. Hock (1999) acknowledges, though grudgingly, that a model of successive waves of migrations out of India could account for the linguistic data. In his recent study, Edwin Bryant (2001) brings to light more limitations in the ability of linguistics to conjure up ancient history, attempts a synthesis between Elst’s approach and Nichols’s Bactrian homeland, and agrees that an Indian homeland cannot be ruled out from a linguistic standpoint. Clearly IE linguistics has suffered from a Eurocentric bias and we are far from having its last word on the PIE question. This becomes even clearer when other aspects of the problem are examined. The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 4 Archaeological Inconsistencies Attempts to correlate IE linguistic and archaeological evidence have remained the subject of endless debates among Indo-Europeanists, with little or no agreement as yet. This is not surprising, for archaeologists have long recognized that a particular type of pottery cannot easily be equated with a given people or linguistic group, as it can change in response to many factors (techniques, trade, raw materials and other environmental factors, lifestyles, or contacts with other groups). In other words, it is quite risky to equate the appearance of a new kind of artefact with the arrival of a new people speaking a new language — yet that still is the most common line of argument found in IE literature. (The classic example of such an erroneous methodology in India’s case is the now discredited use of the Painted Grey Ware as evidence for the supposed arrival of the Aryans.) The whole problem of synthesizing archaeological and linguistic data therefore remains as intractable as ever. Moreover, as archaeological evidence accumulates, the picture of ancient peoples in Eurasia (and, indeed, elsewhere) grows ever more complex and less tolerant of invasionist models. In the case of India, most archaeologists (e.g., R. S. Bisht, Dilip K. Chakrabarti, George F. Dales, S. P. Gupta, Jean-François Jarrige, Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, B. B. Lal, S. R. Rao, Jim G. Shaffer, etc.) have emphatically asserted the complete absence of evidence of invasion or even migration — an absence that has compelled AIT proponents to retreat considerably and dilute their scenario: Aryan invaders were previously portrayed as aggressive conquerors hurtling down the Khyber pass in their horse-drawn chariots and imposing on peaceful natives their military might and a culture “diametrically opposed to its [Harappan] predecessor” (Basham, 1981: 29). But now, except for a few scholars stuck in nineteenth-century models,3 they are forced to admit that the arrival of Indo-Aryans in Northwest India is “scarcely attested in the archaeological record, presumably because their material culture and lifestyle were already virtually indistinguishable from those of the existing population” (Allchin & Allchin, 1997: 222, emphasis mine). What a climb-down! If the lack of positive evidence for an invasion or migration has been acknowledged, archaeological evidence favouring a Vedic background to the Harappan civilization has not been given the attention it deserves. The strongest evidence lies in the identification of the Ghaggar-Hakra river (along which hundreds of Harappan settlements have been identified) with the Vedic Sarasvati river, an identification made since the nineteenth century and accepted almost unanimously by archaeologists (even by supporters of AMT such as the Allchins). This has considerable implications, since the Sarasvati is known to have finally dried up around 1900 BC — several centuries The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 5 before the supposed Aryans could have reached its banks and composed Vedic hymns in praise of the “mighty” river. This paradox remains the Achilles’ heel of AIT — and has compelled a few diehard invasionists to try and relocate the Sarasvati in Afghanistan, making a mockery of the Vedic Rishis’ clear depiction of the river system of the IndoGangetic plains.4 Also, R. S. Bisht (1999) has drawn extensive parallels between Harappan townplanning and terms in the Rig-Veda for settlements, houses etc., rejecting the view that the Rig-Veda has a purely pastoral setting. More positive evidence comes from the crucial cultural field. Anthropological Inconsistencies Before we move on to it, let us briefly consider how the IE homeland theory fares when examined by anthropological evidence. The whole IE edifice rests on migrations across vast areas, but for which evidence is generally nonexistent. Edmund Leach (1990: 241), in his famous devastating paper, ridicules the “persistence of the ‘movement of peoples’ doctrine” that IE scholarship depends on. Colin Renfrew (1989) voices much the same criticism. Moreover, as pointed out by Koenraad Elst (1999: 159ff), on the demographic level, the PIE explosion makes little sense, as the regions variously identified with the PIE homeland never seem to have had a high population density. In addition, demographic movements were rarely if ever symmetrical, in several opposite directions at the same time, as required by the IE theory: whether the PIE homeland is regarded as central Europe, Anatolia or the steppes of Southern Russia, the models asks the PIE people to have migrated westward, eastward and southward at the same time — something very unlikely to have occurred when the said regions had sparse populations. Moreover, India’s Northwest certainly had a relatively high population density during and after the Indus Valley civilization. Yet AIT dictates that it should be invaded by people coming from areas of much lesser density somewhere in Central Asia — clearly the demographic mechanics of the whole thing are gratuitous and unnatural. If some migrations took place, some of them must have been out of India too, and indeed we know that Indus traders did go out in search of markets, all the way to the Gulf and Mesopotamia and to Northern Afghanistan. Finally, we would expect the supposed arrival of Indo-Aryans in numbers sufficient to conquer the subcontinent to have left telltale traces. Quite the opposite is the case: all anthropologists who have examined skeletons found in that region The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 6 concluded that there was no sign of any demographic change such as the one AIT would have caused. One of them, K. A. R. Kennedy (1995: 54), asserts that “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.” Kennedy also repeatedly warns that no such thing as an “Aryan skeleton” or race ever existed; this warning is made necessary by the strange persistence with which certain Indo-Europeanists have kept looking for a racial definition for the IndoEuropeans: for example, Jean Haudry (1992: 122-123) discusses their “physical type,” identifying it to the “Nordic race.” Lothar Kilian (2000: 154ff) does much the same. Some scholars never learn! The complete absence of anthropological and archaeological evidence for AIT has forced its defenders to conjure up models of several small waves of “elite groups” which, as luck would have it, left no such traces yet carried sufficient influence to radically alter the course of the subcontinent’s culture. Let us now turn to this area, which has possibly seen the greatest amount of misinterpretation. Cultural Inconsistencies IE scholarship has long tried to reconstruct the essentials of the hypothetical PIE culture and to decide on their basis whether this or that ancient culture was IE or not. The first point to note here is that many scholars (e.g., A. B. Keith, E. Pulgram) have long voiced serious doubts on the very possibility of such a reconstruction. Dumézil’s famous “tripartition” and “trifunctionality,” often taken to be the ultimate tests for an IE culture, in fact apply to many ancient societies, IE or not (ancient Egypt or Japan among the latter). His wide-ranging studies (1986) of IE deities are certainly valuable, but in the end they establish chiefly that cultures across large parts of Eurasia had deep social, cultural and religious connections. The mechanics and time scale of those connections remain unexplained. When IE scholarship deals with India, it tends to fall into two kinds of rather crude bias: Firstly, the Harappan civilization is perforce declared “non-Aryan” and “preVedic.” Much is made of a few missing “Aryan” traits: the horse is not depicted, ergo the civilization cannot be Aryan.5 Such a partial approach glosses over positive evidence of Vedic elements in the Harappan world: fire altars; the worship of a Shivalike deity, of a mother-goddess; symbols such as the swastika or the trishul; the sacredness of the pipal tree; depictions of a mighty bull, of themes such as the marriage The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 7 of Heaven and Earth, the slaughter of a buffalo, etc. Crucially, we find a clear tradition of yoga: there are many depictions of deities in yogic postures, and the famous “priestking” is in deep contemplation. Not to speak of numerous artefacts and customs that have survived in Hinduism to this day, such as ritual lamps (deep), ritual conch shells (used for libations and also as trumpets), vermilion found at the parting of the hair of female figurines, etc. No wonder that Renfrew remarked (1989: 190), “It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley civilization.” In addition, we have a massive technological legacy in terms of a sophisticated weight system, units of length, metallurgic, building and agricultural techniques,6 even the astronomical division of the Nakshatras.7 When invasionist or migrationist scholars condescend to examine such central elements of Indian civilization, they tell us that all of them were “borrowed” by the incoming Aryans from the Harappans’ descendants: thus the Aryans “borrowed” Shiva, yoga, the swastika and the conch shell, astronomy, and all the above technologies. The mythical Aryans were compulsive borrowers, it would appear — a strange attitude for people who are said to have aggressively imposed their culture over the subcontinent. IE scholarship has pathetically failed to solve this self-inflicted paradox. Secondly, the Rig-Veda is portrayed as containing little more than “primitive animism.” The Rishis were just frightened by the forces of Nature, prayed that the sun might rise again the next morning, and did not mind getting high on Soma. By and large, IE literature still reflects this nineteenth-century colonial view, including of course the racial “dichotomy” between the fair Aryans and the dark-skinned dasyus (e.g. Mallory 1989: 45). Numerous students of the Vedic text from Sri Aurobindo ([1914] 1971) to George Erdosy (1994) or Thomas Trautmann (1997) have demonstrated in detail the sheer absurdity of this racial interpretation, but Indo-Europeanists, most of whom have not even read the Rig-Veda in the original, much less what Indians have to say on their own scriptures, appear unable to shed this entrenched misportrayal, without which the complete absence of any memory of an invasion in the Vedic texts would impose obvious conclusions. As a result, the Rishis’ constant use of potent symbols — whether it is the horse, the cow, the ocean, the seven rivers, the dawn — is not even taken into account: nothing but a strictly materialistic interpretation of their hymns will do. The myths and worldviews of ancient Egypt or ancient Greece have been the object of numerous profound symbolic interpretations, but Vedic India will have to remain as primitive as Max Müller and his successors decided it should be! Who is being primitive here, one wonders. The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 8 Finally, if there are undeniable cultural commonalities running across the IE world, what about the many deep connections between Vedic culture and “non-IE” cultures, from Australia’s Aborigines to Africa, Polynesia and Native Americans? Today’s Hindu feels perfectly at home with their worldviews — much more so than with whatever we can reconstruct of Kurgan or Anatolian proto-cultures. The IE scheme fails to integrate this complexity, as that would challenge the narrow definition of what constitutes an IE culture. Conclusion This all-too-brief survey highlights the sort of inconsistencies to which the IE model gives rise — but rarely thought. It remains essentially Eurocentric, satisfied with an unsophisticated view of Vedic culture. Ever since F. E. Pargiter’s well-known study (1922) of Vedic and Puranic sources, a school of thought has attempted an opposite model, the “Out of India” theory (OIT), in which successive migrations out of India (which, at least, clearly figure in the scriptures) explain the spread of IE languages and culture. Among recent proponents (such as Koenraad Elst mentioned above in connection with the linguistic aspect), two in-depth studies by Shrikant G. Talageri (2000) and David Frawley (2001) deserve attention, based as they are on a fresh look at historical elements in the Rig-Veda. Indian tradition apart, OIT is more consistent with archaeology and anthropology than AIT is — accusations of “chauvinism,” “jingoism” or “nationalism” notwithstanding (strange words in the mouths of proponents of theories that were instrumental in the greatest racist tragedy in human history).8 Yet OIT may not be the last word, and the first question we should ask, in the face of persistent failures of the IE model, is: Do we need an original homeland and an original proto-language at all? An alternative to this “big bang” or “Garden of Eden” approach may lie in a much longer period of interaction between cultures in and outside India, with a multiplicity of now vanished regional dialects tending to converge and diverge in turn, and acting as bridges between the main language families. In such a model, we would have many clusters of homelands, not just in Eurasia but beyond. Vedic culture would be indigenous to India and contemporary with the Harappan civilization — this is clearly imposed by the Sarasvati time line. However, this need not make the Harappan civilization wholly Vedic; the Rishis may have lived on its margins and influenced it, while it would have also retained popular, regional and tribal elements. The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 9 More extensive excavations, especially in the promising Sarasvati region, may one day provide firm answers — or else a final decipherment of the Indus script, but that is unlikely to happen as long as experts in the field remain so reluctant to work together. Also, multidisciplinary studies, integrating advances in biology, archaeobotany, archaeozoology, archeoastronomy, will considerably increase our understanding of the origins of Indian civilization. However they should also integrate an unbiased scrutiny of Vedic texts, and not just on the purely outward level.9 If we cannot read the mind of the Rishis, can we hope to understand the world they lived in? In the end, the more evidence accumulates on the dawn of civilization in various parts of the world, the more our assumptions about ancient peoples turn out to be simplistic and crude. Reality always ends up being more complex than our spotless unilinear models. The Neanderthals seem to have played music with flutes carved out of bones; Aborigines were painting a rich worldview on Australia’s rocks over 60,000 years ago; India’s own treasure of rock art, Bhimbetka, has been occupied for 100,000 years. Only a straitjacket model can seek to confine Vedic times to 1200 BC. There is room for a much more intricate evolution of our ancestors. The IE model remains stamped with its own origins in a biblical paradigm (Trautmann, 1997: 52-57), which sees the world as a simple place with a simple and short history starting from a single point of origin. This worldview is not likely to ever be capable of taming reality. Michel Danino © Indian Council for Historical Research, 2002 The Indo-European Cloudland / p. 10 Notes 1 I have refrained from burdening this paper with numerous quotations in support of every point, as could easily be done. Studies such as those by Edwin Bryant (2001), Michel Danino & Sujata Nahar (2000), Koenraad Elst (1999), B. B. Lal (1998 & 2002), N. S. Rajaram & David Frawley (2001) contain many such references. 2 Such studies have been made with regard to Tamil (R. Swaminatha Aiyar, 1975, and Sri Aurobindo, [1914] 1971), Telugu (C. Narayana Rao, 1929) and Kannada (Varadaraj R. Umarji, 1983). 3 E.g. Michael Witzel (1995: 114): “The first appearance of [the invading Aryans’] thundering chariots must have stricken the local population with a terror ...” 4 For more details on the Sarasvati question, see B. B. Lal (2002), B. P. Radhakrishnan & S. S. Merh (1999). 5 Horse remains have undeniably been found in a number Harappan settlements and there are several terracotta horse figurines (see books mentioned in note 1 for details, in particular by B. B. Lal), although it is true that the horse — and for that matter the cow, the camel and other animals — has not been depicted on Indus seals. On the other hand, after the Harappan civilization and right up to the historical period, horse remains do not increase in any significant manner, which should have been the case if the scenario of Aryans invading India in horse-drawn chariots were valid. 6 Many of these instances of continuity between the Harappan and the later Indian civilization have been well illustrated by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer (1998) and B. B. Lal (2002). 7 8 On this important point, see Asko Parpola (2000) and J. McKim Malville (2000). Strangely too, several groups in and outside India, for instance self-styled Dalit leaders, Christian missionaries, Dravidian activists, etc., have made extensive use of AIT to exacerbate racial and social divisions in Indian society for political or religious ends. Yet this perverted use of a now discredited theory has rarely met with any condemnation from Indo-Europeanists. 9 Sri Aurobindo’s The Secret of the Veda (1971) remains a pioneering work in elaborating a deeper perspective and significance of the Veda. More recently, Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak & David Frawley (1995) have discussed new insights in Vedic scholarship; Satya Prakash Singh’s (2001) is a wide-ranging study of Vedic symbolism. Bibliography AIYAR, R. Swaminatha, Dravidian Theories (Madras: Madras Law Journal, 1975) ALLCHIN, Raymond & Bridget, Origins of a Civilization: The Prehistory and Early Archaeology of South Asia (New Delhi: Viking, 1997) AUROBINDO, Sri, The Secret of the Veda (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1971) BASHAM, A. L., The Wonder That Was India (3rd ed., Calcutta: Rupa & Co., 1981) BISHT, R. S., “Harappans and the Rigveda: Points of Convergence” in Dawn of Indian Civilization, ed. G. C. 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