Tag: india

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Academic Negationism

Language Wars : Aryan vs Dravidian

Language Wars

The chronological frame sketched is somewhat different from the dogma of the generation past. Then we were told that India was invaded around 1500 BC by Aryans from Central Asia or, perhaps, even South Europe. This dogma was at the basis of the construction of an elaborate scenario related to strife between the speakers of the Aryan and Dravidian languages.

As the science of language, historical linguistics in the early 19th century saw itself as providing a framework for studying the history and relationships of languages in the same manner as biology describes the animal world. But whereas biology has been revolutionized by the discovery of the genetic code, no similar breakthrough has brought new illumination to linguistics. Over the protestations of its many critics, mainstream historical linguistics has remained within the parameters of 19th century thinking. In the meanwhile, archaeological discoveries have altered our understanding of ancient Eurasia.

The Indo-Europeans are seen to be present in Europe a few thousand years earlier than was supposed before. The Indian evidence, based on archaeology as well as the discovery of an astronomy in the Vedas, indicates that Vedic Sanskrit is to be assigned to the 4th and the 3rd millennia BC, if not earlier. The Indian cultural area is seen as an integral whole.

The Vedic texts are being interpreted as a record of the complex transformations taking place in the pre-2000 BC Indian society. We understand how the 19th century construction of the Orient by the West satisfied its needs of self-definition in relation to the Other. To justify its ascendancy, the Other was defined to be racially mixed and inferior, irrational and primitive, despotic and feudal. This definition was facilitated by a selective use of the texts and rejecting traditional interpretations, an approach that is now called Orientalism. The terms in the construction were not properly defined. Now we know that to speak of a “pure” race is meaningless since all external characteristics of humans are defined in a continuum.

In the 19th century atmosphere of European triumphalism, what was obtained in Europe was taken to be normative. With hindsight it is hard to believe that these ideas were not contested more vigorously. Although this was the age that marked the true beginnings of modern science, old myths continued to exercise great power. When it was found that the languages of India and Europe were related in structure and vocabulary, the West responded with what J.-P. Vernant calls “a tissue of scholarly myths. These myths were steeped in erudition, informed by profound knowledge of Hebrew and Sanskrit, fortified by comparative study of linguistic data, mythology, and religion, and shaped by the effort to relate linguistic structures, forms of thought, and features of civilization. Yet they were also myths, fantasies of the social imagination, at every level.

The comparative philology of the most ancient languages was a quest for origins, an attempt to return to a privileged moment in time when God, man, and natural forces still lived in mutual transparency. The plunge into the distant past in search of ‘roots’ went hand in hand with a never forgotten faith in a meaningful history, whose course, guided by the Providence of the one God, could be understood only in the light of Christian revelation.

As scholars established the disciplines of Semitic and Indo-European studies, they also invented the mythical figures of the Hebrew and the Aryan, a providential pair which, by revealing to the people of the Christianized West the secret of their identity, also bestowed upon them the patent of nobility that justified their spiritual, religious, and political domination of the world.” Although the term Aryan never had a racial connotation in the Indian texts, the scholars insisted that this was the sense in which the term ought to be understood. It was further assumed that Aryan meant European by race. By doing so Europe claimed for itself all of the “Aryan” texts as a part of its own forgotten past. The West considered itself the inheritor of the imagination and the mythic past of the Aryan and the idea of the monotheism of the Hebrew.

This dual inheritance was the mark of the imperial destiny of the West. Vernant reminds us that despite his monotheism, the poor Jew, since he lacked Aryan blood, should have seen “the dark silhouette of the death camps and the rising smoke of the ovens.”

On the other hand, the Asiatic mixed-blood Aryan had no future but that of the serf. He could somewhat redeem himself if he rejected all but the earliest core of his inheritance, that existed when the Aryans in India were a pure race. For scholars such as Max Müller  this became ultimately a religious issue. Echoing Augustine, Müller saw in his own religious faith a way for progress of the Asiatic. We would smile at it now but he said,

“Christianity was simply the name ‘of the Language Wars , true religion,’ a religion that was already known to the ancients and indeed had been around ‘since the beginning of the human race.’

But ideas—bad and good—never die. Müller’s idea has recently been resurrected in the guise that Christianity is the fulfillment of Vedic revelation!

A linguistic “Garden of Eden’’ called the proto-Indo-European (PIE) language was postulated. Europe was taken to be the homeland of this language for which several wonderful qualities were assumed. This was a theory of race linking the Europeans to the inhabitants of the original homeland and declaring them to the original speakers of the PIE. By appropriating the origins, the Europeans also appropriated the oldest literature of the Indians and of other IE speakers. Without a past how could the nations of the empire ever aspire to equality with the West? Indian literature was seen to belong to two distinct layers.
At the deepest level were the Vedas that represented the outpourings of the nature-worshiping pure Aryans. At the next level, weakened by an admixture with the indigenous tribes, the literature became a narrative on irrational ritual.

Science and Pseudoscience

In scientific or rational discourse the empirical data can, in principle, falsify a theory.This is why creationism, which explains the fossil record as well as evolution by assuming that it was placed there along with everything else by God when he created the universe in 4004 BC, is not a scientific theory: creationism is unfalsifiable. Building a scientific theory one must also use the Occam’s razor, according to which the most economical hypothesis that explains the data is to be accepted.

Bad intent should not turn anyone away from good science. Why isn’t PIE good science? It looks reasonable enough: If there are biological origins then there should be linguistic origins as well. And why don’t we believe that the nature of language tells us something about culture? If Europeans have been dominant in recent history, then why don’t we accept it as a characteristic of the European? Thus the origin of the PIE must be in the European sphere from where the energy of its early speakers carried them to the far corners of Asia and allowed them to impose their language on the native speakers. There are several problems with the idea of PIE. It is based on the hypothesis that languages are defined as fixed entities and they evolve in a biological sense. In reality, a language area is a complex, graded system of several languages and dialects of a family.

The degree of homogeneity in a language area is a reflection of the linkages, or interaction within the area. For a language distributed widely in the ancient world, one would expect several dialects. There would be no standard proto-language. It is clear that language families belong to overlapping groups, because such a view allows us to represent better the complex history of the interactions amongst their ancestor languages.

Such an overlap need not imply that the speakers of either group intruded into the overlapping region. We note further the warning by N.S. Trubetskoy (1939) that the presence of the same word in a number of languages need not suggest that these languages descended from a common parent:

‘ There is, then, no powerful ground for the assumption of a unitary Indogerman protolanguage, from which the individual Indogerman language groups would derive. It is just as plausible that the ancestors of the Indogerman language groups were originally quite dissimilar, and that through continuing contact, mutual influence and word borrowing became significantly closer to each other, without however going so far as to become identical.’

The evolution of a language with time is a process governed by context-sensitive rules that express the complex history of interactions with different groups over centuries. The changes in each region will reflect the interaction of the speakers with the speakers of other languages (most of which are now extinct) and various patterns of bilingualism. There is no evidence that can prove or disprove an original language such as PIE.

We cannot infer it with certainty since the historically attested relationship between different languages could have emerged from one of many competing models. If one considers the situation that prevailed in the New World when Europeans arrived as typical, the ancient Old World had a multitude of languages. It is from this great language diversity that a process akin to biological extinction led to the currently much smaller family of languages.Scholars now say that the metaphor of a perfect or pure language leading to large diversity must be replaced by the metaphor of a web. This becomes clear when we consider biological inheritance. We inherit our genes from more than one ancestor. The postulation of PIE together with a specific homeland in Europe or Turkey does violence to facts.

There is no evidence that the natives of India for the past 8,000 years or so have looked any different from what they look now. The internal evidence of this literature points to events that are as early as 7000 years ago and its geography is squarely in the Indian region. If there was no single PIE, there was no single homeland either. The postulation of an “original home”, without anchoring it to a definite time-period is to Language Wars 17 fall in the same logical trap as in the search for invasions and immigration.

Tree or animal name evidence cannot fix a homeland. In a web of languages, different geographical areas will indicate tree or animal names that are specific to these areas. When the European side of the IE languages is examined, the tree or animal names will favour those found in its climate and when the Indian side of the languages are examined, the reference now will be to its flora and fauna.

Colin Renfrew has pointed out how a circular logic has been used by linguists to justify what has already been implicit in their assumptions. Speaking of the work by Paul Friedrich (1970) on “Proto-Indo-European trees”, Renfrew reminds us that the starting assumption there is that PIE was current in western Caspian and the Carpathians during the fourth millennium and the first centuries of the third millennium and then Friedrich proves that this was the PIE homeland! Reminds Renfrew:

[Friedrich’s] assumption is highly questionable. So complete an adoption of one specific solution to the question of Indo-European origins is bound to have a considerable impact upon his analysis of the origins of tree-names, and the historical conclusions he reaches. It is scarcely surprising if his theory harmonizes with the historical reconstruction upon which it is based. It is perhaps reasonable that the historical linguistics should be based upon the archaeology, but that the archaeological interpretation should simultaneously be based upon the linguistic analysis gives serious cause for concern. Each discipline assumes that the other can offer conclusions based upon sound independent evidence, but in reality one begins where the other ends. They are both relying on each other to prop up their mutual thesis.

Aryan and Dravidian

It was Bishop Caldwell (1875) who suggested that the South Indian languages of Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Telugu formed the separate Dravidian family of languages. He further suggested that the speakers of the proto-Dravidian language entered India from the northwest. Other scholars argued against this Dravidian invasion theory. Scholars have argued that this attempt to see both the North and the South Indian languages coming to the subcontinent from outside (West Asia) as another example of the preoccupation with the notion of the “Garden of Eden’’.

In reality, the problem of what constitutes an Aryan or a Dravidian, in the biological or cultural sense in which it is generally posed, is insoluble. The problem of Aryan and Dravidian is a conflation of many categories. Indian texts do not use the term Arya or Aryan in a linguistic sense, only in terms  of culture.

There is reference in the Manu Smriti where even the Chinese are termed Aryan, proving that it is not the language that defines this term. The South Indian kings called themselves Aryan as did the South Indian travelers who took Indian civilization to Southeast Asia. One may have posed the problem in terms of the anthropological “distinction” between the speaker of the North and the South Indian languages. But the anthropologists tell us that there is no difference. When linguists in the last century insisted that the term “Aryan” be reserved for the North Indian languages alone, it was inevitable confusion would emerge.

The definition of Aryan and Dravidian are extrapolated from the culture of the speakers of the North and the South Indian languages. But the cultures of the North and the South are the same as far back as we can go. (There is some minor difference in kinship rules.) There is even a mirroring of the sacred geography. The North has Kashi and Mathura; the South has Kanchi and Madurai. Who is to say what the original was? If there is no cultural difference then the use of the term “Aryan” as defining the culture of just the speakers of the North Indian languages is misleading.

This following example puts the absurdity of the terminology in focus. There exist texts that state that Tamilian Hindus came and settled in Kashmir in the early 15th century in the liberal reign of Bada Shah. We don’t know how many people came, but that is the nature of such textual evidence anyway. Now what does that make a Kashmiri? An Aryan or a Dravidian?

Some scholars have claimed a Dravidian substratum for Marathi, but how do we know that prior to that Dravidian substratum there was not some other language that was spoken there? And maybe there has been more than one shift back and forth. Let’s imagine that everyone in India originally spoke Dravidian and then due to some process of “elite dominance” most people in the North started speaking Indo-Aryan and they kept their old traditions and legends.

The new speakers will still be culturally Dravidian and certainly they would be so “biologically”, if that could ever mean anything. If this is what happened in India then are the Aryans actually Dravidians and, by implication, are the Dravidians also Aryans?

There could be two groups of people speaking two different languages who culturally belong to the same tradition like the modern-day Hungarians and Czechs. We don’t know who the authors of the Vedas were. They could have been bilingual speakers who knew “Dravidian” and “Vedic”; maybe their first language was really Dravidian even though they had Sanskrit names as has been true in South India for much of historical times; or they were purely Sanskrit speaking. No rhetoric or ideology can resolve this question.

The use of a language in literature does not even mean that the speakers are a dominant elite. Let’s consider the use of Urdu in Pakistan. The Punjabi speaking Punjabis are the dominant group but Urdu is used for official work purely due to some historical factors. In fact, the only Urdu-speaking ethnic group in Pakistan, the Mohajirs, feel they are at the bottom of the totem pole. The texts cannot reveal the ethnic background just as Indians in the US who have adopted American names cannot be identified as ethnically Indian from their writing. The lesson is that the term “Aryan”, misused by so many different parties, should be retired from academic discourse.

Several Kinds of Families

The Indian linguistic evidence requires the postulation of two kinds of classification. The first is the traditional Indian classification where the whole of India is a single linguistic area of what used to be traditionally called the Prakrit family. Linguists agree that based on certain structural relationships the North and the South Indian languages are closer than Sanskrit and Greek.1, Second, we have a division between the North Indian languages that should really be called North Prakrit (called Indo-Aryan by the linguists) and the South Indian languages that may be called South Prakrit (or Dravidian).

There is also the Indo-European family to which the North Prakrit languages belong. Likewise, Dravidian has been assumed to belong to a larger family of agglutinative languages. This classification will allow us to get rid of the term Aryan in marking the families of languages, allowing us to move past the racist connotation behind its 19th century use. Its further virtue is that it recognizes that language families cannot be exclusive systems and they should be perceived as overlapping circles that expand and shrink with time.

Back to the Origins

Some Indologists driven by the old race paradigm have stood facts upside down to force them to fit their theory. We know that the internal evidence of the Indian texts shows that the Vedas precede the Puranas.

Since Puranic themes occur in the iconography of the Harappan times (2600-1900 BC), some take the Puranic material to precede the Vedas so that the Vedas could be placed in the second millennium BC.  I think the only logical resolution of all the archaeological and textual evidence is to assume that the Indic area became a single cultural area at least around 5000 BC. The Indian civilization was created by the speakers of many languages but the language of the earliest surviving literary expression was Vedic Sanskrit, that is itself connected to both the North and the South Prakrit languages.

This idea is supported not only by the internal evidence that shows that the Indic tradition from 7000 BC onwards is an indigenous affair, but also from the new analysis of ancient art. For example, David Napier argues that the forehead markings of the Gorgon and the single-eye of the cyclops in Greek art are Indian elements. Although he suggests that this may have been a byproduct of the interaction with the Indian foot soldiers who fought for the Persian armies, he doesn’t fail to mention the more likely possibility that the influence was through the 2nd millennium BC South Indian traders in Greece.

This is supported by the fact that the name of the Mycenaean Greek city Tiryns—the place where the most ancient monuments of Greece are to be found—is the same as that of the most powerful Tamilian sea-faring people called the Tirayans., Since the 2nd millennium interaction between Greece and India is becoming clear only now, it is appropriate to ask if our languages were frozen into fixed categories wrongly by the 19th century historical linguists. Consider the centum/satem divide in which European languages belong to the centum group and the North Indian languages to the satem group. The tree model is used to divide the PIE into these two sub-classes with the centum group representing the western branch and the satem group representing the eastern branch.

UNESCO helps complete study on equitable access to documentary heritage in South Asian countriesThe discovery of Tocharian as a centum language was seen as an example of a heroic movement of centum-speaking people from the west. But now the discovery of Bangani, a centum language in India, has make the whole idea of a treelike division suspect. Consider also the question of our knowledge of the vocabulary of various languages. For some languages, this knowledge was primarily obtained in quick field-work done decades ago by scholars who were not native speakers. Could it be that they missed out on vital evidence?

One of the orthodox scholars informs us;that the word *mori “seems originally to have meant swamp, marsh land or lake, rather than a large body of open water. [I]t is found only in European languages and not in Indo-Iranian other than Ossetic—an Iranian language contiguous to Europe although originating further to the east.” This “fact” has lent itself to endless theorizing. But this “fact” is a result of incomplete surveys. The word mar, a cognate, is a common Kashmiri term for a swamp or even a lake. We see this word in the formation of Kashyapmar from which the word Kashmir is derived.

Even Kannada has a cognate. Also, many Hindi speakers pronounce the word for “hundred” as sainkara rather than saikara, which the field studies tell us is the “correct” form. Does that make Hindi a centum language? The archaeological findings from India and the discovery of the astronomy of the Vedic period are fatal for the constructions of historical linguistics that arose in the 19th century and are still being followed in schoolbooks in India although textbooks in the West have begun to present the new picture. While the general language categories seem reasonable, the concept of overlapping families seems essential to obtain better conceptual clarity. The breakdown of the old paradigm calls for considerable effort to create a new one to take its place.
In particular, the emerging chronological framework can be used to examine the relationships between Sanskrit and other ancient Indo-European languages. Etymological dictionaries should be revised to take note of the antiquity of Vedic Sanskrit. If PIE did not exist, can we extrapolate from the earliest layer of Vedic Sanskrit for correlations with life in prehistoric Harappan India?

(20908)

Categories
Historical Figures

The Legend of General Zorawar Singh

Atop the rooftop of the world – standing before serene waters of Lake Mansoravar on the Himalayan Plateau the crisp mountain air was broken with the cries of  ‘Har Har Mahadev’.  A band of Hindu warriors, bloodied and battered a thousand miles from their homes in the Jammu kingdom looked with grim satisfaction on the culmination of a successful campaign of war under the leadership of their inspirational leader General Zorawar Singh Kahluria.

Lake Manasarovar And Mount Kailash From Trugo Gompa

 

The northern Indian kingdom of Jammu was ruled for my centuries by various Hindu clans and in themed 19th century was ruled by the Gulab Singh. For many centuries the Jammu kingdom had maintained a solid independence from the empires of northern India. Nominally allied to the Sikh kingdom of Lahore the warrior clans of the Dogras sought opportunities to the north of their kingdom.

Zorawar Singh initially conquered the hill region of Kishwar from its Nawab and the speed and ease of the conquest encourages further ambitions. The majority of Northern India was by this time under the heel of British Imperialism and the areas to the south and west were under the control of their allies the Sikhs. In 1834 he led his Dogra warriors into the remote and previously thought inaccessible regions of Ladakh which today forms part of the Jammu and Kashmir state of India. After defeating the Botis in a bitter engagement his added Kargil to his conquests. The Ladakhis gathered together a large force with assistance from the Chinese imperial army and despite being cut off from his base and with limited supplies Zorawar Singh managed to inflict a decisive defeat on his enemies under the leadership of the Gyalpo.

INDIA-LADAKH-Phanjilla

Although nominally allies the Sikh Kingdom was alarmed by the increasing power of the Dogras and under the instigation of Mehan Singh, the Sikh governor of Kashmir the Ladakhi again resumed the conflict with the Dogras the following year in 1836. However making a lightening march he managed to surprise and destroy the Ladakhi army and inflict a devastating defeat on them thus adding the vast Ladakhi regions to India.

To the north of Ladakh lies Baltistan (in modern Pakistan). General Zorawar Singh now turned his hardy mountain troops in this direction. The Nawab, Muhammad Shah had attempted to help the Ladakhis in the previous battles and in 1841 faced bitter retribution from Zorawar Singh and his Dogra warriors. Despite facing the bitter cold and extreme hardship the Dogras managed to invest and conquer the region in the same year. The fighting abilities of Zorawar Singh allowed the Dogras to proceed to even further ambitions towards Central Asia. Once again however the Sikhs complained to the Dogras that Zorawar Singh was pushing his conquests to areas which were their allies and thus Zorawar Singh turned his attention to the vast kingdom of Tibet to the north. Under the rule of Chinese Empire the plateau of Tibet was also home the sacred lake of Mansoravar and Mount Kailash the abode of Lord Shiva. In 1841 he divided his forces into three columns and headed into the vast unknown of the mighty Himalayas.

After a number of fierce engagements the Chinese troops fled before the ‘Shen Pa’ their name for the Hindu Dogra warriors and fighting both local resistance and the unsparing Himalayan weather Zorawar Singh and his soldiers reached their goal and to complete their pilgrimage. Author Dr Alex McKay  further mentions in his book The History of Tibet,

‘The occupation Of Tibetan areas west of the Mayum pass was completed by the middle of  September. General Zorawar Singh made proper arrangements for guarding advance posts towards the Mayum pass and other passes by posting his own contingents. He then returned to Tirathpuri where he intended to pass the winter.Thus the Dogra General conquered about 720 km. Of  the Tibetan territory (linear distance) in about three and a half months .The first thing Zorawar Singh did after the conquest Of Misra was to take a holy bath in the lake Manasarovar and offer a golden idol at the Kailash temple On The mobilisation of his troops into Tibet he had already announced his intention to perform a pilgrimage of the Hindu holy places of the’ Kailash-kshetra. He now proudly fulfilled that resolve. Thus, by fighting out his way to these holy places and earning the merit of the pilgrimage of Kailash, to which the heroes of the Mahabharata had also retired after attaining the glory and fame in the battlefield of Kurukshetra, General Zorawar Singh had earned both sanctity and renown. He had achieved the height of fame.’

General Zorawar SinghNow standing over 500 miles from his home base and rapidly facing mounting numbers of enemies he turned to return to his home. However by now the enemy had reinforced their strength in vast numbers and in the bitter winter of 1841-1842 suffering from a collapse of their supply lines, facing the relentless Himalayan winter and facing the Chinese/Tibetan forces on all sides the Dogras began to fight their way home.

With each step being fiercely contested it was only the matchless general ship and valour of Zorawar Singh that maintained the discipline and strict order of his army. Inspired by the success of their holy pilgrimage to the sacred lake the Dogras kept at bay the forces of their enemies until brought to bay at the Battle of To-yo in December 1841.

Wounded by bullet in his right shoulder the general continued to rally his troops until in the thick of the fighting a spear was thrust into his shoulder – Wounded he was dragged out from the struggle by his soldiers and a shot while after died from his injuries.

The Chinese-Tibetan attack then moved forward but was resisted by the Dogra general Mehta Basti Ram – the Chinese then followed up their success by an attack on Ladakh but there faced a severe defeat at Dragntese when following the inspirational ideal of Zorawar Singh the Dogras managed to outflank their enemies and by damming the river managed to flood the enemy forces – At the Battle of Chushul the Dogras inflicting a decisive defeat on the Chinese and executed their general to avenge the death of Zorawar Singh

So ended the life and career of one of India greatest and yet least known warriors. His intrepid courage and general ship earned him the title of the ‘Napoleon of India’ from the Europeans  His exertions far beyond the confines of modern India into the vast steppes and mountains of Central Asia were an example of the intrepid Hindu spirit and ethos which has allowed the Hindus to emerge from millennia of history.

Forgotten memorial to General Zorawar Singh where he died.

jorawar.singh samadhi

Toyo, Taklakot, Tibet – that is the hallowed place where stands a dilapidated Samadhi of a brave man called General Zorawar Singh, a Kahluria Rajput of the 19th century India. He was born in 1786 in the Kangra district but his bravery blossomed in the Dogra army of Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu.Brigadier Chitranjan Sawant

(23456)

Categories
Analysis

Colour Prejudice in India : A History

[box_light]In India the preference for lighter skin is well known. In Bollywood lighter actresses such as Katrina Kaif find that the right skin tone outweighs talent and ignorance of Hindi. Skin lightening products do roaring trade. But what lies at the root of all this? Many people assume it is because over three thousand years ago India was invaded by lighter skinned Indo-European speakers known as Aryans. But this idea was actually manufactured by German Indologist Max Muller in order to justify British rule.

As Marx said if Indian history was merely that of a series of invasions, then the question was not if foreigners would rule India, merely which set of invaders imposing their rule. Muller later retracted his thesis saying that by ‘Aryan’ he meant language and not race. But by then the damage had been done and to this day the idea remains regretfully mainstream and is rarely challenged unlike the Hamitic Invasion Theory of Africa which dates to around the same period but has now been dropped for the racist idea it was.[/box_light]

When ‘Brother-in-Law’ means Rape

If we cannot blame the aforementioned non-existent ‘Aryans’ then could it be due to two centuries of British colonialism? Certainly this favoured lighter skin and there was even a mixed race of Anglo-Indians deliberately created as a buffer between the Raj and the masses. But anyone familiar with Indic languages knows that the preference for lighter skin just seems too deep. For example in Punjabi the phrase “kali mu vaaliya” (one with black face) has extremely derogatory connotations. No, we must look at other clues in this search.

Released in 1975 Sholay remains among the greatest films of Hindi cinema. One cinema in Mumbai ran the movie for 286 weeks straight (more than five years). Dubbed a ‘curry western’ Sholay achieved a still-standing record of 60 golden jubilees (50 consecutive weeks) across India and may well have been the highest grossing film ever produced by Bollywood. Now it is the famous scene of Russian roulette we are concerned with here. Leading a band of dacoits, Gabbar Singh (played by Amjad Khan) puts a pistol to the head of three of his men who are sent back empty handed from the village of Ramgarh.

Putting the gun to the head of his first subject Gabbar pulls the trigger only to find the chamber empty. He utters the now immortal words “bach gaya saala” in his menacing voice.

This is usually translated into English as “the bastard survived”.

But in Hindi and Punjabi the word ‘saala’ does not mean ‘bastard’. It means ‘brother-in-law’. So how to explain this? Using the exact translation would not make sense. But in the cultural and linguistic context it makes perfect sense.

The term ‘saala’ can be one of family endearment.But in this and many other contexts is means something very specific, namely ‘I slept with your sister’. This also implies ‘you can now take her back’.

In his 1992 book Negationism in Indian History, Belgian scholar Koenraad Elst mentions this:

“It is because of Hanifite law that many Muslim rulers in India considered themselves exempted from the duty to continue the genocide on the Hindus (self-exemption for which they were persistently reprimanded by their mullahs)….. The Moghul dynasty (from 1526 onwards) in effect limited its ambition to enjoying the zimma system, similar to the treatment of Jews and Christians in the Ottoman empire. Muslim violence would thenceforth be limited to some slave-taking, crushing the numerous rebellions, destruction of temples and killing or humiliation of Brahmins, and occasional acts of terror by small bands of raiders. A left-over from this period is the North-Indian custom of celebrating weddings at midnight: this was a safety measure against the Islamic sport of bride-catching.”

Jaago, meaning “wake up” a marriage folk dance in the Punjab, taking place at night where girls dance through the village streets carrying a pot (gaggar) decorated with lightened candles and singing jaagu songs.

It is the last sentence that should interest us because it explains why ‘saala’ is such an abusive term. In fact it is merely the tip of a massive politically incorrect and rarely explored iceberg.

The Blackness of Servitude in India

In his 1994 book The Muslim Slave System in Medieval India,  KS Lal has detailed how right from the invasion of Muhammad bin Qassim in the seventh century Hindus were subject to enslavement as an integral part of Islamic conquest, rule and forcible conversion. Females were especially targeted to fill the harems of sultans and their nobles. As mentioned by Dr. Elst, this is the origin of Hindu marriages being celebrated at night. It also led to jauhar, the mass self-immolation by which Rajput women preserved their honour rather than be capture. This was done by lighting  a huge fire in a pit into which women and children then jumped in order to avoid rape and enslavement.

In more recent years similar desperate action was taken by Sikhs avoiding humiliation through rape and forcible conversion and marriage when Pakistan was formed. For example in the village Thoha Khalsa of Rawalpindi District in 1947 only three women survived because there was not enough water in the well to drown them as they sought to evade capture by Muslim marauders intent on exterminating the unbelievers in their midst.

What Pakistan perpetrated on its Hindu and Sikh inhabitants from its very inception was merely a replay of centuries of Islamic colonialism, genocide, demographic upheaval and cultural dislocation. It was something that was to burst with full fury in 1971 as East Pakistan fought to break free as the independent state of Bangladesh. The Pakistani military and ruling caste was from the west composed of mainly Punjabis and Pathans such as Ayub Khan who saw their darker-skinned Bengali eastern brethren as mere Hindu converts to Islam, while they were descendants of great conquerors such as the Mughals.

Indeed the Islamic conquests were constantly wracked by internal racial strife. Afghans, Arabs, Turks and Iranians occupied the higher echelons of government. Hindu converts and African slaves were considered as inferior. Lal:

“D.B. Davis in his Slavery and Human Progress attempts to estimate the number of blacks that would have been sold as slaves and imported into India. According to him “the importation of black slaves into Islamic lands from Spain to India constituted a continuous large-scale migration that in total numbers may well have surpassed, over a period of twelve centuries, the African diaspora to the New World”.

The absence of a large population of black survivors can be explained by their high mortality rate; by assimilation with other peoples; and by the fact that many male slaves had been castrated. Even so in central part of India and on the western coast, there are communities of blacks who are descendants of African slaves. On some Western Coast Islands also there live descendants of black slaves. The Jinjeera Island, so called because of mispronunciation by Marathas of Jazeera meaning island, or Zanzeera meaning land of Zanj or Blacks, is their main abode. It is also called Habsan or the land of Africans or Habshis. In the seventeenth century these islanders, called Sidis of Jinjeera, served as admirals of the Mughals and were at constant war with the Marathas.”

 

The writer continues:

“However, in contrast to the foreign imported slaves, whose market price was rendered high by cost of transportation and deaths in transit, the price of Hindu slaves, sold abroad remained low. For example, Hindu Kush (Hindu-killer) mountain is so named because thousands of enslaved Hindus died in crossing it. But their numbers were so large that the price of survivors remained low in foreign markets.”

( http://voiceofdharma.org/books/mssmi/ch10.htm )

The Mughals continued this export of  Hindu slaves to Iran and Central Asia. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited Mughal India during the reign of Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century. He made this observation on the ruling class:

“They were called Moguls, that is, white of complexion . . . the natives being all brown or olive colour.”

The physician François Bernier also noted the skin colour of the ruling elite:

“…to be considered a Mogol, it is enough is a foreigner have a white face and profess Mahometanism.”

The Mughals were in fact Chagatai Turks. But it was the Iranians who dominated the Muslim regime oppressing India’s toiling Hindu masses. The Iranians looked down upon the Mughals and Indians as barbarians and were helped in their superior status by a preference for lighter skin colour. Indeed Bernier said that as successive generations of Iranian immigrants became darker, they lost the respect accorded to newcomers and all fair-skinned Muslim immigrants as part of the ruling class. Italian traveller Niccolao Manucci said that Iranians constantly referred to Indians as “slaves” or “blacks”. Afghans, though part of the ruling class, were portrayed as crude and vulgar.

Racial and ethnic strife had existed from the very advent of Islam, between slaves and free, even between northern and southern Arabs. But the Arabs had always formed a hereditary ruling caste over the vanquished from the time of the Ummayads. Any Muslims who had Iranian, Berber, Aramaen or other undesirable blood was classified as Mawl? and excluded from the dominant racial caste. Strict social barriers were maintained between the Arab ruling racial caste and the non-Arab oppressed masses. Embracing Islam was no escape from this badge of inferiority. While Arabs could take wives from the indigenous people, the converse was not true. The non-Arabs resented their treatment as racially inferior.

For example, Mawálí soldiers were led by Arabs generals only on foot with their weaponry being limited to a baton. As a reward for defeating the Ummayad army outside Mosul was to have the Arabs massacre the 7000 mawálíinhabitants of Kufa. From the late seventh century, black slaves from East Africa were used in the marshland of Mesopotamia to cultivate cotton and sugar on plantations. Housed in very harsh conditions of camps of up to five thousand captives, they rebelled in 694 which was crushed. These were known as the Zanj. The Zanj rebellion resulted in extremely racist attitudes towards blacks, as expressed in Arabic literature, by poets of Ethiopian descent, known as the “black crows of the Arabs”, such as Suhaym (d. 660), Nusayb ibn Rabah (d. 726), and Abu Dulama (d. c.776), pointing to clear evidence that black slaves had the lowest position in Muslim society. Racism was in fact as central to Arab slavery as it was in the western system which developed later. Arabs saw their own olive pigmentation as preferable to lighter Greeks and Iranians as well as darker people of the Horn of Africa. Early Arabic poetry describes the many nuances of human coloration. In fact the name of the seventh century poet, Suhaym, literally means “little black man”, and he penned verses such as the following:

“Though I am a slave my soul is nobly free Though I am black of colour my character is white.”

Nusayb ibn Rabah responded to a racist attack on him by an Arab poet, because he was black:

“Blackness does not diminish me, as long as I Have this tongue and this stout heart.

Some are raised by means of their lineage; the Verses of my poems are my lineage!

How much better a keen-minded, clear-spoken Black than a mute white!”

By the fourteenth century, the Arabic word “abd” as used to mean black slave, while “mamluk” meant a white slave. Black Africa remained a major source of slaves for the Islamic world until well into the twentieth century. Blacks came to be seen as natural slaves when compared to other races. It was this prejudice against darker skin which was imported into India and has been entrenched their over the centuries. But the other legacy of Islamic slavery and racism was even worse.

Hindu Kush means Hindu Slaughter

The numbers of Hindus enslaved and exported from India by various Islamic invaders and imperialists was staggering, to such an extent that it gave the name to the mountains in Afghanistan as so many died en route. In Iran these Indian slaves were forced to work in the mines while slaves were also imported from Africa in huge numbers. In 1849 and 1850, Lady Mary Eleanor Sheil wrote from the British embassy that black slaves known as Nubees or Habshees were highly esteemed and well treated. However racial prejudice appears to have increased after slavery ended, as reported by Joseph Harris in 1967 in several cities. An Afro-Iranian community near Bandar Abbas complained of racism by other Iranians.

As well as colour prejudice towards darker skin in India and Iran, Islamic slavery had other negative influences which are only just being uncovered. In his 1979 book Roma: The Gypsy World, Dr. SS Shashi challenged the belief that Europe’s Gypsies had their origins in any of India’s “untouchable” castes. Instead he traced the Roma to various castes including Rajputs, Banjara, Jat, Ahir, Dhangar, Dom and Sansi. Iranians still refer to Gypsy groups of Indian descent as Luri. Arabs call them Zott while in Syria they are referred to as Nawar. Nineteenth century Dutch historian MJ Goeje wrote that the Arabs brought tens of thousands of Indian peasants from the Indus region as slaves to be settled in Iraq. These Zotts became powerful enough to challenge the Abbasid Khalifate and hence Baghdad sent its forces against them in 820. The Zotts were defeated in 834, and the entire population deported to Syria. South African born scholar and anti-apartheid activist Ronald Segal mentions this slave revolt by the Zotts or Djatts, which he said were Indian slaves deported from the Lower Indus to the swamps of Lower Mesopotamia, to breed water buffalo while living in extremely impoverished conditions, which led to their rebellion. He says that their defeat led to them being deported to various parts of the Abbasid caliphate. This may explain why Gypsy groups of obvious Indian descent remain in the region, continuing to be disclaimed by the Arabs, Iranians and Turks as being part of their respective communities. They  are known as the Domari.

Professor Ian Hancock from the University of Texas , scholar of Hungarian Roma and British Romanichal descent,  concludes that the Roma are therefore most likely the descendants of high-caste Hindu Rajputs and not the Doms. Romani vocabulary points to a one time settled rather than nomadic population. In India there are nomadic groups such as the Banjara which claim descent from Rajputs, and left their homeland of Rajputana after the defeat by Mahmud of Ghazni in the eleventh century. At the Second World Romani Congress in April 1978, Ranjit Naik stated that Rajputs had fled these invasions into Central Asia. Then in 1998, B Shyamala Devi Rathore submitted a paper at the Romani Studies conference at Greenwich University, in which she mentioned Banjara historians that wrote about Rajputs leaving their homeland of Rajasthan due to the Ghaznavid raids, and spreading out in all directions.

Hindu Rajput warriors were captured in warfare by the Ghaznavid Turks who invaded India during the eleventh century. From the Ghaznavids, the Seljuk Turks also took them as slaves. This Indian population then found themselves brought to Europe in the thirteenth century as slaves and also in military battalions by the invading Ottoman Turks. These were to become the Roma or Gypsies. Hancock in his 2002 book We are the Romani People:

“The first Romanies that the Europeans met were very different from any of the local populations – far more distinct than we are today. They were mostly dark-skinned, and wore unfamiliar clothing and spoke a language nobody recognised. They were neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim and seemed to have no country of their own. And most of all, they were extremely reluctant to let outsiders – the gadže – get too close.”

As the Turks conquered the Byzantine Empire and advanced into Europe, Roma were reduced to slave status. They were also enslaved by the landlords in Christian populations of the Balkans, especially Wallachia and Transylvania. Female Roma were subject to horrendous sexual exploitation right up until the abolition of Gypsy slavery after the creation of the modern state of Romania in 1864. It is unknown how this slavery began. Some may have already been slaves of the Ottoman Turks, or even the Tatars who had invaded Europe earlier. By the early 1300s, Roma in the Balkans were being included as property given as payment, even to monasteries. As non-indigenous people, as non-Muslims, and as slaves, Roma were at the bottom of the social scale in the Balkans, especially in that all conquered non-Muslims could be treated as property.

By the sixteenth century, the word for Gypsy in Romanian, tigan, had come to mean slave specifically of Roma origin. For this oppressed minority dislocated from their Indian homeland through distance and the centuries elapsed when their Hindu ancestors had been enslaved by the armies of Islam there was to be no happy ending. Half of the European Roma population died in the Holocaust in what is known in the Romani language as Porrajmos, a powerful world which translates as devouring or rape.

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Categories
Gods of Science and Discovery

Takshashila: The world’s first known university

Takshashila: the world's first known university
Takshashila: the world's first known university

At least 2,800 years ago, circa 800BCE, there existed a giant University at Takshashila (often called Taxila), a town located in the north-western region of India (in today’s Pakistan). According to references in the Ramayana, King Bharata founded the town in the name of his son, Taksha.

The site initially began to develop as a loosely connected group of buildings where learned persons resided, worked and taught. Over the years, additional buildings were added; rulers made donations and more scholars migrated there. Gradually a large campus developed, which became a celebrated seat of learning in the ancient world.

  • Not only Indians but also students from as far as Babylonia, Greece, Syria, Arabia, Phoenicia and China came to study.
  • 68 different streams of knowledge were on the syllabus.
  • A wide range of subjects were taught by experienced masters: Vedas, Language, Grammar, Philosophy, Medicine, Surgery, Archery, Politics, Warfare, Astronomy, Astrology, Accounts, Commerce, Futurology, Documentation, Occult, Music, Dance, etc.
  • The minimum entrance age was 16 and there were 10,500 students.
  • The panel of masters included renowned names like Kautilya (the author of the “Arthashastra”), Panini (the codifier of Sanskrit into today’s form), Jivak (medicine) and Vishnu Sharma (author and compiler of the Panchtantra).

When Alexander’s armies came to the Punjab in the fourth century B.C., Takshashila had already developed a reputation as an important seat of learning. Thus on his return Alexander took many scholars from there with him to Greece.

Being near the north-west frontier of India, Takshashila had to face the brunt of attacks and invasions from the north and the west. Thus the Persians, Greeks, Parthians, Shakas and Kushanas laid their destructive marks on this institution. The final blow, however, came from the Huns (also the destroyers of the Roman Empire) who, A.D. c.450, razed the institution. When the Chinese traveller Huen T’sang (A.D. 603-64) visited Takshashila, the town had lost all its former grandeur and international character.

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Categories
Gods of Science and Discovery

Hindu Mind of Science

In our modernist parlance science and religion are held to be polar opposites. Scientific is equated with being rational, logical and in tune with reason. Religion however is seen as backward, laughable and regressive, as well as totally obscurantist. Yet how does this equate with the fact that many of the scientific strides came from India, a land and civilisation which has endured from ancient times and retains its core spirituality?

The ancient Indus Valley Civilisation dates back 5000 years. Yet the earliest excavations revealed that it must have been developed by a highly complex and intelligent society. Urban centres were planned on a chequerboard pattern with sophisticated drainage and sanitation. The same scientific knowledge was responsible for the reservoir and drainage systems which fed the agricultural base.

Further centuries saw incredible developments in the forging of bronze and iron weapons. Treatment of diseases such as leprosy, cataracts and smallpox. Trigonometric functions were used by the mathematician Aryabhata in the fifth century. The calculus theorem now known as “Rolle’s theorem” was stated by mathematician Bhāskara II, in the twelfth century. It is that to which we now turn.

The Vedic texts treated numbers as sacred and developed highly complex mathematics, especially in geometric constructions. Despite being known today as ‘Arabic’ the decimal number system originated from India. This is one of the most important gifts Hindu civilisation gave to the world. Modern calculations would be unthinkable without this. Key to this is the use of zero, which represents the empty set, nothing, no value.

To us it seems normal but it was an incredible feat of the ancient Hindu mind to realise that ‘nothing’ could be represented. Is it so logical? After all nothing is ‘nothing’? So why represent it? We cannot possible understand this unless we understand the mind which gave rise to the possibility that even ‘nothing’ could be understood in symbolic terms. And to do this that mind had to think both abstractly and delve into deep spiritual consciousness. This means we must revaluate our prognosis that science and spirituality stand at polar opposites of the spectrum in human understanding.

What led to ‘nothing’ be represented by the now familiar circular symbol which we call ‘zero’? Only a human mind which could understand the idea of ‘nothingness’. In this state of eternal bliss free from materialistic ties. This can only be achieved by moksha which is escape from the cycle of rebirth which one is fated to endure. If the mind is obsessed by hedonism and materialism it is destined to be tied to the wheel of reincarnation. But to achieve moksha is to be liberated from this.

It is the understanding of moksha which led the ancient Indian mind to understand that the empty set had a value, a very important value, the most profound value. Hence in ancient India the spiritual and scientific worlds were united and never separate. That is why Hindu civilisation has endured while others have perished. That is also why what we deem as western scientific development has at its core the essence of Indian spirituality.

Let us end this by looking at the most obvious example. Computing could not have developed without binary. And binary could not have developed without zero. Here ‘nothing’ as a value is essential. It is in fact so essential that without ‘nothing’ there would have been no computing. Technologically we would have all remained in the dark ages. So we can thank the ancient Hindu mind for showing us the light.

 

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Categories
Historical Figures

Baji Rao1st : The Peshwa

By the 1730s the Mughal Empire lay in ruins.The rulers of Delhi, the ‘Padshahs of the world’ had been humbled and the successors of Aurangzeb lived in terror of the revolutions convulsing the subcontinent of India. The spectre of religious fanaticism in the late 1600s had led to a revolt by the Hindu populace of India from the foothills of the Himalayas, the Rajputs of Rajasthan, The Jaats of Bharatpur, the Bundelas of Central India, the Satnamis of North India, The Kolis and Bhils of Gujarat, The Bedars of South India and the Ahoms of Eastern India.

None however provoked as much terror and fear in the hearts of their enemies as the slogan of the Hindu Padshahi coined by the first great leader Shivaji of the irresistible cavalry pouring from the arid hills of Western India. These were the Hindu Marathas. From the inspiration of Shivaji and Sant Ramdas they unleashed such energies into India that the Mughal Empire fell in ruin.

Following the death of Shivaji and the 27 year war of liberation the Marathas freed their homeland from Mughal tyranny when the son of the prime minister, a 19 year old named Baji Rao made an inspired speech in the court of the Maratha king.

 

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‘Strike, strike at the heart of the rotting tree and the branches will fall of themselves. Then this land of the Hindus will be free’

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He then embarked on a ceaseless twenty year campaign in a strike northwards, every year inching nearer to Delhi and the extinction of the Mughal Empire. It is said that the Mughal emperor was in such terror that he refused a meeting with Baji Rao, fearing to sit in his presence. The holy pilgrimage routes of the Hindus from Mathura, to Benares to Somnath were made free of harassment.

The greatest of the warriors of the empire, Mughal, Pathan and Central Asian alike were defeated by Baji Rao: Nizam ul Mulk, Khan I Dauran, Muhammad Khan are but a few of the names of the warriors who failed before the Marathas. The Battles of Bhopal, Palkhed, the victories over the Portuguese invaders in Western India are amongst his great achievements.He died at the untimely age of 39 in 1739, in military camp surrounded by his army.He has been described as the incarnation of Hindu energy, ceaselessly striving for 20 years to establish the Hindu Padshahi.

His sons continued his mission of carrying the saffron flag to the gates of Afghanistan in 1758 to the fort of Attock in the North and simultaneously marching to the Southern shores of India. He represents the creative and destructive power of Dharma as he unleashed the urge of a people yearning to be free and remains as a symbol of victory to the modern day.

What others said :

J. Grant Duff says in “History of the Marathas”:

“Bred a soldier as well as a statesman, Baji rao united the enterprise, vogour, and hardihood of a Maratha chief with the polished manners, the sagacity, and address which frequently distinguish the Brahmins of the Concan. Fully acquainted with the financial schemes of his father, he selected that part of the plan calculated to direct the predatory hordes of Maharashtra in a common effort. In this respect, the genious of Baji rao enlarged the schemes which his father devised; and unlike most Brahmins of him, it may be truly said- he had both- the head to plan and the hand to execute.

“Sir R. Temple says in “Oriental Experiences”:

“Bajirao was hardly to be surpassed as a rider and was ever forward in action, eager to expose himself under fire if the affair was arduous. He was inured to fatigue and prided himself on enduring the same hardships as his soldiers and sharing their scanty fare. He was moved by an ardour for success in national undertakings by a patriotic confidence in the Hindu cause as against its old enemies, the Muhammadans and its new rivals, the Europeans then rising above the political horizon. He lived to seethe Maratha spread over the Indian continent from the Arabian sea to the Bay of Bengal. He died as he lived in camp under canvas among his men and he is remembered among the Marathas as the fighting Peshwa, as the incarnation of Hindu energy.

“Jadunath Sarkar says in his forward to “Peshwa Bajirao I and Maratha Expansion”

“Bajirao was a heaven born cavalry leader. In the long and distinguished galaxy of Peshwas, Bajirao Ballal was unequalled for the daring and originality of his genius and the volume and value of his achievements. He was truly a carlylean Hero as king- or rather as Man of action.’ If Sir Robert Walpole created the unchallengeable position of the Prime Minister in the unwritten constitution of England, Bajirao created the same institution in the Maratha Raj at exactly the same time.

“Surendra Nath Sen says in “The Military System of the Marathas”:

“The lover of Mastani knew well how to appeal to the religious sentiments of his co-religionists, although he could scarcely be considered an orthodox Brahman… Shivaji had given the Marathas a common cry, and none appreciated the potency of that cry clearly than Peshwa Bajirao. Shivaji’s military reforms he would not or could not revive, but he stood forth, as Shivaji had done, as champion of Hinduism. People of Central and Northern India saw in him a new deliverer.”

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