INVASIONS OR MIGRATIONS?
Other examples of loanwords in the Sanskrit of the Vedas can be equally revealing. The word for ‘plough’, for instance, is said to be non-Sanskritic. If the arya, when they arrived in India, did not have a word for a plough – and so had to borrow someone else’s – it is safe to assume that they did not have a plough. The Harappans, however, did. It therefore follows that the arya probably learned about ploughs and their use from the indigenous successors of the Harappans. These may have been the despised dasa of the Vedic texts, although there are now grounds to suppose that the dasa were in fact survivors of an earlier wave of the Indo-European diaspora and were not therefore indigenous. It has also been suggested that arya – dasa contact may have taken place in Afghanistan before the arya reached India.
Similar conclusions may be drawn about the arya’s words for ‘furrow’ and for ‘threshing floor’. They too appear to be non-Sanskritic. Obviously the Aryans were not engaged in arable farming in any big way. Nor, evidently, were they interested in architecture. Whereas it is no surprise that they had to borrow a word for ‘peacock’, a bird then not much known outside India, or that they had to invent one for ‘elephant’ (they called it the ‘beast with a hand’, i.e. a trunk), it is more revealing that they had also to borrow a word for ‘mortar’. Archaeology supports the obvious inference; no buildings have yet been found which can certainly be ascribed to the Vedic arya.
For ‘writing’, ‘record’, ‘scribe’, or ‘letter’ the arya of the Vedas had no words at all, not even borrowed ones. It is therefore almost certain that they brought no knowledge of writing into India with them and that, by the time they arrived, the literacy skills of the Harappans had been forgotten, at least in areas where the arya first settled. When and how later scripts emerged is unknown. The first mention of writing occurs in oral compositions dating from after 500 BC. Inscriptions do not appear until two hundred years later, but they use two comparatively sophisticated scripts which suggest several centuries of prior familiarity. One of these scripts may owe something to the ideograms of the Harappan seals; the other looks to have been derived from the Aramaic script of western Asia.
Illiterate and ignorant of many basic agrarian skills, the arya yet knew all, and more, about livestock. While the Harappans used ox-transport and may have found totemic roles for bulls and many other animals, they do not seem to have had a passion for dairy farming or horse-racing; in fact the horse was probably unknown to them, India’s lack of native bloodstock being then, as ever after, the Achilles heel of its ambitious empire-builders. The arya, though, were veritable cowboys. As well as advertising their prowess in the rustling of cattle and the driving of two-horse chariots, they spattered their verses with metaphors about affectionate cows and fiery steeds. In the Rig Veda storm clouds invariably ‘gallop’ across the heavens; their thunder is as the neigh of a stallion. Rivers rush from the hills like cattle stampeding towards pasture; and when the Beas river is joined by a tributary, ‘one the other licks, like the mother-cow her calf’. Cattle were also currency, value being expressed in so many cows; and go, the Sanskrit root for ‘cow’, also features in the word used to indicate warfare, evidence that strife originally resulted from competition not for land and territory but for cows and wealth.
The arya were therefore originally pastoralists and, assuming a migration into India, plus the herdsman’s need to be forever seeking new pastures, they must have been semi-nomadic. We may infer that, like pastoralists the world over, they lived an itinerant outdoor life. Much exposed to the elements, they may have been inclined to discover divine powers in the forces of nature and to assume a ready communion with these powers. The names of their gods predate arrival in India, many (e.g. Indra, Agni, Varuna) being almost synonymous with their counterparts in Persian, Greek and Latin mythology; but their attributes and achievements relate to the Indian environment. It would seem, also, that the basic unit of human society was initially the small nomadic group rather than the settlement. The word grama, although it soon came to mean a village, was originally indicative of a troupe of wagons and their perhaps three or four related families, plus livestock.
During the monsoon months, when pasture became plentiful and transhumance difficult, the arya must have formed their first temporary settlements. No doubt they then also planted their grain crop which, watered by the rains and fertilised by the manure from their cattle pens, would have been harvested during the winter months. The grain was probably barley. Rice, although apparently cultivated by the Harappans, does not feature in the earliest of the Vedas. Nor is the word used to designate it Sanskritic. It, too, was probably acquired from one of India’s aboriginal peoples. Later, however, after the arya had adopted a settled life, rice receives its first mention, and later still, following their colonisation of the middle Ganga in the early centuries of the first millennium BC, the cultivation of irrigated padi would become crucial to their pattern of settlement.
That they initially settled in the Panjab and astride what is now the Indo–Pakistan frontier is clear from references in the Rig Veda to the Sapta-sindhu, ‘the Land of the Seven Rivers’. Each of these rivers has been identified, and most were tributaries of the Indus. They are mentioned frequently, and must therefore have been familiar to the arya (although the most important, the Saraswati, has since dried up). On the other hand, there is only one mention of the mighty Ganga, and that in what is thought to be the latest of Rig Vedic compositions. Subsequent works, like the Brahmanas and Upanisads (C900–600 BC), confirm a shift in geographical focus to the east and specifically to the Doab, the crescent of land between the Jamuna and the Ganga (immediately east of Delhi). As the setting for the Mahabharata, the Doab became arya-varta, ‘the land of the arya’. If one accepts C950 BC as the probable date of the Bharata war, this migration, or colonisation, may therefore have occurred C1100–1000 BC. It would be followed by a further move into the valley of the Ganga itself before the arya, much changed in the interim, began founding states, building cities and rediscovering the trail of civilisation which the Harappans had trodden two thousand years earlier.
As to when the arya made their initial debut in India there remains grave doubt. Nearly two hundred years ago Mountstuart Elphinstone, one of the most outstanding scholar-administrators in the employ of the English East India Company, headed the first British mission into Afghanistan. He failed to reach Kabul, but from Peshawar in what was then Afghan territory Elphinstone got a look at the Khyber Pass and formed some idea of the harsh lands whence the Aryans supposedly came. Years later, having declined the governor-generalship to concentrate on his studies, he produced a magisterial History of India. In it he devoted much attention to Sanskrit tradition, and recalling that dramatic contrast between the arid Afghan hills and the smiling gardens of Peshawar, he for the first time threw serious doubt on the central Asian provenance of the Aryans.
Neither in the code of Manu [the survivor of the flood, who was later credited with compiling a standard compendium of Hindu law] nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any other book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence, or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no farther than the Himalaya chain, in which is fixed the habitation of the gods.