Presence of the equus, horse in Sarasvati Civilization

Lothal. Terracotta horse (c. 2250 BC)

The presence or absence of the horse and chariot in archaeology and 
ancient texts of Bharat has been a subject of continuing interest for 
over 150 years. This section of the website is devoted to the 
presentation of arguments in this regard. Scholars are welcome to make 
their contributions to this topic. 

The subject on chariots has been dealt with elsewhere on the website. 

Scientific evidence for an equidae with 34 ribs and equus sivalensis 
(Horses of the Sivalik range of mountains)

Luristan pictorial motifs with parallels in the Sarasvati Sindhu 
Civilization

R.gvedic horse has 34 ribs, a breed distinct from the Arabian equus 
caballus

The equus species: evidence from ancient times and in regions close to 
the civilization

Arms and armour of Bha_rati_ya Civilization

http://hindunet.org/saraswati/ratha1.htm
http://hindunet.org/saraswati//vedicage.htm
http://hindunet.org/saraswati/resources/Indoaryanproblem.htm

The section starts with an article by Michel Danino.

A reply to Frontline's cover story (October 13 issue)
by Profs. Michael Witzel, Steve Farmer & Romila Thapar

[Note: Michel Danino, a French researcher settled in India for more 
than twenty years, has translated and edited many books related to Sri 
Aurobindo and Mother and given lectures on Indian culture and 
civilization, some of which have been published in book form. He has 
also made a study of the Aryan invasion theory in the Indian context, 
published under the title The Invasion That Never Was (co-authored 
with Sujata Nahar, 2nd edition, 2000). The above reply to Frontline 
was not published in the two issues that followed the October 13 
number.]

The two articles in Frontline's cover story (October 13 issue) 
regrettably show more prejudice than scholarly objectivity, and call 
for the briefest of answers on several distinct points: 1) the horse 
question in the Harappan civilization; 2) N. Jha's and N. S. Rajaram's 
proposed decipherment of the Indus script; 3) the relationship, if 
any, between the Harappan and the Vedic worlds; 4) the deeper question 
of "Indology" vs. Indian civilization.

1) Objective readers will agree with Profs. Witzel's and Farmer's 
convincing demonstration that the so-called horse seal included in 
Jha's and Rajaram's book is unlikely to have depicted a horse at all. 
But a "fraud" or an over-enthusiastic error? Witzel and Farmer imply 
that the distorted seal is central to Jha's and Rajaram's work, but a 
look at their book shows it only occupies a minor place in their 
scheme of things. In my opinion, the reproduction (fig. 7.1a) is, more 
likely, a bad digital enlargement of a bad scan of a poorer original 
than the one Witzel and Farmer give us p. 7; on the whole, the shapes 
remain faithful, but the "artist's reproduction" (fig. 7.1b) is 
certainly not legitimate. No one is above error, not even Witzel who 
mistranslated a Sanskrit text to make it hint at a migration into 
India (see Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate by the Belgian linguist 
and historian Dr. Koenraad Elst for details).

Prof. Romila Thapar's remark that "if the horse had been as central to 
the Indus civilisation as it was to the Vedic corpus, there would have 
been many seals depicting horses" is simplistic. The Harappans did not 
include all the animals around them on their seals - they had cows and 
camels, for instance, yet did not depict them; on the other hand they 
depicted the unicorn and a three-headed creature, which did not exist 
physically. The seals were not meant to be a zoological catalogue, and 
until we can read the Harappans' mind and culture, we can only try to 
guess reasons for the presence or absence of a particular animal.

As regards the horse itself, Witzel and Farmer quote the late Prof. 
Sandor Bökönyi, but omit his important conclusion about "the possibility 
of the occurrence of domesticated horses in the mature phase of the 
Harappa culture, at the end of the 3rd millennium B.C." (South Indian 
Studies 13, 1997, p. 300). Apart from Bökönyi, Indian archaeozoologists 
Bhola Nath and A. K. Sharma had earlier reached similar conclusions. Let 
us not forget that not even five per cent of all Harappan sites have 
been excavated - the question of horse remains will doubtless remain 
open for some more time.

2) Witzel's and Farmer's objections to Jha's proposed decipherment of 
the Indus script are twofold: One, that trying to read Sanskrit on the 
seals shows the work of "Hindutva revisionists"; by that criterion, 
respected archaeologists such as Dr. S. R. Rao, Dr. M. V. N. Rao and 
others, who had much earlier proposed decipherments linked to 
Sanskrit, will probably have to be stuck with the omnibus Hindutva 
label! Two, a valid objection that the Jha's decipherment leaves too 
much room for interpretation; yet that is not a sufficient ground to 
dismiss Jha's work altogether, for our view of the Harappan script is 
probably distorted by the brevity of the inscriptions. What if 
Harappans had longer texts on cloth, wood, reed, or any other 
degradable material? Such texts (even a few dozen words long) would 
clearly restrict the freedom of interpretation, even with Jha's 
method, and would have given the necessary background to make shorter 
texts clear to the Harappans (just as the modern Hebrew script, devoid 
of vowels, can be ambiguous if a reader only had a word or two, but 
ceases to be so with more words). In the end, the reader is left 
wishing for an impartial and open-minded critique of Jha's and 
Rajaram's proposed decipherment rather than this kind of character 
assassination.

3) All three writers are emphatic that the Vedic age came much later 
than the Harappan, and that any attempt at equating the two can only 
come, again, from the fevered brains of "Hindutva propagandists". This 
is absurd as well as misleading, for the connection (or lack of it) 
between the Harappan and the Vedic (or "Aryan") worlds has been a 
matter of scholarly debate for decades, perhaps ever since John 
Marshall remarked in 1931, "[The Harappan] religion is so 
characteristically Indian as hardly to be distinguished from still 
living Hinduism." More recently Colin Renfrew, a well-known British 
archaeologist, remarked (in his Archaeology and Language - the Puzzle 
of Indo-European Origins):

"It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus 
Valley civilization." Indeed, several symbols depicted on the seals or 
other artifacts, such as the bull or a mother-goddess, are reminiscent 
of Vedic themes; Raymond and Bridget Allchin, British archaeologists 
of rather conservative leanings, concede in their Origins of a 
Civilization - the Prehistory and Early Archaeology of South Asia that 
a seal from Chanhu-daro does seem to depict the marriage of Heaven and 
Earth, a theme central to the Rig-Veda. The seals also portray 
numerous deities seated or standing in yogic postures, and figurines 
in various yoga asanas have been found (e.g. at Lothal), which shows 
that yoga was part of Harappan culture. And what about the fire-altars 
found in several Harappan cities, reminiscent of Vedic rituals?

Parallels do not end with artifacts. Prof. Romila Thapar's assertion 
that "there are no descriptions of the city in the Rigveda [...] that 
could be applied to the Indus cities", is astonishing: can she be 
unaware of claims to the contrary by respected archaeologists, such as 
Dr. R. S. Bisht, excavator of Dholavira in Kutch, where he found "a 
virtual reality of what the Rig-Veda, the world's oldest literary 
record, describes"? Bisht is also a deep Vedic scholar, and in a 
masterly article "Harappans and the Rigveda: Points of Convergence" in 
the recently published Dawn of Indian Civilization, he quotes over 500 
references from the Rig-Veda to build his case that not only 
town-planning but various kinds of Harappan habitations are depicted 
in the Veda. Thapar also seems unaware that the Rig-Veda does make 
frequent mention of shipping, trade, and other ingredients of Harappan 
life. As the historian B. K. Ghosh pointed out in 1958, "The Rgveda 
clearly reflects the picture of a highly complex society in the full 
blaze of civilisation," a picture as consistent with the Indus 
civilization as it is inconsistent with pastoral nomads just arrived 
from Central Asia. Finally we have the evidence provided by the 
Sarasvati river which dried up in stages until it disappeared around 
1900 BC. Archaeologists, e.g. the Allchins, J. M. Kenoyer, Gregory 
Possehl, and most Indian archaeologists, accept the identification 
between the Vedic Sarasvati and the Ghaggar-Hakra valley which runs 
through Haryana, Rajasthan, and Pakistan's desert of Cholistan. This 
identification is "well-established," to use Witzel's and Farmer's 
frequent phrase (see their rule No. 2 about "respect for 
well-established facts"). Then how could the Rig-Veda praise the 
Sarasvati as a "mighty river" if its composers arrived on the scene 
much later? Gregory Possehl puts the problems squarely when he remarks 
in his recent Indus Age: The Beginnings: "This carries with it an 
interesting chronological implication: the composers of the Rgveda 
were in the Sarasvati region prior to the drying up of the river and 
this would be closer than 2000 bc than it is to 1000 bc, somewhat 
earlier than most of the conventional chronologies for the presence of 
the Vedic Aryans in the Punjab." In fact it should be much before 2000 
BC if we accept the Rig-Veda's description of the Sarasvati as flowing 
"from the mountain to the ocean" (7.95.2), Once again, the debate will 
go on, and raising the Hindutva bogey will do nothing to advance it. 
(Incidentally, was B. G. Tilak, who advocated an Arctic origin for the 
mythical Aryans, not a staunch defender of Hindutva?)

4) If Rajaram and Jha are such worthless scholars as the writers 
constantly imply, why don't the latter rather spend their energies 
engaging in a serious scholarly debate with a Renfrew or a Rao, a 
Bisht or a Possehl? Is it because they are ill-equipped to do so? 
Clearly, the Harappan-Vedic question is far more complex than the 
three professors are telling us, and cannot be solved by their 
sweeping assertions which ignore much archaeological and other 
evidence in disregard of their own golden rules Nos. 1 and 3.

As regards rule No. 4 about "independence from religious and political 
agendas," it is unexceptionable. But in that case, why don't the 
writers protest against the perverse misuse of the defunct Aryan 
invasion theory (or its new avatar of "Aryan migration") by Marxist, 
Dalit, Christian and Dravidian groups? When Asko Parpola declared in a 
World Tamil Conference that today's Tamilians are the descendants of 
the Harappans, that was fine; when K. N. Pannikar, who describes 
himself as a "Left historian", publicly defended the Aryan invasion 
theory at a recent student congress, that is fine; but when one quotes 
solid evidence from reputed archaeologists to reject such half-baked 
claims, one is a "Hindutvavadi" - where is the logic? And why are 
outdated Indian textbooks, which still speak of Aryan and Dravidian 
races, of Aryans invading India and destroying the Indus civilization, 
allowed to continue stuffing the brains of Indian children with such 
antiquated nonsense?

The demand underlying both articles is that none except holders of 
university chairs should have a right to discuss issues related to 
India's ancient past. That demand is untenable. Knowledge has never 
been the exclusive property of academia. If in addition Indologists (a 
very hazy term) are unwilling to tap living sources of knowledge on 
Indian civilization from genuine Indian scholars, pandits, and (why 
not?) yogis, and hasten to dismiss all historical data derived from 
traditional sources, they should not be surprised if they find 
themselves isolated in their ivory tower. More importantly, Western or 
Westernized Indologists subconsciously try to impose a purely Western 
intellectual approach which, despite its great usefulness as a tool, 
fails to fathom India's non-intellectual content. Recall for instance 
Thapar's characterization (in her History of India) of the Rig-Veda as 
"primitive animism", of the Mahabharata as the glorification of a 
"local feud" between two Aryan tribes, or of the Ramayana as "a 
description of local conflicts between the agriculturists of the 
Ganges Valley and the more primitive hunting and food-gathering 
societies of the Vindhyan region" (sic!). Such a shallow, reductionist 
look at one of the profoundest cultural heritages in the world is too 
often (though not always) the bane of Western academia. It can only 
leave many Indians dissatisfied and in search of more perceptive 
alternatives that do not belittle the Indian psyche.

Michel Danino
Sent by e-mail 9.10.2000

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