Hindutva Claim.

Hindutva Claim.

People preaching Hindutva fantasies as history who advocate that ancient Indians are Hindus are averse to call themselves Aryans, even though that name is an accepted one in Veda and other sacred texts. May be because of the stigma attached to the word Aryan through its association with Nazies? They cannot claim any specific character for the ancients that are not with others. They established civilizations similar or with some difference in many geographical areas. It is appoint to consider that there are not convincing and connecting evidence between Indus Valley civilization and the later Gangetic one. This fact is completely obscured by those ardent advocates of Vedic people being indigenous and that include Indus Valley as well. If there are evidences to show that their habitats were outside, the same evidences could be interpreted as spreading from inside to outwards. The gaps between Mohanjo Daro and Harappa compared to  Vedic is so great that they demarcate two different civilizations in the period of Indian history. There are very few similarities than disparities in them. While all others agree that, the Harappans are pre-Aryan i.e. pre-Vedic the pariavar believe that the Vedic is pre-Harappan much earlier than Mohanjo Daro and Harappa. The difficulties encountered in such presentation are either kept in silence or dismissed as imaginations. They are strenuously trying to explain away that the urban manifestations of Indus Valley as natural development from Vedic times. But so much are awaiting explanations in order to establish a firm foundation to the claim. Some of them try to find Vedic rituals and practices in some aspects of Harappan life. However, they seem to be not sure of themselves in their conviction.  All of them do agree that the two periods are separated through years. Very selected features found in later Hindu life like Shiva and Shakti cults are ascribed to Indus Valley and thus Vedic.

If Mohanjo Daro and Harappa are the continuation of an uncertain Vedic past, they should show much more sign of the knowledge of the vast Vedic legacies starting with Rigveda. The reason might be that the Vedic lore is already past and mostly forgotten in between. Even though that there are no known literary evidences, the archeological evidences available show that the Harappan was a development from low to high going through several faces from food gathering to agriculture and then to an urban face. The development exhausted for unknown reasons and finally buried in the banks of rivers in Panjab. The present finding are that even during the period of its decline the Indus Valley developments expanded to a very large part of north and west India. They also came to an end due the decline at the centre. The period is estimated to be some two millennium. Te later period started with low level developments and went on to form the highly urbanized Mauryan period and so on. Since; the continuity are very much visible and recorded in history by several sources. All these show the so called Hindu and Vedic became wide in the country in later years and not much earlier. If we accept that, the Vedic was earlier than Harappa there is no clinching explanation for the complete elimination of urban signs such as horse. One cannot hold a view that the horse which was in abundance in Vedic lore disappeared from that part of India in the succeeding two millennium of the Indus period. They reappeared in the later decades. Still more studies are required to get at the real history of horse in India.

K.N.Krishnan.

April 1999.