Indus Sanskrit

TOI of 26.4.1999 carried a news item from Hyderabad that featured N.S.Rajaram, as having prepared a book claiming Indus Seals are written in Sanskrit in the form of cryptic sutras of Panini and some others. It is the same Rajaram who at an earlier occasion scripted and published two tracts namely ‘Aryan Invasion’ and Politics of History’. The Hindutva groups published them as part of correcting history. This time Rajaram teamed with a Vedic Sanskrit scholar Jha, in interpreting the signs in Indus Seals as that of Vedic ones.

If what Rajaram and his teammate Jha claimed to have unearthed evidence for interpreting the Seals; then there should be enough and more evidence to the Vedas being part of Indus Civilization. Shiva and Pasupati are commonly mentioned in Rig Veda. In it, it is Rudra or rather eleven Rudras. In Indus finds there are no evidence of Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Marut and Agni etc. the common divinities variously described in Rig Veda. One cannot accept the argument that during the Indus Civilization the Vedic divines were already disappeared. It will be an absurd contention. Moreover, the horse that is so much referred, praised in Veda is not supposed to be an animal native to India but found only very later in this land. That should have been the time for Rig Veda. Besides, the archeological findings from Indus do not include anything remotely connected with horse. If Sanskrit is the language of Indus people, they have to be the heirs of Vedic traditions. But they are not any prominent in Indus archeology.

The only motive for Rajaram to collaborate with Jha in preparing the book is to bolster up the communalist claim for the ancient Indus Valley civilization. There have been a good lot of such unfounded claims in the past, from supporters of Sangh Parivar ideology of Hindu Rashtra. Now they are propagating that their concept of Hindu religion is the one natural and universal in pre-historic times. While in other countries that natural religion i.e. Hindu succumbed to the propagation of Semitic ones; India did not go under them because of its original roots in India. According to Hindutva ideologues, there was no Aryan immigration to India but a reverse emigration from India to other countries including America in pre-historic times. No need of any evidence since Hindu is natural to all. Rajaram reminds that historians other than people like him did not find any literary evidence in Indus except its archeological remains. At the same time, they maintained that Vedic people did not leave any evidence other than literary ones. If according to Rajaram the archeological evidence of Vedic Aryans is Indus civilization itself. Then the problem starts as to why the two i.e. archeological and Vedic literary evidences do not tally each other in all phases. Literary evidence is for northern mountains and rivers (most of them could not be located with accuracy), the archeological evidences are confined to a vast area that could not be located in then Vedic literature. According to the propagandists of Hindutva, the Vedic times were earlier to Indus Civilization. If so, the question arises about the progress made in those literatures during nearly 2,000 years of Indus period. We have more knowledge on the literary output after the Indus than during. The horses that were in abundance in Vedic times are not traceable in Indus Valley for about 1,500 years. They cannot disappear just like that. Some evidence of horse was said to have found in the last years of Indus civilization. May be some are being imported by that time.      

If the script found in Indus Seals is Sanskrit it should not have been forgotten by the later inhabitants. The Hindutva claim for an uninterrupted history tumbles necessitating Rajaram likes to re-invent the script. Only in cases of discontinuity or disappearance of civilizations, make scripts and language unintelligible. While Indus valley created an advanced urban living, there was a long gap thereafter to find urban settlements in India. Why did the people following Indus times did not take with them the advanced urban settlements? Indus had baked bricks and planned houses and streets. That legacy came about only some hundreds of years later.

K.N.Krishnan.

June 1999.