The present generation of Hindus owe much to Shivaji. Although he is famous throughout the length and breadth of India, in the West many Hindus, will not even have heard of him. This article is a tribute to the great King, whose life has had a profound impact on history, and who was an emblem of both courage and virtue.

Shivaji was born in 1627 in a turbulent period when the Hindu people were being oppressed and religiously persecuted by foreign invaders in their own homeland. The carnage included massacres of Hindus, the mass rape of Hindu women, Hindu children taken into slavery, the imposition of heavy discriminatory taxes on Hindus (the Jiziya tax) and the destruction of Hindu temples. Indeed, it seemed like Hinduism was in danger of dying out.

However, his mother, Jijabai raised Shivaji with high ideals of spirituality, heroism and chivalry by inspiring him with the great Hindu epics and heroes of the past ages. With his desire to rise to the defence of the Hindu civilisation and freedom now evoked, he was ready to live up to the seal he prepared for himself at the age of 12 inscribed with the words: \”Although the first moon is small, men see that it shall gradually grow. This seal befits Shivaji, the son of Shahaji.\”

From the age of 16, Shivaji began to undertake battles to liberate lands that were under enemy control. His mind was made up by this early age – he wasn\’t going to wait around or pray for a champion to be born to renew the rule of dharma. In one of his early victories he and a small group of friends captured a fort and renamed it Rajgad. With this and subsequent victories Shivaji became powerful and his army grew to thousands, giving him enough confidence to attack and liberate Mughal occupied territories (the Mughals were the most powerful dynasty in India and had most of North India under its control at that time). Shivaji fought with determination and strategic brilliance. He used guerrilla warfare to devastating effect, and made great advances against the much larger and heavily armed Mughal forces. At times Shivaji would enter into a strategic truce, giving him the opportunity to strengthen his positions in other areas, while planning his next offensive.

Shivaji understood that it is better to use cunning strategies and break a truce against an enemy that molested Hindu women and children and destroyed Hindu temples, than to abide by an honourable code of conduct towards the dishonourable enemy and risk losing the urgent cause he stood for. But while Shivaji was brutal against those who oppressed Hindus, he did not permit attacks against their women and children or places of worship. Shivaji stood for dharma; he used might as a tool to establish justice not oppression.

Shivaji died on 4 April 1680, from failing health, thought to be due to his vigorous and continuous struggle. His contribution to our history cannot be overstated. The poet Bhushan, who lived at the same time as Shivaji wrote: \”Kasihki Kala Gayee, Mathura Masid Bhaee; Gar Shivaji Na Hoto, To Sunati Hot Sabaki!\” [Kashi has lost its splendour, Mathura has become a mosque; If Shivaji had not been, All would have been circumcised (converted)].

After the untimely death, Aurangzeb the Mughal Emperor and his armies descended upon the kingdom to crush it, thinking that after Shivaji\’s death his warriors would be disheartened. However, Shivaji had inspired his followers to such an extent that not only did they weather this storm and saw Aurangzeb\’s death but went from strength to strength with Peshwa Baji Rao the First at the realm, and went on to unleash the final death blow to the Mughal Empire.
Shivaji\’s legacy can be seen alive to this day. For example, the profound benefits of Hindu spirituality, philosophy, Yoga, mediation, Ayurveda and art resonate not only in India but all over the world. But these practices and knowledge would only be found as partial relics in the museums and libraries like all other ancient civilisations had it not been for great Hindu warriors like Shivaji.

Veda Vyas & Untouchability

Veda Vyasa is a legendary Hindu sage, whose very name is synonymous to Hindus with knowledge. According to traditional Hindu accounts, he lived at the end of the Treta Yuga and early Kali Yuga (the date for the beginning of the Kali Yuga is 3102BC).

Veda Vyasa is accredited with compiling the Vedas and writing the Brahma Sutras (one of the three great authoritative Hindu philosophical texts. He was also the recorder/writer of the earliest form of the Mahabharata (which was originally called the ‘Jaya’). The followers of Veda Vyasa (the Vyasas or ‘compilers’) carried out the compilation of the Puranas.

His birthday is celebrated as ‘Guru Purnima’ – one of the most sacred days in the Hindu calendar, which is the day when teachers are honored. A popular saying about Veda Vyasa goes: ‘Vyasocchishtasam jagat sarvam’ meaning that so great was the learning of Rishi Veda Vyasa, that even his voluminous writings represent only the periphery of his knowledge. Virtually every Hindu sampradaya (order) traces their lineage to him, and wherever knowledge is propagated and respected is called a Vyaspeeth – Vyasa’s throne.

Yet had Veda Vyasa, the compiler of the Vedas, lived in the later degenerate and perverted age of Hindu society, he may well have been considered an untouchable and not even allowed to touch the Vedas!

His mother (Satyavati) used to sell fish to make a living, and in many parts of Hindu society in its later period of caste insanity this would have made him an untouchable. Yet Vyasa is considered by all Hindus to be the very epitome of wisdom!

This shows that the terrible caste rigidity of Hindu society that we have seen at some points in our past, and even today, was definitely not originally the state of things, and certainly does not represent the true spirit of Hinduism.

Did Hindus copy from Greeks?

By MSN Menon

The Hindu and Greek civilisations were the greatest among the civilisations of men. But today there is an attempt to give precedence to Greek civilisation. It is claimed that the Hindu civilisation has borrowed much from the Greek.

I admire both civilisations. But I am partial to truth. But what is the truth? The truth is: Dharma (ethics) has been the guiding principle of Hindu life from times we know to this day. More so when there was no code of law. But the concept of Dharma was foreign to Greeks till Socrates (4th a BC) began to preach his moral philosophy in Greece. But his preaching had no impact on their tyrant rulers. Which explains why they condemned Socrates to death. Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of Europe, faced the same fate. He had to flee his country, although he was the teacher of Alexander, the Great. Hindus never produced tyrants. Why? Because violation of Dharma brought severe punishment on the violator.

A society without a sense of justice is barbarous. Greece was just that—a barbarous society, says Draper, author of the book Intellectual Development of Europe Vol II. The idea of law was foreign to Homer (8th c BC) the epic writer. There was no morality. “The heroes of Homer are not more moral than the giants of the fairy tales,” he says. There was little respect for the gods, who were made in the image of the Greeks. Thus, Hermes was a thief, Aphrodite, voluptuous, Zeus incestuous, Aris reckless. “Homer and Hesiod” says Xenophanes, “attribute to the gods all the acts which among men are culpable and shameful.”

It is true the concept of democracy was given by the Greeks. But there was no democracy in Greece. In an Aristophanes comedy, the Chrorus ridicules the rulers of Athens.

A new class of people arose at this time called the Sophists. They opposed the beliefs of the Greeks, said that as we cannot have a standard for truth, there can be no standard for good.” They proclaimed that might was right and that they had no faith in reasoning. They promoted rhetoric in order to win their arguments. India never produced such a class. Even the atheists of India were reasonable.

It was at this time that Greece produced its greatest moral philosopher—Socrates. He was the first Greek to bring ethics into Greece. Socrates raised the status of knowledge among the Greeks. He said that virtue lay in knowledge. His teachings are to be found in the writings of Plat, his chief disciple, and Aristotle. Plato established an Akademi in Athens. His disciples founded a new philosophical system called Neo-Platonism, which was heavily influenced by Hindu philosophies, especially Vedanta. Greede was even influenced by the mystic tradition of the Hindus (Orphic movement).

The Greeks were indifferent to history. In this they were like the Hindus. But with this difference that the Greeks remembered their heroes, while the Hindus did not. They could not remember even Ashoka.

The Greeks were great lovers of drama, but of tragedy. They believed that tragedy purged the soul of its passions. The Hindus too were great lovers of drama, but they preferred comedy, because they believed that the purpose of drama was to leave the audience in a happy frame of mind.

The Greeks thought of time in cycles. In this the Hindus contribution is clear.

No study of Greek civilisation can be complete without studying the role of Asia Minor. It was the meeting point of Asia and Europe. It was under the Persian empire which extended from Punjab (India) to Asia Minor Most of the Greek philosophers were born and brought up in Asia Minor. And one cannot forget that Alexander took with him a number of Hindu scholars on his return to his native land. Nor can we forget the influence of Indian story books like Panchatantra and Dhammapada, which carried considerable material on ethics.

For the first time, a quantitative chemical analysis done on seven paintings from the Louvre Museum of France, without disturbing any samples, explains how did Leonardo Da Vinci manage to paint such perfect faces?

For the first time, a quantitative chemical analysis done on seven paintings from the Louvre Museum of France, without disturbing any samples, explains how did Leonardo Da Vinci manage to paint such perfect faces?

Da Vinci’s paintings fascinate, partly due to a range of subtle optical effects that blur outlines, soften transitions and blend shadows, reports the journal Angewandte Chemie International edition.

Known as “sfumato”, this technique is not only the result of the genius of the artist but also of technical innovations at the beginning of the 16th century. Scientists used a technique called X-ray fluorescence, to determine the composition and thickness of each layer in the paintings (including Mona Lisa’s) of Da Vinci, made through the 40 years of his career.

Scientists have also found different recipes used by Da Vinci to do the shadows on the faces. These recipes are characterised by a technique (the use of glaze layers or a very thin paint) and by the nature of the pigments or additives.

In the case of glazes, thin layers of one to two micrometres (a micrometre is a millionth of a metre) were applied to obtain a total thickness of no more than 30 to 40 micrometres. The study was led by the team of Philippe Walter, Laboratoire du Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, in collaboration with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility and the support of Louvre Museum.

Source: IANS

Discovered in 1974, the Bhima Devi temple complex in Pinjore town is a must-visit place for its ancient heritage and aesthetic architecture, says Rajeev Ranjan Roy

If you are on your way to Shimla, you will come across the Yadavindra Singh Tourist Complex (popularly known as Pinjore Gardens) in Haryana’s Pinjore town. Nearby stands the Bhima Devi temple, adjudged the best-maintained historical monument in the country. Unfortunately, not many people know about this structure that stands as a manifest of India’s rich architectural heritage.

There is an interesting story behind the discovery of the temple. According to details furnished by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), a fallen mango tree led to the discovery of this architectural jewel in 1974. During a rainstorm the tree fell, revealing a couple of sculptures buried in the mound.

Soon, a team of the ASI from Delhi and the neighbouring states reached the spot to begin excavation. Work on the site carried on for a decade, finally unveiling what is now treated as a rare architectural marvel.

The stone-carved sculptures recovered at this place were found to be identical to those in Khajuraho. “Mostly stone-carved, the sculptures can be dated back to the time of the Pandavas,” says Harnam Singh, an ASI caretaker of the temple. The sculptures are mostly of Hindu deities like Surya, Vishnu, Saraswati, Ganesh and Shiva. The sculpture of a three-headed Shiva is the most precious find along with that of Bhima Devi.

In all, there are about 1,000 sculptures; around 100 of them are preserved in four museums, while the rest are kept in the open. The complex, maintained by the ASI, is open for people to offer prayers and perform puja every evening.

Findings suggest that the temple dates back to the eighth century AD. The complex was declared protected under the Punjab Ancient and Historical Monuments and Archeological Sites and Remains Act, 1964. The findings include 1,000 antiquarian sculptures apart from a layout plan indicating a five-temple complex, including the main central shrine representing the Panchayatana architectural style, similar to those of the Khajuraho and Bhubaneswar temples.

The temple complex adjoins Pinjore Gardens which was built by Aurangzeb’s foster brother Fidai Khan on the ruins of Hindu temples destroyed by Muslim invaders. Just to recall, Muslim invasion of Pinjore started with Nasiruddin Mahmoodin in 1254 AD. It continued with invaders like Timur Lang and lasted till Sirhind Governor Fidai Khan’s onslaught in 1666 AD. These invasions were responsible for the destruction of this ancient temple complex.

The complex also has an open-air museum where the recovered sculptures have been aesthetically installed. Integrated with the Yadavindra Gardens, the place has been developed with attractive modern illumination arrangements.

Pinjore town itself has mythological links with the Pandavas, heroes of the Mahabharata. It is believed that the Pandavas stayed here for about a year on their way to the Himalayas to spend the forced exile period of 13 years. It is also said that the Pandavas prayed to Goddess Mahakali here and performed yagna (sacrifice).

The excavations have also revealed five ancient plinths or pedestals. In fact, the direction of these plinths indicates that the temple followed the Panchayatana style of architecture. In keeping with the Hindu style of temple architecture, the outer walls of the complex are adorned with statues of Indra, Agni, Vayu, Varun and Ishan.

The idols of Hindu gods and goddesses such as Shiva, Parvati, Vishnu, Ganesh and Kartikeya that have been unearthed are now displayed in the museum which is spread over an area of eight acres.

The entire complex has been artistically restored with the renovated museum adding to the grandeur of the place. Fortunately, both the Centre and the State Government are making sincere efforts to harness its potential as a tourist attraction. While the Union Government provided Rs 77.82 lakh, Haryana’s Department of Archaeology gave Rs 82.15 lakh for the development of the museum.

The Haryana Government is also making efforts to get the temple complex to feature on the global map. “It is a great place and has tremendous tourism potential. We are looking into different aspects of the matter to ensure more and more people visit the complex and see the country’s rich architectural heritage,” says State Tourism Minister OP Jain.

The temple complex is approachable by road, rail and air from across the country. Located about 20 km from Chandigarh, it is well-connected with the capital of Haryana and Punjab and is only five kms from Kalka.

Kapila, founder of Sankya.

By MSN Menon

“DID God create the universe? No. It was always there.” so said Kapila, perhaps, the first atheist in the world. 2600 years ago!

Kapila, which means red faced, was author of Sankhya was followed by Mahavira, Buddha, Charvaka and Lokayatas, respectively. We, Hindus, have a long tradition of materialism (atheism). This is why a Hindu can never be a fanatic like others – we carry the doubt with us.

Do you know that Sankhya is the mother of all philosophic thoughts in the world, that it is the eldest philosophic system in the world and that it was the first attempt to answer questions raised by all thinking men about the origin of the universe and the destiny of man? Sounds strange? But that’s very true.

Kapila says: “Nothing should be accepted without evidence.” There is no evidence of the existence of a Supreme Being. Kapila says that there are only three ways to know everything: perception, inference and testimony. Faith has no place in his scheme of things.

This is where he departed from the traditional Brahmanical teachings. He also drifted himself away from the Brahmanical way of worship. Why? Because, according to him, Brahmanical way of worship was “tainted” by the association of animal sacrifice. He opposed animal sacrifice and declared himself in favor of ahimsa. This is said to have influenced both Mahavira and the Buddha, as also some of the Greek thinkers like Pythagoras, who gave up eating of meat. (However, it may sound strange that “acclaimed follower of Buddha” Dalai Lama himself, today, is a non-vegetarian).

If the Universe was eternal and uncreated, what does it contain? It contains Prakriti and Purusha. Prakriti exists in two forms: manifested and non-manifested. They are both eternal and independent but cannot act on their own, for Prakriti is blind, but can move, while Purusha can see, but cannot move. Purusha is not active, but contemplative. It accounts for the subjective aspects of nature. When Purusha and Prakriti combined they produced 23 elements, like water, air, fire etc.

How does Prakriti create the objective world? It creates by combining within itself three gunas, namely: Satva, Rajas and Tamas in different proportions. Gunas, as explained by Kapila is considered a great contribution of his to the world of knowledge. Gunas play a very significant role in Kapila’s system. If the objective world is full of varied life, it is because of the way the gunas combined.

Soul, or Atman, is yet another significant element in the teachings of Kapila. The souls are eternal, self-existing, separate from each other, independent, not born of Prakriti, intelligent, changeless. Kapila was the first to draw worship line between matter and soul. Kapila does not accept the Upanishadic position that souls are part of the universal self.

Yet another pillar of Sankhya is the theory of evolution. It took 2500 years to Darwin for re-discovering the theory. Evolution presents matter as eternal, which existed in a non-manifest form. Its transformation into the world of objects and beings accessible to our senses is effected by the combination of gunas. The unconscious original matter contained within itself the power of evolving in the interests of souls which are passive.

In the event of salvation, the internal body is dissolved along with its material elements and the soul becomes isolated. It continues to exist in an unconscious state.

Kapila’s basic social formulation is the “complete elimination of pain.” The purpose of life is to quit suffering. It is these ideas which preoccupied the thinkers of India in the coming centuries.

By Koenraad Elst

When evidence from archaeology and Sanskrit text studies seems to contradict the theory of the entry of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family in India through the so-called “Aryan Invasion” (Aryan Invasion Theory, AIT), we are usually reassured that “there is of course the linguistic evidence” for this invasion, or at least for the non-Indian origin of the IE family.

Thus, F.E. Pargiter had shown how the Puranas locate Aryan origins in the Ganga basin and found “the earliest connexion of the Vedas to be with the eastern region and not with the Panjab”¹, but then he allowed the unnamed linguistic evidence to overrule his own findings: “We know from the evidence of language that the Aryans entered India very early”.² (His solution is to relocate the point of entry of the Aryans from the western Khyber pass to the eastern Himalaya: Kathmandu or thereabouts.)

At the same time, the linguists themselves are often quite aware that the AIT is just a successful theory, not a proven fact. Those who try to take the scientific pretences of their discipline seriously, are not all that over-confident about the AIT. Many are willing to be modest and concede that so far it has merely been the most successful hypothesis. In fact, when quizzing linguists about the AIT, I came away with the impression that they too are not very sure of their case. By now, most of them have been trained entirely within the AIT framework, which was taken for granted and consequently not sought to be proven anymore. One of them told me that he had never bothered about a linguistic justification for the AIT framework, because there was, after all, “the well-known archaeological evidence”!

But for the rest, “the linguistic evidence” is still the magic mantra to silence al doubts about the AIT. At any rate, it is time that we take a look for ourselves at this fabled linguistic evidence.

1.2. Down with the linguistic evidence

A common reaction among Indians against this state of affairs is to dismiss linguistics altogether, calling it a “pseudo-science”.  Thus, Prof. N.S. Rajaram describes 19th-century comparative and historical linguistics, which generated the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), as “a scholarly discipline that had none of the checks and balances of a real science”³, in which “a conjecture is turned into a hypothesis to be later treated as a fact in support of a new theory”.⁴

Likewise, N.R. Waradpande questions the very existence of an Indo-European language family and rejects the genetic kinship model, arguing very briefly that similarities between Greek and Sanskrit must be due to very early borrowing.⁵ He argues that “the linguists have not been able to establish that the similarities in the Aryan or Indo-European languages are genetic, i.e. due to their having a common ancestry”. He alleges that “the view that the South-Indian languages have an origin different from that of the North-Indian languages is based on irresponsible, ignorant and motivated utterances of a missionary”.⁶ The “missionary” meant is the 19th-century prioneer of Dravidology, Bishop Robert Caldwell.

This rejection of linguistics by critics of the AIT creates the impression that their own pet theory, which makes the Aryans into natives of India rather than invaders, is not resistent to the test of linguistics. However, the fact that people fail to challenge the linguistic evidence, preferring simply to excommunicate it from the debate, does not by itself validate this body of evidence. Prof. Rajaram’s remark that hypotheses are treated by scholars as facts, as arguments capable of overruling other hypotheses, is definitely valid for much of the humanities, including linguistics. To be sure, it doesn’t follow that linguistics is a pseudo-science, merely that linguists in their reasoning have often fallen short of the scientific standard.

2. Origin of the linguistic argument

2.1. Linguistic and geographical distance from the origins

In the 18th century, when comparative IE linguistics started, the majority opinion was that the original homeland (or Urheimat) of the IE language family had to be India. This had an ideological reason, viz. that Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire were eager to replace Biblical tradition with a more distant Oriental source of inspiration for European culture.⁷ China was a popular candidate, but India had the advantage of being linguistically and even racially more akin to Europe; making it the homeland of the European languages or even of the European peoples, would be helpful in the dethronement of Biblical authority, but by no means far-fetched.

Moreover, there was also a seemingly good linguistic reason for choosing India as the Urheimat: the ancient Indian language, Sanskrit, was apparently the closest to the hypothetical Proto-lndo-European (PIE) language from which all existing members of the language family descended. It had all the grammatical categories of Latin and Greek in the most complete form, plus a few more, e.g. three numbers including a dualis in declension and conjugation, and all eight declension cases. Apparently, Sanskrit was very close to if not identical with PIE, and this was taken to support the case for India as the Urheimat.

In reality, there is no necessary relation between the linguistic antiquity of a language and its proximity to the Urheimat. Thus, among the North-Germanic languages, the one closest to Proto-North-Germanic is Icelandic, yet Iceland was most definitely not its Urheimat. The relative antiquity of Sanskrit vis-à-vis PIE does not determine its proximity to the Urheimat. Conversely, the subsequent dethronement of Sanskrit, and the progressive desanskritization of reconstructed PIE does not imply a geographical remoteness of India from the Urheimat. Yet, this mistaken inference has been quite common, though more often silent and implicit than explicit.

2.2. Kentum/satem

The first major element creating a distance between PIE and Sanskrit was the kentum/satem divide. It was assumed, in my view correctly (but denied by Indian scholars like Satya Swarup Mishra)⁸, that palatalization is a one-way process transforming velars (k,g) into palatals (c,j) but never the reverse; so that the velar or “kentum” (Latin for “hundred”, from PIE *kmtom) forms had to be the original and the palatal or “satem” (Avestan for “hundred”) forms the evolved variants.

However, it would be erroneous to infer from this that the kentum area, i.e. Western and Southern Europe, was the homeland. On the contrary, it is altogether more likely that the Urheimat was in satem territory. The alternative from the angle of an Indian Urheimat theory (IUT) would be that India had originally had the kentum form, that the dialects which first emigrated (Hittite, Italo-Celtic, Germanic, Tokharic) retained the kentum form and took it to the geographical borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia, China), while the dialects which emigrated later (Baltic, Thracian, Phrygian) were at a halfway stage and the last-emigrated dialects (Slavic, Armenian, Iranian) plus the staybehind Indo-Aryan languages had adopted the satem form.  This would satisfy the claim of the so-called Lateral Theory that the most conservative forms are to be found at the outskirts rather than in the metropolis.

Moreover, Indian scholars have pointed out that the discovery of a small and extinct kentum language inside India (Proto-Bangani, with koto as its word for “hundred”), surviving as a sizable substratum in the Himalayan language Bangani, tends to support the hypothesis that the older kentum form was originally present in India as well.⁹ This discovery had been made by the German linguist Claus Peter Zoller, who does not explain it through an Indian Urheimat Theory but as a left-over of a pre-Vedic Indo-European immigration into India.¹⁰ He claims that the local people have a tradition of their immigration from Afghanistan.

However, in a recent survey among Bangani speakers, George van Driem (Netherlands) and Suhnu R. Sharma have found the hypothesis of a kentum Proto-Bangani to be erroneous: the supposed kentum words turned out to be misreadings of quite ordinary modern Bangani words or phrases.¹¹ Then again, an even more recent survey on the spot by Anvita Abbi (Jawaharlal Nehru University) and her students has almost entirely confirmed Zoller’s list of kentum substratum words in Bangani.¹² As the trite phrase goes: this calls for more research.

2.3. Sanskrit and PIE vowels

The second element in the progressive separation of Sanskrit from PIE was the impression that the [a/e/o] differentiation in Latin and Greek was original, and that their reduction to [a] in Sanskrit was a subsequent development (as in Greek genos corresponding to Sanskrit jana). Satya Swarup Mishra argues that it may just as well have been the other way around, and unlike the palatalization process, this vowel shift is indeed possible in either direction.¹³ Mishra cites examples from the Gypsy language, but we need look no farther than English, where [a] has practically become [e] in “back” and “bake”, and [o] in “ball”.

There are, however, excellent reasons to stick to the conventional view that the [a/e/o] distinctness is original and their coalescence into [a] a later development. Firstly, the reduction to [a] is typical of just one branch, viz. Indo-lranian, whereas a differentiation starting from [a] would have been a change uniformly affecting all the branches except one, which is less probable. Secondly, the different treatment of the velar consonants in reduplicated Sanskrit verb forms like jagâma or cakâra suggests a difference in subsequent vowel, with only the first vowel having a palatalizing impact on the preceding velar: jegâma < gegâma, cekâra < kekâra.

So, there is no reason to reject the conventional view that Greek vowels are closer to the PIE original than the Sanskrit vowels are. But here again, we also see no reason to make geographical deductions from this. India may as well have been the homeland of Proto-Greek, which left before the shift from [a/e/o] to [a] took place.

2.4. Indo-Hittite

A third element which increased the distance between reconstructed PIE and Sanskrit dramatically was the discovery of Hittite. Though Hittite displayed a very large intake of lexical and other elements from non-lE languages, some of its features were deemed to be older than their Sanskrit counterparts, e.g. the Hittite genus commune as opposed to Sanskrit’s contrast between masculine and feminine genders, or the

It is by no means universally accepted that these features of Hittite are indeed PIE. Thus, the erosion of grammatical gender is a common phemomenon in IE languages, especially those suddenly exposed to an overdose of foreign influence, notably Persian when it was overwhelmed by Arabic, and English when it was overwhelmed by French influence (and this in spite of the fact that both French and Arabic have grammatical gender themselves). So, it is arguable that Hittite underwent the same development when it had to absorb large doses of Hattic or other pre-lE influence. The laryngeals have been explained by competent scholars as being due to South-Caucasian or Semitic influence.

But for our purposes there is no need to align ourselves with these dissident opinions. Even if we go with the dominant opinion and accept these elements as PIE, that is still no reason why the Urheimat should be in the historical location of Hittite or at least outside India. As the first emigrant dialect, Hittite could have taken from India some linguistic features (genus commune, laryngeals) which were about to disappear in the dialects emigrating only later or staying behind.

3. Direct geographical clues

3.1. Geographical asymmetry in expansion

In the 19th century, as India went out of favour, a number of European countries started competing for the honour of being the Urheimat. Ukraine and Russia gained the upper hand with the archaeological discovery of the so-called Kurgan culture, dated to the 5th to 3rd millennium, and apparently the source of migrations into central and western Europe. This area also fell neatly in the middle of the expansion area of IE, a fact which some took as an element in support of the Kurgan culture’s Urheimat claim. However, unless IE differs in this respect from other languages and language families, this central location argues more against than in favour of the Kurgan culture’s Urheimat claim. Indeed, we find very few examples of languages expanding symmetrically: Chinese spread from the Yellow River basin southward, Russian from Ukraine eastward, Arabic from Arabia northwestward. There is consequently nothing against an IE migration starting from India and continuing almost exclusively in a westward direction.

The reason for this observed tendency to asymmetry is that the two opposite directions from a given region are only symmetrical in a geometrical sense: climatologically, economically and demographically, the two are usually very different,

e.g. the region north of the Yellow River is much less fertile and hospitable than theregions to its south. From the viewpoint of Kurgan culture emigrants, there was hardly a symmetry between the European West and the Indian Southeast: India was densely inhabited, technologically advanced and politically organized, Europe much less so. Europe could be overrun and culturally revolutionized by immigrants, while in India even large groups of immigrants were bound to be assimilated by the established civilization.

India satisfied the conditions for making the spectacular expansion of IE possible: like Europe in the colonial period, it had a demographic surplus and a technological edge over its neighbours. Food crises and political conflicts must have led to emigrations which were small by Indian standards but sizable for the less populated countries to India’s northwest. Since these emigrants, increasingly mingled with the populations they encountered along the way, retained their technological edge vis-a-vis every next population to its west (esp. in the use of horse and chariot), the expansion in western direction continued until the Atlantic Ocean stopped it. Processes of elite dominance led to the linguistic assimilation of ever more westerly populations.

It is easy to see how and why the tendency to asymmetric expansion in the case of other languages also applies to India as the Urheimat of IE. On the road to the northwest, every next region was useful for the Indo-Europeans in terms of their established lifestyle and ways of food production. The mountainous regions to the north and west of India were much less interesting, as were the mountainous areas in the Indian interior. In India, Aryan expansion was long confined to the riverine plains with economic conditions similar to those in the middle basin of the Indus, Saraswati and Ganga rivers; the Vindhya and Himalaya mountains formed a natural frontier (the Vindhya mountains were first bypassed by sea, with landings on the Malabar coast). To the northwest, by contrast, after crossing the mountains of Afghanistan, emigrants could move from one riverine plain into the next: Oxus and Jaxartes, Wolga, Dniepr, Dniestr, Don, Danube, and into the European plain stretching from Poland to Holland. Only in the southwest of Europe, a more complex geography and a denser and more advanced native population slowed IE expansion down, and a number of pre-lE languages survived there into the Roman period, Basque even till today.

4.5. Semitic

Semitic (and by implication also the Chadic, Kushitic and Hamitic branches of the Afro-Asiatic family, assumed to be the result of a pre-4th-millennium immigration of early agriculturists from West Asia into North Africa) is suspected to spring from a common ancestor with IE, even by scholars skeptical of Nostratic adventures. The commonality of some elementary lexical items is striking, and includes the numerals 6 and 7 (Hebrew shisha, shiva, Arabic sitta, sab’a, conceivably borrowed at the time when counting was extended beyond the fingers of a single hand for the first time), arguably even all the first seven numerals.

Contact with Akkadian (the Semitic language of Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC) and even Proto-Semitic is attested by a good handful of words, esp. some terms for utensils and animals. This includes two terms for “axe”: PIE *peleku, Greek pelekus, Ossetic faeraet, Sanskrit parashu, “axe”, related (one way or the other) to Akkadian pilaqqu, “axe”, cfr. Arabic falaqa, “to split apart”; and PIE *sekwr, Latin securis, “axe”, secula, “hatchet”, Old Slavic sekyra, “hatchet”, related to a Semitic root yielding Akkadian shukurru, “javelin”, Hebrew segor, “axe”. Some terms are in common only with the Western IE languages, e.g. Semitic gedi, still recognizable in English goat.

This testimony is too slender, though, for concluding that the Western Indo-Europeans had come from the East and encountered the Semites on their way to the West.

Even more remarkable are the common fundamental grammatical traits, which indicate a common genetic origin rather than an influence from the one language family on the other. Semitic, like IE, has grammatically functional vowel changes, grammatical gender, declension, conjugational categories including participles and medial and passive modes, and a range of phonemes which in Proto-Semitic was almost entirely in common with PIE, even more so if we assume PIE laryngeals to match Semitic aleph, he and ‘ayn. Many of these grammatical elements are shared only by Semitic (or Afro-Asiatic) and IE, setting them off as a pair against all other language families. If any language family has a chance of being the sister of the IE family, it is Semitic.

One way to imagine how Semitic and IE went their separate ways has been offered by Bernard Sergent, who is strongly convinced of the two families’ common origin. He combines the linguistic evidence with archaeological and anthropological indications that the (supposedly PIE-speaking) Kurgan people in the North-Caspian area of ca. 4000 BC came from the southeast, a finding which might otherwise be cited in support of their Indian origin. Thus, the Kurgan people’s typical grain was millet, not the rye and wheat cultivated by the Old Europeans, and in ca. 5000 BC, millet had been cultivated in what is now Turkmenistan (it apparently originates in China), particularly in the mesolithic culture of Jebel. From there on, the archaeological traces become really tenuous, but Sergent claims to discern a link with the Zarzian culture of Kurdistan 10,000 to 8500 BC. Short, he suggests that the Kurgan people had come along the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea, not from the southeast (India) but the southwest, in or near Mesopotamia, where PIE may have had a common homeland with Semitic.²⁴

However, those who interpret the archaeological data concerning the genesis of agriculture in the Indus site of Mehrgarh as being the effect of a diffusion from West Asia, may well interpret an eventual kinship of IE with Semitic as proving their own point: along with its material culture, Mehrgarh’s language may have been an offshoot of a metropolitan model, viz. a Proto-Semitic-speaking culture in West Asia.  This would mean that the Indus area was indeed the homeland of the original PIE, but that in the preceding millennia, PIE had been created by the interaction of Proto-Semitic-speaking colonists from West Asia with locals. On the other hand, now that the case for an independent genesis of the Neolithic revolution (i.e. the development of agriculture) in Mehrgarh is getting stronger, we may have to reconsider the direction of such a process.

4.6. Dravidian substratum elements

Apart from contact between different languages which have continued to exist, there can also be influence from a disappearing language on a surviving language, often in the form of a substratum: people take to speaking a new (mostly the elite’s) language, and drop their old language all while preserving some lexical items, some phonetic propensities, some grammatical ways of organizing information. The alleged presence of a large dose of “pre-Aryan” substratum features in Sanskrit and the other Indo-Aryan languages, notably from now-extinct Dravidian languages once spoken in northern India, was historically one of the important reason for deciding against India as the Urheimat.

In the 19th century, it was not yet realized how the European branches of IE are all full of substratum elements, mostly from extinct Old European languages. For Latin, this includes such elementary terms as altus and urbs, borrowed from a substratum language tentatively described as “Urbian”. For Germanic, it includes some 30% of the acknowledged “Germanic” vocabulary, including such core lexical items as sheep and drink. For Greek, it amounts to some 40% of the vocabulary, both from extinct branches of the Anatolian (Hittite-related) family and from non-lE languages.  The branch least affected by foreign elements is Slavic, but this need not be taken as proof of a South-Russian homeland: in an Indian Urheimat scenario, the way for Slavic would have been cleared by forerunners, chiefly Celtic and Germanic, and though these languages would absorb many Old-European elements as substratum features, they also eliminated the Old-European languages as such and prevented them from further influencing Slavic.

Even if we accept as non-lE all the elements in Sanskrit described as such by various scholars, the non-lE contribution is still not greater than in some of the European branches of IE.²⁵ And, as Shrikant Talageri has shown, a large part of this so-called Dravidian contribution is highly questionable: many words routinely described as

Dravidian-originated have been analyzed as pure IE.²⁶ Numerous supposed loanwords have no counterpart in Dravidian and Munda, or when they do, there is often no reason to assume that the direction of borrowing was into rather than out of Indo-Aryan, especially when you consider that Dravidian is attested in writing at least 1500 years after (and at a distance of 2000 km) the Sanskrit sources, and Munda has not been committed to writing until the 19th century.

The observation had been made earlier by Western scholars: the convergence of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian (as well as Munda and to an extent Burushaski) in lexical and grammatical features need not be due to a Dravidian substratum, for which there are in fact no compelling indications.²⁷ At any rate, there has been so much interaction of Indo-Aryan with Dravidian, including exchange of people and goods, that a Dravidian contribution (as a neighbourly or adstratum influence) is perfectly normal; this contribution remains in any case much smaller than the well-known Indo-Aryan influence on the Dravidian languages, which no one tries to explain as a substratum effect.

In this respect, the testimony of the place-names may be useful.  In the Hindi belt and most of Panjab, there is no evidence of a Dravidian substratum in the toponyms. By contrast, in Sindh and Gujarat, Dravidian toponyms are fairly common, e.g. names ending in valli/palli, “village”. In Sindhi, and more so in Gujarati and Marathi, Dravidian influence is discernible, e.g. in the existence of two pronouns for we, an inclusive one (including the speaker as well as the person addressed) and an exclusive one (including only the speaker and his group, like in the French expression nous autres). By contrast, Hindi has much fewer Dravidian elements, even “losing” (or just never having had) a number of loanwords which had been adopted in Sanskrit. There is no reason to assume a Dravidian presence in North India, but it seems to have been there in the coastal area.

This would fit in with David McAlpin’s Elamo-Dravidian theory, which puts Proto-Elamo-Dravidian on the coast of Iran, spreading westwards to Mesopotamia (Elam) and eastwards to Sindh and along the Indian coast southward.²⁸ This theory is supported by the similarities between the undeciphered early Elamite script and the Harappan script, and by the survival of the Brahui Dravidian speech pocket in Baluchistan. It would make the Harappan culture area bi- and possibly multi-lingual: a perfectly normal situation, comparable with multi-lingual Mesopotamia or with Latin-Greek bilinguism in the Roman Empire.

But in that case, Indo-Aryan influence on Dravidian may be much older than usually assumed, and date back well into the heyday of Harappan culture. However, the Dravidians influenced by Indo-Aryan in Gujarat and Maharashtra may have been a dead-end in the history of Dravidian, losing their language altogether. There is no trace of Harappans migrating south, whether to save their Dravidian language from Indo-Aryan contamination or for other, more likely reasons.

Either way, Indo-Aryan influence on Dravidian is certainly more profound than generally thought. Apart from the tatsama (literally adopted) Sanskrit words which make up more than half of Telugu or Kannada vocabulary, and which are attributed to the influence of Brahmin families settling in South India since the turn of the Christian era, many apparent members of the Dravidian core vocabulary as attested in Sangam Tamil are actually very ancient tadbhava (evolved and sometimes unrecognizably changed) loans from Sanskrit or Prakrit, e.g. âkâyam, “sky” (< âkâsha); âyutham, “weapon” (< âyudha); tavam, “penance” (< tapas); tîvu, “island” (< dwîpa); chetti, “foreman, merchant” (< shreshthi), tiru, term of respectful address (< shrî).²⁹ It is not impossible that there ever was a pure Dravidian language in South India, but in the oldest texts already, we find a Dravidian written in a Brahmi-derived script and influenced by Sanskrit.

Many scholars now assume that there was a third language in northwestern India, which acted as a buffer between Dravidian and Indo-Aryan before being eliminated by the latter. Words looking like Dravidian loans in Indo-Aryan could then in fact have been borrowed from this third language into both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. To Indian critics of linguistics as a “pseudoscience”, such a ghost language is a perfect proof of the purely speculative nature of our science. Yet, it is an entirely reasonable proposition: even Sumerian, one of the great vehicles of civilization, died out, and we have reason to assume that the Bhil tribals originally spoke a different language, possibly related to the isolated tribal Nahali language still spoken in a few villages in Madhya Pradesh.

Such a buffer language would at any rate explain, in an Indian Urheimat theory, why there is no Dravidian influence on IE as a whole, merely on Indo-Aryan and to a very small extent on Iranian (though it is remarkable that some of the words transmitted from Indo-Iranian to Uralic are usually credited with a Dravidian origin, e.g. shishu, “child”, and kota, “house”; if correct, this would be a modest argument for an Indian Urheimat). By the time the buffer language had been swallowed and Dravidian-lE interaction began, most of the IE proto-languages had already left India.

4.7. Sino-Tibetan

To prove an Asian hoomeland for IE, it is not good enough to diminish the connections between IE and more westerly language families. To anchor IE in Asia, the strongest argument would be genetic kinship with an East-Asian language family.

There have been very early contacts between IE and Chinese, fossilized in IE loan-words in Chinese, e.g. ma (< *mra, cfr. mare, Sanskrit marka, “swift”), “horse”; quan, “hound”; sun, “grandson” (cfr. son); mi, “honey” (cfr. mead, Sanskrit medhu); gu, “bull”, and niu, “cow” (through *ngiu, from IE *gwou-); and, more recently, shi, “lion” (Iranian sher). Chang Tsung-tung has pleaded that there were linguistic and cultural

contacts between Indo-Europeans from Inner Asia and late-neolithic Chinese peasants, who learned cattle-breeding from them.³⁰ These loans generally came through Tokharic, which we know was the northwestern neighbour of Chinese for many centuries, at least since the turn of the 1st millennium BC when the Tokhars are mentioned in records of the Western Zhou dynasty, and until the mid-1st millennium AD.

The contact between Tokharic and Chinese adds little to our knowledge of the Urheimat but merely confirms that the Tokharic people lived that far east. The adoption of almost the whole range of domesticated cattle-names from Tokharic into Chinese also emphasizes a fact insufficiently realized, viz. how innovative the cattle-breeding culture of the early IE tribes really was. They ranked as powerful and capable, and their prestige helped them to assimilate large populations culturally and linguistically. But for Urheimat-related trails, we must look elsewhere.

Vedic Sanskrit and ancient Greek, and therefore perhaps also PIE, had a pitch accent, a typical feature of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, preserved in Chinese and in a smaller way in Tibetan. True, the behaviour of this pitch accent is completely different in Vedic from what it is in Sino-Tibetan.  But that is only what you would expect after millennia of separate development; after all, the behaviour of the pitch accent is completely different between some of the Sino-Tibetan languages as well.  Picking up this hint from a similarity in accentuation, scholars have looked around for other “deep”, structural similarties, e.g. the presumed fact that all PIE roots were monosyllabic.³¹ Edwin Pulleyblank claims to have reconstructed a number of rather abstract similarities in the phonetics and morphology of PIE and Sino-Tibetan.

Though he fails to back it up with any (even a single) lexical similarity, he confidently dismisses as a “prejudice” the phenomenon that “for a variety of reasons, the possibility of a genetic relationship between these two language families strikes most people as inherently most improbable.” He believes that “there is no compelling reason from the point of view of either linguistics or archaeology to rule out the possibiity of a genetic connection between Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European.  Such a connection is certainly inconsistent with a European or Anatolian homeland for the Indo-Europeans but it is much less so with the Kurgan theory”, esp. considering that the Kurgan culture “was not the result of local evolution in that region but had its source in an intrusion from an earlier culture farther east”.³² This is of course very interesting, but: “It will be

necessary to demonstrate the existence of a considerable number of cognates linked by regular sound correspondences. To do so in a way that will convince the doubters on both sides of the equation will be a formidable task.”³³

Apart from Pulleyblank’s vision of a deep, Nostratic-type connection between Sino-Tibetan and PIE, we should also consider the question of influence, especially the interaction with neighbouring Tibetan. There is of course a mass of Buddhistic loan-words which crept into Tibetan during the Middle Ages, but they tell us nothing about origins.

As Prof. Ulrich Libbrecht writes, the Tibetans were not native to their present habitat, and immigrated there in the historical period: “The general ethnic movement of the Sinitic-speaking peoples was southward. The immigration of Tai- and Tibeto-Burman-speaking languages in Indochina has entirely taken place within the historical period. The same is true of the Chinese-speaking peoples from the middle part of the Yellow River basin towards the southern and eastern coast. Indications from Greek geographers and in Tibetan traditions teach us that the early centre of these peoples lay more to the north than present-day Tibet, viz. in the upper Yangzi basin.  It is suspected that the centre of dispersion of the Sinitic languages was near the Koko-nor lake, at the borders of China proper, Tibet and Mongolia.  From there, one branch spread eastward and formed the Chinese language; another went southward to form the Tibeto-Burman subgroup.  The cause of this dispersal may well be found in the periodic droughts affecting Inner Asia in prehistoric and historical periods.”³⁴

So, unless PIE came from China, there may have been thousands of years without any substantial contact between IE and Sino-Tibetan, the first contact being the Tokharian settlement on the Chinese border. No evidence of contact has been identified for the PIE period.

4.8. Austronesian

A language family with unexpected similarities to IE, similarities which provide a strong geographical clue, is Austronesian. This family of languages is the one with the second greatest geographical spread after IE: from Madagascar through Malaysia and Indonesia, Taiwan and the Philippines, to Melanesia and Polynesia, as far south as New Zealand. So, what is the relation of Austronesian to Indo-Aryan and to PIE?

According to Franklin Southworth: “The presence of other ethnic groups, speaking other languages [than IE, Dravidian or Munda], must be assumed (…) numerous examples can be found to suggest early contact with language groups now unrepresented in the subcontinent. A single example will be noted here. The word for ‘mother’ in several of the Dardic languages, as well as in Nepali, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Gujarati, and Marathi (…) is âî (or a similar form). The source of this is clearly the same as that of classical Tamil ây, ‘mother’. These words are apparently connected with a widespread group of words found in Malayo-Polynesian (cf. Proto-Austronesian *bayi …) and elsewhere. The distribution of this word in Indo-Aryan suggests that it must

have entered Old Indo-Aryan very early (presumably as a nursery word, and thus not likely to appear in religious texts), before the movement of Indo-Aryan speakers out of the Panjab. In Dravidian, this word is well-represented in all branches (though amma is perhaps an older word) and thus, if it is a borrowing, it must be a very early one.”³⁵

Next to âyî, “mother”, Marathi has the form bâî, “lady”, as in Târâ-bâî, Lakshmî­bâî. etc.; the same two forms are attested in Austronesian. So, we have a nearly pan-Indian word, attested from Nepal and Kashmir to Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and seemingly related to Austronesian. For another example: “Malayo-Polynesian shares cognate forms of a few [words which are attested in both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian], notably Old Indo-Aryan phala-['fruit'], Dravidian palam ['ripe fruit'], etc. (cf. Proto-Austronesian *palam, ‘to ripen a fruit artificially’…), and the words for rice.”³⁶

Austronesian seems to have very early and very profound links with IE. In the personal pronouns (e.g. Proto-Austronesian *aku, cfr. ego), the first four numerals (e.g. Malay dua for “two”) and other elementary vocabulary (e.g. the words for “water” and “land”), the similarity is too striking to be missed. Remarkable lexical similarities had been reported since at least the 1930s, and they have been presented by Isidore Dyen in 1966.³⁷ Dyen’s comparisons are sometimes not too obvious but satisfy the linguistic requirement of regularity. At the same time, this lexical influence or exchange is not backed up by grammatical similarities: in contrast with the elaborate categories of IE grammar, Austronesian grammar looks very primitive, the textbook example being the Malay plural by reduplication, as in orang, “man”, orang-orang, “men”.³⁸

Most scholars of IE including myself know too little of Austronesian to verify this claim, and all of us tend to remind ourselves of the existence of pure coincidence when confronted with these data. At any rate, the relation would be one between the entire Austronesian and the entire Indo-European family, indicating that it pre-dates their split into daughter languages. Moreover, it concerns the very core of the vocabulary. Further, it so happens that some Austronesian languages have the typically Indian cerebral or retroflex consonants; it is possible that this was an original feature of Proto-Austronesian, which its other daughter languages have lost.

As for the language structure, to our knowledge the similarity between PIE and Proto-Austronesian is not established as being much above statistical coincidence.  It is, in that case, less than that between PIE and Proto-Semitic, which latter is still not enough to convince all linguists of a genetic relationship rather than an influence through contact. At first sight, the similarities between IE and Austronesian vocabularies may therefore better be explained through contact than through a genetic relationship. In this case, we may also be dealing with a case of heavy pidginization: a mixed

population adopting lexical items from PIE but making up a grammar from scratch. Then again, genetically related languages may become completely different in language structure (e.g. English vs. Sanskrit, Chinese vs. Tibetan). Dyen therefore saw no objection to postulating a common genetic origin rather than an early large-scale borrowing.

Dyen cannot be accused of an Indian Urheimat bias either for IE or for Austronesion. For the latter, “Dyen’s lexicostatistical classification of Austronesian suggested a Melonesian homeland, a conclusion at variance with all other sources of information (…) heavy borrowing and numerous shifts in and around New Guinea have obviously distorted the picture”, according to Peter Bellwood.³⁹ It is in spite of his opinions about the Austronesian and IE homelands that he felt forced to face facts concerning IE-Austronesian similarities.  Meanwhile, the dominant opinion as reported by Bellwood is that Southeast China and Taiwan are the Urheimat from where Austronesian expanded in all seaborne directions (hence its substratum presence in Japanese, a rather hard nut to crack for an Indian Urheimat theory of Austronesian).

Yet, just as the Kurgan culture may be a secondary centre of IE dispersal, formed by immigrants from, say, India, the supposed Southeast-Chinese Urheimat of Austronesian may itself be a secondary homeland. If there is to be a point of contact between PIE and Proto-Austronesian, it is hard to imagine it in another location than India.

Bernard Sergent suggests northern China, arguing that the yellow race as a whole comes from there, and that the Chinese-Siberian border was the place of contact between white Indo-Europeans and the yellow race, including speakers of Sino-Tibetan, Austro-Asiatic (Munda, Khmer) and Austronesian.⁴⁰ But that is a petitio principii: just as it need not be assumed that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were blonde Nordics (as Sergent himself has forcefully argued)⁴¹, there is no ground for racial assumptions about the Austronesians. If they originated in India, they may have been brown-skinned (as most of them still are) rather than yellow. Moreover, even if it is assumed that Austronesian came from southern China, there is no need to trace it further back to northern China; and if its very thin connection to northern China is sufficient for an impressive amount of IE-Austronesian isoglosses, how come there aren’t even more IE-Chinese isoglosses, as Chinese or Sino-Tibetan has a much longer certified presence in northern China on the border with the barbarians?

For another alternative: suppose the Indo-Europeans and the Austronesians shared a homeland somewhere in southern China or Southeast Asia. An entry of the Indo-Europeans into India from the east, arriving by boat from Southeast Asia, is an interesting thought experiment, if only to free ourselves from entrenched stereotypes. Why not counter the Western AIT with an Eastern AIT? Just imagine, a wayward Austronesian tribe sailed up the Ganga led by one Manu who, as related in the Puranas, started Aryan history in the mid-Ganga basin (Ayodhya, Prayag, Kashi), and whose progeny subsequently conquered the Indus basin and expanded further westward. In that case, the elaborate structure of PIE would be an innovation due to a peculiar intellectual culture (let’s call it proto-brahminism) and to the influence of local languages, including perhaps a lost branch of Semitic spoken by colonists who had brought agriculture from West Asia to Indus settlements like Mehrgarh.

We will welcome any new evidence which forces us to take the southeastern scenario seriously. Until then, if there has to be a common homeland of IE and Austronesian, we consider India more likely. India, in this case, may have to be understood as including the submerged lands to its south which were inhabited perhaps as late as 5000 BC. The scenario that unfolds is of India as a major demographic growth centre, from which IE spread to the north and west and Austronesian to the southeast as far as Polynesia. Though disappearing from India, Austronesian expanded in the same period and just as spectacularly as IE. These two most impressive linguistic migrations would then have been part of one India-centred expansion movement spanning the Old World from Iceland to New Zealand.

5. Conclusion

We have just presented the pro and contra of some prima facie indications for language contacts which would imply an ancient IE and even PIE presence in Harappan and pre-Harappan India.  In our opinion, none of these can presently be considered decisive evidence for an Indian Urheimat theory.

However, to put the strengths and weaknesses of our findings in the proper perspective, we should not forget to also evaluate the evidence from language contacts for the rivalling European Urheimat theory, which should be put to the same tests as the Indian Urheimat theory. The fact is that such evidence is very scarce, if not non-existent.  The Old-European Basque language has no ancient links with IE. For the rest, all Old-European languages have disappeared and have not even survived as dead inscriptional languages providing us with material for linguistic comparison. Evidence of the type tentatively provided by isoglosses between IE and Semitic, Austronesian or Uralic, all Asian language families, is simply not available for the westerly branches of IE or for a hypothetical Europe-based PIE.  On balance, the evidence from contact with once-neighbouring languages does not provide compelling evidence for an Indian Urheimat (unless the Austronesian connection is valid), but even less evidence for a European Urheimat.

It is too early to say that linguistics has proven an Indian origin for the IE family. But we can assert with confidence that the oft-invoked linguistic evidence for a European Urheimat and for an Aryan invasion of India is completely wanting. One after another, the classical proofs of the European Urheimat theory have been discredited, usually by scholars who had no knowledge of or interest in an alternative Indian Urheimat theory. In the absence of a final judgment by linguistics, other approaches deserve to be taken seriously, unhindered and uninhibited by fear of that large-looming but in fact elusive “linguistic evidence”.

Footnotes:

1. F.E. Pargiter:Ancient Indian Historical Tradition, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1962, p.302.

2. F.E. Pargiter: Ancient Indian Historical Tradition, p.1.

3 N.S. Rajaram: The Politics of History, Voice of India, Delhi 1995, p.144.

4. N.S. Rajaram: The Politics of History, p.217.

5. N.R. Waradpande: The Aryan Invasion, a Myth, Babasaheb Apte Smarak Samiti, Nagopur 1989, p.19-21.

6. N.R. Waradpande: “Fact and fiction about the Aryans”, in S.B. Deo & SuryanathKamath: The Aryan Problem, Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti, Pune 1993, p.14-15.

7. The classic reference for the ideological factors in the development of the Indo-European theory is Léon Poliakov: The Aryan Myth, London 1974.

8. Satya Swarup Mishra: The Aryan Problem (Delhi 1992). This palatalization is known in numerous languages, e.g. Chinese (Yangzi-kiang > Yangzi-jiang), the Bantu language Chiluba (cfr. Ki-konko, Ki-swahili, but Chi-luba), Arabic (Gabriel > Jibrîl), English (kirk > church), the Romance languages, Swedish etc.

9. E.g. Shrikant Talageri:The Aryan Invasion Theory, a Reappraisal, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 1993, p.70.

10. The “discovery” of Kentum elements in Proto-Bangani was announced to the world by Claus Peter Zoller at the 7th World Sanskrit Conference, Leiden 1987, in his paper: “On the vestiges of an old Kentum language in Garhwal (Indian Himalayas)”, and elaborated further in his articles: “Bericht über besondere Archaismen im Bangani, einer Western Pahari-Sprache”, Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft, 1988, p.173-200, and: “Bericht über grammatische Archaismen im Bangani”, ibid., 1989, p.159-218.

11. George van Driem and Suhnu Ram Sharma: “In search of Kentum Indo-Europeans in the Himalayas”, Indogermanische Forschungen, 1996, p.107-146. In terms of serenity and academic factuality, the language they use to qualify Zoller’s work leaves much to be desired, a fact which is sure to be used by the Indocentric school to prove their point that the AIT school is just biased.

12. Anvita Abbi: “Debate on archaism of some select Bangani words”, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/bangani.abbi2.html, 1998.

13. Satya Swarup Mishra: The Aryan Problem.

much-discussed laryngeal consonants, absent in Sanskrit as in all other IE languages.

14. T. Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov: Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, Walter De Gruyter, Berlin 1995.

15. S. Zimmer: “On Indo-Europeanization”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, spring 1990.Cited in R.S. Sharma: Looking for the Aryans, p.36, with reference to J. Harmatta: “The emergence of the Indo-Iranians: the Indo-Iranian languages”, in A.H. Dani and

16. V.M. Masson, ed.: History of Civilizations, vol.1, UNESCO Publ., Paris 1992, p.374

17. A rather complete list and discussion of common IE-Uralic vocabulary is Karoly Rédei: “Die ältesten indogermanischen Lehnwörter der Uralischen Sprachen”, in Denis Sinor, ed.: The Uralic Languages: Description, History and Foreign Influences, Brill, Leiden 1988, p.638-664.

18. Karoly Rédei: “Die ältesten indogermanischen Lehnwörter der Uralischen Sprachen”, in Denis Sinor, ed.: The Uralic Languages: Description, History and Foreign Influences, p.641.

19. V.V. Napolskikh: “Uralic fish names and original home”, Ural-Altaische Jahrbücher, Neue Folge Band 12, Göttingen 1993, p.35-57.

20. Even according to AIT defender Prof. R.S. Sharma (Looking for the Aryans, p.36), Mesopotamian inscriptions from the 16th century BC “show that the Kassites spoke the Indo-European language”, and mention the Vedic gods “Suryash” and “Marutash”.

21. That the Dasas, Dasyus (Iranian dahyu, “tribe”) and Panis were Iranians and not “dark-skinned pre-Aryan aboriginals” is argued by a number of Indian anti-invasionist authors but also by Asko Parpola: “The problem of the Aryans and the Soma: textual-linguistic and archaeological evidence”, in G. Erdosy: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia (W. De Gruyter, Berlin 1995), p.367 ff. The identification of Pakthas, Parshus and other tribes encountered by the Vedic king Sudas in the “battle of the ten kings” (related in Rg-Veda VII:18, 19, 33, 83) is elaborated by Shrikant Talageri: The Aryan Invasion Theory, a Reappraisal, p.319 ff.

22. A. Parpola in G. Erdosy: The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, p.355.

23. In the margin of the 1996 South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, Prof.

J.M. Kenoyer did a slide show on beads and jewels found in Central Asia: many of themwere imported from the Harappan civilization.

24. Bernard Sergent: Les Indo-Européens, Payot, Paris 1995, p.398 and p.432.

25. Among the highest estimates is the 5% to 9% of Dravidian loans in Vedic Sanskrit proposed by F.B.J. Kuiper: Aryans in the Rigveda, Rodopi, Amsterdam 1991. On p.90 ff., he gives a list of 383 “foreign words in the Rigvedic language”, including such obviously IE words as aksha, “axle”.

26. Shrikant Talageri: Aryan Invasion Theory, a Reappraisal, p.156-175. To this effect, Thomas Burrow (in Thomas A. Seebok: Current Trends in Linguistics, Mouton, The Hague/Paris, vol.5, p.18, quoted by Talageri, op.cit., p.162) already wrote that “there has been a certain amount of controversy concerning the question of non-Aryan loan­words in Sanskrit, and some scholars (P. Thieme, H.W. Bailey) have adopted a sceptical position in this respect. Alternate Indo-European etymologies have been offered for words for which a Dravidian or Munda etymology had previously been proposed, in some cases successfully (…) but more dubious in other cases.”

27. Summarized by Edwin Bryant: “Linguistic Substrata and the Indo-Aryan Migration Debate”, read at the 1996 Atlanta conference on the Indus-Saraswati civilization; he mentions Jules Bloch and H. Hock, among others, to this effect.

28. See e.g. D. McAlpin: “Linguistic Prehistory: the Dravidian Situation”, in M.M. Deshpande and P.E. Hook, eds.: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Ann Arbor 1979.

29. R. Swaminatha Aiyar:Dravidian Theories, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1987 (but written in 1923).

30. Quoted in Stefan Zimmer: Ursprache, Urvolk und Indoger-manisierung, Innsbruck 1990, p.25.

31. As remarked in 1952 by Oswald Szemerenyi, quoted to this effect by Edwin G. Pulleyblank: “The Typology of Indo-European”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, spring 1993, p.63-118, spec. p.63-64.

32. Edwin Pulleyblank: “The Typology of Indo-European”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, spring 1993, p.106-107. The article is followed by two sharply critical pieces of comment, but the focus of their criticism is not the connection between Sino-Tibetan and PIE, though the authors do no conceal their skepticism of that point too.  Remark that the claim of typological similarity with PIE, here made by Pulleyblank for Sino-Tibetan, is also made by others for North-Caucasian, and that the triangle is closed by yet other argumentations for a typological (and even lexical) relation between North-Caucasian and Sino-Tibetan, e.g. S.A. Starostin: “Word-final Resonents in Sino-Caucasian”, Journal of Chinese Linguistics, June 1996, p. 281-311.

33. Edwin Pulleyblank: “The Typology of Indo-European”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, spring 1993, p.109.

34. U. Libbrecht: Historische Grammatika van het Chinees, part III, Leuven 1978, p.3-4. In my opinion, the fertile and moderate-climate Yellow River basin itself is a more likely centre of dispersal.

35. Franklin Southworth: “Indo-Aryan and Dravidian”, in M. Deshpande & P.E. Hook: Aryan & Non-Ayan in India, Ann Arbor 1979, p.205.

36. Franklin Southworth: “Indo-Aryan and Dravidian”, in M. Deshpande & P.E. Hook: Aryan & Non-Ayan in India, p.206.

37. I. Dyen in G. Cardona:Indo-European and Indo-Europeans, Philadelphia 1970, proceedings of the Third Indo-European Conference, 1966, p.431-440.

38. It goes without saying that “primitiveness” in grammar says little about the civilizational level of a language community; Chinese is spoken by a highly civilized people, but its grammar strikes native speakers of German or Russian as very childlike.

39. Peter Bellwood: “An archaeologist’s view of language macrofamily relationships”, Oceanic Linguistics, December 1994, p.391-406.

40. Bernard Sergent: Les Indo-Européens, p.398.

41. B. Sergent: Les Indo-Européens, p.435.

In 1940 a little known Buddhist Bhikshu (monk) – Chaman Lal – authored & published a book entitled “Hindu America” with the intent of “revealing” the forgotten story of the ancient Americas, especially India’s “immortal links” with the Aztec and Mayan civilizations of Mexico and the Ayar-Inca rulers of the Ayar Empire.

The book, though coupled with several circumstantial evidences and supporting theories, failed to make its point owing to several misrepresentations. But the very idea of Vedic, aka Harappa & Mohenjo-Daro, civilization having links with their American counterparts, namely Mayan & Aztec, was never completely ruled out. This was because of several resemblances found between the two civilizations in their customs and traditions though geographically miles apart. Here are few compelling similarities:

Panchisi & Patolli

Who has not heard about the game of dice – Panchisi (Pagade in Kannada)? Approximately 130 years ago Sir Edward B. Taylor[1] had point out that the ancient Mexican game of Patolli (see image) was similar in details to the game of Panchisi played in India and the whole region of Southern Asia. Later on Stewart Culin[2] proved that even the “cosmic meaning” of the Mexican game with it’s relation to the four quarters of the world and to the calendars ascribed to them was essentially the same.

Afterwards even Dr. Kroeber[3][i], leading anthropologist from California, observed that “the mathematical probability of two games invented separately agreeing by chance in so many specific features, is very low. The close correspondence between rules of two games indicates a real connection.”

The Lotus Motif

Lotus is one of the most sacred symbols in India even today. Hinduism is essentially embodied in the lotus. One of the most frequent motifs of early Indian art is the lotus plant. Interestingly, the same kind of lotus motif occurs in America at Chichen Itza (Mexico) as a border in the reliefs of the lower room of the Temple of the Tigers. Dr. Robert Heine-Geldern had long pointed out that “the water lily panels at Chichen Itza closely resemble those of southeastern Asia.” Further they state that “It is certainly remarkable that in India as well as in Middle America, the rhizome, a part of the plant not normally visible because it is submerged and deeply buried in mud should have been the basic element of a whole motif and, moreover, be stylized in the same unrealistic manner as undulating creeper.”[4] They were also of the opinion that such a combination of highly specific details cannot be accidental.

In a paper published in American Antiquity, January, 1953, Gordon Ekholm of the American Museum of Natural History, pointed out the close similarity of the lotus motif used in Buddhist (essentially derived from Vedic) and Mayan carvings. He states “Perhaps among the most significant parallels between Hindu-Buddhist and late classic and post-classic Maya art are those we can classify under the heading of lotus panels… For the Maya we will refer to carvings occurring at Chichen Itza and Palenque. The lotus motifs at these two sites are remarkably similar although the more elaborate and more Asiatic-like panels are at Chichen.”

Charak Puja & Volador Ritual

Charak Puja, a very enchanting folk festival of the Southern Belt of Bangladesh and West Bengal, is also known as Nil Puja. The Hindus, even to this day, celebrate it on the last day of Chaitra believing that the festival will carry prosperity by eliminating sorrow and sufferings of the previous year.  In this festival a human Charak is made ready and is tied with a hook on his back and then he is moved around with a bar with a long rope. Though it’s risky they arrange. Interestingly the Mexican ritual of Volador practiced in Mexico and Peru is very similar to Charak Puja. “The people take part in this ceremony asking the gods for fertility and bountiful crops.”[5]

Parasol as a Symbol of Royalty: The use of Parasol (Chattra in Sanskrit) is an age old sign of royalty and rank in India, Burma, China and Japan. The Maya Aztec and Incas also used it as a sign of royalty[6]. Frescos of Chak Multum in Yucatan show two types of parasols both of which correspond to types still in use in Southeast Asia.[7][ii]

Thrones and Palanquin: Chaman Lal in his book strongly asserts that “The use of throne and of fans mounted standard like on long poles as insignia of rank and royalty in the countries of Central and South America bears the strong imprint of India.” According to him “… the last Ayar ruler of Peru was carried in his palanquin on the day the Spaniards invaded Peru. His turban with plume and his Mudra (hand symbol) of the hand are unmistakable proofs of his Hindu origin. His four Ranis performed Sati after he was murdered by the Spaniards.”

Use of Zero: After Vedic people the Mayas of Yucatan were the first people to use a zero sign and represent number values by position of basic symbols. The similarity between the Mayan and Vedic Indian zero is undisputedly striking. Though the logical principle are the same the expressions of the principle are quiet dissimilar. While Vedic system of notation was decimal, like the European, the Mayan was Vigesimal (i.e. relating to or based on the number twenty).

Use Elephant in Sculpture: The American writer and explorer, John L Stephens, who, accompanied by Catherwood, an accomplished artist, visited the ruins of Maya civilization in Central America in the middle of the last 20^th, detected the elephant on a sculptured pillar at Copan, which he referred to as an “idol”. “The front view”, he wrote, “seems a portrait, probably of some deified king or hero. The two ornaments at the top appear like the trunk of an elephant, an animal unknown in that country.” [8] A reproduction of one of the ornaments in question should leave no doubts as to the identity of animal depicted by ancient American sculptor. It is not only an elephant, but an Indian elephant, a species found in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Borneo and Sumatra. The African elephant has larger ears, a less elevated head and a bulging forehead without the indentation at the root of the trunk which is a characteristic of the Indian species. The African elephant has in the past been less made use by man than the Indian, and has consequently not figured prominently in African religious life. In India the elephant was tamed since Vedic period.

[2] Stewart Culin, Chess and Playing-Cards (Report, United States National Museum for 1896, pp. 665-942, 1898), p. 855

[3] Charles John Erasmus, Patolli, Pachisi, and the Limitation of Possibilities, South-Western Journal of Anthropology Vol. 6, 1950. Pp 369

[4] Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 151. Can be accessed online at: http://www.archive.org/stream/bulletin1511953smit/bulletin1511953smit_djvu.txt

[5] Sergioy Rosa, The ritual of the “Volador” (flyer) at Guachimonton @ http://members.virtualtourist.com/m/tt/8f66c/

[6] Jean Leonard Gilder & Joseph Benson Gilder, The Critic Vol. 11, Good Literature Pub. Co. 1884-1906 pp. 256

[7] Shyam Singh Shashi, The World of Nomads, Lotus Press Publisher 2009, pp. 213.

[8] J. L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucata, London edition, 1842, Vol. I, p. 156.

Who are Saraswats?

In India, there are at least five Brahmin communities who claim themselves as ‘Saraswat Brahmins’, including: Gaud Saraswat Brahmins, Chitrapur Saraswats, Rajapur/Bhalavalikar Saraswat Brahmins, Kashmiri Saraswats, Punjabi Saraswats, Sindh Saraswats, Kutch Saraswats and Rajasthan Saraswats. This community, as a whole, has produced eminent personalities including Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, Vijay Mallya, Dr TMA Pai, Nandan Nilekani, Girish Karnad, Sachin Tendulkar, Sunil Gavaskar, Deepika Padukone, Shyam Benegal, and Guru Dutt.

Though being miles apart from each other for ages all Saraswat legends claim of their ancestors having once lived on the banks of now extinct river Saraswati. Today, however, there is no doubt that Saraswats are among the oldest living communities in India – still preserving their own indigenous culture which essentially hails from the Rigveda – that which is believed to have been written by their forefathers during their stint on banks of river Saraswati.

Their relationship with Saraswati River

Even to this day many Saraswat’s in their daily Sandhyavandana rite swears their allegiance to Rigveda. This apart, several of Saraswat’ rituals are conducted by reciting the hymns from the texts from Rigveda; firmly establishing links between Saraswats, Saraswati River and Rigveda.

According to two distinguished historians and Vedic Scholars Dr. NS Rajaram and Dr. David Frawley for Vedic Aryans the holiest river was “not Ganga but Saraswati.” This they said because “In Rigveda Ganga is mentioned only once while Saraswati is lauded no less than fifty times.” There is at least one whole hymn devoted to Saraswati River. In a famous hymn, Saunaka Gritasamda, the seer of the second Mandala lauds the Saraswati as ambitame, naditame, devitame Saraswati:

Sarasvati, the best of mothers, the best of rivers, the best of Goddess…

To follow the very descriptions given in the Vedic literature, Saraswati was the greatest river that then used to flow to the west of the Yamuna but to the east of the Sutlej. According to the seventh Mandala of the Rigveda attributed to the famous Rishi (Sage) Vasistha, the Saraswati was a mighty stream that flowed from the “mountain to the sea” sustaining the lives of Vedic people:

Pure in her stream, from the mountain to the sea, filled with bounteous abundance for the worlds, nourishing with her flow the children of Nahusa.

Interestingly, this very reference ‘from mountain to sea’ gives us a valuable pointer to Saraswati’ geography. But today we have no river called Sarasvati flowing in this country or elsewhere. The question then is: whatever became of it? Thanks to archeology and satellite photography we now know that Saraswati gradually became weaker and finally dried up completely around 1900 or 2000 BCE or even a little bit earlier.

According to several recent findings Vedic Saraswati once used to flow mainly through the channel of what is now an insignificant flow called the Ghaggar close to Indus thus making part of what we now know Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro civilizations. Even Satellite photos have shown that the Ghaggar was once a great river. Paul-Henri Francfort who recently surveyed the area calls it the “immense Ghaggar system”.

Intensive research carried by Dr. Frawley and Dr. Rajaram has completely debunked the Aryan-Invasion theory. They have also strongly established that the so-called Indus Valley or the Harappa civilization (of which Saraswati River is a part) did not consist of just a few urban settlements. It was a part of a vast civilization that stretched from the borders of Iran to East UP, with some sites as far south of Godavari River; as far as its duration is concerned, it represents a continuous evolution dating back to 7000 BCE in terms of the sites and more are being found all the time. So we can see that this great civilization spanned over 5000 years!

Saraswati’s extinction

Regarding the ending of this great civilization, thanks again to recent archeological and ecological findings, we now know how that end came about. By putting together those evidences on the basis of archeological and satellite studies it was most certainly due to gradual depletion of water resources in North India that culminated in a calamitous drought in the 2200 BCE to 1900 BCE period.

Fig. 1: Map showing the flow of Saraswati from ‘mountain to sea’

Fig. 2: Area covered by Indus-Saraswati civilization and its over lap with area covered by early Vedic Civilization.

This was, also, a global phenomenon that affected civilization across an immense belt from southern Europe to India. The Akkadian (Sumerian) civilization of Mesopotamia was practically wiped out around 2200 BCE, while in Egypt, the so-called Old-Empire collapsed. In India itself, the mature Harappa civilization of which Saraswati was an integral part came to an abrupt end and there were severe dislocations. As SR Rao observed:

In circa 1900 BCE most of the mature Harappa sites were wiped out forcing the inhabitants to seek new lands for settlement. They seem to have left in great hurry and in small groups, seeking shelter initially on the eastern flank of the Sutlej and the Ghaggar and gradually moving towards the Yamuna. The refugees from Mohenjo-Daro and southern sites in Sind fled to Saurashtra and later occupied interior of the Peninsula.

That this was not restricted to India is clear from a recently concluded major French-American study in Mesopotamia. The report of the study notes:

At 2000 BCE, a marked increase in aridity and wind circulation, subsequent to a volcanic eruption, induced considerable degradation in land-use conditions… this abrupt climatic change evidently caused abandonment of Tell Leilan, regional desertion, and collapse of Akkadian empire based in southern Mesopotamia. Synchronous collapse in adjacent regions suggests that the impact of abrupt climatic change was extensive.

Whether a volcanic eruption was sufficient to trigger a drought so destructive may still be open to doubt; but whatever caused the draught, its effect now seems established beyond all doubts. The authors summarize their momentous findings as follows:

The abrupt climatic change that generated Habur hiatus I and the associated Akkadian-Gutti-Ur III collapse are synchronous with climate change and collapse phenomenon documented in the Aegean, Egypt, Palestine, and the Indus. The reoccupation of the Habur plains [in the northern Mesopotamia] in the 19^th century BC and the sudden emergence of centralized Amorite control… was evidently facilitated by the amelioration of climatic conditions…

These very recent reports make it clear that the ending of Harappan civilization was a part of a world wide climate change phenomenon that affected all ancient civilizations.

Determining age of Saraswat Community

There is no doubt that Saraswats were the people who played a pivotal role in the authoring of Rigveda. Thus the age of the Rigveda can easily be regarded as the age of the early Saraswats.

Thanks to our understanding of ancient metallurgy, we can now say that Rigveda must be older than 3500 BCE.

Kunal, a recently discovered Saraswati site in Haryana has yielded silver ornaments. This shows that their metallurgy must have been quiet advanced; for unlike gold, silver never appears in pure form and has to be extracted by separating it from other metals like copper. The archeological research dates Kunal to be much earlier than 3000 BCE.

The presence of silver ornaments at Kunal shows that it is much later than the society described in the Rigveda. This is because Rigveda dose not know silver. The oldest Sanskrit word for silver is Rajata Hiranyam – literally ‘white gold’ – and it is mentioned for the first time in Yajurveda. This evidently disapproves the currently ascribed date of Rigveda as 1200 BCE as Kunal is evidently the last phase of the Saraswati civilization. Interestingly though there are proofs to suggest a date marking the end of the Saraswati civilization there is no evidence to suggest its exact beginnings.

Thus Dr. Rajaram has suggested that:

All we have to do is look hard and deep along the Sarasvati and other Vedic rivers. Such sites are likely to date to 3500 BCE or earlier. These when found are likely to be from the Age of Rigveda. The key identifying factor will be the relatively primitive metallurgy of their artifacts.

Conclusion:

Today, though we have archeology telling us that: there was extensive trade between the Harappans, Egyptians and Sumerians besides presenting existence of science and mathematics much advanced to that age, our understanding of the Harappa Mohenjo-Daro or better put Sindu-Saraswati civilization is incomplete.

Though we have evidence to suggest existence of now extinct Saraswati we are yet to find evidence to suggest beginning of the civilization. However with the available information we can fairly conclude that:

1. Saraswats, who once lived on the riverbed of Sarasvati, have a history equivalent to that of Rigveda.
2. The riverbed of an extinct river found by American and French satellites near Harappan excavation are of Saraswati as the very description of the riverbed matches with that of Saraswati mentioned in Rig Veda.
3. The Kunal excavations discovered on the riverbed of Sarasvati belong to the Yajurveda period dating earlier than 3000 BCE. And because Rigveda was written much earlier than Yajurveda the current idea of Rigveda being authored around 1300 BCE is false.
4. Given this we can firmly conclude that Sarasvati civilization of which Saraswats were one an integral part has a history of at least five thousand years.

The author, U. Mahesh Prabhu, is a Fellow of Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, London (UK).

Kestur Vasuki writes about the slow transition that Belgaum has made into the modern world, keeping the lessons and memories of the past intact.

You cannot expect to achieve new goals or move beyond your present circumstances unless you change — this quote by famous motivational speaker Les Brown fits perfectly when one notices how present has quietly stepped in to join hands with the past in Belgaum. And resulted in this south Indian city becoming a major hub in the region after State capital of Bangalore. In fact, it is interesting to note how heritage and modernity have become the key words in the growth of this city, situated in the northwestern parts of Karnataka and on the border of two States: Maharashtra and Goa. It is one of the oldest towns in the State, at a distance of 502 km from Bangalore; 515 km from Hyderabad and 500 km from Mumbai.

The geographical location adds up to the city’s advantage since it is situated right in between Bangalore and Mumbai-Pune to support the major automotive and aerospace companies in the region. The changing face of Belgaum has been recognised by many and it has been developing as a link town between Bangalore and Mumbai. Though the links between these two metros have changed, Belgaum has managed to keep its date with history.

In fact, history has helped this conservative town turn into a cosmopolitan city, in tune with the changing world. Belgaum, today is not only an industrial hub but a big trading centre after Bangalore. Not only this, it is an important location for vegetable trading, fish, wood and mining resource trading in Karnataka.

Belgaum has an enviable heritage and much more needs to be discovered. It lies in the zone of cultural transition between Karnataka, Maharashtra and Goa with a known antiquity that can be traced up to 2nd century AD. Due to its proximity with these States, Belgaum has acquired their cultural flavour and blended it with the local Kannada culture to create its own unique rich heritage. It is also known as Malenadu or Rain Country and the vegetation here is verdant throughout the year.

Belgaum is also now developing as a Tier II city in software and hardware development, augmenting the need of the growing graduates with a number of educational institutions imparting quality education. Nestled high in the Western Ghats, it is one of the most prominent historical places in the country. The old town area with cotton and silk weavers stands gloriously besides the modern and bustling British Cantonment area.

“Belgaum is the perfect example of change which is taking place at a rapid pace. A major reason for this is its close proximity from the IT city of Bangalore and the fashion city of Mumbai, also the hub of economic activities. The diversity and change has added to the cultural menu of Belgaum as a significant city in Karnataka,” explains Professor DS Poornanda of the Department of Journalism and Communication, Kuvempu University.

The name Belgaum originated from Velugrama or Ikhsugrama. The earliest mention of this fact is made in the Nesari Plates of 805 AD. The archaeological inscriptions in the Vadgaon-Madhavapura area reveal a prosperous town of the Satavahana times.

History tells us Belgaum was built in the 12th century AD by the Ratta dynasty who were based at nearby Saundatti. The fort of Belgaum was built in 1204 by a Ratta officer named Bichiraja. It served as the capital of the dynasty between 1210 and 1250, before the Rattas were defeated by the Yadava dynasty of Devagiri. Belgaum then briefly came under the sway of the Yadavas of Devagiri. The Khiljis of Delhi invaded the region at the turn of the 1300s and succeeded in ruining both the indigenous powers of the region, the Yadava and the Hoysalas without providing a viable administration. This lacuna was supplied by the Vijayanagara empire, which had become the established power of the area by 1336.

A century later, the town had become a bustling trading hub for diamonds and wood, owing to its favourable geographic location in the kingdom. In 1474, the Bahmani Sultanate, then ruling from Bidar, captured the fort of Belgaum. Shortly afterward, in 1518, the Bahamani sultanate splintered into five small states, and Belgaum became part of the Adilshahi sultanate of Bijapur. The Adilshahis reinforced the fort of Belgaum, much of the existing structure dates from 1519.

In 1686, the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb overthrew the Bijapur sultanate, and Belgaum passed nominally to the Mughals. However, the Mughal empire went into decline after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and his principal detractors, the Maratha confederacy, took control of the area during the rule of the Peshwas. In 1776, the country was overrun by Hyder Ali of Mysore, but was retaken by the Peshwa with British assistance. In 1818, the British deposed the last Peshwa and annexed his kingdom, which included Belgaum.

It is the only district in Karnataka which was fully part of the Freedom Struggle. In 1857, when the Indo-Gangetic plain was convulsed by the flames of a sepoy-led rebellion against colonial rule, its heat were witnessed in Belgaum. A Muslim Wahabi and munshi in the army were discovered instigating sepoys in Belgaum in August 1857; five of them were executed by the British and four others imprisoned for life. Mahipalsingh was deputed by Raja Venkatappa Nayaka of Shorapur (Gulbarga district) to instigate sepoys in the native infantry in Belgaum. Though he succeeded in persuading a considerable number of soldiers to revolt, his plot was discovered and he was arrested and hanged. Bhaskar Rao alias Babasaheb of Nargund planned a revolt and attacked a British contingent but was caught in Torgal and later hanged in Belgaum. His samadhi is located at the Military Dairy.

Rich deposits of bauxite that were found in Belgaum district have led to the creation of Hindalco, the famous company for the production of aluminium. Additionally, uranium deposits have recently been found in Deshnur, a small village near Belgaum. Beginning early 1970s, the city began developing as an important centre for the manufacture of heavy machine tools including high pressure oil hydraulics. Not this alone, it also is a strong industrial hub for machine shops catering to automotive manufacturing, especially crank-shaft machining.

Another significant change can be noticed when one visits Jaffer Wadi, just 3 km away. The self-sufficient village dreams of becoming part of second green revolution in the country. Villagers here grow a local variety of paddy called ‘Indrayani’ which has a unique flavour. This variety of rice which is grown abundantly is also called the ‘local Basmati’. This yield would shortly be patented and added to the flavour of Belgaum.

The city houses the Maratha Light Infantry Regimental Centre (MLIRC). It also houses the Commando Training Wing which is a part of the Infantry School, where the country’s infantry commandos are trained in endurance, escape and evasion, guerrilla and commando warfare techniques.

The city served as a major military installation for the British Raj too, primarily due to its proximity to Goa which was then a Portuguese territory. Once the British left India, the Indian Government continued and still continues to have Armed forces installations in Belgaum. In 1961, the Indian Government, under Prime Minister Nehru used forces from Belgaum to end Portuguese rule in Goa.

Like Francis Bacon said any journey “teaches life” and Belgaum does that. It teaches you the past and shows you the slow transition it has made into the modern world and has kept the lessons and memories of the past intact. It is a journey to this wonderful land that traverses and teaches past and the present.