Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Because of their link to the horse, the proto-Indo-Aryans are variously said to have come from the steppe land between the Black Sea and the Caspian, between the Caspian and the Aral Sea, or from other locations in central Asia. The most recent research locates the homeland in the Abashevo culture on the lower Volga and in the Sintashta-Arkaim culture in the southern Urals. From there, according to Asko Parpola, a Finnish professor of Indology, ‘the domesticated horse and the Indo-Aryan language seem to have entered south Asia in the Gandhara grave culture of north Pakistan around 1600 BC’. The most important aspect of their migration is held to have been in north-west India, around the Indus valley, where the great early civilisation of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro suffered a mysterious decline in the second millennium BC, for which the Indo-Aryans are held responsible. It is the Indo-Aryans who are held to have composed the Rig Veda. Their place of origin, and their migration, are said to be reflected in the fact that the Finno-Ugaric language shows a number of words borrowed from what became Sanskrit, that the Andronovo tribes of the steppes show a culture similar to that described in the Rig Veda, and that they left a trail of names, chiefly of rivers (words which are known to be very stable), as they moved across central Asia. They also introduced the chariot (and therefore the horse) into India, and iron – again, items mentioned in the Rig Veda.³⁶ Finally, the general setting of the Rig Veda is pastoral, not urban, meaning it was written down before the Indo-Aryans arrived in the mainly urban world of the Indus valley.

This view has been severely criticised in recent years, not least by Indian scholars, who argue that this ‘migrationist’ theory is ‘racist’, developed by Western academics who couldn’t believe that India generated the Rig Veda all by herself. They argue that there is no real evidence to suggest that the Indo-Aryans came from outside and they point out that the heartland of the Rig Veda more or less corresponds to the present-day Punjab. Traditionally, this presented a problem because that name, Punjab, based on the Sanskrit, panca-ap, means ‘five rivers’, whereas the Rig Veda refers to an area of ‘seven rivers’ with the Sarasvati as the most majestic.³⁷ For many years no one could identify the Sarasvati among today’s rivers, and it was therefore regarded by some as a ‘celestial’ entity. However, in 1989, archaeologists discovered the bed of a once-massive, now dried-up river, six miles wide in places, and this was subsequently confirmed by satellite photographs.³⁸ Along this dried river bed (and a major tributary, making seven rivers in all in the Punjab) are located no fewer than 300 archaeological sites. This thus confirms, for the indigenists at least, not only that the area of the Rig Veda was inside India, but that the drying-up of the river helps explain the collapse of the Indus valley civilisation.³⁹ They also point to recent research on the astronomical events in the Rig Veda which, they say, confirm that these scriptures are much older than the 1900–1200 BC date traditionally ascribed. They argue that the astronomy, and the associated mathematics, show that the Indo-Aryans were indigenous to north-west India, that that is where the Indo-European languages began, and that Indian mathematics were much in advance of those elsewhere. While this debate is inconclusive at the moment (there are serious intellectual holes in both the migrationist and the indigenous theories), it remains true that Indian mathematics was very strong historically, and that, as was discussed in the last chapter, a very old script – perhaps the oldest yet discovered – was unearthed recently in India.