aryan-dravidian divide or kinship - michel danino

Aryan-Dravidian Divide or Kinship?

by Michel Danino

Published in Thamizhaga Anthannar Varalaaru

(“History of Tamilnadu Brahmins”),

Brahmin Research Centre, Chennai, 2004, Chennai pp. 924–38

For a century and a half, Indian children have learned in their history classes that an

“Aryan people” entered India around 1500 BC and subjugated the “native Dravidians,”

driving them to the South of the peninsula. Everything about those two peoples,

originally referred to as “races,” was said to be different: their skin colour, noses,

temperament, languages, literatures, and of course cultures. Thus a deep divide was

sought to be institutionalized between so-called Aryans and so-called Dravidians.

Textbooks, scholarly literature, dictionaries and encyclopaedias relayed this new

“knowledge” — new, because Indians had never defined themselves as Aryans or

Dravidians in any racial or ethnical sense, until nineteenth-century European scholars

decided otherwise.

The issue generously spilt over beyond the scholarly field, as politicians seized

on it, especially in Tamil Nadu, and turned it into an ideology which declared that North

Indians were descendants of the Aryan invaders, their Sanskrit language (and its

offshoot, Hindi) was a foreign import and imposition, and Vedic culture was out to

suppress the older “Dravidian culture.” The motive was clear: encourage division,

create imaginary frustrations and promote rejection of anything perceived as “Aryan,”

including Sanskrit, Vedic culture and Hinduism, and of course the Brahmin caste. A

divisive colonial theory was thus readily accepted and amplified to foster an equally

divisive political agenda, whose objective was to rid their State of all forms of “Aryan”

imposition. With no solid evidence, everything South Indian was projected as being

“separate”; the result inevitably led to a separatist movement. That it failed to gather

momentum among the masses is only a testimony to the stronger cultural bonds that

unite Indians. Still, a sense of separateness has been created among some South Indians,

Tamilians especially, through distorted textbooks and propaganda.

In recent years, a growing number of scholars, archaeologists and historians

have come to dispute the very occurrence of an Aryan invasion of India; they have done

so on several grounds, a few of which we will briefly examine.1 If they are right, that

Aryan-Dravidian Divide or Kinship? / p. 2

would naturally sap the very foundations of the Aryan-Dravidian divide. Let us first

summarize the evidence.

No Archaeological Evidence of an Aryan Invasion

An invasion by Aryans or any other people from Central Asia, moving across the plains

of the Indus and its tributaries, would have left some physical traces. It so happens that

this region has been rather well explored, as it was one of the two heartlands of the

Indus Valley (or Harappan) civilization — the other being the Sarasvati river, which is

why this civilization is now increasingly named the “Indus-Sarasvati civilization.” By

whatever name, it developed a remarkably advanced urban phase from about 2600 BC,

which came to an end around 1900 or 1800 BC.

For decades after its discovery in 1921-22, archaeologists hunted for evidence of

an invasion by Aryans, who at first were assumed to have destroyed this civilization.

However, they could not come up with the smallest bit of evidence relatable to any

invading group; as a result, today, they all agree that there is no physical sign of any

invasion of the subcontinent towards the end of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization or for

several centuries thereafter. We find no sudden appearance of any artefacts denoting an

incoming culture anywhere in the North-West — no new type or style of pottery,

weapon, tool, art or building. Renowned archaeologists such as G. F. Dales, Jim

Shaffer, J.-F. Jarrige, B. B. Lal, S. R. Rao, S. P. Gupta, Dilip K. Chakrabarti, J. M.

Kenoyer and many others can be quoted to that effect. Let us give just one example

from the last:

There is no archaeological or biological evidence for invasions or mass

migrations into the Indus Valley between the end of the Harappan Phase about

1900 BC and the beginning of the Early Historic period around 600 BC.2

Kenoyer calls the Aryan invasion theory an “absurd theory.” Let us note,

moreover, that there is no sign whatsoever of any man-made destruction in the entire

Indus-Sarasvati civilization; it was possibly the most peaceful in the ancient world, and

the end of its urban phase was most likely caused by environmental cataclysms such as

earthquakes and the consequent diversion and drying up of the Sarasvati river, its main

lifeline.

The Sarasvati River

In fact, the Sarasvati river provides us with the strongest evidence against the Aryan

invasion theory. The existence of the vanished river has been demonstrated by

considerable data from field surveys by geologists and archaeologists, and from satellite


photography.3 What has come to light is the dry bed of a once huge river which flowed

through the Ghaggar-Hakra valley in Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Pakistan’s

Cholistan desert, and followed a course south of the Indus to finally reach the Arabian

sea north of the Rann of Kutch. Along this dry bed, at least 1,000 Harappan settlements

have been listed by Pakistani and Indian archaeologists. Most archaeologists, even

“conservative” ones such as Gregory Possehl or Raymond and Bridget Allchin, accept

the identification of the Ghaggar-Hakra river with the ancient Sarasvati repeatedly

praised in the Rig-Veda.

Because the Rig-Veda describes the Sarasvati as a “mighty river” (VI.61.13)

flowing “from the mountain to the sea” (VII.95.2), the Rishis who composed the Vedic

hymns must have lived near the Sarasvati while it still flowed, therefore in mature-

Harappan times at the latest, around 2500 BC or earlier. This contradicts the

conventional view that the invading Aryans composed the Vedic hymns around 1500 or

even 1200 BC — how could they have praised the mighty Sarasvati when it had

disappeared centuries earlier?

Cultural Continuity

In reality, what emerges from the archaeological record is a remarkable continuity in

India’s prehistory right from 7000 BC (e.g. at Mehrgarh in Baluchistan) up to the

historic period. After the collapse of the Indus-Sarasvati urban administration, the

Harappan legacy lived on in the villages, and many of its contributions resurfaced a

millennium later in the second urbanization which started around the eighth century BC.

Examples of such survivals have been documented in various fields from agriculture to

technology and from town-planning to governance.4 In the Harappan cultural and

religious life in particular, we may mention depictions of the swastika, the trishul, the

presence of fire altars, the use of conches for libations as well as for blowing, the

sacredness of the pipal and other trees, or the use of pigment at the parting of the hair

(found on a few female statuettes). In addition, symbols depicted on the seals or other

artefacts, such as the bull or a mother-goddess, evoke Vedic themes; one seal from

Chanhu-daro symbolically depicts the marriage of Heaven and Earth, a theme central to

the Rig-Veda. We also see numerous deities seated or standing in yogic postures, the so-

called “priest king” in deep contemplation, and figurines in various yoga asanas (e.g. at

Lothal), all of which shows that yoga was a Harappan tradition.

It is therefore not surprising that John Marshall, one of Mohenjo-daro’s first

excavators, remarked in 1931:


[The Harappan] religion is so characteristically Indian as hardly to be

distinguished from still living Hinduism.5

More recently, Colin Renfrew, a well-known British archaeologist, went further

and asserted:

It is difficult to see what is particularly non-Aryan about the Indus Valley

civilization.6

Final proof of a Vedic background to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization will only

come with the decipherment of the Indus script, but the high degree of cultural

continuity between Harappan and later times strongly militates against the cultural

break that the Aryan invasion theory postulated.

Biological Continuity

The Aryan invasion theory also assumed that a new people entered India, taller and

fairer than the “natives.” This myth was the outcome of nineteenth-century European

politics supported by spurious scholarship.7 In recent decades, many sites of different

epochs throughout India have yielded skeletons, and experts examining them have tried

to see if the dead men might tell a tale of Aryan invasion: this would have been the case

if a distinct human type could be shown to have appeared in India in the centuries that

followed the disintegration of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. However, U. S.

anthropologist K.A.R. Kennedy, who studied many skeletons at Harappan sites, is

categorical:

Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories

concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.... In short, there is no

evidence of demographic disruptions in the north-western sector of the

subcontinent during and immediately after the decline of the Harappan culture.8

Previous studies by Indian experts had reached exactly the same conclusion.

Kennedy also refers to a “biological continuum [... with] the modern populations of

Punjab and Sind,”9 which rules out any invasion or large-scale migration into the

subcontinent.

Let us note here that we in India are not sufficiently aware that “race” as a

concept has lost all scientific validity. To quote Gregory Possehl:

Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been

totally discredited as a useful concept in human biology.... There is no reason to

believe today that there ever was an Aryan race that spoke Indo-European

languages and was possessed with a coherent and well-defined set of Aryan or

Indo-European cultural features.10


In other words, to speak of an Aryan or a Dravidian race is absurd. Human types

vary all over India, and no one can say where one type begins or ends. Biological

evidence rules out any substantial difference between the Harappans and today’s

inhabitants of the same region (Sindhis, Punjabis, Gujaratis, Rajasthanis etc.). This also

means that the Harappans cannot have been “Dravidians” or the ancestors of today’s

South Indians.

The Harappans Were Not “Dravidians”

Archaeological evidence equally rejects the possibility that the Harappans might have

migrated to South India en masse under some Aryan onslaught. If they had, we should

expect to find at least a few late-Harappan settlements on the way to the South — there

are none beyond the Vindhyas. We would also expect some survival or Harappan

artefacts in the South — again, there is none. And let us not forget that the earliest signs

of an urban civilization (in Tamil Nadu) go no further back than the third or fourth

century BC, i.e. 1,500 years after the end of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization! Assuming

“Dravidians” had been its creators, what happened to them during that lengthy interval?

Why did they forget all their Harappan achievements, including writing, town-planning

and building techniques?

When neither the supposed Aryan migration into India nor the supposed

Dravidian migration to the South receive the smallest scrap of confirmation from

archaeology and anthropology, why insist on them at all?

Brahui

Self-styled “pro-Dravidian” scholars are content with brushing aside the above

evidence, and often point to what they think to be a linguistic proof: the presence of

Brahui, a Dravidian dialect in Baluchistan. Brahui, they argue, shows that Dravidian

languages were once widespread in the Indus region — and therefore that Harappans

were Dravidians. There are many gaps and fallacies in the argument, but the worst of all

is that several linguists who have studied Brahui (for instance Jules Bloch, Joseph

Elfenbein and H. H. Hock11

) have concluded that far from being an ancient relic in the

region, it is a fairly recent import from central India. Thus the whole argument has

actually no basis, leave alone that using a dialect of today to draw conclusions on the

languages spoken in the same region 5,000 years ago is reckless, to say the least.


Literary Evidence

It is now clear that the Aryan invasion of India never took place. Long before

archaeological findings established this, many Indians, including Swami Vivekananda,

Sri Aurobindo, B. R. Ambedkar, noted that Indian literature and tradition carries no

memory of an Aryan invasion of the subcontinent, much less of a clash between

supposed Aryans and supposed Dravidians. Sri Aurobindo,12

and more recently scholars

such as George Erdosy13

and Thomas T. Trautmann,14

have effectively repudiated the

nineteenth-century misreadings of the Rig-Veda, which sought to portray the wars

between Aryas and Dasyus as conflicts between Aryans and Dravidians. The last

scholar, for instance, stated:

That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a miracle of faith. Is it

not time we did away with it?... The concept of race does nothing to illuminate

our understanding of the ancient sources of Indian history and, on the contrary,

has only served to corrupt our reading of them.15

If Sanskritic scriptures and traditions are silent about an Aryan-Dravidian

conflict, so is Tamil tradition. There is no record, no recollection of any physical or

cultural clash between “Aryan” and “Dravidian.” This means that if we were to accept

the old invasion theory, we would also have to assume that both Aryans and Dravidians

were struck with complete amnesia shortly thereafter!

Still, the question remains: What kind of culture does the Sangam literature,

India’s oldest non-Sanskritic literature, point to? Is there any truth in the claim of

“Dravidian” activists that it depicts a non-Vedic culture?

An objective examination of the Sangam literature points exactly to the opposite.

No doubt, Tamil poetry has a stamp and genius of its own, but from its earliest layers it

integrates Hindu gods and goddesses, the caste system, references to the Mahabharata

and Ramayana, to many Puranic legends and concepts, as well as Buddhist and Jain

elements. A wealth of examples can be and has been given.16

We will only mention a

few briefly here.

The Tolkappiyam refers to Vedic mantras as “the exalted expression of great

sages.”17

In its well-known fivefold division of the Tamil land (the five tinai), each tinai

is associated not only with one poetical mood, but also with one deity: Cheyon

(Murugan), Korravai (Durga), Mayon (Vishnu-Krishna), Varuna and Ventan (Indra), a

fine synthesis of non-Vedic, Vedic and Puranic gods. The “Eight Anthologies”

(ettuttokai) abound in references to many gods: Shiva, Uma, Murugan, Vishnu, Lakshmi

(Tiru) and several other Saktis.18

The Paripadal, for instance, consists almost entirely of


devotional poetry to Vishnu. The Purananuru,19

whose poems stress human heroism

and sentiments more than religious feelings, still refers to Lord Shiva as the source of

the four Vedas (166) and describes Lord Vishnu as “blue-hued” (174) and “Garuda-

bannered” (56). Similarly, a poem (360) of a third anthology, the Akananuru, declares

that Shiva and Vishnu are the greatest of gods. Deities apart, landmarks sacred in the

North, such as the Himalayas or Ganga, also become objects of great veneration in

Tamil poetry. Court poets praised Chera kings for conquering North Indian kingdoms

and carving their emblem onto the Himalayas. India was seen as one entity; thus the

Purananuru says they ruled over

… the whole land

With regions of hills, mountains,

Forests and inhabited lands

Having the Southern Kumari

And the great Northern Mount [the Himalayas]

And the Eastern and Western seas

As their borders....20

The Kural follows the traditional Sanskritic four objects of human life: dharma

(aram in Tamil), artha (porul), kama (inbam) — the last (moksha) being implied rather

than explicit. It has references to Bhagavan (1), Indra (25), Vishnu’s avatar of Vamana

(610), also to Lakshmi (167, 179, 920), and to concepts such as rebirth (10). Far from

being the “atheistic” text it is sometimes said to be, the Kural reflects much the same

values we find in the Gita and other scriptures.21

Of course, later texts such as the two

epics, the Shilappadikaram and the Manimekhalai, are even more replete with Vedic,

Buddhist, Jain and Puranic inputs.

Quoting from various Sangam texts, P. S. Subrahmanya Sastri demonstrated how

“a knowledge of Sanskrit literature from the Vedic period to the Classical period is

essential to understand and appreciate a large number of passages scattered among the

poems of Tamil literature.”22

Others have added to the long list of such examples.23

Thus the most ancient culture of the Tamil land known to us is inextricably related to

Vedic culture. This picture is confirmed by findings from archaeology and epigraphy.24

Aryan-Dravidian Kinship

Let us always keep in mind that culture, ethnicity and language are three different,

unrelated notions. One language may be a vehicle for several cultures, just as several

languages may give voice to one culture. As regards ethnicity, we would do well to

forget about it in the Indian context: is the peasant of north Karnataka (a “Dravidian”,

we are told) genetically closer to his “Aryan” counterpart across the Karnataka-


Maharashtra border, or to a Tamilian of Kanyakumari? We remain obsessed by words

like Aryan and Dravidian, forgetting that their racial meaning has no validity.

Archaeologist S. P. Gupta correctly states,

There was neither an Aryan race nor a Dravidian Race. The concept of ‘race’

itself is a myth.25

Those much-abused words of “Aryan” and “Dravidian” are therefore acceptable

only in a geographical sense, as they were used in the ancient texts: dravida referred to

South India in Sanskrit texts, while arya referred to North India in the Sangam

literature. In addition, the Vedas gave arya has a primary cultural meaning: an Arya is

one who fights for the truth and upholds Vedic culture. But a racial meaning such as the

one imposed by nineteenth-century European scholars was never intended.

To insist on divisive theories that receive support neither from archaeology nor

from Indian literature or tradition is irrational as well as irresponsible. Whatever

regional variations we may note between South and North India, the underlying picture

is one of kinship. Without it, India could not have been regarded as one land and one

nation, as it has been for millennia. We often read about India as a land of “unity in

diversity”; diversity is certainly there to a very high degree, and has greatly enriched

Indian culture, but let us not lose sight of what made unity possible.

* * *

References

1 More detailed studies include: Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate by Koenraad Elst (New Delhi:

Aditya Prakashan, 1999), The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate

by Edwin Bryant (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), and The Invasion That Never Was by

Michel Danino (Mysore: Mira Aditi, 2nd

ed., 2000).

2 J. M. Kenoyer, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (Karachi & Islamabad: Oxford University

Press & American Institute of Pakistan Studies, 1998), p. 174.

3 See Vedic Sarasvati – Evolutionary History of a Lost River of Northwestern India, edited by B. P.

Radhakrishnan & S. S. Merh (Bangalore: Geological Society of India, 1999) and Sarasvati, the River that

Disappeared by K. S. Valdiya (Hyderabad: Universities Press, 2002).

4 In addition to J. M. Kenoyer’s comprehensive book (see note 2), see B. B. Lal’s India 1947-1997: New

Light on the Indus Civilization and The Sarasvati Flows On: the Continuity of Indian Culture (New Delhi:

Aryan Books International, 1998 & 2002).


5 John Marshall, Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization (London: 1931), vol. I, p. vi-viii.

6 Colin Renfrew, Archaeology and Language – the Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (London: Penguin

Books, 1989), p. 190.

7 For more details, see chapter 1 of The Invasion That Never Was by Michel Danino.

8 Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, “Have Aryans been identified in the prehistoric skeletal record from South

Asia?” in The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, ed. George Erdosy (Berlin & New York: Walter de

Gruyter, 1995), p. 60, 54.

9 Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, “Skulls, Aryans and Flowing Drains,” in Harappan Civilization – a

Contemporary Perspective, ed. Gregory L. Possehl (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH, 1st ed., 1982), p. 291.

10 Gregory L. Possehl, The Indus Age: The Beginnings (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH, 1999), p. 42

11 See Hans Heinrich Hock, “Convergence of Subversion? The Issue of Pre-Vedic Retroflexion

Reexamined.” Pp.73-115 in Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, vol. 23.2 (Fall 1993). See also a discussion

of the question of Brahui in The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration

Debate by Edwin Bryant, op. cit., p. 83.

12 Sri Aurobindo, The Secret of the Veda, Centenary Edition (Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1972),

vol. 10.

13 See George Erdosy, “The meaning of Rgvedic pur: Notes on the Vedic landscape,” in From Sumer to

Meluhha, ed. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin, 1994).

14 See T. R. Trautmann, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 1997).

15 Ibid., p. 215.

16 See for instance K. V. Sarma, “Spread of Vedic Culture in Ancient South India” in The Adyar Library

Bulletin, 1983, 43:1. See also “Vedic Roots of Early Tamil Culture” by Michel Danino, available online

at http://www.bharatvani.org/michel_danino/tamil_cult01.html .

17 Tolkappiyam, Porul 166, 176, quoted by K. V. Sarma, “Spread of Vedic Culture in Ancient South

India”, op. cit., p. 5.

18 See K. V. Raman, Sakti Cult in Tamil Nadu—a Historical Perspective (paper presented at a seminar on

Sakti Cult, 9th

session of the Indian Art History Congress at Hyderabad, in November 2000).

19 Purananuru, 2, 93, etc. See also invocatory verse.

20 Purananuru, 17 as translated in Tamil Poetry Through the Ages, vol. I, Ettuttokai: the Eight

Anthologies, ed. Shu Hikosaka and G. John Samuel (Chennai: Institute of Asian Studies, 1997), p. 311.

21 For more details on Tiruvalluvar’s indebtedness to Sanskrit texts, see V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar’s

study of the Kural, as quoted by P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar in History of the Tamils (Madras: reprinted Asian

Educational Services, 1995), p. 589-595.

22 P. S. Subrahmanya Sastri, An Enquiry into the Relationship of Sanskrit and Tamil (Trivandrum:

University of Travancore, 1946), chapter 3.


23

See for instance: K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, “Sanskrit Elements in Early Tamil Literature,” in Essays in

Indian Art, Religion and Society, ed. Krishna Mohan Shrimali (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal

Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 1987); K. V. Sarma, “Spread of Vedic Culture in Ancient South India,” op. cit.;

Rangarajan, “Aryan Dravidian Racial Dispute from the Point of View of Sangam Literature,” in The

Aryan Problem, eds. S. B. Deo & Suryanath Kamath (Pune: Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti, 1993), p.

81-83.

24 See “Vedic Roots of Early Tamil Culture” by Michel Danino, op. cit.

25 S. P. Gupta, “Paleo-Anthropology and Archaeology of the Vedic Aryans,” in The Aryan Problem, eds.

S. B. Deo and S. Kamath, op. cit., p. 157 (emphasis in the original).

aryan-dravidian divide or kinship - michel danino

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