BAWDY LINE. Conspiracy theory

As the glaucous Indus rushes, with crazed assiduity, through a deep and narrow and craggy gorge out of Ladakh and up into the groin between Gilgit and Baltistan, it passes by five villages occupied by a strange kind of primitive people. The Brogpas are relicts of a lost proto-Rgvedic Indo-Aryan tribe, allegedly of Caucasoid racial stock; about 5,000 of them in the villages of Garkone, Hanu, Dha, Beema, Dartsigs. Living in unmiscegenated, purebred isolation for a few thousand years now.

In the village of Dha, we looked long and hard at the woman’s sniffer. According to Max Müller, a straight and narrow and long proboscis (that could almost give an account of itself) was important. The particularity of the Aryan nasal organ was reportedly one of the clinchers of the Aryan Invasion Theory. In the Rgveda, the word a-nasa (noseless), as applied to the Dasyu, has been quoted by Max Müller (amongst others) to prove that the Dasyus were a flat-nosed people and therefore, by contrast the Aryans were straight-nosed.

On that peg was hung the weight of presumption of the conquest of Sapta-Sindhu by a straight-nosed alien people till Srinivas Iyengar, in 1914, pointed out that the word was actually ana-asa (those of incoherent speech). The specimen of Brogpa snout in front of us was a fair to middling one, attached to a face that wasn’t exactly Nordic white. She wasn’t golden-haired ( hiranyakeshin ) by any measure but probably had polycystic ovaries as indicated by a noteworthy run of facial hair. And she wore a sheepskin tunic and a wonderfully resplendent headdress made out of large, luridly orange dried flowers. She looked like a proto-Rgvedic Frida Kahlo.

As I settled down later that night to narrate to my eight-year-old son the story of the Aryans, all I could come up with was a reduced account of the authorised history I had grown up on : In the beginning were the Indo-Europeans, originally a people in the Pontic steppe of South Russia. Some of them (the Indo-Iranians) branched off and settled down in Central Asia. Much later, one branch of the Indo-Iranians, the Indo-Aryans, migrated southeastwards into what is now Northern Pakistan and became the Vedic Aryans. They produced the various books of the Rgveda much before they came in contact with the other regions of India.

To the historians of India, the Aryan Invasion/Immigration theory (AIT) is an axiomatic fact. The Invasionists and Immigrationists agree that it was, at any rate, a kind of demographic infiltration that led to the obliteration of the native culture and languages. Well, that is the potted version.

The only basis for this theory is a linguistic one and it is this: the languages of Northern India, Iran, Central Asia and Europe are cognate. This Indo-European language family is completely unconnected to other language families (Semito-Hamitic, Dravidian, Austric, Sino-Tibetan) and must have descended from a common ancestral language spoken by a group of people inhabiting a shared, delineated geographical homeland from where the daughter languages scattered all over India, Iran, Central Asia and Europe. The homeland, obviously, must have been in some reasonably central place, possibly South Russia. The Indo-Aryan languages spoken in India, therefore, are not indigenous, but owe their existence to languages brought in by Aryan invaders/immigrants.

The AIT is a narrative of slow migration of a people from one habitable region to the next, installing themselves for a while and, in the process, not merely assimilating into the local population but altering them phenotypically, culturally, religiously. It was a migration, however, that left absolutely no trace in any archaeological or ethnic or textual record or in traditional memory.

In the service of half-suppressed relativism in historiography we must ask ourselves how we know what we think we know? Therefore, dear reader, let me ask you this:

What if there were well-founded linguistic arguments to prove that the locus of the protolanguage was close to the Vedic area and not somewhere in South Russia?

And that the Vedic dialect with its three genders, three numbers, eight cases and 70 out of 72 basic cognate words might present the closest representation of the protolanguage? And if there was rigid evidence in favour of the idea that the Indus area was never non Indo-European in speech; that there was never a substrate of Dravidian languages in the North, that the oldest layers of Vedic literature contain no loan words from Dravidian (not even hydronyms)?

And the evidence of the isoglosses (linguistic features that develop in a certain language and then spreads to other languages and dialects over a contiguous area) presented by the great Hans Hock was found to be deliberately biased and selective and actually showed that the IE homeland simply couldn’t be situated in a central area such as South Russia?

What if the internal chronology of the early, middle and the late books of the Rgveda and the evidence in the Avesta and in Mittani (Syria) revealed that the late Rgveda, the Avesta, the rulers of Mittani and the Kassites (of Babylonia) shared a common culture with common names and name elements that are not encountered in the early and middle Rgvedic books, forensically indicating that the early Rgvedic canon represented a period anterior to the period of development of this common culture? And it gave rise to the ineluctable conclusion that the direction of the migration of the various branches of the Indo-Iranians was East to West and out of the Vedic area?

What if the archaeological investigations of the Ghaggar Hakra riverbed and the satellite imagery of the course of the primeval river conclusively showed that it had almost dried up by the second millennium BCE, and that long before that it was a mighty river, possibly the Saraswati, mightier than the Indus and that a large number of archaeological sites of the Harappan cities are actually located on the banks of this ghost river rather than the Indus? What if this meant that the Vedic Aryans who lived on both banks of the Saraswati in full flow (Rgveda VII.96.2) might have been inhabitants of the region long before 1500 BCE and in fact may be the indigenous Harappans?

Would all this evidence in favour of indigenous Aryanism be allowed its rightful place in the study of Indo-Aryan origins? Or would it, in the circles of academe, be called a symptom of Hindu nationalist discourse? And those questioning the status quo of the AIT? Reserved for them are some official phrases of disapprobation — ‘loonies’, ‘flat-earthers’, ‘Atlantists’, ‘functionaries of the chaddiwallahs’, etc. On which side, might I ask, lies the syndicate of partisans? Indigenous Aryanism is not a ‘nonsensical political theory’, not any more than the AIT. Is ‘adivasi’ a politically rigged word?

The Brogpas, primitive people of the pastures, are adivasis under the law. They have folklore and songs that lament a lost homeland. Might one place that in Gilgit without being called a Hindu nationalist?

asatwik@gmail.com

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