Harappan-Aryan Myth

By Dr. M.K. Teng

Methodologically, the analysis of linkages of between archeology and an ideology of history may appear to be serious work of research, but ultimately it is only, one of thos many attempts to distort Indian history by various techniques of logical reductionism. The pre-supposition of a Harappan-Aryan debate, hings on the British historiographic assumption of a civilisational conflict, which the Aryan race movement in India generated. Mortimer wheeler, dazed by this stanctural formats of the Sind Valley Civilisation and their historical antecedents, could not imagine the sequences of events which led to the growth of the Harappan civilization, except in the conceptual formats of the race movements across Asia, the liberalist reformism envisioned. The attempt made by scholars of Indian history to use the Indian media, for a projection of the Indian past, provides good reading but in essence it is a preposterous combination of archeologist evidence and paradigms of approach to the study of history, built around an irrational urge to deny the continuity in Indian history and its civilisational identity. A psychologist complex of fear, haunts the mind of the Indian historian that the acceptance of the continuity of the India history and its civilisational identity would necessitate the reconstruction of the Indian history in the context of its Sanskrit content. The Aryan myth was a part of the sociology of the race movement and the ideological and moral commitment to formulate premises that racial differences were fundamental to the growth of human civilisation. The sediments of a civilisational history bear evidence of the racial characteristics presumed to provide clues to the analysis of the levels of its culture. The myth that Aryans considered themselves to be superior to the Authroloid and proto-Austraoloid stock of the Indian population, is also a projection of the British liberalist reformism. That caste had its origin in the social differention between the Nordic invaders and the Austroloid and proto-Autroloid survivors on the India sub-continent has its roots in the presumption that race movements were ideologically oriented. An attempt is made with deliberate intent to ignore and leave out of reckoning the race-movement of the Western-Brachycephlic Alpinoid peoples, across the north of India, spreading down to Bengal. The Alpinoids disappeared and are now extinct as a separate raceist identity, but their acculturation in India had a deep impact on the social patterns into which the Indian civilisation grew. Possibly a study of such acculturation would explain the western Bracky-cephlitic presence in northern India. Ideological conflict dominates the study of Indian history for their are visible trends in historiography in India to prove that Indian culture was an extension of the civilisational process of the Occient, where divinity had ordained the reality of an ominipotent masculine God, who determined the legitimacy of human action. The claim to the closer proximity of the Sind civilisation to the civilizational, has an ideological thrust to Occidentalise the Harappan culture. Having grown along the river Saraswati or the Sind, is only important in so-far as it establishes the proximity of Sind Valley civilisation to the Middle East, to prove that the civilisational process of the Harappan culture was not Indian and it had a plural origin. Not far off from the remains of the Harapan culture in the upper reaches of the Shivaliks, across the Pir Panjal mountain range, the worship of the Mother Goddess, Bhawani had already achieved a systemic shape with a basic sub-stratism of Shakht, which the mesopotamian civilisation did not envision, and which later florished in the Shiavite monism of the Trika, in the Kashmri valley. In the Sind valley cilivisation, figures of Goddesses were found and a representation similar to the Pashupati was also found, with the types of ornaments, which were strictly native and which had a ritual texture close to the Vedic ritual system. The later Neolothic culture at Burzaham in the Kashmir valley, populated by people of the Aryan stock. The chalcolithic revolution in the Burzaham civilisation came about, in the begining of the period of the Nilmat Puran in Kashmir, undoubtedly by its contact with the Sind valley. The ritual culture which grew in Kashmir in the Nilmah era, was the negotiation of the masculine God of the Occident. The Harappan culture and the myth of its civilisational conflict with the Aryans requires to be analysed by new and more sophisticated tools and techniques of history Linguistic sociology and the analysis of ritual culture and social anthropology provide as vital data on history as archeology does. The neolithic culture, which flourished in Kashmir along the river Vitasta (Jehlum) and which formed the ground work of the Shahkt-Shiva ritual structure, must be studied more intensively, to understand the contours and content of the Sind valley civilisation and its alignments with, the Aryan people.

Source: Kashmir Sentinel