early twentieth century were Swami Vivekananda_and Mahatna
Gandhi. Both were deeply imbued with the spirit of Hinduisn
and both served Mother India in their own way. Whle
Vivekananda dedicated himself to religion and awakened cur
people to their greatness and inspired them to greater endeavou-s,
Mahatma Gandhi sacrificed his all to enter politics in order to
lead us out of slavery to freedom. Both were deeply conscicus
of their religiosity and proud of being Hindus. Vivekanarda
made religion the foundation of a successful temporal word,
Gandhiji made spirituality and truth the essence of his politi;al
philosophy. Both succeeded beyond measure in their G>6
ordained mission.) In Young India his weekly journal, Mahatma Gandhi wrtte,
that nothing could be further from his thought than that ”,ve
(Indians) should become exclusive or erect barrier. Bu
respectfully contend that an appreciation of other cultures
follow, never precede an appreciation and assimilation ot our
own”. His views on borrowing foreign values were very exp’Cit,
and he said, ” I do not want my windows to be stuffed. I wn PT^PTER 16 TRUTH ABOUT HINDUISM 243 the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house, as freely
as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet.” And then Swami Vivekananda declared, ” The old religion j
said that he was an atheist who did not believe in Cod. The new (
re|jgion says that he is an atheist who does not believe in himself. \
It is the coward and the fool who says this is his fate. But jtjs \
thejtrong man who stands up and says I will make my own i
fate/’” ”””” \ The process of learning never stops. I was amazed to learn
b’ggest strength is its power of assimilation, open endedness,
continuous evbTutibrTand eclectic response to all that is progressive
and new. Hinduism can_absprb and co-exists with people of any
fS!.th as long as they owe allegiance to this mother country. Even
a Hindu converted to Islam who shares the same collective 244 INDIA AND ISRAEL CHADT CHAPTER i/- memories with the Hindus is welcome in its fold. Hindu’
being progressive,, the genius of its people can be seen •
entrepreneurial skills, business acumen, technological expert’’0
and excellence in all forms of human activities. Unfettered jn!i
uncontrolled by a tyraneous state Hjnduism encourages seif
actualization, and abjures acquisitive or imperialistic tendencl?”
The weaknesseses, though endemic, are curable. There i
an excessive stress on the individual which led to his neglect of
organized effort. Lack of development of social institutions
community alliance and collectivism has led to the weakening of
our polity and social fabric. Proverbial Hindu tolerance has oten
verged on cowardice and projected an image of weakness leading
to foreign invasions and defeats in battles. Indian history from
700 A.D. onwards with a few exceptions is a monotonous s:ory
of defeats. In spite of Kautilya’s Arthshastra Hindus took little
interest in military methods and political sciences. The caste
system though well intended in its inception degenerated in:o a
cruel caste divide and led to internal conflict an enfeeblement of
the Hindu nation. And last but not the least is the ”crab in the
can” mentality of Hindu individuals who cannot see their brot’iers
rise to excellence and often attempt to drag them back to their
was separated from natural brass casting. Rigvedic period would CHAPTER 17 ANCIENT INDIAN CIVILIZATION 247 , even earlier. The theory of Aryan invasion invented by Max
Muller nas ’ts ro°te m tne nineteenth century political concerns
f Germany and British colonial India. The Aryan theory has its
genesis not in India but Europe. Let us examine the facts. People
Of North and South India speak languages from different families,
-rhe two are derivatives from the Aryan and Dravidian families
of languages. We shall soon realize that separating the two people
on linguistic basis is a gross distortion of facts. First a look at the
motivation of Max Muller’s theory in the nineteenth century
Europe, and the political, racial, religious and nationalistic forces
at work at that time. There was no Indus archaeology and there
was no known co-relation between Indian and European
languages. The two important pillars of the Aryan theory were
European racism, mainly anti-Semitism and German nationalism.
Comparative linguistics and archaeology did not exist at this time
and the fact is that Sanskrit was the source of most European
languages. Instead of the ’theory’ being the result of archaeology
and comparative philology the position is the other way round.
Indus archaeology itself contradicts the invasion theory. The
invasion of the dark skinned people by the light skinned ones
was really a replay of the European strategy of colonizing Asia
and Africa. Substituting European for Aryan, and Asian and
African for Dravidian, you have the leit motif of the European
colonial campaigns in the two continents. This makes the Aryans
a replica of the European colonizers. The archaeological finds of
the Indus Valley civilization were made to fit the Aryan invasion
theory which was supposed to have come later and destroyed
the’former. In fact, the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro
were interpreted as the result of the destruction caused by the
Aryan invasion. The myth of the invasion was thus invented to
corroborate the tautology or a circular argument, as a proof that
the Aryans came after the Indus civilization, which they destroyed.
This effort totally ignored the fact, as we shall see later, that most
of the artifects found in the Indus valley excavations were in use
much earlier in the Vedic period. The destruction of the Indus
valley civilization was not due to any invasion but the drying up
of the river Saraswati, which flowed across the Thar desert and 248 ^ INDIA AND ISRAEL CHAPTER 17 watered this civilization to prosperity. Later, as the river dried un
the civilization too came to an end/ but this happened much
later after Rigveda perjod. Certain Shaivic remains found in I-I ^ii--i«-i.-i.-.,..:»-L’ •! ’ .. _ ’’I m Harappa with simil^r finds in Cujarat; and the phai|us Wor$h of Dravidian Shaivit^s |ed to the belief that the people of Harappa were Dravidian, corv,p|ete|y ignoring the fact that the stronghold of Shaivites is not th^ Dravjdian south, but the Himalayan regions of Nepal, Kashmir ^nd the northern parts of Uttar Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh. T his was the crad|e of the ear|jer Vedic people whose legacy was p*assed |ater to the Harappan civilization. To quote the famous h jstOrian, Talageri, ”The negative evidence in the form of absence ^f the horse and rice in the [ndus civilization, which was taken as evidence of its Dravidian origin is no more tenable in view of -^he occurrence of horse bones and rice at Lothal, Kalibangan, ^urkotada and Ropar in India and Mohenjodaro in Pakistan. O^-, tne otner nand( tnere js enough positive evidence in support of the re|igiOus rites of the Harappan being similar to those of th^ Vedic Aryans. Their religious motifs, deities and sacrificial altars bespeak of Aryan faith...” The word Druids 1 of England sounds : strange|y like ’Druhyus’, who were driven out of India in susta jnecj campaigns and had their Asian origins in the early fourth millennium B.C. Thus there have been so many Indo-Europear^, mjgrations and this points to India as the original home of th e speakers of Indo-European dialect, who migrated to the Wes^t and North-West in pre-historic times, the exact reverse of the . facts of the Aryan jnvasion theory. I have discussed the subjec^ of the Aryan invasion in some detail in my book on Nehru. The^ Aryan invasiOn theory requires a negation of a substantial bodtiy of |iterary and archaeological evidence. How could the Ary^a^ who were basically supposed to be nomads, evolve suoch a refined language as Sanskrit, its sophisticated texts ar^d generate a vocabulary that spread to the rest ot the world, influencing Greek, Latin, Sumerian and Egyptian languages. The sophi- stication of Panini’s grammar three thousand years ago, the Astadf\hyayj and Patanjali’s Mahabhasya will maKe one wonder how suc^h. a linguistic perfection can be achieved oy a nomadic people s»-o (ate to arrive on the historic scene, m