Early Indians — A Party Book

Fifteen years ago, while I was travelling in the USA, I bought a book—Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground by Kenneth R. Miller. I believed it was about evolution. As I read through the pages, however, I became increasingly confused. I eventually checked the subject of the book and discovered that it was actually about creationism, not evolution. It argued that evolution was indeed correct, but that it had been designed and set in motion by an unknown God.

Thousands of books are available in bookshops across America and Europe on this particular subject. Many of them are written by genuine scholars with impressive academic credentials. Some have received funding from religious organisations to promote the idea of God.

In the early period, religious groups opposed the idea of evolution. At a certain point, however, they realised that evolution had become so strongly established through scientific evidence that it could no longer be openly rejected, especially by religious people addressing younger generations. They therefore began to accommodate evolution within their theology, creating what amounts to a form of pseudo-science or pseudo-theology.

In India, we still tend to believe that a book containing numerous citations and apparently scientific logic, written in balanced language and presented in a well-classified structure, must be authentic and constitute a form of academic work. We know, however, that many books have been written by religious fanatics to present their beliefs as theories and established truths. This is particularly evident among some Vedic scholars, who argue that the Vedas are the only sources of modern knowledge and science. They write about Vedic mathematics, Vedic science, the astronomical calculation of time in the epics, and, more recently, the genetic mapping of characters from the Puranas. An Indian reader can easily recognise these books as intellectual trash and discern the dubious intentions behind such writing.

Yet, over the past twenty-five years, the English-language publishing world has produced a large number of books dealing in pseudo-science and pseudo-history, and many of them have become bestsellers in India. This has happened partly because a large and growing population in India now reads in English, thanks to the dominance of English-medium education throughout the country. Most of these readers are technically educated, but they are not necessarily academically trained to examine political, social, and cultural questions critically.

They tend to be attracted to books that employ scientific-sounding terminology and present seemingly convincing theories in the form of engaging narratives. Such books immediately appeal to a large reading public because they offer an interesting idea to discuss at a party and allow the reader to present himself as a learned person with an unconventional perception of history, politics, or religion. Academics used to label these kinds of books as “party books.”

Early Indians, written by Tony Joseph and published by Juggernaut Publications, has been praised by Sheldon Pollock as “fascinating,” by Gurcharan Das as “I could not put it down,” by Bibek Debroy as “amazing,” and by Nobel Prize winner Venki Ramakrishnan as “a very readable account.” This popular book is a perfect example of the term “party book.”

What is the academic credibility of this particular book? The author is not an academician to begin with; he is a journalist. He worked at Business Standard as an associate editor and later served as an editor at The Economic Times. He describes himself as a science journalist, although he has no formal academic training in fields such as genetic mapping or anthropology.

Early Indians is not the only book of this kind. There is a whole genre of popular writing that assumes an academic appearance without necessarily following the standards of academic research. Such books become particularly successful when they are written in lucid language and employ simple, apparently convincing arguments.

The general reading public often has its own system of logic, which becomes the primary scale by which it judges what it reads. If an author can persuade readers through a simple and apparently rational chain of arguments, they tend to accept the book’s conclusions. Once they have done so, their ego begins to defend the book; anything that challenges it hurts their emotions, and they argue vehemently in its favour. “My logical system has approved this, and I consider it the supreme one”—this is the attitude of the semi-learned public.

Academic research, by contrast, is usually more cautious. Methodology is a cruel, fire-emitting, sacrifice-demanding god in the academic field. An academician is reluctant to make bold or far-reaching claims without sufficient evidence. Academic writing relies heavily on data, methodology, citations, and conformity with the total picture. To a general reader, this approach can appear slow, technical, and monotonous. Such books rarely achieve popular success.

There is another important element in books of this kind: imagination. Early Indians, in my reading, can be understood as a fictional narrative presenting itself as a work of research. It is this imaginative element that makes such books attractive to the general reader, particularly to those with a literary sensibility. This is one reason why such books are often enthusiastically promoted by creative writers and readers of fiction and subsequently acquire a significant place among the intelligentsia.

I would like to make one point very clearly: if we want to understand a particular field of knowledge, we must take the trouble to read authentic academic papers and books in that field. The first criterion is the credibility and expertise of the author. The second is the methodology employed in the research. The third is the manner in which the argument is supported by sufficient evidence and situated within the existing body of scholarship.

I am making these observations because I have recently read one or two magazine reviews and Facebook posts celebrating this book as a major academic breakthrough. In my view, it is neither an academic text nor a reliable substitute for engaging with the primary scholarship in these fields. It is a popular book, closer to popular fiction, written to satisfy the curiosity—and, perhaps, the simple intellectual pride—of the general reader.

What is the basic problem with this book, which I would label a pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-academic work? The first problem is that Tony Joseph presents a number of concrete conclusions about the migration of human beings from various places into India, how they created different layers of Indian culture, and how each layer contributed to the others, thus creating the sociopolitical cobweb of Indian culture. These conclusions are presented as concrete, whereas the evidence offered for them consists largely of hypotheses. Citing one or two scientific papers as evidence and using them to construct an entire historical picture is the major defect of this book.

In fact, it is almost the reverse in archaeology. Archaeologists present very concrete evidence, and even then, their conclusions remain hypotheses and open-ended until the end of their research.

Discussing the book’s contents and logic categorically is not appropriate for someone who does not regard it as an intellectually honest or academically authentic work. I only want to remind readers of the basic flaw of its original conception.

Academically, this book could be described as employing an eclectic analytical methodology. The author draws evidence from various fields of research, including genetics, anthropology, sociology, environmental science, and even linguistics. We cannot examine every citation and independently verify its authenticity.

The book actually attempts to talk about almost everything concerning India and Eastern culture. It begins with the various migrations of human beings out of Africa and traces the routes of these migrations from more than 70,000 years ago. It narrates how various ethnic groups migrated to India and settled here, thereby creating a multi-layered ethnic population in the subcontinent—yes, like a pizza.

The book’s errors begin at this point. Genetics is an evolving science. Genetic decoding can help us understand that humanity throughout the world shares a complex biological heritage, with different populations carrying varying patterns of genetic ancestry. It also shows that human populations have continuously moved, interacted, and mixed with one another, and that this mixing could have taken place several thousand years ago and continued for several thousand years. Fixing a precise timeframe for this genetic mixing is not objectively possible today, and the time calculations involved are highly approximate, varying by thousands of years. That is why anthropologists are reluctant to use these calculations to arrive at definitive conclusions.

That is why the concrete conclusions Tony draws from genetic evidence are, from an academic perspective, deeply problematic. Tony adopts the complicated picture of the migration of human beings and the creation of cultures, but within this intricate logic he presents the age-old, simplified invasion theory with some genetic explanation. Since it is hidden in the elaborate logic, it is not easy for an average reader to discover it. Though the surface of this book is complex, inside it is motivated and simple.

For example, Tony discusses R1a-Z93 as a paternal lineage associated with Steppe populations and Indo-European-speaking populations. He says that R1a, specifically the Z93 subtype, was common in South Asia and occurred at high frequency among Middle and Late Bronze Age Steppe populations. Though this line of argument is elaborate and supported by a lot of citations, it actually attempts to connect the so-called invaders, referred to earlier as Aryans, with a clear genetic identity.

Tony argues that, after a long period of extensive genetic admixture among different Indian populations, this mixing sharply declined around 100 CE. He connects this change with the emergence and consolidation of caste-based endogamy, citing the Manusmriti and other evidence for increasing restrictions on intermarriage, again placing the same theory of racial supremacy associated with the invader theory inside the discourse.

Anyone with even a basic knowledge of the customs of Brahmins in India would know that the Brahmin tradition accepts women from other communities, while their identity as Brahmins is defined only through the paternal lineage. From the Mahabharata, we can see evidence of this custom, and it continued until the 15th century CE. There was also another custom in Brahminism whereby people from other communities could enter the Brahmin fold through the acceptance of a guru. They would then be identified through the guru lineage. This practice continued until the period of Ramanuja.

From there, Tony embarks on a very tedious journey, almost parallel to the vast human migration from Africa to other parts of the world, eventually arriving at the caste system in India and covering almost every historical, cultural, religious, spiritual, and sociopolitical issue in the country.

Regarding the emergence and collapse of the Harappan civilization, a lot of narratives exist. They are nothing more than simple devices to understand that phenomenon. In archaeology and anthropology, narratives play a vital role. Researchers connect individual pieces of evidence to create some kind of coherent understanding of the past using them. Tony adopts almost all the details in those narratives and again presents the invasion theory inside them in the form of genetic evidence.

(In fact, the name Harappan civilization is itself problematic. Mohenjo-daro and Harappa were among the early cities excavated by British and Indian archaeologists a hundred years ago. But later on, a large number of cities and settlements were discovered, stretching from the banks of the Ganges to the border of Iran. From R. D. Banerji to R. S. Bisht, a great deal has happened in this field of research. The centre of this vast civilization is not Harappa or Mohenjo-daro. But to avoid the religious hypothesis that this civilization could be called the Sindhu-Saraswati civilization, I would accept the term Harappan civilization in this particular context.)

In the early days of Harappan archaeology, when a human skull was discovered in a Harappan city with what appeared to be an axe wound, archaeologists assumed that the entire civilization might have been destroyed by invading forces in a war. With the discovery of other Harappan cities and settlements, the invasion theory gradually lost its prominence, and the environmental catastrophe theory emerged in its place. Yet this too lacks conclusive evidence; it also remains a narrative.

Tony cannot dismiss the environmental catastrophe theory because it is new and more logical; so he presents all the recent explanations for the decline of the Harappan civilization: drought, disruption of trade, collapse of ideology, possible internal rebellions, and migration towards the Ganga. But he includes the same ‘Aryan invasion theory’ in the form of the arrival of Steppe migrants as possibly the last straw. He argues that the religious places and icons of Harappan culture ‘seem‘ to have been destroyed, and that this shows that there was an invasion. He accepts that the term “Aryan” does not refer to a race and is a linguistic expression, yet he argues that an invading ethnic group had a separate genetic identity.

Still, there is no common understanding among archaeologists about what happened to the Harappan civilization. Were the cities abandoned, or were they destroyed? These are the popular theories. It is equally possible that this was not a destruction but a transformation resulting from cultural and economic evolution—that the people living in these regions gradually developed more efficient forms of culture and social organisation, and that the old settlements were eventually abandoned. In India, near almost every major city, we can find abandoned settlements of this kind, often belonging to the same people.

The Dravidian–Aryan story, or the Harappan–Aryan story, consists of narratives used by archaeologists and historians to connect the evidence and understand the distant past. Discussing them as simple theories can stop further research and create strongly ideologically motivated sides. In the later parts, Tony discusses the emergence of Sanskrit, the caste system, and other Indian cultural phenomena based on these fundamental assumptions. They are also narratives discussed in academic circles, and there are alternative versions as well.

What Tony Joseph does throughout this book is to read the various archaeological narratives, connecting these hypotheses and narratives into a single overarching account, and present it as a grand historical narrative. As mentioned earlier, the fictional element of the book is perhaps the major source of its appeal.

A common intellectual reading and discussing cultural matters in India should be very cautious when dealing with these kinds of books. He must rely on authentic archaeological scholarship and consider all archaeological narratives as attempts to connect the available data and fill the gaps between them. If he relies on a particular narrative because of his caste, creed, or religious faith, he is losing his intellectual ground.

In the South, a number of Tamil scholars believe that the entire Harappan culture was created by Tamil people and that they are the sole descendants of the Harappan civilization. They write pseudo-archaeological and pseudo-intellectual books on this subject, and these books garner considerable support from general readers who read them in order to validate their own understanding of culture and thereby reassure themselves of the supremacy of their caste, race, or religion. Similarly, in North India, there have been attempts to argue that the entire Harappan civilization was actually Vedic, thereby extending the history of the Sanatana tradition to include the Harappan period.

The major problem with the study of Indian culture is that we have a great deal of archaeological evidence. In fact, a large proportion of the archaeological evidence available to us belongs to the prehistoric period and the Harappan cultural sphere. But we have virtually no linguistic evidence with which to explain it. Conversely, we have substantial linguistic and textual evidence for the later period—the Vedic and epic age—while relatively little archaeological evidence is available for that period. Often, the entire cultural discourse is plunging into this abyss, and books of this kind are products of that misadventure.

The entire spectrum of Indian politics is, in one way or another, rooted in competing explanations of cultural origins. Religious politics and fundamentalism in North India, as well as racial politics and linguistic fundamentalism in South India, are engaged in interpreting Indian culture according to their respective political aspirations. Books of this kind exploit that urgency and sell their theories to readers who are looking for confirmation of their existing beliefs.

There are innumerable missing links and cultural puzzles in explaining the prehistoric age of India. Across India, numerous cave paintings and rock-cut drawings (petroglyphs) have been discovered, and many of them appear to share an interconnected symbolic thread. A number of ideas found in the Vedas could perhaps be connected with these prehistoric symbols. Some of the hieroglyphs in the Deccan are loosely dated to 30,000 or even 40,000 years ago, to a period when rhinoceroses and straight-tusked elephants lived in the lands of South India.

The symbols found in many of the cave paintings and rock art of India appear to share common themes and motifs with prehistoric expressions from Central Asia. Some of these ancient symbols also seem to have connections with elements of present-day folk religions in India.

It is not easy to establish precise dates or clear boundaries for the Harappan era, the Vedic era, or other prehistoric cultures. We must therefore exercise some restraint when formulating simple theories. Indeed, understanding these connections is the task of scholars from various branches of knowledge, through continuous discussion and the exchange of ideas over a long period of time. Intellectuals should listen to these scholars rather than relying on popular books.

R. Radhakrishnan