IV

HORSES OF HARAPPA

One of the greatest hoped for achievement of the Hindutva component of Hinduism was to assimilate the recently discovered Indus Valley Civilization as Aryan in order make Vedic civilization as indigenous. One of the basic problem with that was that while the Vedic warfare and life style was heavily dependent on horses and there were no horses in Indus Valley tradition.  Some devout Hindu scholars took the help of technologists and decided to fix this problem.

“N.S. Rajaram, is a computer scientist based in North America, who has authored two books, Aryan Invasion of India (1993) and The Politics of History (1995). The arguments and interpretations in these two books are found to be fictional and historically unfounded. (See Shereen Ratnagar, Revisionist at work: A chauvinistic Inversion of the Aryan Invasion Theory, Frontline, February 9,1996.)” Outsider as enemy The politics of rewriting history in India.  K.N. Panikkar, Frontline Volume 18 - Issue 01, Jan. 06 - 19, 2001.  Using his expertise in computer technology   N.S. Rajaram claimed to have  deciphered the Indus script. The discovery was widely published as, “The Deciphered Indus Script, Methodology, Readings, Interpretations by Natwar Jha and N. S. Rajaram (New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan, 2000)  The authors summarize their findings thus:

"Jha's decipherment tells us that the language of the seals is Vedic Sanskrit, while the writing itself is proto-alphabetical, representing an intermediate stage in the transition from a primitive consonantal (syllabic) system to the phonetically exact alphabetical writing which is the unique achievement of the Indian civilization.

"...The readings on the seals are overwhlemingly from the Vedic literature. The same is true of the symbolism of the images. From this we conclude that at least those seals that carry Vedic themes were created to serve as educational aids, as a combination of an index and a Vedic theme."

“The most primitive form of the Aryan speech has been identified, also partly read and understood. It is the Indus language at the isolating stage,represented by the extant Indus inscriptions….

“Briefly,The Indus Valley is the original home of the Aryans or Indoeuropeans.The racial distribution as Aryan,Dravidian and Austric,etc. is ill conceived.

“Gradually, the behaviour of the language of the Indus texts began to reflect in  the Sanskrit grammar of Panini, and the multiplicity too of the script  began to be automatically sorted out. The language of the Indus texts appeared to be the  sprouting form of what later came to be called Sanskrit. It was the grandmother of the Sanskrit language, the Sanskrit language at the isolating stage.”  http://www.indusscript.com/decipher.html INDUS SCRIPT 2001-02

This led to some fantastic claims:

“Through some of these examples, we can imagine how the urban Indus culture is linked underneath with the pastoral Vedic culture. A centrally heated room of the urban Indus culture has become an abyss; the chemical liquid has become soup, and so on. As the form of the society changes, there is a perceptible change in the phonetic aspect of the language, but semantically it makes a frog's jump. Aravinda says: ....the vocabularies of primitive languages must have varied from century to century......many savage tongues change their vocabulary almost from generation to generation.. (The secret of the Veda, p.556). Because the Vedic words peep into the Indus texts we say that the Vedic and Indus  form one stream of language”

How this claim was soon turned upside down.

In this process  Rajaram has been found faking evidence by Michael Witzel, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University. (http://www.Safarmer.com/horseseal/update.html) The authoritative version of Witzel and Farmer's collaborative work on Rajaram's supposed findings has been published as a cover story in Frontline, October 13, 2000.)

http://www.thehindu.com/fline/fl1720/17200040.pdf

HORSEPLAY IN HARAPPA

The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax

“MICHAEL WITZEL, a Harvard University Indologist, and STEVE FARMER, a comparative historian, report on media hype, faked data, and Hindutva propaganda in recent claims that the

Indus Valley script has been decoded.”

The article goes on in detail   as they express the techniques used by the proponents of Hindutava  to attain their ends.  Extracts

“Boasts like this do not surprise battle-scarred Indologists familiar with Rajaram’s work. A U.S. engineering professor in the 1980s, Rajaram re-invented himself in the 1990s as a fiery Hindutva propagandist and “revisionist” historian. By the mid-1990s, he could claim a following in India and in émigré circles in the U.S. In manufacturing his public image, Rajaram traded heavily on claims, not justified by his modest research career, that before turning to history “ he was one of America’s best known workers in artificial intelligence and robotics.” Hyperbole abounds in his online biography, posted at the ironically named “Sword of Truth” website. The Hindutva propaganda site, located in the United States, pictures Rajaram as a “world-renowned”

expert on “Vedic mathematics” and an “authority on the history of Christianity.” The last claim is supported by violently anti-Christian works carrying titles like Christianity’s Collapsing Empire and Its Designs in India.  Rajaram’s papers include his “Search for the historical Krishna” (found in the Indus Valley c. 3100 BCE); attack a long list of Hindutva “enemies” including Christian missionaries, Marxist academics, leftist politicians, Indian Muslims, and Western Indologists….. …..The Rigveda rishis, we find, packed their hymns with occult allusions to high-energy physics, anti-matter, the inflational theory of the universe, calculations of the speed of light, and gamma-ray bursts striking the earth three times a day. …..

One of Rajaram’s early Hindutva pieces was written in 1995 with David Frawley, a Western “New Age” writer who likes to find allusions to American Indians in the Rigveda. Frawley is transformed via the “Sword of Truth” into a “famous American Vedic scholar and historian.” The book by Rajaram and Frawley proposes the curious thesis that the Rigveda was the product of a complex urban and maritime civilisation, not the primitive horse-and-chariot culture seen in the text. The goal is to link the Rigveda to the earlier Indus Valley Civilisation, undercutting any possibility of later “Aryan” migrations or relocations of the Rigveda to “foreign” soil. Ancient India, working through a massive (but lost) Harappan literature, was a prime source of civilization to the West. ……

The Deciphered Indus Script makes similar claims with different different weapons. The Indus-Saraswati Valley again becomes the home of the Rigveda and a font of higher civilisation: Babylonian and Greek mathematics, all alphabetical scripts, and even Roman numerals flow out to the world from the Indus Valley’s infinitely fertile cultural womb. Press releases praise the work for not only “solving the most significant technical problem in historical research of our time” – deciphering the Indus script – but for demonstrating as well that “if any ‘cradle of civilisation’ existed, it was located not in Mesopotamia but in the Saraswati Valley.”…. The decoded messages of Harappa thus confirm the Hindutva propagandist’s wildest nationalistic dreams…….

Once Rajaram’s book could actually be read, the initial skepticism of Indologists turned to howls of disbelief – followed by charges of fraud. It was quickly shown that the methods of Jha and Rajaram were so flexible that virtually any desired message could be read into the texts.    The language of Harappa was declared to be “late Vedic” Sanskrit, some 2,000 years before the language itself existed. Through the decoded messages, the horseless Indus Valley Civilisation – distinguishing it sharply from the culture of the Rigveda – was awash with horses, horse keepers, and even horse rustlers. To support his claims, Rajaram pointed to a blurry image of a “horse seal” – the first pictorial evidence ever claimed of Harappan horses.

Chaos followed. Within weeks, the two of us demonstrated that Rajaram’s “horse seal” was a fraud, created from a computer distortion of a broken “unicorn bull” seal……

“Evidence suggests that the horse (Equus caballus) was absent from India before around 2000 BCE, or even as late as 1700 BCE, when archaeology first attests its presence in the Indus plains below the Bolan pass…….”

In 2004, Steve Farmer published a paper, “The Collapse of the Indus-Script Thesis: The Myth of a Literate Harappan Civilization”, arguing that the Indus valley figures are merely a non-structured symbol system and do not represent a full language.