Dating the Vedas – Part 1: The Myth of Aryan Invasion

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असतो मा सद्गमय ।

तमसो मा ज्योतिर्गमय ।

मृत्योर्माऽमृतं गमय ॥

Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.3.28

‘Lead me from falsehood to truth, from darkness to light and from death to immortality‘. Thus sang Sage Yajnavalkya in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The Indian civilization has always been about the awakening of the inner spirit and leading a life to attain enlightenment. To go from falsehood to truth has been the essence of life.

This blog series continues in that age old tradition of searching for the truth – the truth behind the Vedas. When were the Vedas authored, who composed them? Who were the Aryans and did they really invade and destroy the Harappans and then sit down and compose the Vedas? Are the Dravidians those Harappans who escaped the wrath of the Aryans? This blog, in two parts, will try to answer some of these questions and attempt to dispel falsehoods that have been propagated for more than a hundred years about our civilizational past.

Part 1 of the blog will dwell upon how the colonial powers attempted to date our history and their motives behind this. In Part 2 we will use latest technologies, including satellite imagery, to follow the course of the mythical river Saraswati. We will time travel several thousands of years – a journey where culture, science and faith will be pitted against deliberate distortion of facts and ignorance. As Yajnavalkya wrote: let us be led from falsehood to truth.

Beginning of Time

The generally accepted theory that is taught in our schools about ancient Indian history goes along these lines:

• At the beginning there was the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC)
• Somewhere along the way, the Aryans from Central Asia invaded, defeated and destroyed the IVC
• The Aryans settled down along the Gangetic plains and wrote the Vedas, developed Sanskrit and Hindu religion
• Many Aryan tribes existed, they were frequently at war with each other.
• The tribe of Bharatha succeeded in the inter-Aryan wars and from them, over years, the succeeding Indian kingdoms such as the Mauryan empire was formed

Let’s examine each of these aspects in detail and see whether they stand the test of scrutiny.

Did you know…

We will use the terms BCE and CE while referring to years. BCE stands for “Before Common Era” and CE stands for “Common Era”. CE years start from 0 and increments with each passing year. We are currently at CE 2021. BCE is the period before CE. Before BCE/CE was widely accepted, the terms BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini – in the year of the lord) were used. Due to the religious nature of BC/AD, they are no longer used.

Janapadas

During the early-mid 19th century, the oldest known civilizations in the world were the Egyptian and the Mesopotamian. Both of these went as far back as 3500 BCE, with Mesopotamia usually termed as the ‘cradle of civilization’. The 19th century also saw the rise to power of the British in the Indian subcontinent. From a trading company with a few outposts along the Eastern and Western coastline, the British East India Company had gained complete political control of the country.

When British explorers spread out across the length and breadth of the country they were stunned to see the rich archaeological heritage of the land. British officers started tabulating and deciphering the manuscripts and inscriptions they came across. By cross-referring rock inscriptions, copper plates and dates in Hindu, Buddhist & Jain texts, the earliest traces of civilized India was dated to about 750-1000 BCE. Northern India, in those days, had ‘Janapadas’ which can roughly be compared to present day republics.

Over time, the Janapadas merged together to form bigger entities called ‘Mahajanapadas’ and from these was formed the Nanda empire. The Nanda’s, ruling from Pataliputra (present day Patna), was at that time India’s first recognized empire. The Nanda’s were in power from around 500 BCE till they were overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya in 322 BCE.

Indian View

The native Indians had a very different story to tell though. Our ancestors had, by the 19th century, unfortunately lost track of the sense of history and historical story telling. Centuries of foreign attacks and invasion had dulled their sense of time. All the same, something connected them to their yet-unknown past: the Puranas, the two great epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Upanishads and above all the Vedas themselves. And when were they written? The Indian inability to comprehend time came out in the answers – some would say they are from time immemorial (!), some would say they are 10,000 years old. It really depended on whom you talked to.

In effect, by the early 20th century, there was a British (and hence a Western) view of how old the Indian civilization was (about 750-1000 BCE) and a totally divergent Indian view (many thousands of years earlier than this). This contradiction was to get even more murkier as a museum assistant at the Indian Museum at Calcutta discovered the greatest archaeological find of the subcontinent.

Mound of the Dead

In 1921-22, R D Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) discovered artifacts at Mohenjo-Daro (‘Mound of the Dead Men’ in Sindhi language) in present day Pakistan. He correctly identified them to be earlier than the Buddhist or the Mauryan period. Around the same time, another ASI archaeologist, Daya Ram Sahni, excavated at another site at a place called Harappa. Here also the artifacts excavated pointed to something much older than the Mauryan period.

Banerji connected the dots and proposed a theory that there existed a civilization, along the banks of the Indus river, that was significantly older than the Mauryan period. It was as if somebody had shone a torch into the darkness of pre-Mauryan India – India was suddenly the seat of a culture that co-existed with the Egyptian and Mesopotamia. Banerji and Sahni had just discovered the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC).

Did you know…

Excavations at the sites continued over many decades and new discoveries came out ever so often. The archaeologists concluded that IVC spread over an area far more than either the Egyptian or Mesopotamian civilizations. A script was discovered, but nobody knew how to decipher it. Many more sites were found – mostly in Rajasthan, Haryana and the Kutch region of Gujarat. Here was a culture that was truly magnificent, spectacular in scale and breath taking in their achievements. The IVC at Harappa/Mohenjo-Daro was dated to be around 3000 BCE, i.e 5000 years old.

Max Mueller does some math

So far so good you may say. From being a civilization that was about 2500 years old, we neatly doubled it with the discovery of the IVC. It gave good bragging rights, no doubt, but where does the Vedas come in the middle of this?

You see there are two fields at work here – Archaeology which if more of a science and goes purely by evidence from excavations or inscriptions, and History that interprets the information available. At the IVC, the archaeologists excavated remains after remains of cities and dated them as best as they could. The historians now had to build a narrative or a story about who the IVC people were, how they lived and why did the IVC civilization disappear.

Truth be told, nobody in the early 20th century had any clue about what caused the IVC to decline. Was it natural causes or was it war? And that’s where an approximation done in haste by the German scholar Max Mueller in the 19th century would be used to fill the gaps.

Dating the Vedas

Max Mueller who was a professor at Oxford was one of the first European to study the Vedas and Vedic literature. As part of his study, he arrived at a ‘magic figure’ on how old the Vedas were. His calculations were very simple: he started with the assumption that the Vedic Sutras could be dated to the sixth century BCE. To this, he made the assumption that it would have taken about 200 years each for developing the Aranyakas, the Brahmanas and finally the Vedas. Add these numbers and you get 600 + 200 + 200 + 200 = 1200. Voila, the Vedas were composed around 1200 BCE.

Max Mueller may have made his approximation in good faith. But it definitely didn’t stand the test of challenges from his contemporaries. Eventually in 1890, in his seminal work ‘Physical Religion’, he retracted his assumptions.

If now we ask how we can fix: the date of these three periods, it is quite clear that we cannot hope to fix. Whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000, or 1600, or 2000, or 3000 years B. 0., no power on earth will ever determine.

Page 91, chapter ‘Age of the Veda’, Physical Religion: Max Mueller

Unfortunately, the date stuck. Look up any standard book on the Vedic period and they all date the Vedas to around 1200-1500 BCE, influenced mainly by Max Mueller’s arbitrary calculation.

Did you know…

To quote an ICSE text book on History & Civics, “The Vedic texts may be divided into two broad chronological groups: the Early Vedic texts (1500-1000 BC) when most of the hymns of the Rig Veda were composed and the Later Vedic texts (1000-500 BC) to which belong the remaining Vedas”. Note how the time period is neatly classified into groups of 500 years. The author(s) are merely following generally believed timings, which is not based on real evidence. The later Vedic age (1000-500 BC) corresponds to the period of the Janapadas and Mahajanapadas.

The Aryans invade

So far we have seen how the Vedas were arbitrarily and incorrectly dated to around 1200 BCE. The IVC excavations at Mohenjo-Daro was dated to about 2500-3000 BCE. How did vast urban settlements such as Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa collapse? Enter the Aryans and the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT).

The faulty dating of the Vedas worked perfectly here. If the IVC did not last beyond 1500 BCE and the Vedas were written in 1200 BCE by the Aryans, it automatically implied that the Aryans had defeated and destroyed the IVC!

Birth of a theory

To help bridge the gap between the dating of the Vedas and the end of the IVC, a theory was invented. The basic idea was this:

• The Aryans were a ‘race’ of fair skinned, blue eyed people who were nomadic. They came from the Steppes of Central Asia
• The citizens of IVC were peace loving and lived a simple life. They had no army of their own. And, keeping with the theme of race, they were brown skinned.
• The Aryan invaders came across the IVC settlements and in no time razed and destroyed the large cities.
• The simple IVC people never stood a chance – those who survived the Aryan attack escaped down south and make up the Dravidians of today
• Once the job was done, the Aryans settled down in the Indo-Gangetic plane and maybe out of remorse for their deeds decided to give up their violent life style
• And while they were at it, the Aryans thought that they should do something worthwhile – now that they were settled down properly – and composed the Vedas

AIT as an instrument of Colonialism

Read the basic tenets of the AIT slowly once again – doesn’t it sound extraordinarily far fetched? But the colonialists ruling India wanted to devise a way to show how the “fair skinned and blue eyed” race was superior to the “brown skinned and black eyed” natives and the AIT was just what the doctor ordered.

The faulty dating of the Vedas worked perfectly here. If the IVC did not last beyond 1500 BCE and the Vedas were written in 1200 BCE by the Aryans, it automatically implied that the Aryans had defeated and destroyed the IVC! This is how the dates matched up (magically):

• The Aryans invaded IVC around 1500 BCE
• After settling down, the Aryans composed the Vedas around 1200 BCE
• Various Aryan tribes formed Janapadas around 1000 BCE. Janapadas formed Mahajanapas and from them the Nandas and later the Mauryan empire evolved.

Theory without a proof

The most ridiculous part about the AIT was that no proof whatsoever was offered for it being true. AIT was deemed to be true just because the theory was proposed by the British and the arrangement of dates were convenient to the colonialists. The Indian masses, in the middle of a freedom struggle, had no time to examine and/or cross question what was being taught to them in their schools or colleges. Net result – over generations, the notion of Aryan invasion and the Aryan origin to the Vedas were considered as sacred truth.

Ulterior Motives

The colonialists had another intent behind this theory. What it would mean was that India as a country was used to being invaded and occupied from time immemorial and the British colonialization was nothing new – India had never stood on its own feet.

Over generations, the notion of Aryan invasion and the Aryan origin to the Vedas were considered as sacred truth.

Our history text books took over from here. Anything that the colonialists said had to be true, so there was no doubt about the theory of Aryan invasion. Generation upon generation of school children have been fed the same story – India has always been invaded, the most ancient of Indian scriptures which form the core of our civilization are just mythical accounts at the best or the creation of central Asian invaders at the worst.

Aryan Story

Those who proposed AIT had the luxury of never having to prove it. But if we are to conclude that AIT was a story invented to justify colonialism, we have to examine evidences and conclusively prove that AIT is a hoax. Let us look at the evidence available.

Evidence #1: Vedic literature

The Rig Veda does not use the word ‘Aryan’ anywhere. In fact, the word used in the Rig Veda is ‘Arya’ – and Arya means ‘noble’. If the Vedas were written by the ‘Aryan race’, then surely they would have had no reason to not refer to themselves in their holy books. With Aryan not finding any mention in the Rig Veda, the first of the Vedas, the whole notion of Aryan race does not stand scrutiny.

Evidence #2: Skeletal remains

If Max Mueller was guilty of inventing dates, the British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler was doubly guilty of inventing the story of the militarily mighty Aryans destroying the IVC. During the original excavation at Mohenjo-Daro, many skeletons were discovered, and no satisfactory explanation could be given as to why some of them were grouped together in a single room. While conducting further excavations in 1946, Wheeler put across the theory that the Aryans killed the IVC people in cold blood and these skeletons were the result of that massacre. “On circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused” was his in-famous accusation against the ‘Aryan God’ Indra.

Did you know…
Mortimer Wheeler had a dislike for Indians that he never disguised. He is known to have written letters to his friends in England with racist language against Indians. Post-independence, he authored a propaganda book for Pakistan and titled it “Five Thousand Years of Pakistan” (clearly forgetting that the word Pakistan was not in existence before the 1920’s).

Truth about the skeletal remains

Was this true? Further excavations in the 1950’s and 1960’s conducted by other archaeologists pointed to a different story altogether:

• The skeletal remains at Mohenjo-Daro were found at the ‘Lower Town’ (where the common people resided) and not at the ‘Citadel’ (where the ruling elite were present). In a normal situation, the final fight would have happened at the Citadel and bodies should have been found there as well. The remains in the lower tower were more of an organized burial site, across generations.
• The skeletal remains had no marks of any bodily injuries. Surely if people were killed because of an invasion, there should have been weapon marks on skeletons. None were present.
• Archaeologically, the skeletal remains were present in different layers of mud. Each layer was separated by several hundred years. In other words, the skeletons belonged to people across more than a thousand years. They were not people who lived together and were massacred in one swift event.

George Dales, the American archaeologist, referred to Wheeler’s massacre story as a ‘Mythical Massacre‘. For all his hard work on AIT, Mortimer Wheeler was knighted by the British crown and became Sir Mortimer Wheeler. In any case we can conclusively say: “On scientific evidence, Indra stands exonerated“.

Evidence #3: The Names

If the AIT was true, then surely the people who invaded and finally settled in the fertile alluvial plains of North India would have named their new towns and cities after that of their original country. To give an example, many places in the East coast of the USA has names that show the connection to far away England from where the immigrants came (New England, New Hampshire, Manchester).

What do these so called Aryans do? Not a single place they occupy and control is named after a place in Central Asia. In fact, there is no reference to the term ‘Aryan’ anywhere for any race of people or any literature (religious or otherwise) in Central Asia. It appears that the Aryans came out of thin air, just to invade and subdue the IVC.

Evidence #4: Scale of IVC

The IVC was the largest of the ancient civilizations. To put it in numbers, the IVC population is estimated to have been home to about 5 million people spread over 1 million km². The Western outposts of the civilization was near the Hindukush mountains and expanded East to the Gangetic basic and down south to the Kutch peninsula. It was bigger than the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations combined.

There was no way that some horse riding nomads, much smaller in numbers and far less organized, could swoop down on IVC cities and destroy it beyond repair. It could happen for a city or two, but not across the length and breadth of the civilization.

Back to 1²

On scientific evidence, Indra stands exonerated

We have seen so far that the Vedas could never have been authored by the Aryans, simply because there were no Aryans in the first place. No Aryan race existed in Central Asia, no Aryan hordes invaded and destroyed the IVC. If not the Aryans, then who else could have authored it?

Where the Saraswati flows

Vedic scriptures, especially the Rig Veda, has innumerable references to the river Saraswati. The Vedas were supposed to have been composed on its banks, and all the great sages of the past had their ashrams there.

Vedic literature also describes how, over time, the flow of water in the Saraswati decreased and finally the river disappeared into the desert. Logic dictates that if the Rig Vedic sages had their ashrams on the river bank, it must surely have been before the river dried out. If we could determine whether the Saraswati actually existed, and, if it did, where the river flowed and when it dried out we could use that information to conclusively date the Vedas.

Now, in the 21st century, we have clinching evidence to answer all these questions. In part 2 of this blog series, we will look at how satellite images, especially studies conducted by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), have helped date the Vedas and closed the argument on the AIT once and for all.

Saraswati, the Goddess of learning, wisdom and speech, will speak – and, as ever, she will dispel ignorance from our minds.

Further Reading

The renowned Indologist, David Frawley, gives a very simple and sane introduction to what the AIT is all about. This YouTube video is a must watch.

Max Mueller’s ‘Physical Religion‘ is his explanation of the Vedas. Here he stops attempting to date the Vedic period.

Saraswati, the Goddess of learning, wisdom and speech, will speak – and, as ever, she will dispel ignorance from our minds.

George Dales dissects the skeletal remains of Mohenjo-Daro and proves why they belong to an orderly burial of people spread across hundreds of years. The Mythical Massacre at Mohenjo-Daro was published in 1964 in the Expedition Magazine. Penn Museum has a copy of the document, I would highly recommend this quick read.

Mortimer Wheeler’s character & contribution is ‘celebrated’ by a blue plaque tribute by the English heritage organization. Read about that here, scroll down to the part on ‘Excavations Abroad’ section.

Amongst books, I highly recommend B B Lal’s book “The Rigvedic people: Invaders, Immigrants or Indigenous”. Prof Lal, was the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) between 1968-1972. He retired and has since been involved in extensive research activities. Prof Lal was the lead archaeologist for the excavation of the IVC site at Kalibangan in Rajasthan where he discovered the world’s first ploughed field (dated to 2800 BCE, i.e. 4800 years ago!).

Max Mueller’s Physical Religion can be read for free here.

Another book that covers ancient India is R S Sharma’s “India’s Ancient Past”, although this book tries to gloss over the AIT and continues to date the Rig Veda to 1500 BCE.