Francois Gautier, born in Paris in 1950, is a
French journalist and writer, who is the political correspondent in
India and South Asia for "Le Figaro", France's largest circulation
newspaper.
Why is it that Indians, particularly its elite - the
intelligentsia, the journalists, the writers, the top bureaucrats, the
diplomats - hold an image of themselves which is often negative?
This is particularly striking amongst Indian journalists, who always
seem to look at India through a western prism and constantly appear to
worry how the foreign countries perceive India, what the Human Right
agencies say about India... Thus, when one reads certain Indian
magazines, one has the impression that they could be written by foreign
journalists, because not only do they tend to look at India in a very
critical manner, but often, there is nothing genuinely Indian in their
contents, no references to India's past greatness, no attempts to put
things in perspective through the prism of India's ancient wisdom.
Therefore, most of the time, their editorial contents endeavour to
explain the present events affecting India, such as Ayodhya, or the
problem of Kashmir, or the Christian missionaries' attempts at
conversion of tribal Hindus, by taking a very small portion of the
subcontinent's history - usually the most recent one - without trying
to put these events in a broader focus, or attempting to revert back to
India's long and ancient history. In a gist, one could say that there
is hardly any self-pride amongst India's intellectual elite, because
they are usually too busy running down their own country. It is done in
a very brilliant manner, Indian journalists, writers, artists, high
bureaucrats, are often intelligent, witty and talented people - but
always with that western slant, as if India was afflicted by a
permanent inferiority complex. One then has to try to analyse the
underlying reasons of this negative self-perception.
The Theory of the Aryan Invasion
The first and foremost explanation for this inferiority complex
could be the theorem of the Aryan invasion, which is still taken as the
foundation stone of the History of India. According to this theory,
which was actually devised in the 18th and 19th century by British
linguists and archaeologists, who had a vested interest to prove the
supremacy of their culture over the one of the subcontinent, the first
inhabitants of India were good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned
shepherds, called the Dravidians. They were supposedly remarkable
builders, witness the city of Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistani Sind, but had
no culture to speak-off, no written texts, no proper script even. Then,
around 1500 B.C., India is said to have been invaded by tribes called
the Aryans : white-skinned, nomadic people, who originated somewhere in
Ural, or the Caucasus. To the Aryans, are attributed Sanskrit, the
Vedic - or Hindu religion, India's greatest spiritual texts, the Vedas,
as well as a host of subsequent writings, the Upanishads, the
Mahabharata, the Ramanaya, etc...
This was indeed a masterly stroke on the part of the British :
thanks to the Aryan theory, they showed on the one hand that Indian
civilisation was not that ancient and that it was posterior to the
cultures which influenced the western world - Mesopotamia, Sumeria, or
Babylon - and on the other hand, that whatever good things India had
developed - Sanskrit, literature, or even its architecture, had been
influenced by the West. Thus, Sanskrit, instead of being the mother of
all Indo-European languages, became just a branch of their huge family;
thus, the religion of Zarathustra is said to have influenced Hinduism -
as these Aryan tribes were believed to have transited through numerous
countries, Persia being one, before reaching India - and not vice
versa. In the same manner, many achievements were later attributed to
the Greek invasion of Alexander the Great: scientific discoveries,
mathematics, architecture etc. So ultimately, it was cleverly proved
that nothing is Indian, nothing really great was created in India, it
was always born out of different influences on the subcontinent.
To make this theory even more complicated, the British, who like
other invaders before them had a tough time with the Brahmins and the
Kshatriyas, implied that the Aryans drove the Dravidians southwards,
where they are still today; and that to mark forever their social
boundaries, these Aryans had devised the despicable caste system,
whereby, they the priests and princes, ruled over the merchants and
labourers... And thus English missionaries and later, American
preachers, were able to convert tribes and low caste Hindus by telling
them : " you, the aborigines, the tribals, the Harijans, were there in
India before the Aryans; you are the original inhabitants of India, and
you should discard Hinduism, the religion of these arrogant Aryans and
embrace, Christianity, the true religion".
Thus was born the great Aryan invasion theory, of two civilisations,
that of the low caste Dravidians and the high caste Aryans, always
pitted against each other - which has endured, as it is still today
being used by some Indian politicians - and has been enshrined in all
history books - Western, and unfortunately also Indian. Thus were born
wrong "nationalistic" movements, such as the Dravidian movement against
Hindi and the much-maligned Brahmins, who actually represent today a
minority, which is often underprivileged.... This Aryan invasion theory
has also made India look westwards, instead of taking pride in its past
and present achievements.
But today, this theory is being challenged more and more by new
discoveries, both archaeological and linguistic. There are many such
proofs, but two stand out : the discovery of the Saraswati river and
the deciphering of the Indus seals. In the Rig Veda, the Ganges,
India's sacred river, is only mentioned once, but the mythic Saraswati
is praised on more than fifty occasions. Yet for a long time, the
Saraswati river was considered a myth, until the American satellite
Landstat was able to photograph and map the bed of this magnificent
river, which was nearly fourteen kilometres wide, took its source in
the Himalayas, flowed through the states of Haryana, Punjab and
Rajasthan, before throwing itself in the sea near Bhrigukuccha, today
called Broach. American archaeologist Mark Kenoyer was able to prove in
1991 that the majority of archaeological sites of the so-called
Harappan (or Dravidian) civilisation were not situated on the ancient
bed of the Indus river, as first thought, but on the Saraswati. Another
archaeologist , Paul-Henri Francfort, Chief of a franco-american
mission (Weiss, Courty, Weterstromm, Guichard, Senior, Meadow, Curnow),
which studied the Saraswati region at the beginning of the nineties,
found out why the Saraswati had 'disappeared' : " around 2200 B.C., he
writes, an immense drought reduced the whole region to aridity and
famine " (Evidence for Harappan irrigation system in Haryana and
Rajasthan -Eastern Anthropologist 1992). Thus around this date, most
inhabitants moved away from the Saraswati to settle on the banks of the
Indus and Sutlej rivers.
According to official history, the Vedas were composed around 1500
BC, some even say 1200 BC. Yet, as we have seen, the Rig Veda,
describes India as it was before the Saraswati dried; which means in
effect that the so-called Indus, or Harappan civilisation was a
continuation of the Vedic epoch, which ended approximately when the
Saraswati dried-up. Recently, the famous Indus seals, discovered on the
site of Mohenja Daro and Harappa, may have been deciphered by Dr
Rajaram, a mathematician who worked at one time for the NASA and Dr
Jha, a distinguished linguist. In the biased light of the Aryan
invasion theory, these seals were presumed to be written in a Harappan
(read Dravidian) script, although they had never been convincingly
decoded. But Rajaram and Jha, using an ancient Vedic glossary, the
Nighantu, found out that the script is of Sanskrit lineage, is read
from left to right and does not use vowels (which like in Arabic, are
'guessed' according to the meaning of the whole sentence). In this way,
they have been able to decipher so far 1500 and 2000 seals, or about
half the known corpus. As the discovery of the Saraswati river, the
decipherment of the Indus scripts also goes to prove that that the
Harappan Civilization, of which the seals are a product, belonged to
the latter part of the Vedic Age and had close connections with
Vedantic works like the Sutras and the Upanishads. In this light, it
becomes evident that not only there never was an Aryan invasion of
India, but, as historian Konraad Elst writes, it could very well be
that it was an Indian race which went westwards : " rather than
Indo-Iranians on their way from South Russia to Iran and partly to
India, these may as well be the Hitites, Kassites or Mitanni, on their
way from India, via the Aral Lake area, to Anatolia, or Mesopotamia,
where they show up in subsequent centuries" (Indigenous Indians).