CHAPTER 5 ARYANISATION : INDIA, HINDUTVA AND HISTORY

 INDIA, HINDUTVA AND HISTORY

by Suranya Aiyar 

CHAPTER 5: ARYANISATION 

                                            Homam                                            

Northern Migration and Conquest of South India

Before proceeding further in our study of South Indian history, we need to understand certain historical dynamics. One of these, is the relationship of the North to the South of India.

The historian RG Bhandarkar says that “Aryavarta”, i.e., the land of the Aryas in Hindu texts such as the Manusmriti, is defined as the land between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas (96). According to these texts, the area that we today call Maharashtra, known as “Dandakaranya desa” in the Hindu tradition, was the last country occupied by the Aryas.

A separation between North and South India in Vedic times is also implicit in legends in the Aitareya Brahmana of the South being the place where Aryas were sent to exile (97).

The earliest Hindu texts, the early Vedas, were most likely not composed in South India but in the North, indicating the movement of people and their ideas from the North to the South of India. The historian Nilakanta Sastri says that until about 600 BC, works composed in North India exhibit little knowledge of the country south of the Vindhyas (98).

The geography of the Rig Veda, the first Veda, is said to be limited to the “sapta sindhu” area of the northern plains of the River Indus. This comprises eastern Afghanistan, the Swat Valley (in today’s Pakistan), Punjab and parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain. It is said not to be familiar even with lower Sindh, Kutch or Gujarat (99).

Many early Hindu texts treat North and South India as having been populated by distinct peoples at some far-off time in history. Sastri says that Manu and some shlokas of the Rig Veda make a distinction between the inhabitants of the land between the Himalayas and the Vindhyas, and those below it. The composers of the Rig Veda called themselves “Arya” (100). There are references to “Aryans” in the Sangam poems.   

There are also legends that hint at a migration of Brahmins or “Aryas” from the North to the South. For instance, the legend of the Sage Agastya who crossed the Vindhyas from the North to enter the South. The legend goes that the Vindhyas bent low in salutation to Agastya when he crossed them, and have been waiting for his return in that position ever since.

Incidentally, the Vindhyas are the oldest mountains in India (and among the oldest in the world), and are relatively low owing to the natural process of erosion over time. The historian PTS Iyengar says that the Agastya legends might refer to a community called “Agastya” that came from the North and settled in Tamil country (101).

The Sage Parashuram is said to have brought forth the southern-most ends of the Southern Peninsula by flinging his axe into the ocean. He is also associated with various legends about the creation of Kerala. According to these legends, Parashuram settled many Brahmins from the North in the South (102).

Sastri says that the name of a section of South Indian Brahmins, “Brihaccarena”, means “the great migration”, and might preserve the memory of a great movement towards the South from the North (103). Historical records of royal land grants show successive episodes of land grants to Brahmins both from North India, and from northern to southern parts of South India (104).

It is widely believed that some pre-Vedic or co-Vedic deities of the South were assimilated into the Northern pantheon. Iyengar says that the association of trees with the worship of Shiva, and of the tulsi plant with the worship of Vishnu, originates from the custom of tree- and other nature-worship that existed in South India in ancient times (105).

He says that the ancient Tamils had five indigenous gods that were absorbed into the Vedic pantheon. These were “Seyon” of the hills, who became Murugan (also known as Skanda, Subhramania or Kartikeya); a god of the rains, probably called “Senon”,  who was assimilated as Indra; a god of the sea, who was assimilated as Varuna; a “Black” God of the pastures called “Mayon”, who sported with shepherdesses, who became Krishna or Vishnu; and a goddess of the desert-lands called “Korravai”, to whom blood sacrifices were made.     

Sastri categorises as “pre-Aryan” a number of references mentioned in the Sangam poems, such as to certain ancient castes or “kudi” that were named “tudiyan”, “paanan”, “paraiyan” and “kadamban” (106).  

Sastri also mentions the worship of Murugan as embodying some “indigenous” meaning with originally non-Vedic features, like the ecstatic ritual dance of “velanadal”. There is also historical evidence in South India of ancient non-Vedic beliefs in magical forces called “ananku” and non-Vedic sacred traditions connected with megalith stones, memorials to fallen warriors in the form of carved or plain stones, called “hero stones”, and three-walled stone chambers of sacred significance, both with and without hero stones (107).

In the literary work “Maduraikkanji”, a Pandya king is said to have defeated an “Arya” army. Sastri says that in the Tolkappiyam, a grammatical treatise of the Sangam Age, “marriage as a sacrament attended with ritual” was established in Tamil country by the “Aryas” and that the marriage-traditions in Tamil country before this were different (108).

Sastri also says that the eight forms of marriage that formed part of the “Aryan code” was “itself the result of a blend between Aryan and pre-Aryan forms that prevailed in the North”.

Incidentally, the Valmiki Ramayana also mentions several forms of marriage. In one brilliant section where Ram is trying to dissuade Sita from following him into exile, and to remain instead in the comfort of Ayodhya under the protection of Bharat, Sita lists all the forms of marriage, insisting that it is her right to follow Ram into exile as their marriage had been conducted according to the rites that forged the closest bond between man and woman. 

Sastri says that the mangalsutra – called the “thali” in Tamil  - was a “pre-Aryan” Tamil custom that was “taken over and perpetuated into latter times” (109). Iyengar also refers to the tying of the thali as an “anarya” (meaning non-Aryan) custom that came into the marriage rituals of the Brahmins through the pre-existing native “Dasyu” traditions that they encountered in Tamil country (110).

     Tamil Thali or Mangalsutra

It is ironic that while the mangalsutra has been made into a great symbol of Hindutva-politics today, it originated outside the Hindu tradition. This is only one of countless ways in which Hindutva narrations of our history and traditions are simply wrong.

The Controversy Over Aryanisation

The notion of “Aryanisation” became controversial in the field of history as Aryans are said to have originated outside the Indian sub-continent among nomadic pastoralists of the Eurasian Steppes who came here via Iran.

This discomfits Hindutva ideologues who like to believe that they are the “original” or “authentic” inhabitants of India. They particularly object to the suggestion that there could have been an Aryan invasion of India.

The Aryanisation theory is tricky; I will demonstrate by reference to Sastri’s commentary itself:

Ancient Indian texts refer to two types of music – “desi” and “margi”.  Sastri says that desi music was the indigenous “pre-Aryan” music of the South, and that “margi” was the music that came here with migrations from the North.

But Sastri was wrong. “Desi” music is neither purely southern nor Tamil, and “margi” music is also desi or “regional” in the sense that margi compositions can have desi names indicating the regions they came from, such as “Maagadhi giti” from Magadh, “Andhri jati” from Andhra, “Pauravi murchanana”, which likely refers to the “eastern” or “purva” regions and “Simhali jati”, which likely refers to Sinhala (Sri Lanka) (111).

The ragas of Hindustani and Carnatic classical music, which are considered to be margi music, also have echoes of their regional or “desi” connections in their names, such as, “Kamboji”, “Sindhi”, “Purabi”, “Multani”, and so on.

According to our ancient musical treatises, classical music evolved from work done by musicians and scholars to systematise desi music, such as folk and tribals songs, which had evolved organically among the people.

The systemisation was done using notation, meters and scales that had their roots in an earlier phase of theorisation about the simple melodies of three-to-four notes of the Vedic chants. This was first used in the recitation of the Sama Veda.

“Margi” was used to distinguish religious from other secular forms of song. It was not “Northern”, except to the extent that ancient scholars of music traced a musical connection of margi music to Vedic chanting, which is itself of northern origin. But this may have been meant as a methodological link (as in connected with the method of Vedic chanting) rather than a regional or historical (as in having its origins in Vedic chanting) one.

The word “margi” is also used in different senses in different treatises. In some texts “margi” is used to distinguish formal (“classical”) music from light (popular or folk) music. For example, the Brihaddeshi of Matanga Muni says “That which is structured through alapa (melodic elaboration) is called “marga”, but the one devoid of alapa is called desi.” The same shloka refers to desi music as a “marga” or “path” of music, with two branches – nibaddha (structured) and anibaddha (free).

To add to the confusion, the term “marga” is used both in the sense of a style of music, and in the sense of a type of rhythm cycle. There is also reference to the “dakshin marga” as a type of rhythm cycle; in other words here “marga” is used to indicate a place - dakshin. “Des”, which is related to “desi”, is also the name of a raga (112).

From this discussion readers can see how inaccurate, and how many nuances and complications are lost in Sastri’s categorisation of ancient Indian music into “pre-Aryan” or desi and “Northern” or Aryan. Indeed, the emergence of Indian classical music from the synthesis of desi with margi music is a good metaphor for the way in which the culture and society of the Indian sub-continent has formed and transformed through the interaction of different traditions down the ages. 

To this extent, the theory of a whole-hog “aryanisation” of India, whether in the South or North, does not fully or fairly represent what happened here. Iyengar argues that Tamil country had already developed a sophisticated culture and wealthy kingdoms by the time the Northern Vedic tradition came here. He says that this led to the evolution of a new composite culture having elements of both, but with strands of both Aryan and Tamil traditions continuing independently as well for many centuries thereafter (113).

Romila Thapar has given a lucid account of the debate on Aryanisation among historians from the beginning to the present time (114). The whole saga is a testament to the confusion that can result from bringing pre-conceived ideas to the study of history – some of which is caused by the scantiness of hard evidence available for so ancient, and yet so constantly changing and receptive a people, as us Indians.

A study of our living traditions, such as literature, orally told and sung kathas, rituals around festivals and worship, painting and the performance arts may help to get a clearer understanding of the past – of the context and mood of the times.

This would also have the happy effect of educating our people more about our arts and culture. I believe that more than all the logic and arguments in the world, we can wean people away from the dour and angry world of Hindutva by giving them a sense of the joy and delight of our art and culture, and of the debt they owe to diverse and disparate traditions, some from far flung corners of the world.

Navina Haidar’s passionate and diligent curating of the arts of the Deccan Sultanate and David Shulman’s imaginative and empathetic work on the literature and arts of South India are brilliant examples of this kind of enquiry (115).

Historians now lean to the position that there was no invasion by Aryans (116). However, the consensus remains that the people to whom the early Vedic tradition is ascribed originated outside India in the Eurasian Steppes, and that they came to India via Iran and surrounding areas. This would be consistent with the movement of peoples from the Eurasian Steppes for centuries thereafter, as described in previous chapters.

Aryan Invasion Theory and Aryanisation are presented by Hindutva propaganda as an invention of colonials and secularists (whom they call “anti-Hindu”) to show Hinduism as being “foreign” or somehow less “originally” Indian. But it should be noted that the Tamil Brahmin scholars writing in the British Raj and early decades after Independence themselves advocated the Aryan Invasion Theory as well as Aryanisation-without-Invasion, atleast in so far as the movement of Aryans from the North to the South of India is concerned.

These writers were not writing as advocates of secularism. Almost all of them, such as Nilkanta Sastri and SK Aiyangar, take the Hindutva view of Indian history as being divided between a Hindu and a Muslim era. This is a completely communal attitude, and also one that ignores all the other religions that held sway, and even overshadowed Hinduism, in ancient and medieval South India. They also fail to even acknowledge, let alone expound on the composite culture that grew out of the encounter of Hindus with Muslims in the course of India’s history.

The espousal by these scholars of the Aryanisation theory demonstrates that this was not an invention of “secularists” or Western colonialists but was, at the very least, a traditional belief of upper caste Hindus in South India from before the 20^th century.

These communities traced as evidence of Aryanisation the descriptions in the Ramayana of Rama’s southwardly march to Lanka to rescue Sita from Ravana, and his youthful adventures coming to the aid of rishis to subdue the rakshasas of the jungles, whom they characterise as non-Vedic tribes that existed in ancient India. These tales were read by them as metaphors for the conquest or “civilising” of South India.

Writing in 1947, Sastri’s discussion of Sangam poems assumes Hinduism to have been brought to Tamil country by “Aryans” from the North, who “Aryanised” and “civilised” the South (117). Before that, according to Sastri, “while the aryanisation of Northern India had become complete, little progress had been made beyond the Vindhyas; only one settled Aryan kingdom was known, Vidarbha, and the rest of the South was peopled by pre-Aryan inhabitants”.

The historian B. Seshagiri Rao, who wrote on Jainism in South India had an interesting twist on this, that Aryanisation was first brought to the South by Jains and Buddhists who settled here from the North (118). 

We have also seen in the previous chapters that apart from the Cholas, Cheras, Pandyas and some of the Telugu clans, almost all the South Indian rajas since Mauryan times either came from or claim to have had some northern origins. This includes the Mauryas, Gangas, Satvahanas, Andhra Ishkavakus, Pallavas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas and Hoysalas. From this it certainly appears as though there was a continuous stream of movement from North to South India since atleast the Mauryan Age.

Who Was the “Original” Indian?

Aryan Invasion Theory or not, just as there have been competing kings in the Deccan for millennia, so have there been multiple competing peoples, civilisations, if you will, on the sub-continent for millennia. The Hindus, or the people following the composite of traditions falling under the umbrella of Hinduism, are only one of these diverse peoples.

Moreover, what has been called “Hindu” at any point of time is the result of a mingling of many traditions that originated outside of, and before and after the “Vedic” or “Aryan” tradition.

This is not to say that Hinduism is any less “original” or “authentic” to India as any of this country’s other traditions. The point is that Hinduism made its home here by accommodating, incorporating and, as we will see in later sections, sometimes imposing itself on the various other traditions that also made their home here in the same way. Contrary to Hindutva claims, there was no single “original” Indian religion or culture.

The hybridity of Indians is also brought forth by many different types of evidence that indicate the mixing of different peoples in India in pre-historic times, one indigenous and the other from outside the sub-continent. Genetic studies indicate that Indians are a mixture of two different populations – “Ancestral North Indians” and “Ancestral South Asians”. The former are related to the peoples of Europe, and Central and West Asia; while the latter are not related to any present-day population outside of India (118A). Moreover, you do not have to be a race expert to observe that there are numerous and mixed ethnicities in India. 

The intermingling of distinct populations can also be seen linguistically. For instance, Tamil and Sanskrit have exchanged loan-words and sounds (119). According to Iyengar, linguistic analysis of Sangam and other early Tamil literature reveals a clear trend of the increasing use of Sanskrit words over the centuries. This indicates that Tamil preceded Sanskrit in time.

Linguists believe that retroflex consonants (for example, the sounds of “ट”, “ठ”, “ड”, “ढ”), which are a hallmark of Indian languages (pronunciation and accent) came into Indo-Aryan languages from the Dravidian family of languages. A convincing piece of evidence that this occurred with the mingling of Indo-Aryan languages with Dravidian languages in India is that the incidence of retroflex consonants increases in the former over time (120).      

The language of the Sangam poems is Tamil, and linguistic studies have shown that Tamil comes from a different family of languages to the Indo-European one of Sanskrit. Tamil belongs to the “Dravidian” language family, and could be older than Sanskrit.

So, the Tamil language and literature itself is evidence that South India had a distinct linguistic, historical and cultural tradition, the “Dravida” tradition, that was distinct from the northern Sanskritic one. This Dravida tradition may have pre-dated the Sanskritic one.

Shulman, who has written a “biography” of Tamil says that there is much evidence that late pre-historical south India “was home to Dravidian languages, and that these languages and their oral poetry and poetics underlie, in various modes, though not without substantial contact with Indo-Aryan, the earliest literary works in Tamil and Telugu, with possible influence over early Prakrit poetry as well (120).”

Historians trace linguistic connections of the first Veda, the Rig Veda, to Indo-European speaking peoples who came to northwest India via present-day Iran or regions around the Caspian Sea (121). Historians also claim that there are similarities of language between the Zoroastrian Avesta (from Iran) and the Rig Veda, again pointing to the origins of the early Vedic peoples in the world not just outside South India, but outside the Indian sub-continent entirely.

The migrations of Brahmins, Jains and Buddhists from the North to the South indicate that from time-to-time Hindus, Jains and Buddhists have moved to places previously uninhabited by them in this country.

Brahmins were settled in existing villages. Some of these Brahmins may have settled in their new homes by entering into voluntary and private arrangements with the locals - we can only speculate as there is no historical record of this. But we do have a historical record of “brahmadeyas” or Brahmin dwellings being settled unilaterally by royal decree in the form of land grants to Brahmins in pre-existing villages (122).

A number of superstitions and taboos associated with Brahmins may have been among the factors guiding the making of these grants. For one, any kind of giving to Brahmins was considered to be a good deed that earned the blessings of god, and gave luck for any venture, including wars.

There was also a long-standing tradition of the killing of a Brahmin being considered one of the major sins – “brahma-hatya”. Settling Brahmins with this immunity (atleast when things were not too out of hand) in lands conquered by newly-risen kings could have acted as a physical buffer to keep off rebellious commoners or potential challengers.  

Taking these factors into account, Hindutva claims to Hindus being “original inhabitants” of India appear highly overstated. Everyone here comes from a mixed heritage – partly indigenous and partly originating elsewhere. Everyone, including those following the Vedic tradition in ancient times, has lived here by accommodating with and being accommodated by others, from time to time.

Moreover, the entry of newcomers, including of Hindus, has not always been an entirely private and organic phenomenon. They often, as in the case of Brahmins in South India, were brought in by rajas and given lands by royal decree, regarding which the opinion or consent of the locals would not have mattered. 

 Bibliography & Index

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