The Harappans and the Aryans

Kamal Lodaya, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

Continued from the article in the Mar-Apr issue of JM.

The story so far:
The Harappans
The Harappan civilization is the earliest urban one found in South Asia, in west Punjab. This civilization flourished four thousand years ago, from around 2500 BCE to 1500 BCE.  One of the markers of the Harappans is the use of small postage stamp-sized {seals}, which are decorated with pictures and a writing using a strange script: the Indus script, which we do not know how to read. Who were these Harappans and where did they disappear to after 1500 BCE? Are we, in fact, their descendants?
The Aryans
The earliest literature we have is the four {Vedas}, among which the oldest is the {Rigveda}. The people who wrote the Rigveda called themselves Aryans. They lived in a region described by them, roughly from Afghanistan to Haryana. The horse is definitely the favourite animal of the Rigveda and the people who wrote it. These writers lived in India between 1800 and 1000 BCE.
Now we see that the Harappan civilization was on its way out when the Rigvedas were being written. Since both overlapped in the Punjab, did these two communities know each other? Could it be that they were the same people? This was the question posed in the first part of this article.
Now read on.
The Harappans and the Aryans are different
From the descriptions, it seems that the two cultures are very different: the Harappans were an urban civilization, with urban conveniences such as common wells and bathing areas; the Aryans were not. The Aryans loved the horse but it finds no place among the Harappan seals or pottery pieces that have been found. Almost all historians believe today that the Harappans and Aryans were different people.
Could the Aryan people have always lived in the Punjab? Could Sanskrit have been the original language which spread from here to West Asia and Europe with the Aryans?
Horse sense
Once again the horse comes in our way. It is known from biological studies that the horse is not indigenous to India; it comes from Central Asia. Could the Aryans have imported horses from there? We find similar love of the horse, expressed in Indo-European languages like Iranian and Greek, even as far back as 1400 BCE at a site in West Asia.
This suggests that the Aryans were migrants who {moved} with their horses from Central Asia, to South Asia, Iran and West Asia. That the horse is found earliest at Swat on the route here from Central Asia suggests that the Aryans came to India.
The relationship between the Harappans and Aryans
The great Indian freedom fighter Bal Gangadhar Tilak suggested in 1903 that the Aryans spread fom the North Pole to India, Europe and other countries. The Rigveda also mentions the Aryans' battles with other tribes who spoke languages different from them, whom they call the Panis, the Dasyus and the Dasas. These people are described as dark-skinned and snub-nosed, and having {pur} (forts) which were destroyed in battle.  Their {grama} (villages) were looted by the Aryans when they won. 
Tilak suggested that originally it was the Dravidians who lived in north India and the Aryans invaded them and drove them to the south.
The Harappan civilization was excavated only in the 1920s, so today's version of Tilak's theory would be that the Harappans were Dravidians, and they were driven south by the invading Aryans around 1500 BCE. But archaeologically there is no evidence that the Harappan cities were destroyed or looted.
The Aryans as traders
A more modern theory is that the Aryans migrated from Central Asia to India over several generations and settled here, just as centuries later the Moghuls did (and the British did as well, many more centuries later).
It seems that the strongest enemy the Harappans had was {climate}.  Space pictures clearly show that the Saraswati (Sarsuti) river had dried up in Rajasthan by about 1900 BCE. By the time the Aryans came the Harappan cities were already gone and only some smaller settlements might have remained. Today we know that the region is very dry and the Thar desert occupies a large area on the border of Rajasthan and Sindh. It might even be the case that the Harappans themselves contributed to this desertification by overuse of water. (For example, it was reported this year that the Indus-Ganga basin from Punjab to Bangladesh is where the most water is being drawn out of the soil anywhere in the world.)
When they came to India, the Aryans might have come as traders. Slowly they found that with their horses and chariots, they had an advantage in military strength over the population living in India. They could then have taken over the region of the Punjab. Whether this was taken from the Harappans still living there or from a tribal population which had taken over that region after the Harappans left we do not know.
The writers of the later Vedas describe clearing the forests in the valley of the Ganga and its tributaries. From about 600 BCE, we find archaeological evidence that altars made of brick were being used for sacrifices in the Ganga valley. This suggests that by then the Aryans had learnt the use of bricks instead of the more makeshift altars they used earlier.
Studying history
By painstakingly studying old texts and matching them to archaeological evidence, historians can approach their subject in the manner of a scientist. Great care has to be taken because often an ancient language (like the archaic Sanskrit of the Rigveda) is different from the same language today (modern Sanskrit).
Until we learn to read the Indus script we can only infer or guess about the people of those times. We still do not have all the answers.