This site — varnam.org/blog — has existed since the Pre-Cambrian era of Indian blogging. During those initial days, the urge was to write about everything; now this blog focuses on Indian history. The next logical step in evolution is to join a group of folks with similar interests and INI seems to be the perfect place.

Hope to see you at varnam.nationalinterest.in

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Fifth point, choosing the point of escalation. When Afzal khan entered Maharashtra, first he roamed around on Deccan plateau. He destroyed temples in an attempt to incite Shivaji. Shivaji did not escalate the matters. Khan committed atrocities. Shivaji chose not to respond. Khan attacked and conquered several forts. Shivaji kept quiet. Khan attacked Pune. Shivaji just sucked up that insult. If there is a man who has killed your brother in the past (Khan had killed Shivaji’s brother Shambhu raje) and who comes back and one by one destroys the things you love and revere, won’t you respond in revenge? You will right? That’s why you are not Shivaji.[How Shivaji Tackled Afzal Khan « The Eastern Horizon]

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This skeleton, of a man who probably was 35+/-10 years and 5′10″, was found in a settlement which flourished from 3700 – 1820 BCE; the people there had pottery and copper and cultivated barley as well as wheat. He was buried between 2500 – 2000 BCE — much before the decline of the Harappan civilization — and was a leper. In fact, this skeleton is the oldest example of leprosy in the world.

But he was not Harappan: he belonged to the Ahar-Banas culture. In the Mewar region of Rajasthan, hunter-gatherers developed farming communities in the middle of the fifth millennium BCE, independent of the Harappan culture. By around 2500 BCE, they became prosperous and had fortified settlements, roads, and lanes. Also, the earliest burned brick (4000 BCE) was found in Gilund at this site^[2].

By 2500 BCE, Ahars had trade relations with the Harappans to the north. They also had trade relations with their contemporaries in South and Central India and the skeleton confirms it. This skeleton was buried with vitrified ash from cow dung. So far the Southern Neolithic ash mounds found in South Deccan and North Dharwar were believed to be cattle settlements or the result of  cow dung disposal. Now we can speculate that they were the result of funeral activities of a shared tradition.

Besides this domestic connection, these people had international contacts as well. There are two strains of leprosy: an Asian one and an East African one. It is possible that the African one was transmitted to Asia around 40,000 BCE or vice versa at a much later date. The second one seems to have happened since lerosy depends on human contact and it must been transmitted over the trading network involving the Ahars, Harappans,people of Magan, Mesopotamians and Egyptians.

This skeleton fits well with  the Atharva Veda (Hymn 23, 24) making it the earliest historical reference to leprosy. The Ebers papyrus, dated to 1550 BCE has been interpreted to contain evidence of leprosy, but the earliest affected skeleton found in Egypt has been dated only to 400 – 250 BCE.

Another point is regarding the burial; after 2000 BCE, burial was uncommon except for some special cases like infants and spiritual people. Harappan skeletons were both cremated — there is evidence at Sanauli at least — and buried, but true burials are very few compared to expected numbers. Many archaeologists believe that cremation must have been widely practised by Harappans. Also, at Dholavira and other sites, dozens of graves turned out to be without any bones which implies symbolic burials.

It is believed that the burial at Balathal followed the Vedic tradition: lepers were buried alive in some parts of India. Also there is evidence that diseased bodies were sometimes not cremated.

(One of the skeletons from Balathal in samadhi posture)

The excavations reveal a large number of bull figurines indicating the Ahar people worshipped the bull ^[6]. At Marmi, a site near Chittorgarh, these figures have been found in abundance indicating it could be a regional shrine of the bull cult of this rural population. Discovery of cow-like figurines in Ojiyana, the first site found on the slope of a hill, has baffled archaeologists. Cow-worship was not a known Ahar practice. “There are no humps and we can see small teats,” B.R.Meena, superintendent, ASI Jaipur circle, who undertook the excavation, says, “These are certainly cows.” Other archaeologists suspect them to be bull calves but insist if further studies prove these to be cows, one could infer that the cow was a revered animal and the Hindu practice of treating the cow as a holy animal can thus be of pre-Aryan antiquity. [Were they cow worshippers?]

The large number of bull figurines found at Ahar and Gilund could indicate a bull cult^[6]. There is a debate over if the figurines represent bulls or cows, but these figurines were part of the second phase of the Ahar culture (2100 – 1800 BCE) or as late as 1600 BCE ^[7] and are the only clue to the religious beliefs of the Ahars^[8].

Another clue is the time frame of these skeletons. While the leper was dated to 2000 BCE, the skeletons in samadhi were from700 BCE^[9]. So while the leper burial was unusual, there is nothing unusual about burying a man in samadhi posture by the Early Historical Period.

While the bull figurines and the skeletons in samadhi were known earlier, this leper skeleton has added new information about this less known culture. Hopefully as more papers come out, we will get a clear picture on their religious beliefs, such as if this Vedic burial was an exception or a common practice.

1. This post is based on [4]. Many thanks to Michel Danino for information and images of the samadhi skeletons and Harappan burials. Also thanks to Gwen Robbins, the primary author of [2, 4], for patiently answering many questions.

1. The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective by Gregory L. Possehl
2. A panel on the The Cultural Diversity of Northwestern South Asia at the time of the Indus Civilization convened by Prof. Gregory Possehl (University of Pennsylvania) and Prof. Vasant Shinde: Deccan College
3. Gwen Robbins, Veena Mushrif, V.N. Misra, R.K. Mohanty and V.S. Shinde, Human Skeletal Remains from Balathal: a Full Report and Inventory, Man and Environment, XXXII 2007, pp. 1-25.
4. Ancient Skeletal Evidence for Leprosy in India (2000 B.C.), Gwen Robbins et al.
5. Piecing the Ahar Puzzle by Rohit Parihar
6. Encyclopedia of Prehistory: South and Southwest Asia By Peter Neal Peregrine
7. Tribal roots of Hinduism By Shiv Kumar Tiwari
8. The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan by Bridget Allchin
9. The skeletons have also been dated all way back to 1800 BCE

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It is fashionable to remark that while early humans lived in harmony with nature, the modern man abuses it. Many believe that it is massive use of fossil fuels in the post-Industrialization era that triggered global climate change. But a new model says that climate change was triggered by the burning of forests for agriculture. Though the population was smaller, farming techniques were not optimized resulting in more land use per person for food production.

He said that early populations likely used a land-clearing method that involved burning forests, then planting crop seed among the dead stumps in the enriched soil. They would use a large plot until the yield began to decline, and then would burn off another area of forest for planting. They would continue this form of rotation farming, ever expanding the cleared areas as their populations grew. They possibly cleared five or more times more land than they actually farmed at any given time. It was only as populations grew much larger, and less land was available for farming or for laying fallow, that societies adopted more intensive farming techniques and slowly gained more food yield from less land[Agricultural Methods Of Early Civilizations May Have Altered Global Climate]

But if you put the blame entirely on the early farmer, that would be wrong. New studies show that even the hunter-gatherer managed to affect their environment, through the use of fire, translocation of animals and altering the marine ecosystem.

Rick has also found layers of sea otter bones thousands of years old in California’s Channel Islands. The layers above just had sea urchin remains. He thinks people killed the otters because they ate too many shellfish. Since otters also prey on sea urchins, the urchin population exploded. All those urchins ate up the kelp forests, creating what Rick calls an “urchin barren.” [For Early Man, It Wasn't Easier Being Green : NPR]

But the key to remember is that, the ancient man had no choice and most of the damage was unintentional. Also there was no one to tell them the Inconvenient Truth.

“The take-home point to some extent is that humans do things to make their life easier,” Hames says. “It was really hard to make a living back then, so you know, you took advantage of the knowledge and skills you had in order to make the environment useful to you.” [For Early Man, It Wasn't Easier Being Green : NPR]

(Photograph by author)

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These photographs were taken during a recent visit. It is forbidden to take photographs inside the synagogue, and so the two inside images are from the post cards they sell in the gift shop. They also sell a facsimile of the copper plates by which the Rajah granted them land and one photograph is from my copy of those plates.

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But this was not the case before; female worship was prevalent all around the world. Recently three such artifacts were found:  in Turkey, in Golan and in Scotland.

The one in Golan, dated to 500 CE, was of Aphrodite – the Greek goddess of love. (see pictures)

“Aphrodite was the goddess of love, but also the goddess of fertility and childbirth,” Segal says. “Pregnant woman hoping for a safe birth would sacrifice to her, as would young girls hoping for love. Mainly, flowers, rather than animals, would be sacrificed to Aphrodite. The figurines we found were made in a mold in rather large numbers. They would be offered to the goddess in a temple by supplicants, or kept above one’s bed,” Segal said. [Dig unearths ancient cult figurines of Aphrodite]

According to the person who led the dig, Christians outlawed the Aphrodite cult, but it still survived since women clung to it.

While the Aphrodite figurine is just 1500 years old, the one found in Turkey is ancient, dating to 16,000 years back.

Erek said that the figurine showed that the social status of women was very important 16,000 years ago. Erek noted that the oldest fired clay god or goddess figurines unearthed in Mesopotamia, Anatolia and Near East were made in 5,000 BC. He added that experts believed that the clay was used earliest in that period, however, the goddess figurine showed that this method was older than thought. [16,000 Year-Old Mother Goddess Figurine Unearthed]

Finally, a sandstone figurine, 5000 years old, was discovered in Scotland and it is supposed to Scotland’s earliest face.

The carving is flat with a round head on top of a lozenge-shaped body. The face has heavy brows, two dots for eyes and an oblong for a nose. It is thought other scratches on top of the skull could be hair. A pair of circles on the chest are being interpreted as representing breasts, and arms have been etched at either side. It is believed a regular pattern of crossed markings on the reverse could suggest the fabric of the woman’s clothing.[Scotland's 'earliest face' found]

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After further objections to the “imaginary learning” of Hindu schools, he [Ram Mohan Roy] summarily assures Lord Amherst that “the Sanskrit system of education would be the best calculat-  ed to keep this country in darkness.” What he wants to see established is “a more liberal and enlightened system of  instruction, embracing mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, with other useful sciences.” This, he urges “may be accomplished with the sums proposed, by employing a few gentlemen of talent and learning educated  in Europe and providing a College furnished with neces- sary books, instruments, and other apparatus.” [The life and letters of Raja Rammohun Roy]

Macaulay was of the opinion that there was no point in perfecting the vernaculars, since there was nothing intelligent, but falsehood in them. In his Minute, he noted that he had no knowledge of Sanskrit or Arabic, but was convinced that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. On the other hand, whoever learned English had access to the vast intellectual wealth of the wisest nations of the earth and the literature available in English is valuable that the literature of all languages of the world together.[Macaulay's Education Part 3: The Minute]

Duff had already done this without any Government support and had solved many problems which the administration would face later. When a medical college was established in Calcutta there seemed to be a problem since Hindu shastras prohibited touching a dead body for anatomical purposes. To find a way out, the education commission visited Duff’s school. The students told the commission that it was a fact that shastras prohibited handling of a dead body, but they did not care. They wanted to take up the medical profession. Later orthodox priests told William Bentinck that there was no prohibition against touching a dead body for learning, but Duff was praised for showing that modern science was compatible with traditionalism.

Duff’s work continued and Bengalis from high castes, ignoring opposition from their families, converted. The conversion process was dramatic: people would leave their families and take refuge in Duff’s house where he would baptize them. Soon he could not handle the flood of people and had to build a home for the new converts.  He gave Sunday classes to clerks, weekly lectures for students who kept in touch with him and theological lectures for the converts. Duff’s converts became Indian missionaries and pastors and some of them went abroad and served in foreign missions. The ones who stayed India also hit the jackpot; soon the Governor General Sir Henrey Harding opened Government service to English educated Indians and Duff looked like a visionary.

Due to bad health, Duff often left India for Scotland for rest. After one such trip he arrived back in 1856 – a crucial year in Indian history. There were agrarian revolts and revolts by the aboriginals and soon the First War of Independence broke out. Duff was in Calcutta which was not a site for the revolt, but he lived in panic.

From Bengal, Duff expanded his activities. He started a mission for the Santals; his disciples too started spreading around starting missions in Jalna, which was part of the state of Hyderabad. It bothered Duff that missionaries were ill-educated and fanatical and this was not the quality he wanted in people for his missionary enterprise, which for him was the heart of the Gospel. He wanted to create an army of educated and experienced men and for this training he wanted a Missionary Institute to be set up in Scotland similar to the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples in Rome.

His campaign worked and the institute was set up with Duff as the first Professor, but unlike his mission in India, this turned out to be a failure.He had become old and could not connect to the younger people with his lengthy speeches. Besides this, he was not keeping well. The Indian weather was not agreeable to him and he had returned often due to jungle fever and dysentery. He died on Feb 12, 1878.

The Duff Effect

Due to the efforts of Duff and  Macaulay, English became the language of the educated people, replacing Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit. Also due to this Western literature and science  became accessible to the educated. It has also been argued that nationalism was a consequence of English education, but that would be ignoring the fact that the Vellore mutiny and First war of Independence happened without the infusion of English language.

Duff’s work highlights a less mentioned part of Indian history:  the decision to impose English had reasons other than the economics of text books and the need for educated employees. Though he only had a superficial knowledge of the religion, Duff sincerely believed that Hinduism was an evil darkness from which people had to be rescued. During one of his trips to Scotland, he lectured on his technique – spreading Western education linked with Christian teaching – and thought it was the best way to preach to Hindus without antagonizing them.

Duff hated secular education; in a spiritual country like India, he thought  it would be dangerous to try it. He did not want education to create a “spiritual barrenness”, but instead address the whole personality.  Duff’s concept of teaching Christian truths in educational institutions had a great effect. Soon there were many such schools, not just in Bengal, but also in Madras, Bombay and Lahore; about 1/4th of the educational institutions were missionary schools. Members of the Indian Christian Community became highly educated and started occupying positions of power in the Government.

If the success was measured in terms of the number of converts, probably Duff was a failure. His success was in making Christian thought very popular in India and in spreading those ideas among the educated. When Duff had started his school, it was considered sacrilege to even touch the Bible, but he was able to change that attitude. Duff legacy lies in creating a favorable image of Christianity among the educated which continues even to this day.

1. Alexander Duff, pioneer of missionary education, by William Paton
2. The Life of Alexander Duff by George Smith.
3. Clive, John. 1973. “Indian Education: The Minute” and “Indian Education: The Consequences”. Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian , 342 – 426. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

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But seven years later, on May 27th, 1830, a Scottish missionary arrived in Calcutta and his goal was to “prepare a mine which should one day explode beneath the very citadel of Hinduism.” This 24 year thought that the methods of other missionaries, like directly appealing Hindus to renounce their faith, would do nothing but anger the natives. Instead he claimed to have found a unique way to destroy Hinduism in a peaceful manner.

1. The language of the Government was Persian and there were a few educational institutions which taught Arabic and Sanskrit. The learned people spoke these Oriental languages and not English.
2. Duff arrived at a time when there was a controversy in British India over the language to be used for Indian higher education. On the one side there were the British Orientalists who wanted to use Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic and on the other side there were the Anglicists who had scorn for Oriental languages and Indian culture and wanted to enforce English
3. The missionary activities were not very successful. The missionary technique consisted of standing in the street corner and preaching which fetched an occasional convert or two, but nothing of great significance. Even in South India, where there were more converts, the converts came from the out castes; the Hindu masses remained unaffected.

1. Provide English education for the masses
2. Make Bible studies an integral part of this education
3. Be non-apologetic about teaching Christianity.

Duff was very clear about what Christian education meant: it was not secular education with some Biblical studies thrown in. For him Christianity contained all knowledge and his goal was to teach with Christianity revelation at the center.

When Duff first proposed this method, veteran missionaries did not find it appealing. Still he went ahead without any government support. Bengalis did not mind an English school, but had reservations about an English school where Bible was an important subject. This reservation made it difficult for Duff to get started; he could not even find a building to start his classes.

One Indian who helped get Duff was Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Mohan Roy who worked with Lord William Bentinck in suppressing sati and who believed that the pure faith of the vedas were corrupted by various cults had founded Brahma Samaj to teach the worship of one God. Ram Mohan Roy provided Duff with a hall as well as his first students. When parents learned that Bible was being taught there, they were reluctant to send their kids, but Ram Mohan Roy helped there as well. On the first day of school, Ram Mohan Roy, who had three more years to live, calmed the students who refused to read the Bible and appeared daily for the Bible class.

Though Duff was a proponent of higher studies in English, he did not hate Bengali. He did not want students to be alien to their culture and hence Bengali studies were an important part of the curriculum. After one year, Duff conducted a public exam  – in front of parents and the media – and students demonstrated their knowledge in language, science and Bible. This was a huge success and it convinced both Indians and the British. Soon the number of students started increasing.

Not everyone in Calcutta was his fan. One of the newspapers published an article suggesting that all students who attended Duff’s school be outcasted. This warning had an effect and the attendance dropped briefly, but later picked up.

Soon Duff encountered students —- not from his school, but from the Hindu college — who were enamored by Western thought and had a low opinion of Hinduism. These were the kind of people Duff wanted to seed Christian religion into and he invited them to his home to attend lectures on “God and His Revealing.” Hindus reacted strongly against Duff and asked the Government to stop this. Lord William Bentinck asked Duff to slow down and this crisis too passed.

But soon Duff got his converts — Krishna Mohan Banerjee, Mohesh Chunder Ghosh, Gopinath Nandi and Anando Chand Mazumdar  — and as he had expected they came from the higher castes. Some of them were Brahmins who ate beef to show their defiance against Hinduism and whose moral vacuum was happily filled by Duff.

By this time the Orientalist-Anglicist fight had reached critical mass. The East India Company needed a supply of qualified clerks and there were educational institutions like the Mohammedan college in Calcutta and Sanskrit college in Benares which provided the employees. The company even started a new Sanskrit college in Calcutta and Oriental colleges in Delhi and Agra. A large sum of money was spent in publishing books in the Oriental languages and translating European works into these languages. For the amount of money spent on education, there was not enough demand for these books.

In the language fight, the Government, missionaries and Orientalists wanted to use the Oriental languages, while Duff sided along with the Anglicists. If Indians were to learn Western culture and Christian theology, he said, it was not possible to do it in Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian or the vernacular Bengali. This decision on which language to choose for Duff was very critical and in a later speech given in Scotland, he said that it concerned the ultimate evangelization of India.

His arguments against Sanskrit were that (a) it was not perfect for Western education (b) ordinary people did not speak Sanskrit and © Western literature was not translated to Sanskrit. Since Sanskrit was tied to Hinduism, even if one were to teach Western literature in Sanskrit, the association formed in the mind of people would of an idolatrous and superstitious religion whereas English, would bring fresh ideas without the burden of association.

(Read Part 2)

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1. Where do Nairs come from? Maddy does a literature survey and “To summarize, the Nayars have been considered a derivative of local people with invading Aryans, have been wandering Scythins who settled down, the Nagas and so on. No one theory holds forte, though from all the above, the Scythian link seems to be the near fetched one”
2. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Paul Beckett wondered why Indians were not contributing to charity like Americans. He also used the derogatory term “Hindu rate of growth” to which Sarvesh Tiwari responds, “Here we shall share some random thoughts from the historical perspectives on Hindu outlook to economy and charity, and try showing how, there is continuity even today, although latent, of the same outlook prevailing among the more traditional Hindu shreShThins of our age.”
3. The effort to set up a Sanskrit University in Karnataka is facing considerable opposition. Sandeep B says, “Sanskrit is what gives identity to the Indian civilisation as we know it. From Valmiki to Kalidas, every major Sanskrit literary work spoke of this identity in its own way.”
4. History and Mythology, a blog about Amar Chitra Katha, has a post about Chandragupta II: “He is almost certainly the King Chandra eulogized in the Sanskrit inscription on iron pillar in the Quwat al-Islam mosque in New Delhi’s Qutub Minar campus, which dates back to 4th century.”
5. “Located near the city of Jogjakarta on the island of Java, it’s a stunning remnant of the days when the Dharmic religions were politically ascendant in the islands. It was commissioned and built between 800 and 900 CE by the local monarchs so that devotees need not travel all the way to India for spiritual pilgrimage.” Usha Alexander writes about the Borobudur stupa.
6. “In 1193 CE, Nalanda was put to a brutal and decisive end by Bakhtiyar Khilji, a Turkish Muslim invader on his way to conquer Bengal. He looted and burned the monastery, and beheaded or burned alive perhaps thousands of monks,” writes Namit Arora on his post on Nalanda.
7. Feanor has translated Afanasii Nikitin’s fifteenth century memoirs of his travel to India. Nikitin was a merchant from the Mongol areas of Russia. He had heard that horses were in demand in India and spent few years in Deccan.
8. Hari, based on Vaasanthi’s Cut-outs, Caste and Cine Stars, looks at the life of MG Ramachandran (1917-1987), “one of the most important figures of Tamil politics, who, with help from other prominent leaders of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), including the crafty script writer Karunanidhi, seamlessly moved between cinema and politics as if the two were one.”

See Also: Previous Carnivals

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The earlier assumptions are now being questioned because the biblical narrative was not able to withstand examination by archaeological data.

According to the PBS documentary, the Hebrew Bible was formed during the Babylonian exile.

Israelites were reminded that they had broke the covenant with God and hence were incurring his wrath. Still this was not taken seriously till the time the Babylonians exiled the Caananites. It was during this exile that one of the scribes of that era, known as “P”, took all the previous revisions and created the present version of the Bible. The documentary suggests that the Abraham story was created then, by this scribe, to enforce the concept of the covenant. The scribe lived in Babylon and Abraham was placed in the nearby Ur; Abraham’s goal was to reach the promised land, so was the dream of the exiles. [Bible's Buried Secrets (2/2)]

Yahwism after the Exile experienced discontinuity of iconographic practices and matured as it consolidated its sacred literature.Stern (2001: 29) insists that “upon the return from exile, the Jews purified their worship. Jewish monotheism was at last consolidated.” This assumes that there were no iconographic representations of Yahweh after the Babylonian deportation. The archaeological and textual evidence supports pentateuchal Yahwism as the official, normative religion that was practiced by the majority, even though there are some iconographic representations from the Persian period that require more detailed discussion. The Persian period seems to be the time when the prohibition on representation of Yahweh was particularly widespread. Pentateuchal Yahwism thrived and became the norm that would be followed by the world’s major religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. [The Persian Period and the Origins of Israel: Beyond the "Myths"]

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