The "Race" Myth

Race was a convenient taxonomy to classify the different people that Europeans saw when they traveled around the world in the 15 and 16th centuries. Carl Linnaeus, the 18th century Swedish botanist, even assigned various traits: Native Americans (wild), Europeans (gentle, law abiding), Asians (melancholic), Africans (ruled by impulse). Well, you get the drift.

In the 20th century, as I wrote in Outdated Syllabus, anthropologists abandoned race as a valid biological construct; it is no longer used to explain the differences between various peoples. But we all are not the same, you may say. Just walk around the agora, and you will be able to distinguish a Malayali from a Punjabi or a Kashmiri from a Naga. Since there is variation among human population and since we can group people by visible biological traits, doesn’t race exist?

No, says Prof. Tara D Carter categorically in Making of the Modern World 1 course (podcast). When we say people are different, we are referring to their — to throw some jargon —phenotypic trait. It just means a quantifiable trait like skin color or hair color or height. These differences occur due to evolution and these traits are preserved since it helps individuals with the traits survive. For example, dark skin is advantageous in warm climates to withstand the ultra-violet radiation. If you are living in a dense forest, it helps to be shorter. Thus this variation is good for us as a species for survival.

These adaptations do not occur randomly, but is dictated by geography. Over a long period, the advantageous traits become common in a population; the differences among us is just an adaptation. To conclude, biologically we all are the same.

In Pragati: An Outdated Syllabus

(Photo: Justin Gaurav Murgai)

(a shorter and sweeter version of this article appeared in the Nov 2010 issue of Pragati)
Recently M. Night Shyamalan kicked off a race row with his latest movie The Last Airbender (2010). In the TV series, the characters, Aang, Katara, Sokka are Asian, but in the movie, they were portrayed by white actors; the casting call specifically asked for Caucasian actors. Shyamalan was accused of “whitewashing” and “racebending.” Another movie which attracted similar attention was Walt Disney’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) where actor Jake Gyllenhaal played an Iranian Prince. But in this case, most Iranians were pleased that a fair skinned actor played the role because it accurately represented how “Aryan” Iranians looked before Islam was forcibly imposed.
In Iran, the external Aryan ancestry is a non-issue, but in India it is a matter of angry controversy. The fact that it is a source of controversy in India has been bothering scholars in Western universities. In his course, History of Iran to the Safavid Period, Prof. Richard W. Bulliet, an Iranian specialist at Columbia University ridicules the people who oppose Aryan invasion theory and tells students that Indians believe that proponents of the Aryan Invasion Theory are members of CIA who want to portray India as a wimpish state; he specifically mentions members of BJP as belonging to this group.
In the first lecture he mentions the similarities between Old Iranian and Vedic and their relation to the Indo-European languages. For him, this similarity indicates invasion, and this invasion theory is supported not just by philologists, but also by archaeologists and historians. This Grand Canyon wide gap between scholarly consensus and what is being taught in American universities is not surprising. Last Fall, in a course titled History of India, at University of California, Los Angeles, Prof. Vinay Lal lectured about rejected 19th century racist concepts like “subdued snub-nosed and dark skinned people known as the Dasas” and how forts and citadels were attacked by the invading Aryans.
These professors are wrong — about the Aryan Invasion Theory, about race, about the people who dispute it and the reason they dispute it. Though nationalism and sometimes Hindu nationalism is blamed, the reason why Indians are suspicious of colonial theories will become obvious as we look at an example where “scientific” European minds applied pseudoscience and divided the Indian population.
First, let us look at the Aryan Invasion Theory. In his book The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (2004), Prof. Edwin Bryant who looks at both sides of the Aryan debate concludes that, “there is general consensus among South Asian archaeologists that, as far as archaeological record is concerned, clear, unambiguous evidence of invading or immigrating Aryans themselves is nowhere to be found either in central Asia or in the Indian subcontinent.” Romila Thapar writes in Early India: From the origins to the AD 1300 (1995), that, “The theory of an Aryan invasion no longer has credence.”
Second, when it is mentioned that only members of the BJP are against the Invasion Theory, it is incorrect. Edwin Bryant is not an Indian; Romila Thapar is an antagonist of Hindu Nationalists. Truth is the casualty when he says that opponents of Aryan Invasion Theory have been ignoring archaeological evidence for Prof. Bryant’s survey shows that it is the lack of archaeological evidence, among other things, which prompted many historians to re-think. Instead of the invasion theory, many scholars now believe in a migration theory.
Finally, Prof. Bulliet says that opponents of the invasion might take refuge in the writings of his colleague Edward Said, the author of the seminal book Orientalism. On this point, he is absolutely right. It was the colonial historian who gave us the concept of race. 19th century Europe was the center of racial studies; scientists measured the volume of the skull for various races and found that the white race was the largest and hence of superior intellect.
From 1891, the British official, Herbert H. Risley defined 2378 castes as belonging to 43 races on the basis of their nasal index. Also, Indo-European, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman linguistic groups were identified as different races with Indo-European speakers or Aryans at the top of the tree. Based on this mythology, the skeletons found in Mohenjo-daro were classified as belonging to various races, mostly non-Aryan. Coming to the Vedic texts, a racial interpretation was assigned to various passages. The dark skinned and nose-less Dasyu was considered of a different race than the fair and high-nosed Aryan. This racial identification was objected to by Indian scholars like Srinivas Iyengar as early as 1914, but such dissenting voices were not the ones writing history.
Following World War II, Western anthropologists realized that race cannot be scientifically defined, based on cranial size or nasal index. According to Prof. Kenneth A. R. Kennedy, who has studied the Harappan skeletal remains extensively, “Biological anthropologists remain unable to lend support to any of the theories concerning an Aryan biological or demographic entity.” According to Prof. Gregory Possehl, an anthropological archaeologist at the University of Pennyslvania, “Race as it was used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been totally discredited as a useful concept in human biology.” Thus there is nothing to distinguish the invaders from the natives; in short, there is no Aryan or Dravidian race.
A century after Indian scholars raised objections, Western scholars are realizing that the racial interpretation was based on over reading soft evidence; it was a consequence of the 19th century racial insanity that ruled Europe. In 1999, Hans Hock reexamined the supposedly racial Vedic material and found them either to be mistranslated or open to alternative non-racial interpretations. Among multiple interpretations, the racial one was preferred because it favoured colonialism. Still the Professor at UCLA still talks about the snub-nosed Dasyus, even though Indian scholars have interpreted that the Vedic word means one devoid of speech, not nose.
Over the years, historians have accepted that various language groups are just that — language labels — and does not map to racial identity. In the 11th Neelan Thiruchelvam Memorial Lecture given in Colombo on Aug 1, 2010, Prof Romila Thapar made this very clear. According to her the notion of separate Aryan and Dravidian racial identities has no basis in history. According to Prof. Thomas Trautmann, “That the racial theory of Indian civilization still lingers is a matter of faith. Is it not time we did away with it?” But even in the last general elections, the Dravidar Kazhagam party leader exhorted his followers to reject “Aryan” candidates.
It is such non-benign theories and their consequences that has caused Indian scholars to view Western theories with suspicion. Prof. Edwin Bryant writes, “I argue that although there are doubtlessly nationalistic and in some quarters, communal agendas lurking behind some of this scholarship, a principal feature is anti-colonial/imperial.” Thus the issue is not what members of BJP believe or do not believe; the issue is what is the latest scholarly consensus and why is it not being taught to students. Maybe the Prince of Persia can investigate if the CIA is involved.

References:

Michel Danino, The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization and its Bearing on the Aryan Question
Michel Danino, Genetics and the Aryan Debate, Purtattva, Bulletin of the Indian Archaeological Society No. 36 (2005- 06): 146-154.
Edwin Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate (Oxford University Press, USA, 2004).
History of Iran to the Safavid Period, Columbia University (Podcast, Lecture 1)

Lost Language Decipherment using Computers

The headline reads Software that automatically deciphers ancient language developed. The language thus deciphered was Ugaritic – used in Syria from the 14th through the 12th century BCE. To find out if such a technique can be used to decipher the Indus script, we need to understand how Ugaritic was deciphered.
The language itself was deciphered manually decades earlier. What helped the manual decipherment was the fact that Ugaritic is similar to Hebrew and Aramaic. The first two Ugaritic letters were decoded by mapping them to Hebrew letters and then based on this information few other words were also deciphered. Then one word inscribed on an axe was guessed to be “axe”, which turned out to be a lucky guess.
There were two inputs to the computer program: corpus of the lost language and the lexicon of the related language. The output was the mapping between the alphabets of the known language and Ugaritic and also the traslation between Ugaritic and cognates in the known language. The program was able to map 29 of the 30 letters accurately. It also deduced the cognates in Hebrew for about 60% of the words.
But when it comes to the Indus script, both the script and language are unknown; there is no second input to the program. Still that has not prevented researchers from applying various techniques to gain insight into what the script represents. In the 60s the Soviets and Finns used mathematical models find order in the symbols. Taking this further, Subhash Kak did a mathematical analysis of the Indus script and the oldest Indian script – Brahmi. When a table containing the ten most commonly occurring Sanskrit phonemes (from ten thousand words), was compared to the ten most commonly occurring Indus symbols and there was a convincing similarity, even though Brahmi was a millennium after the Indus script. Surprisingly some of the characters, like the fish, looked similar too.
But that’s it. The current research is not in comparing Indus script with a known language, but in finding if the Indus script even encodes a language or not.
References:

Benjamin Snyder, Regina Barzilay, and Kevin Knight, A statistical model for lost language decipherment, in Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics(Uppsala, Sweden: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2010), 1048-1057
Subhash C. Kak, A FREQUENCY – ANALYSIS – OF – THE – INDUS – SCRIPT – PB – Taylor & Francis, Cryptologia12, no. 3 (1988): 129.
Subhash C. Kak, INDUS – AND – BRAHMI – FURTHER – CONNECTIONS – PB – Taylor & Francis, Cryptologia 14, no. 2 (1990): 169.

Koro – A "hidden" language of India

In February a person by the name of Boa Sr died in the Andamans and with her death, the language named Bo was gone; she was the last known speaker of that ancient language. While Bo was a known language, Koro was not. It was only in 2008 that researchers found that such a language — spoken by 800 to 1200 people— even existed in Arunachal Pradesh.

The speakers of Koro had remained invisible to outside observers because their bright red garments, the rice beer they made and other details of their lives seemed no different from that of the speakers of Aka, the socially dominant language in the region, Harrison said.
“There’s a sort of a cultural invisibility; they’re culturally identical in what they wear, what they eat, the houses they live in…. They just happen to have a different word for everything,” Harrison said.
Koro also blends in because its speakers frequently marry Aka speakers (who number 4,000 to 6,000) and people who use another tongue, Miji (who number 6,000 to 8,000). And because the villages had been largely cut off from the outside world for so long, the languages in the region remain poorly studied.[Linguists uncover ‘hidden’ language in north India]

If you want to hear this language, National Geographic has the video.

Ayodhya: Article 25

Shocked by the verdict of the Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court, Siddharth Varadarajan of The Hindu wrote, “Collectives in India have faith in all sorts of things but “faith” cannot become the arbiter of what is right and wrong in law.” Romila Thapar, writing in the same newspaper wrote that the verdict was based on Hindu faith and belief and that the verdict had set a legal precedent “by declaring it to be the birthplace of a divine or semi-divine being worshipped by a group that defines itself as a community.”
It turns out that Hindu belief is protected by the constitution.

Justice Agarwal, in his over 5,000-page judgment, said: “We are of the view that once such belief gets concentrated to a particular point, and in totality of the facts, we also find no reason otherwise, it partakes the nature of an essential part of religion, particularly when it relates to a matter which is of peculiar significance to a religion. It, therefore, stands on a different footing. Such an essential part of religion is constitutionally protected under Article 25.”[“Hindus’ belief about Lord Rama’s birthplace protected under Article 25”]

Also

The court said: “Various religious literature, which have been placed before us, show that Ayodhya is believed to be the place of birth of Lord Rama. It did not specify any particular area or a particular place in Ayodhya. It is quite possible that the entire city may be held to be very pious and sacred on account of some occurrence of divinity or religious spirituality. It may happen that a small place may attain such a status. For example, the tree under which Gautam Buddha attained divine knowledge is considered to be extremely sacred and pious place by Buddhists. In a country like ours, where unity in diversity is its characteristic, the existence of people or other faith, existence of their place of religion at a place, in wider sense as its known, cannot be ruled out and by necessity they will have to exist, live and survive together.”[“Hindus’ belief about Lord Rama’s birthplace protected under Article 25”]

If only Siddhath Varadarajan and Romila Thapar read The Hindu.

Ayodhya: Why are some historians angry?

The Allahabad High Court verdict in the “The Sunni Central Board of Waqfs UP Lucknow & Others Versus Gopal Singh Visharad and Others” lawsuit has upset some historians and they have started questioning the credibility of the Archaeological Survey of India report. According to Romila Thapar, few archaeologists and historians had quesioned the ASI report and hence it was not fair to accept it in a simplistic manner. She then lamented about the mention of destruction of the “supposed temple” without balancing it with the mention of the destruction of the not-so-supposed mosque. Dr. Omar Khaladi went one step furthur and accused the ASI — an institution controlled by a non-Hindutva party — of being a handmaiden of Hindutva.
This anger against the ASI can be understood if we examine the narrative perpetuated by these historians. In 1989 many historians issued a statement that there was no temple.But a decade back, under a project titled, “Archaeology of Ramayana Sites”, the ASI had conducted surveys around Babri Masjid. The goal was to determine the antiquity of the site; settlements existed in Ayodhya as far back as the second millennium BCE. Archaeologists also found twelve stone pillars with Hindu motifs and deities, but the report published in 1976 did not mention these.
Some eminent historians tried to explain these pillar bases away by suggesting that these were part of a wall or a cowshed. But the court ordered excavations conducted by the ASI from March 12 to August 7, 2003 found pillar bases all over the area. Based on this, the ASI summarized the following for the court.

“Subsequently, during the early medieval period (11th–12th century AD) a huge structure was constructed, which seems to have been short-lived. On the remains of the above structure was constructed a massive structure with at least three structural phases and three successive floors attached to it. It is over the top of this construction during the early sixteenth century, the disputed structure was constructed directly resting over it.[Massive shrine was under disputed site]

Second, following the demolition of the Babri Masjid, a large stone block with a Sanskrit inscription was found. This inscription clearly indicated that a temple dating to 11-12th century existed at that location. Some historians argued that the inscription was forged but many epigraphists who examined the slab disagreed. Finally, as B.B.Lal (Director General of ASI) wrote in Rama: His Historicity, Mandir and Setu, Evidence of Literature, Archaeology and other Sciences

Anyway, to allay misgivings, I append here a note from the highest authority on epigraphical matters in the country, namely the Director of Epigraphy, ASI, Dr KV Ramesh (Appendix II). In it he first gives a summary of the inscription, then an actual reading of the text and finally an English translation thereof. While many scholars may like to go through the Note, it maybe straightaway here that according to it this temple was built by Meghasuta who obtained the lordship of Saketamandala (i.e. Ayodhya) through the grace of the senior Lord of the earth viz Govinda Chandra, of the Gahadavala dynasty who ruled over a vast empire, from 1114 to 1155 CE.

What ASI proved was that Romila Thapar’s “supposed temple” did exist. Taking note of the criticism against the ASI, the judges have mentioned the ASI excavations were transparent and it proved beyond doubt, the existence of the temple and “even Muslim members have also signed the report of ASI.” Finally, dismissing the argument by some historians that the structure beneath the mosque could not be a temple because of the discovery of animal bones, “HC was also surprised to note the “zeal” in some of the archaeologists and historians appearing as witnesses on behalf of the Sunni Waqf Board who made statements much beyond reliefs demanded by the Waqf.”

varnam

The name of this blog is varnam, which means color in Sanskrit. It has many other meanings as well.

The word for color in Sanskrit is ‘varNa’ (वर्ण) and it actually signifies quality, one of them being color. It is also used for the letter of the alphabet (quality of sound), the alphabet being called varNa-mAlA (वर्ण-माला, letter-garland). Gold is called su-varNa (सुवर्ण, सु=good, beautiful; वर्ण=color, quality ). The four personality types are called वर्ण as well – ब्राह्मण, क्षत्रिय, वैश्य, शूद्र (brAhmaNa, kShatrIya, vaishya, shUdra) which are the thinkers, administrators, business and working class of a society by professions, but they are based originally on personality types, qualities of a person.[how colorful is your life? – colors in sanskrit]

Aryans, Early Christians and their Travel Plans

In Robert D. Kaplan’s South Asia’s Geography of Conflict (warning: pdf), there is a section about the history of India. He writes

“Aryans may have infiltrated from the Iranian plateau, and together with the subcontinent’s autochthonous inhabitants were part of a process that consolidated the political organization of the Gangetic Plain in northern India around 1000 B.C.”

Once upon a time, the Aryan Invasion Theory was considered infallible; now everyone agrees that there was no invasion. AIT morphed into the Aryan Migration Theory, Two Wave Migration theory, trickle down theory etc. Now that too has become: may have happened.

In a blog post, Ajay Makken, MP (Cong) writes about Homeland security

India has been a land where people have mastered fusion, a land, a place where perhaps the first Jews arrived, soon after Jerusalem fell, where perhaps Christians came back as early as 3rd Century and had settlements on shores of India as early as 4th Century, where perhaps the Parsis came in 7thCentury after being driven away from Iran and even now, in the last century we have Bahai’s who were driven from their mother land and who came and sought refuge in India.

He mentions the date of Christian arrival as 3rd century, discounting the myth of St. Thomas (52 CE). According to Pope Benedict, St. Thomas went only as far as Western India. According to Romila Thapar, there is no historical evidence to the claim that he was martyred in Mylapore. According to her, the first coming of Christians is associated with the migration of Persian Christians led by Thomas Cana around 345 CE.

Hat Tip to Dhruva, Pragmatic Euphony

Apsidal Shrines

Last year there was news of discovery of a 2000 year old Shiva temple complex in Uttar Pradesh, one of the oldest in India. Besides the age, what was interesting was the shape: the temple was apsidal. It was widely believed that the apisdal shape had Buddhist origins and was used by Hindus later. Historians like Romila Thapar have argued that if Hindu temples had such shape, they were converted Buddhist chaityas or shrines
This theory, in fact, cannot be credited to Marxist historians; they evolved out of a colonial myth. Colonial archaeologists, who found that the written record of India was imperfect, resorted to studying the history of art. This study, they hoped, would give a better historical record as well help understand the relation between various Indic traditions.
This Marxist/Colonial explanation — that Hindu traditions replaced Buddhist shrines — actually makes sense if you follow a linear chronology. There is no dispute over the fact that there was a resurgence of Hinduism inspired by bhakti and hence it can be logically argued that this resurgent Hinduism or traditions usurped Buddhist chaityas. Also, Buddhist shrines have been around since the 4th century BCE while Hindu apsidal temples make their appearance few centuries later.
There are three reasons why the Colonials and Marxists are wrong.
First, archaeology has disproved many cases. For example, one site where an apsidal temple was found was Barsi in Maharshtra. According to the British, a Buddhist shrine was converted to a Trivikrama temple, but later archaeological excavations found an apsidal brick temple with a wooden mandapa. The mandapa was not a later addition, but an integral part of the temple. A similar theory was proposed by the British for the Kapotesvaraswamy temple in Guntur and the Durga temple at Aihole, but both were disproved.
Second, this theory ignores another possibility – co-existence. In Nagarjunakonda valley, which was settled from third millennium BCE to sixteenth century CE, there is evidence of both Buddhist establishments and Hindu temples, both using the same plans in different areas. Besides this, Naga traditions too used the same style. Between second century BCE and seventh century CE, there is a rise in apsidal Buddhist shrines in peninsular India. Hindus also constructed new apsidal temples. For example in Kerala, after 800 CE, numerous sanctums with apsidal plans were constructed, especially the ones dedicated to Ayyappa. All these show that various branches of Hindu traditions shared style and space with a number of domestic and regional traditions.
Finally, a point regarding the origin of this style. The earliest elliptical shrines are seen in Vidhisha (second century BCE), Nagari in Chittor (first century BCE) and Etah, Uttar Pradesh (200 – 100 BCE). An apsidal mud platform was also found in Ujjain (500 – 200 BCE). That’s not it. At Daimabad (1600 – 1400 BCE), a complex with a mud platform having fire altars and an apsidal temple with sacrificial activity were found. Similarly at Banawali, a Harappan site on the banks on the Sarasvati bed, there were fire altars on an apsidal structure. Thus the elliptical shape had religious significance from a much ancient time and there is only tradition which still builds fire altars the way people in Banawali did.
References

Himanshu Prabha Ray, The apsidal shrine in early Hinduism: origins, cultic affiliation, patronage, World Archaeology 36, no. 3 (2004): 343. (Thanks Ranjith)
Michel Danino, Lost River: On The Trail of the Sarasvati (Penguin Books India, 2010).
Upinder Singh, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, 1st ed. (Prentice Hall, 2009).

Movie Watch: Urumi

Santosh Sivan has announced that his next venture will be a movie titled Urumi. The name is the Malayalam word for a long sword made of flexible steel. This video clip makes you wonder how those two managed to give a demo without killing themselves.
In The Mannanars of Chirakkal, Maddy has a description of how it can be used.

The sword was made of thin pliable steel, and worn round the waist like a belt, the point being fastened to the hilt through a small hole near the point. A man, intending to damage another, might make an apparently friendly call on him, his body loosely covered with a cloth, and to all appearances unarmed. In less than a second, he could unfasten the sword round his waist, and cut the other down. This for those who do not know, is the weapon called ‘Urumi’ of the warriors of Malabar. [The Mannanars of Chirakkal]

Urumi is a period film set in the 15th century, at a crucial moment in Indian history — the arrival of Vasco da Gama. The story line we have is minimal at this point.

Urumi is about a group of men who wanted to assassinate Vasco Da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, who set foot in Kappad in Calicut in 1498. The film will have an English subtitle- “Who Killed Vasco De Gama?” Genelia will play a Portuguese princess while Prithviraj will be the leader of the gang that wants to kill Vasco De Gama. [Genelia opposite Pritviraj!]

This is both exciting and scary at the same time. Remember Santosh Sivan’s period film Asoka (2001), where Sivan, Shah Rukh Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Anu Malik did a Kalinga on our brains.? But there are three plus points: Santosh later made another period film Before the Rains which was watchable. Second, this movie is being scripted by Shankar Ramakrishnan, who directed one of the brilliant shorts in Kerala Cafe. Finally, the movie does not have Shah Rukh Khan.