PartIII: The Approximate Calendar.

The abundance of urban Harappan ruins at Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Lothal and other places along the course of extinct river beds in the Thar desert suggests that it was the disappearance of water and a simultaneous disappearance of maritime commerce that led to the extinction of the Harappan civilization.

There are conflicting views of the fate of the Harappan Civilization.The most lucid and credible one seems to have been that of N.S.Rajaram .Rajaram argues that the Rig Veda, associated entirely with the Aryans, had a Harappan connection, a point of view fiercely contested by others.

Even as far as religion is concerned, there is a problem. The Vedic deities: Indra, Varun, Marut etc. are no longer overtly worshipped by the Hindus. Shiva, who has many worshippers today, appears to have a parallel existing in Harappan times.

Looking at the mass of conflicting evidence (and lack of it), my own understanding of events reads something like this:

1. A flourishing civilization existed on the banks of the snow-fed Saraswati(now extinct) around 3700 BC.The river started drying up, becoming totally dry around 1900 BC.The people settled along its banks scattered to the East, West and South.
   The abandonment of the cities appears to have been traumatic.At Dholavira, in Gujarat here is evidence of brickwork storages of large masses of water(visit this site), and the impoverishment of a people as maritime trade vanished.




2. The Aryans were immigrants from West Asia or Eastern Europe, whose exact date of entry is not certain.Parallels between the ancient Hindu religion described in the Rig Vedas, and the Zoroasterian religion which prevailed in Iran until the advent of Islam suggest that the Aryans came from Iran.They were basically a rural people, but had strong cultural values, distinct from those of the ruling classes of the Harappan civilization.In the collapse of the cities that followed, the Aryans somehow managed to preserve their identity and their culture as a separate entity.




3. The question of which of the two cultures spawned the Hindu religion is meaningless. Nowhere do the Hindus refer to themselves as "Hindus" in scriptures. Later texts refer to the "Sanatana Dharma" which roughly translates into "The traditional religion". Even the word "dharma" does not translate into "religion"."Dharma " is a set of practices, both spiritual and temporal. It is not a doctrine, as "religion" is."Hindu" was the name used by ancient Greeks to describe the people settled on the banks of the Indus, and the name stuck.Right up to the Buddhist Age, Hinduism appears to have absorbed, internalized and modified the religious practices it came across




4. What happened to the Harappan language? There is no evidence that we are talking about one language, but of one script which disappeared. It is more likely that there was more than one language, and these continued to evolve; no evidence is at hand to show otherwise.




5. Early Hinduism, in the pre-Buddhist age, appears to have three different layers:
   
   1. The pantheon described in the Rig Vedas.This is similar to the Greek, Roman and Norse pantheons that followed in Europe.

   
   

   2. Absorption of local deities being worshipped in the Indian sub-continent.

   
   

   3. A sophisticated layer of religious philosophy that probably coincided with the following other developments of the age:
      • The decimal number system with 'zero' as a number.
      • The philologically constructed Devnagiri script.
      • The artificially constructed Sanskrit language based on the Devnagiri script.
      • The remarkably sophisticated Indian Classical Music system.

Each of the developments noted above merits its own study. I shall however return to my original thesis: the origins and practice of caste, which I pursue in my next article.