Did the British Raj represent Greater India?

[aneeshm]

You may be interested in knowing, Shiva, that the association of Sanskrit with the north is a much later thing. Earlier, Sanskrit was simply a language. Wherever it went, it used the local script. It was a contact language for the people, because a person who had studied Sanskrit would always know two languages - his own native Prakrit tongue, and Sanskrit. Sanskrit education meant that you could travel anywhere in India and be understood. The upper three castes had a compulsory duty of learning the language.

Sanskrit never was, and never will be, an exclusively northern language. The people of the south wrote it in their local scripts, the people of the north in Devanagari. Only with standardisation did it become fixed with Devanagari, and only later did it gain the "north" association. Since time immemorial, Sanskrit HAS been synonymous with India (though not vice-versa).

[Zkribbler]

I always assumed "India" was derived from the Indus River, which is in Pakistan.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Zkribbler
I always assumed "India" was derived from the Indus River, which is in Pakistan.

Indus Indu Sindhu Sind Hind Hindustan Indus India - they're all related, etymologically. Same root.

So technically, India is synonymous with "Hindu", if only linguistically.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by aneeshm
The author is not basing anything on the claim that the Aryans knew about the sea. He is saying that what is significant is that the sea is an all-pervading presence in the Vedas, which could not have happened had the Aryans been central Asians.

Also, the fact that the Dravidians have a word for the horse is quite significant - it means that the horse was known to the Dravidians before contact with the Aryans, which demolishes the theory that they did not know of it.

And again, you ignore the most central part of the guy's thesis - that the Vedic reference to the horse gives the horse 34 ribs, whereas central Asian horses have 36 ribs. Had the Aryans been central Asians, the Vedas would have said 36 instead of 34.

This is the clinching bit, which no amount of playing with words can discount.

The Dravidian civilization was not a closed system. They traded with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and all sorts of smaller tribes. I'd be surprised if they didn't know what horses were.

The vedic reference is interesting, but hardly clinching. The vedas weren't bodies of literature that were written in a day and then set aside, but continued to evolve after the advent of the Aryans in India. This is a more plausible explanation for these "anomalies" than the assertion that the Aryans were indigenous, yet somehow managed to be of distinctly lighter skin than their neighbours, get their language and customs exported to Central Asia and the Middle East, and peacefully convince the Dravidians to migrate south.

Originally posted by aneeshm
Ah. So now we have you justifying temple destruction.

Emphatically not. I'm only questioning the extent of their impact of Indian culture. I'll accept that it was as widespread as you say, and that this is tragic. I'll also continue to hold that this sort of thing isn't a particularly extraordinary aspect of human history.

Originally posted by aneeshm
In the first instance, Hindu kings were by no means beholden to their priests. The myth of Brahmin domination is just that - a myth. The kings did pretty much as they pleased. The duties of Brahmins were three-fold: as priests, as advisors, and as philosophers or religious leaders.

...

Why would a person from a nominally low caste want to set up a Hindu empire, and why would he trust Brahmins as his closest advisors, if caste was so rigid?

My point is simply that the caste system was entrenched aspect of medieval Hindu culture, and that neither the enlightened Hindu kings nor the intellectuals made any effort to remedy this. Do you dispute this? That these examples you cite stand out is testament to that.

You paint a picture of some sort of Utopia that was ruthlessly destroyed by barbarians.

Originally posted by aneeshm
Big, fat, blazing strawman. I never said ANYTHING of the sort. I just said they did not patronise it. Which is true - they did not patronise the orthodox form of music, which survives in the Carnatic form. But in this regard, I must admit that the Muslim influence did give rise to something new (if not necessarily better). We now have two traditions instead of one.

They did patronise it where they had influence, and in doing so, infused elements on their music into it.

Which was exactly my initial point: invaders come and go, and leave their mark. India has always been around as a distinct culture, and has taken in elements from outside, which has contributed to its vibrancy.

[Arrian]

I'll say this:

If you google "ancient China" or nearly any other major ancient civilization, you get more reliable-looking results than for ancient India.

-Arrian

[lord of the mark]

i am so happy to have stumbled on a discussion of the origins of Indian civilization, about which i have been so long curious.

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by aneeshm
Sanskrit never was, and never will be, an exclusively northern language.

That's true. But the northern-southern language division isn't just about script; the Southern languages have a completely different, non Indo-European core structure (though they do incorporate Sanskrit vocabulary).

[Arrian]

http://www.iranchamber.com/people/articles/aryan_people_origins.php

Of course, that site might be a little biased...

*snicker*

-Arrian

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Arrian

http://www.iranchamber.com/people/articles/aryan_people_origins.php

Of course, that site might be a little biased...

*snicker*

-Arrian

It might even be biased against what you're arguing.

[Arrian]

http://india_resource.tripod.com/aryan.html

That's a fairly interesting link, IMO.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

The opponents of the "Aryan invasion" theory do make a plausible argument about Europeans opportunistically siezing upon a psuedo-scientific theory (based on the the "Indo-European" language group) for their own political/ideological reasons.

It's not conclusive, but it's believeable.

-Arrian

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by LordShiva

The Dravidian civilization was not a closed system. They traded with Mesopotamia, Egypt, and all sorts of smaller tribes. I'd be surprised if they didn't know what horses were.

It is claimed by the proponents of the AIT, as a CENTRAL point of their claim, that is was due to the Dravidians' lack of knowledge of the use of the horse which led to their decline against the Aryans. This idea is completely shattered by those horse remains, and by the other evidence presented.

Originally posted by LordShiva

The vedic reference is interesting, but hardly clinching. The vedas weren't bodies of literature that were written in a day and then set aside, but continued to evolve after the advent of the Aryans in India.

That's patently impossible. I'll tell you why. The entire BASIS of the sacrificial religion which was the first stage of Hinduism was the infallibility and the unchanging nature of the Vedas. Entire lifetimes of priests were spent in simply preserving that knowledge. Nobody would DARE change even a single word. And even if one person did, nobody else would adopt it, and thus it would die out.

The central idea of the AIT proponents is that the Vedas describe a fight or struggle between the Aryans and Dravidians. Assuming that to be true, this means that it was apparently a civil war, and not an invasion, because the horse referred to is the Indian horse, so the Aryans were apparently Indians, who were fighting other Indians. This nullifies the racial as well as invasion aspect of the theory.

Another thing is the if the Vedas' geography is dated chronologically, they describe a migration from the East to the West, and not the other way around. This means that it was probably the reverse - they describe Indians fighting off invaders from Central Asia.

But the most likely and common-sense explanation, which seems not to have found much currency with either side, is that the Vedas are simply stories or myths, compendiums of tribal or racial memory, with no real historical significance, and thus we should not base our view of history on them.

Originally posted by LordShiva

This is a more plausible explanation for these "anomalies" than the assertion that the Aryans were indigenous, yet somehow managed to be of distinctly lighter skin than their neighbours, get their language and customs exported to Central Asia and the Middle East, and peacefully convince the Dravidians to migrate south.

Have you considered the possibility that it was the Indus valley people who were the original Aryans, who were forced to migrate further into south when the basis of their civilisation, the River Saraswati, dried up? That is another very plausible explanation.

Originally posted by LordShiva

Emphatically not. I'm only questioning the extent of their impact of Indian culture. I'll accept that it was as widespread as you say, and that this is tragic. I'll also continue to hold that this sort of thing isn't a particularly extraordinary aspect of human history.

Maybe I'm failing to describe to you how central the temple was. It wasn't just a place to go pray, as are most other religious buildings.

It was the centre of literary education, because the Brahmins taught there.

It was the centre of culture, because it acted as a place for the common people, who could not afford culture otherwise, to be exposed to drama, recital of the epics in the local language, or discourses by the learned based on Puranic or epic stories, all free of cost, because it afforded shelter to travelling scholars who did this as their duty. If a scholar wanted to travel from one royal court to another, he would find shelter in temples, where he would be requested to discourse to the people if he could. The larger temples also patronised dance and music, because they could afford it, and for the sake of their deity.

It was the centre of religion (obviously).

It was the centre of the community, because that was where the leaders and elders usually happened to meet (informally), and interact with other people from the village or town.

It was basically the centre of LIFE in a village, and its destruction symbolised the destruction of an entire way of life and all that it represented.

Originally posted by LordShiva

My point is simply that the caste system was entrenched aspect of medieval Hindu culture, and that neither the enlightened Hindu kings nor the intellectuals made any effort to remedy this. Do you dispute this? That these examples you cite stand out is testament to that.

The caste system was entrenched, but fluid. Entire castes could rise and fall in the hierarchy. This is not a defence of the system, but simply pointing out that it wasn't AS rigid as you make it out to be. For an excellent example, I point you to this speech by Arun Shourie (it is quite entertaining in its own right, and it is on the reservations issue, which is related to the topic at hand. It is in English, so everyone can enjoy it. It's quite funny and entertaining, too, so I'd recommend everyone to give it a watch.).

And a few medieval kings and intellectuals definitely did try to remedy it, but unfortunately, the system was far too entrenched to be reformed by one man. It has acquired a life of its own, and no one person could have unmade it.

But given time, it would have worked itself out of the system. I can say that with confidence, because the system is fundamentally incompatible with Indian philosophy. The effect of caste on Indian philosophy is absolutely nothing. Zilch. Nada. Each philosophical system begins with either consciousness, or the empirical world. Caste has no role to play ANYWHERE in these systems. When you read about the schools of philosophy in India, you realise that given a few hundred more years, the system would have slowly unravelled on its own, because it could not have found a justification within the Vedas OR the philosophical systems. And even if, in the exceeding unlikely scenario that it would have taken more than three hundred years, contact with the outside world would have speeded up its demise. But the enforced contact with, and subsequent retreat against, the Muslim invaders, made the system more rigid than it ever was before.

Originally posted by LordShiva

You paint a picture of some sort of Utopia that was ruthlessly destroyed by barbarians.

On the contrary. We were not perfect, by any standard. But the changes the Muslims brought were infinitely for the worse. So when you compare the time of their rule with what preceded it, you feel that the time before their coming was a utopia RELATIVE to the period of their rule. The coming of Islam not only left evils like caste untouched, it even excabarated them. And it introduced all sorts of other social ills, such as child marriage, and made Sati a real problem, whereas earlier it was extremely rare.

Originally posted by LordShiva

They did patronise it where they had influence, and in doing so, infused elements on their music into it.

Which was exactly my initial point: invaders come and go, and leave their mark. India has always been around as a distinct culture, and has taken in elements from outside, which has contributed to its vibrancy.

But the problem is, the Muslim invaders tried to destroy what was Indian, and replace it wholesale with Arabic and Persian culture. If culture is a number, then before the Muslims, we were at 1. The Muslims tried to subtract our one, then add their one. Ideally, it should have been that there should have been two traditions - the original and the hybrid. The invaders tried to simply destroy the indigenous. That's my grouse. The contribution bit is fine, though there wasn't much of that.


But when it comes to architecture, Shiva, you have to admit that Mughal architecture is but a poor attempt to ape the architecture of Isfahan. Google it up, and you'll see that I mean.

[Sandman]

I do not consider a forcedly bastardised culture a "vibrant" one. I'll be happy when Sanskrit is revived and resurrected and is used again as the language of literature, and Old India is reborn. Until then, it is but a phase of the cultural digestion of rubbish.

Then you will never be happy.

[aneeshm]

Originally posted by Sandman


Then you will never be happy.

You have no idea what is going on in India, do you? The movement is slow, but it is sure. Sanskrit is returning. Very, very slowly, but very, very surely. Link. Wiki Link.

I'll be happy in my fifties, maybe. But happy I will be in my lifetime.

[Arrian]

Originally posted by Sandman


Then you will never be happy.

QFT.

This yearning for the lost golden age (mythical, usually) is something you see in pretty much every culture. You can never go back. Trying now would result in a pale imitation (assuming at the outset that this golden age was really as golden as you may think).

More scholarly study of the Origins of Hindu Civilization (tm), on the other hand, with the result of gaining a better understanding of History... that's both a worthy goal and one that strikes me as attainable.

Then again, it won't be particularly useful in propping up a political agenda...

-Arrian