What do Marilyn Monroe and the Indus civilisation have in common? The fact that in the press, factoids circulate ceaselessly about them. ‘Factoid’ was coined in 1973 by Norman Mailer in his photo-biography of Marilyn Monroe to describe speculations that are repeated so often that they seem to be eventually taken for hard fact.
The factoids that the Indus civilisation has spawned are not as spectacular as those that were shaped around the seductive Monroe. Yet, they are as insidious. Several are evident in the worries expressed by Jagmohan, former Minister of Tourism and Culture, to the Prime Minister (A search for our lost cities, May 7) about an archaeological project conceived by him that has since been shelved.
Much remains to be salvaged from the wreckage of the ruins of Indus cities, we are told. Jagmohan’s sentiments are impeccable on this count and would be accepted by all. The flaws flow out of the objectives that would direct such work if the former minister had his way.
To begin with, one purpose in excavating Indus cities under this project would have been to establish that there was no Aryan invasion. Jagmohan evidently thinks that archaeologists, like lawyers, ought to operate by an adversary method. But what is appropriate to a courtroom is inappropriate to field research. First, research has to be genuinely interrogative. Being so certain about the result before the project can even take off would not improve our understanding either of the Aryans or of Harappan cities. Second, the Aryan invasion itself is best described as a factoid. While it continues to be regularly regurgitated in the media, most right-thinking scholars no longer believe in it. These range from those who are White and of Western origin to dark-skinned Delhi University types. The issue today is really to explain the presence of an Indo-European language in early India, provided the idea of such a language based on ‘comparative philology’ is independently valid. Obsessive refutation of the myth of an Aryan invasion will not illuminate this. But it will help prolong the life of the myth itself.
Spending public money on such counterfactual scholarship is unwise for another reason. Any research objective must be operational — it must be resolvable in empirical terms. How can you disprove the presence of what Jagmohan calls “light-skinned nomadic tribes” by digging lost cities? Ancient skeletons are entirely useless for establishing pigmentation. To seek, therefore, to prove or disprove the colour of the skin of the putative Aryans is unlikely to end in a victory for wisdom. In any case, all biologically modern humans came out of Africa. Once we accept that, the Aryans will cease to be a national priority. Indian history, in fact, will gain enormously if we stop searching for the Aryans — in ancient ‘lost’ cities or among those who think that they are the direct descendants of those who peopled them.
Another factoid that forms a premise of the ‘lost cities’ project is that early research on the Indus civilisation, conducted when India was a British colony, was preoccupied with the presence of a foreign hand there. Jagmohan’s project, on the other hand, would establish the true nature of the Indus civilisation by disproving this, especially the views of archaeologists who first excavated Indus cities, who mistakenly believed that these cities had Mesopotamian roots.
{{/usCountry}}Another factoid that forms a premise of the ‘lost cities’ project is that early research on the Indus civilisation, conducted when India was a British colony, was preoccupied with the presence of a foreign hand there. Jagmohan’s project, on the other hand, would establish the true nature of the Indus civilisation by disproving this, especially the views of archaeologists who first excavated Indus cities, who mistakenly believed that these cities had Mesopotamian roots.
{{/usCountry}}Now either I’ve read wrong history or those who advised Jagmohan read selectively. Actually, the officers of the British raj who excavated Mohenjodaro and Harappa emphasised the civilisational autarky of the Indus region. One only has to look at the statement that is most nearly immediate to the event of discovery itself. This is the announcement in 1924 in the Illustrated London News, which declared that “this forgotten civilisation, of which the excavations of Harappa and Mohenjodaro have now given us a first glimpse, was developed in the Indus valley itself, and just as distinctive of that region as the civilisation of the pharaohs was distinctive of the Nile”. It then went on to state that “there is no reason to assume that the culture of this region was imported from other lands, or that its character was profoundly modified by outside influences”. Factual integrity is what all good archaeologists and historians feel in their bones. But factoids probably are better for promoting projects of dubious relevance.
While pages can be filled up with more fallacies, it is not my purpose here to catalogue them. There are, though, some simple propositions that may be remembered in relation to this dead project. What the former minister appears to be advocating is that field work support a particular reading of religious texts. This is reminiscent of research pioneered in the 19th century. It would be unfortunate if this became the priority of the ASI today. Moreover, once we read the Indus script, scholars can decide on the Indus language; in the meanwhile, attempts to read the Rgveda in Indus archaeology are not academically testable.
Above all, what needs reiteration is that the past would cease to be worthy of study if it was assumed to be a mirror version of the present. A project whose design predisposes researchers to show that India as it exists today was already a reality in the 3rd millennium BC is not worth pursuing. Any research, in fact, which is aimed at finding facts for one kind of argument usually promotes partisan propaganda. It does not inspire honest scholarship.
(The writer is Professor of History, Delhi University)