SmartSurat  #  Hinduism

The demise of the civilization

The famous archeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, one of the excavators of the Indus sites, is immortalized on film giving a graphic description of how the cities of the Indus valley were overcome by Aryan invaders from the north - people being cut down as they fled from the marauding armies of the aggressors. But it is now known that the true picture is somewhat different. While it is true to say that waves of immigrants from the north settled in the Indus valley regions somewhere around the middle of the second millennium, and eventually extended their influence to all parts of India, these Aryans, as they called themselves, arrived at a time when the Indus valley civilization. had long been in decline.        What caused the demise of the Harappan culture is difficult to say; there may have been a variety of reasons and it is perhaps wrong to look for a single cause. Moreover, there may have been different causes at different sites: Mohenjo-daro and Lothal, for example, may have suffered extensive flooding. Indeed, Mohenjo-daro is now thirty-nine feet below the level of the river plain. We know that the level of the Indus rose at Mohenjo-daro because new houses were built on top of old ones, and streets on top of streets, to nine levels. Such flooding may have been the result of geological disturbances and must surely have caused a decline in important agricultural land along the river plain. But on the other hand, there must have been a certain amount of desiccation, a gradual drying up of the land and climate. Seals and figurines show that jungle animals like the tiger and rhinoceros inhabited the area and this suggests that in ancient times there was an abundant rainfall. But today Mohenjo-daro has usually less than ten centimetres a year in rainfall, so a gradual process of desiccation is evident. And considering the deforestation which must have taken place in order to produce the kiln-fired bricks for the cities, the Indus valley people themselves must have contributed rapidly to this process.        Then, too, there is some evidence of over-population at the end of the Indus valley period. The culture must have degenerated somewhat because the houses became squashed and small, the population becoming so dense that earlier spaciousness of planning was abandoned. There was, in short, an urban breakdown, a lower grade of life, and urban pollution. Herman rather aptly states:        All of this surely made the culture ripe for Hooding, invasion, and conquest, if, indeed, there was anything left to flood, invade, or conquet.      But perhaps Mortimer Wheeler's words should, not be entirely dismissed. The Aryans referred to the strongholds which Indra their god destroyed so there are some suggestions that the Aryan invasion was not a peaceful one. The forty skeletons which were found unburied and haphazardly fallen at Mohenjo-daro were one of the main sources of evidence for Sir Mortimer Wheeler's claims for an aggressive invasion, but they do not seem to have belonged to the appropriate level of occupation to match a mid-second millennium invasion. The Aryans called the natives of the Indus valley asuras ' demons ', dasyus ' robbers ', dasas ' slaves ' and pasus ' two-footed animals ', criticizing their flat noses, thick lips and dark skins. These were probably the Proto-Dravidian strand of the Harappan culture. Other strands seemed to have incurred less criticism, but it is clear from references such as these that the settlement of the invaders was in many ways a hostile one. So what can be concluded from the material presented here in relation to the beliefs and practices of modern Hiriduism? The Aryans brought with them a very different type of culture and different religious beliefs and practices, but it would be erroneous to suppose that these replaced the earlier ones. Rarely in Hinduism are aspects of culture lost, they are simply accommodated alongside what is new. It is likely that the religious customs of the Indus valley, in particular worship of the Mother Goddess, were maintained at the village level though it would be many centuries before we have written evidence of such practices. The village economy remained one which was based on agriculture, and fertility would have been a concept which would have influenced religious practice considerably, as it does today. The emphasis on reproductivity, albeit more metaphysically conceived of in later Hinduism, probably owes its origins to the survival of such ideas in the ancient village cultures. By 1000 BCE the sage Agastya is credited with having Aryanized the indigenous population; but the converse was also true, for many of the concepts of the Indus valley people are consonant with, or similar to, later Hindu ideas, and must have survived because they were partly accommodated by the Aryans themselves: the influence was mutual. If we look for the origins of Hinduism we would have to see them in this kind of complex accommodation of ideas, but particularly emerging from the ancient Indus valley culture on the one hand and the Aryan beliefs and practices on the other.