By propagating false narratives on Indian ancestry, IITs are damaging their position
Built on the site of an infamous detention center set up by the British government, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Kharagpur was the first IIT to be operational. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who addressed a memorable convocation at the IIT-Kharagpur in 1956, said: “Here is India’s outstanding monument in place of that Hijli Detention Camp, which represents India’s insistence, India’s The future is happening. This picture seems to me to be symbolic of the changes that are coming in India.” Despite criticism of encouraging brain drain and creating intense entry competition among school students, the roots of an unhealthy tutoring culture, India’s technical and science education of major IITs The system continues to have a transformative presence. Nehru was indeed right to say that IITs are becoming the future of India. But the strange thing is that IIT-Kharagpur is not for its role in shaping the future but for a particular social agenda. It is in discussion to distort our past in order to move forward.
an unscientific story
In its New Calendar for 2022, IIT-Kharagpur’s new Center of Excellence for the Indian Knowledge System An unscientific narrative on the beginnings of our ancestors is propagated. Title ‘Recovery of foundations of Indian knowledge systems’, this calendar presents a very confusing collage of symbols and images with clearly distorted ideas. The intention of the calendar is to establish an alternative premise that the Aryans, the bearers of Vedic culture, were indigenous to the Indus Valley and surrounding regions. This premise advances the theme that these people were the custodians of the Indus Valley Civilization which was active for more than 10,000 years and which eventually spread its cultural influence from India to the west. This is called ‘Out of India’ theory.
As historian Charles Allen points out in his book, such revisionism flies in the face of all evidence – archeological, archaeological, linguistic, zoological, botanical, geographical and religious. Evidence informs us that the civilizational beginnings of the pre-Indian state are linked to the Harappa, the earliest settlers, and a larger Indus Valley civilization whose culture spanned from 7,000 to 2,000 BCE. The remains of their settlements lie around the Indus river, parts of Kutch, Saurashtra and Balochistan and the Makran coast. Engaged in agriculture and trade, he was adept in designing well designed townships with a good system of water management. They used bullock carts. Primarily focused on farming, these communities gradually declined as a result of increasing aridity and declining summer rainfall.
Archaeological evidence also suggests that at the end of the Harappan period, the Rigvedic peoples entered the Indian subcontinent through present-day Iran and Afghanistan. These herding migrants and their grazing animals, including horses, came from the Eurasian steppes to the Indus Valley region, in batches, to mingle with the darker settlers of the Indus Valley. Although not an ‘invasion’ in the classical sense, as noted by the American archaeologist George Dales, “the Harappans did not end with the Aryan explosion, but by the whispers of the Indus migrant”. But the ‘in-group-out-group’ dynamics that may have played out in such a cultural landscape may have encouraged caste-based social hierarchies, allowing resource-rich newcomers to dominate and first settlers may be marginalized and possibly forced to migrate south. The results of excavations from Keezhari in Tamil Nadu provide evidence of an extended spread of non-Vedic culture to South India as far back as 2,200 years ago.
Recent archaeological studies give us a strong scientific basis for the theory of Aryan migration from the Eurasian steppes. For example, the mitochondrial DNA of some social groups in India (designated haplogroup R1a1a) share a common genetic paternal ancestry with that of Eastern Europeans. It has been suggested that haplogroup R1a1a mutated from haplogroup R1a in the Eurasian steppe about 14,000 years ago. Thus, these studies support the ‘out of the East European steppes’ theory. It also means that the original form of the Indo-European languages was first spoken in Eastern Europe, the ‘native’ homeland. It is possible that a group of nomads, who shared the genomic subclass R1a1a, left their homeland and migrated east towards the Caspian grasslands, where they tame horses, goats and dogs, and to nomadic life Learned to make chariots of necessary horses. Around 1,900 BC, these peoples broke up and one group moved towards what is now Iran, and the other towards India. Those who entered India around 1500 BCE established a major civilization in the North-West. By then, most of the older Harappans had either been marginalized or moved to parts of southern and central India and even Balochistan. The newly settled people, the so-called Aryans, who worshiped fire, were not builders like the Harappans, but they are likely to be better storytellers.
Two recently published scientific papers, reporting archaeological studies of early settlers from Central and South Asia, chart the genetic traces of hunter-gatherers, Iranian farmers and herders from the Caspian steppes, and show that they became builders. for how some of the world’s earliest civilizations may have been interconnected. Obtained from the skeleton of a woman from a 5,000-year-old Indus Valley Civilization settlement at Rakhigarhi village in Haryana’s Hisar district, the companion paper tracks the ancestry of people who settled in the Indus Valley. DNA from the skeleton “shows no traceable ancestry from steppe pastoralists or Anatolian and Iranian farmers, suggesting that farming in South Asia originated from local villagers rather than mass migration from the west”. This conclusion, along with the caveat that a single sample may not fully characterize the entire population, reinforces the prevailing belief on the origins of the Harappan settlers. There is also the possibility that there may be greater genetic similarity between the first settlers of Africa and the Harappans.
reason back
The January page of the IIT calendar begins with a statement: “The tributaries of the Indus mentioned in the Rigveda derive from the Shivalik ranges in the central-eastern Himalayas”. The Shivaliks are the lowest-elevation southern-most mountain ranges of the Himalayas from which no major rivers originate. If it is not a deliberate distortion for the ease of false messaging, this apparent lack of geographical understanding is baffling to pioneers in the study of Indian knowledge systems. The calendar-makers’ resort to confusing facts becomes clear in other pages. For example, as Meera Nanda pointed out, the idea of ’karmic’ vengeance and reincarnation is not part of the early Vedic tradition, but is derived from currents of Buddha-Jain thought that were later incorporated into the Upanishads.
If the IIT-Kharagpur 2022 calendar is an indication of how the Indian knowledge system is being discussed in our higher education centres, we need to be mindful of its impact on generations to come. Such a center indicates a retreat of logic in education and an independent inquiry.
CP Rajendran is an assistant professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. thoughts are personal
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