Early Indians

Title: Early Indians – The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From

Author: Tony Joseph

Publisher: Juggernaut, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9789386228987

Pages: 262

Two terms that refer to linguistic groups are widely misunderstood in India and taken to be racial denominators that split the country into two demographic zones in the north and the south. We know them as ‘Aryan’ and ‘Dravidian’. The former is broadly associated with the north and the latter with the south, more commonly in the state of Tamil Nadu. Scholars are divided on the issue of paternity of the Harappan Civilization (2500 – 1900 BCE) that marked the foundation of later socio-religious development in India. A few scholars argue that Harappa was made possible by Aryan effort and the Vedic literature was composed there. Dravidian scholars indignantly claim that the Harappan culture was a Dravidian one which was destroyed by the Aryans who then set the inhabitants on an exodus to the south. Literary, archeological and epigraphic evidence could not break the stalemate even now. This book comes up with genetic data to finally decide what is what. Tony Joseph is a columnist and contributor to leading newspapers and magazines. He is also a former editor of Businessworld’.No formal training in history or archeology is mentioned in any of the personal introductions of the author found online.

Joseph banks on the recently acquired ability of scientific establishment to successfully extract and analyse DNA from ancient fossils and map its genome. This helps to compare it with modern DNA and find out the era in which they diverged genetically. It has also produced some truly astounding conclusions. It is gratifying to learn that DNA evidence is conclusive that humans originated in Africa and all of them now living outside that continent are descendants of a single population of migrants who moved out of Africa to Asia around 70,000 years ago. A group among them reached India too and the author calls them ‘First Indians’. They mixed with later entrants but serve as bedrock of genetic ancestry to all modern Indians. But there are closer direct descendants to them, with little mixing with later societies. The Onge tribe in Little Andamans, numbering about 100 souls, is the closest relative of the First Indians. However, the author suggests to Indians a simple method to physically view the other descendants of the First Indians – look at a mirror. Genetic data brings to light more interesting facts about the ancestry of modern Indians. 70-90 per cent of people in the current Indian population originated from a single woman among the First Indians who arrived 65,000 years ago, while only 10-40 per cent can trace their descent to a single man in that society. This means that most of the later migrations were sexually biased towards the male.

India witnessed further migrations, but the author identifies the influx of Iranian agriculturists from the Zagros Mountains in 7000-3000 BCE as the first notable wave after the event that happened 65,000 years ago. These people (Joseph calls them Dravidians) introduced the art of agriculture in India. The earliest agricultural experiment took place in a 200-hectare area in the remote village of Mehrgarh in Balochistan around 7000-2600 BCE. The next wave occurred in the interval 2000-1000 BCE. Multiple waves of steppe pastoralists calling themselves Aryans from central Asia brought Indo-European languages and new cultural practices to south Asia. If the author is to be believed, these two migrations account for the ancestry of 95 per cent of the modern Indian population. Scientific studies repeatedly show that the genetic imprint of the First Indians is carried by all castes and tribes of the country in all regions and all linguistic groups. This is unique to India in the world. The author is careful not to antagonize powerful public opinion. Instead of using misnomers like Aryan and Dravidian, he uses expressions such as Ancestral North Indians (ANI) and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) where in fact he should have plainly stated that we are the result of the admixture of the First Indians and West Eurasians seen in varying percentages among the two groups.

This book upholds the scholarly consensus that Aryans did not destroy the Harappan Civilization. During 1900-1300 BCE, in the Late Harappan period, the civilization declined and eventually disappeared. This was primarily due to unusually long spells of drought probably caused by changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulations. This severely affected other civilizations in Egypt, West Asia and China as well. The prolonged drought ultimately made monsoonal rivers go dry or become seasonal, affecting habitability along their courses. There is no archeological evidence that the Aryans destroyed the Harappan Civilization. On the other hand, there are ample indicators that they merged into it. This is clear from the reducing discrepancy between the Vedic texts and Harappan Civilization over time. The later the Vedic text, there is more likelihood of finding connections to Harappan cultural heritage. The author also lists out a few examples. In another section, he argues that after 2000 BCE, when the Late Harappan Civilization was already in decline, steppe pastoralists who took Indo-European languages to Europe reached India bringing with them an early version of Sanskrit and related cultural concepts and practices such as ritual sacrifices. These newly arrived Indo-European language speakers called themselves Aryans (p.142).

Contrary to the claims of the Dravidian political movement that they are the original inhabitants of India, this book affirms that they too have come to India as migrants, but a few millennia before the Aryans did. Dravidian languages show clear linguistic affinity to the Elamite language spoken in ancient Iran. This book makes a delightful comparison of ten common words in Proto-Elamite and modern Dravidian languages which are strikingly similar. Joseph surmises that a band of herders from southern and central Zagros region migrated to south Asia as speakers of the Proto-Elamite language sometime after 7000 BCE, mixed with the First Indians and this new, mixed population sparked an agricultural revolution in the north-western region of India and then went on to create the Harappan Civilization over the next few millennia (p.136). Hence it is definitely Dravidian.

The author makes a cursory analysis of the caste system and arrives at a year in which it solidified with an exercise that is mostly conjecture. Aryans originated in the Eurasian steppes around 2500 BCE as seen by the presence of haplogroup R1a among the ancient DNA collected from these regions. Many Indians still carry this unique variation in their DNA. This R1a group is reported to be having about twice as high an incidence rate among Brahmins than other lower castes. Genetic studies show extensive admixture between different Indian populations between 2200 BCE and 100 CE. This is indicative of exogamy and absence of endogamous castes. The mixing came to an abrupt end sometime around 100 CE. It is guessed that a new ideology, which had gained ground and power, imposed on the society new social restrictions and a new way of life, possibly in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Mauryan Empire. The caste system had arrived in this way and the author mocks that it cut the country into ‘tukde tukde’ (pieces), borrowing the vocabulary of television news channel discussions in 2018.

The book’s content is very logically argued and pleasing to read. However, it relies too much on genetics research papers that have not yet received wide acceptance. Joseph himself admits that such papers often show contradictory findings (p.11). He also concedes that even in the most professional of settings, personal preferences can play a part in how research findings are interpreted (p.11). Judging from the author’s remarks in the book, it is fairly evident that he has built an edifice that harbours his pre-existing convictions on the genetic development of Indian populations. The research that had gone into the text does not appear to be so deep, as some best seller books such as Harari’s Sapiens are listed as references and material for further reading. All in all, this book is a good effort to buttress the left-liberal outlook of Indian history. It is by no means impartial.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Runaways

Title: The Runaways

Author: Fatima Bhutto

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670088515

Pages: 422

Apart from the religious divide that separated the newly born states of India and Pakistan in 1947, a distinct contrast in the running of both countries was seen right from the beginning. Even though Pakistan professed its adoption of democracy, what they had in effect was a form of feudal aristocracy polished for popular consumption and easy digestibility for the liberals. A few super-rich families controlled the destiny of the country, with their strangulating hold on the all-powerful army and bureaucracy. The Bhuttos were one such family that once controlled almost half the cultivable land of the southern province of Sindh. Fatima Bhutto is the daughter of Murtaza Bhutto, niece of Benazir Bhutto and granddaughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. She is an easily recognizable Pakistani writer and her memoir titled ‘Songs of Blood and Sword’ was reviewed earlier here. In this book, which is a novel, Bhutto presents a tragic sequence of events that drew three impressionable Muslim youths into jihad sponsored by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Bhutto’s selection of the cast is admirably representative. All the three – two boys and a girl – have lost their roots in the society they live and manage to push a forlorn existence just by doing nothing worthwhile. One is a second-generation Indian Muslim boy living in England, who is enraged by the apathy shown by the British people to the immigrants. His father migrated to England early on and was quite content with having received admission into the society. But the second generation wants assimilation, which is not forthcoming. The other boy is the son of a Pakistani aristocrat who lives in Karachi in an artificial bubble, insulated from the scum of the city by posh homes, elite restaurants and luxury cars. Lack of proper guidance leads the boy to fall for shallow relationships which is taken very seriously by him, thereby becoming a puppet of fate in the larger scheme of things. The third character is a Christian girl in the Karachi slums. Being penniless and belonging to a minority community means hell in Pakistan. After recurring abuse and humiliation by her peers, the girl and her brother assume Muslim names at first and then have to convert to that faith, just in order to obtain the status of a human being that is automatically granted to citizens anywhere in the world. All three discontented youths end up in the lure of Islamic terrorism like moths fluttering into the flame. Bhutto has maintained a very relevant and convincing plot in the novel.

The author’s credentials as a secular intellectual is impeccable, yet she has provided considerable leeway to sympathizers of jihadism. All educated Muslims appear to be nostalgic about the Moorish kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula which Islam had won and conquered in the first century after the religion’s birth. But they were defeated and evicted in the fifteenth century by Christian forces. The fact that not a trace of Moorish culture is seen today in Iberia is mourned even by moderate Muslims. They forget that the Islamic invaders had done exactly the same thing in the lands that fell under their horses’ hoofs. Hints that suggest cultural alienation of youths drive them to radicalism look like apology to jihadism. There are Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish migrants living in Europe who are also subjected to the same treatment, but they don’t queue up to join terrorists. The whites are accused of not being able to understand the migrants and their struggles. This may be true, but then again, they didn’t force the migrants to leave their home country in the first place!

The ISIS terrorists shocked the world through their explicit video clips of beheadings, shootings and burnings alive. They have proved themselves to be inhuman monsters who don’t deserve an iota of mercy or empathy from the civilized world. However, this book portrays them as excitable teenagers who anguish over the low speed of their data connection on their mobile phones in the middle of the desert. All of them are addicts of social media, which again makes them identifiable with the other youth.

The author’s observation that the ‘only way to look at powerful societies is through the people they excluded’ is prescient and original. So is the wry comment that the youths’ life was marked only by its unremarkability. The book contains such nice references readers can carry in their minds. The author also paints a colourful picture of liberated Pakistani women in England and the moral wreck caused by Birmingham grooming gangs in which gangs of Pakistani men and boys sexually abused British women in a systematically organized manner.

Bhutto makes a dig at India when she says that ‘the bacterial disease of trachoma, spread by flies was eradicated in most of the world, even India, but was still knocking around in Turkey’ (p.158). This is mild and pardonable, coming from a person whose grandfather was supposedly willing to eat grass to have a nuclear bomb to match India and to fight it for a thousand years. However, the irony of his judicial murder committed by his own countrymen within a decade of this speech is profound, which displays the insignificance of Pakistan’s politicians when the army is poised against them. This novel is structured in a descriptive style, with the author’s presence felt in every page. This makes the story unfold in a rather forced way as the author never recedes into the background. This plan leaves the plot with too few conversations between characters. A strong argument against this work is the humanization of inhuman terrorists. She paints them in so casual a tone that a comparison is unwittingly made by readers to William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. It tells the story of a group of children who get trapped in an island by shipwreck. At first, they form a disciplined organisation to arrange efforts to get the attention of passing ships. But as time goes on, hope fades and despair sets in, making their descent into the abyss of barbarism. Reading about the radicalization of two innocent youths as they walk on a mission to cross the Iraqi desert reminds one of Golding’s masterpiece.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Story of Philosophy

Title: The Story of Philosophy – The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers from Plato to John Dewey

Author: Will Durant

Publisher: Unknown, 1933 (First published 1926)

ISBN: 9780671739164 (typical)

Pages: 543

The term ‘philosophy’ has something repulsive in the nature it sounds for most of us mortals. That is because it is most of the time mixed with obscure metaphysics that lives only in the abstract domain. This book was with me unopened for about 25 years. But when the unexpected Covid lockdown dried up my reservoir of books, there was no other option than seeking refuge in the lap of the good old dusty volume sitting in the corner of my bookshelf. It took much time to complete, but now I am not so averse to philosophy. I don’t pretend that I have understood it all, but what I had assimilated after reading the book has spawned a new respect for philosophy. Philosophy is in fact organized thinking about the fundamental nature of the world, society and man. Queries on god and soul originate as a corollary to the serious researcher, but there is enough to satisfy an inquisitive lay reader in this book which presents the great philosophers from Plato to John Dewey and the system of knowledge they promulgated. Philosophy attempts to coordinate the real in the light of the ideal. It begins when one learns to doubt, particularly to doubt one’s cherished beliefs, dogmas and axioms. Will Durant was an American writer, historian and philosopher who was best known for his work ‘The Story of Civilization’ in eleven volumes. ‘The Story of Philosophy’ is widely described as a groundbreaking work that helped to popularize philosophy.

Durant chalks out his role as a ground-breaking exercise. The difference between philosophy and science is first of all clearly established. Philosophy deals with problems that are not yet open to the methods of science like good and evil, order and freedom. As soon as a field of enquiry yields knowledge susceptible to exact formulation, it is called science. The role of an interpreter to smoothen the ride of the novices is also spelt out. If knowledge becomes too great for communication, it would degenerate into scholasticism and mankind would slip into a new age of faith, worshipping its new priests at a respectful distance. A teacher mediates between the specialist and the nation, learning the specialist’s technical jargon and breaks down the barriers between knowledge and need. The author dons that mantle for us.

Of the varied characteristics of the philosophers mentioned in the book, the readers can quickly follow the arguments of the ancient masters such as Plato and Aristotle than more recent ones. Plato had such an avid concern for philosophy that he wanted it to be taught first only after the student has reached 30 years of age; that too, after eliminating a great many through a selection process. The philosophers were never fond of socialism and would have recoiled in horror at the thought of ‘simplifying’ their work for the consumption of the masses like what this book does. Aristotle had a far-reaching writ in philosophy through his thoughts. Many of the indispensable terms we now use for philosophical thought such as faculty, maxim, mean, category and energy etc. were minted in Aristotle’s mind. With his death, the world awaited the resurrection of philosophy for a thousand years. His works were translated by Nestorians into Syriac in fifth century CE and thence into Arabic and Hebrew in the tenth century. By the year 1225, its Latin translations were ready, thereby making them accessible to Europe. Crusaders brought back more accurate copies of works. With the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Greek scholars of the city brought further Athenian treasures with them, when they fled from the besieging Turks.

The legacy of Aristotle reigned supreme through the Middle Ages till it was challenged by Francis Bacon. He resolved to set philosophy into a more fertile path, to turn it from scholastic disputation to the illumination and increase of human good. As with other philosophers, the democratic spirit did not appeal to Renaissance thinkers as well. Bacon distrusts people, who were in his day without access to education. Philosophers pined for an aristocracy which was entitled to rule. Plato had even called for a philosopher king.

The turf of philosophy too witnessed the transition of economic and political processes from feudal aristocracy to the rule of the middle class. Voltaire and Rousseau were the two voices that signaled this process. The first stirrings of dethronement of kings from history were seen in Voltaire’s philosophy of history in its attempt to trace the streams of natural causation in the development of European mind. The nineteenth century saw monarchy give way to universities as the asylum of philosophers.

Nietzsche’s philosophy was said to be the theoretical bedrock of autocratic polities of the Nazis and Fascists. Durant gives a faithful narrative of the German scholar’s thought that is sure to upset a modern mind steeped in liberal ideology. Nietzsche argued unblinkingly for the elite among the elite. Because of democracy and Judeo-Christian morals, the strong are now ashamed of their strength and begin to seek reasons for their prominence rather than asserting it unhesitatingly. The whole morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful only to the herd. The formula for societal decay is that the virtues proper to the herd infecting the leaders and breaking them into common clay. Nietzsche also advocates the rearing of a class of supermen to rule the society. The superman is a superior individual rising out of mass mediocrity by deliberate breeding and careful nurture. They must have good birth in a noble family. Intellect alone does not enable and an element of heredity is also accounted for. They are to be subjected to severe schooling where perfection will be extracted as a matter of course. A man so born and bred would be beyond good and evil. Other people should serve the superman. For Nietzsche, war is an admirable remedy for peoples that are growing weak. War and universal military service are the antidotes to democratic effeminacy. No wonder he was anathema to the progressive mind of the twentieth century.

A great drawback of the book is that it is confined to Western philosophy with not even an aerial survey of Indian and Chinese philosophical systems. This is especially jarring as the author finds Indian influence in Spinoza’s remarks such as ‘the greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole nature’. The misogyny of the reputed philosophers will surprise modern readers. Schopenhauer’s conviction that the most distinguished intellects among the whole [feminine] sex have never managed to produce a single achievement in the fine arts that is really genuine and original; or given to the world any work of permanent value in any sphere (p.343) is a representative sample written in the latter half of nineteenth century. The author also tries to train the readers in properly appreciating philosophy. You should not read a book of philosophy all at once, but in small portions at many sittings. And having finished it, consider that you have begun to understand it. Read then some commentary. Finally, read the book again which will feel like a new one. When you’ve finished it, you will remain forever a lover of philosophy (p.170).

Durant has followed as witty a narrative as a book of philosophy can afford. However, I don’t claim that I enjoyed it, though it is equally true that I don’t repent it either. Such books mark a milestone in your reading life rather than providing a quick dose of fleeting pleasure. I regard completing this great work the same as my ‘conquest’ of Arnold Toynbee’s ‘A Study of History’ in eleven volumes (reviewed earlier). This particular volume was especially difficult with its very small typeface for the main text and the still smaller quotes and foot notes.

The book is highly recommended for serious readers.

Rating: 4 Star