Padma Bhushan B.B. Lal expressed his inability to join the conference and instead presented his address via video. He discusses in detail observations from geological, literary, archaeological disciplines on the theory of aryan invasion. Dr. Lal traces the issue to the ad hoc dating of the Vedas to 1200 B.C.E by Max Mueller, even though his methodology was challenged by his contemporaries including Goldstucker, Whitney, Wilson. Dr. Lal feels it’s a pity that scholars are treating 1200 B.C.E as a lakshmana rekha despite Muller’s recanting of his own date as the effects of this dating of the Vedas have been disastrous. When the Harappan civilization was discovered and dated to 3rd millennium B.C. in the 1920s, people wrongly declared it as non-Vedic based on the 1200 B.C.E dating of Muller. It was the scholar Wheeler who discovered a fort at Harappa in 1946 and wrongly observed that the Rig Vedic god Indra, as an Aryan, destroyed the Harappan civilization. Wheeler wrongly interpreted the skeletons found at Mohenjo-daro to support his thesis, even though there is no evidence at all to support the idea that an invasion took place to destroy the Harappan sites. Hemphill in his 1991 paper Harappa Excavations, has clearly established that no new people at all arrived between 4500 - 800 B.C., disproving the entire idea of an invasion.
The claim that Harappans were Dravidian-speakers is further wrong, says Dr. Lal, as not a single Harappan or Harappan-related settlement has been unearthed in the Dravidian speaking southern India, neither is there any Dravidian river name or place in the once Harappan area. Once invasion was disproved, Romila Thapar and her follower R.S. Sharma continued with the bogey of migration instead of invasion and held onto the idea that the migrants were pastoralists who came from Bactria - Margiana. An in-depth analysis of the BMAC people shows that they were far from the nomads Thapar and et al would like one to believe to be the progenitors of the Rig Vedic people. Since the Aryans were neither invaders nor immigrants, in order to settle the question if they were indigenous, one needs to date the Rig Veda correctly. It is in this context that the river Sarasvati’s historicity becomes crucial. The river Sarasvati has been described as a mighty, fully flowing river in the Rig Veda. Radiocarbon dating has shown the abandonment of settlement sites at Kalibangan in the Harappan area to around 2000 B.C.E, thus giving us timelines to work with.
There are three major challenges raised against the Vedic = Harappan equation: 1) the Vedic people were nomads whereas the Harappans were urbanites 2) The Vedic people knew the horse while the Harappans did not 3) the Vedic people used spoked wheels but the Harappans did not know of the spoked wheels. The response to the first challenge is that, the vedic people were not nomads. The Rig Veda speaks of several instances referring to regular settlements including forts. The Vedic people were traders, including across the seas, had kings and political systems. On the second count, Mackay in 1938 and Wheeler in 1968 have both confirmed the presence of jawbones of horses among the skeletal remains at Mohenjo-daro. A terracotta horse figurine has been found in Lothal as well. Even on the third count of the spoked wheel, terracotta models of spoked wheels have been unearthed at Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi, Banawali and so on, thus disproving all the challenges posed to the identity of the Harappans as Vedic people. Dr. Lal also presents his views on the use of genetics in the debate. He cites passages from the Baudhayana Srautasutra and other archaeological, epigraphic and literary evidence from Iran, Iraq and Turkey to show that the Vedic people in fact migrated westward in the 2nd millennium BCE. Dr. Lal ends his address with the urgent reminder that the NCERT books need urgent correction so that the colonial biases and theories are replaced by authentic, fact based history regarding the particular issue.
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