By Koenraad Elst
Many northwestern tribes were are at war with Vedic kingdoms from the rest of India, similar to Pakistan's position in today's time.
Note: Some faulty terminology has been edited but everything else is the same.
Introduction
The three most famous sculptures from Mohenjo Daro, on the Sindhu/Indus
river, seem ill-chosen to represent the Pakistani publicity campaign
“5000 years of Pakistan”. The “king-priest” apparently is an officiant
of a stellar cult, and at any rate of a cult other than Islam, so
according to the Pakistani state ideology, raison d’être for
Pakistan’s very existence, he was a leading figure in a false religion
belonging to Jahiliyya, the “age of ignorance”. Like the seated yogi
surrounded by animals, “Śiva Paśupati”, he must be burning in hell now.
As for the “dancing girl”, stark naked and in a defying pose, in today’s
Pakistan she would be stoned to death right away.
And yet, that Pakistani slogan does make sense. Bear with me, as I will
take the reader through a convoluted array of scriptural and historical
data, and you will see why this conclusion is anything but far-fetched.
Indeed, it is inevitable.
Foreign
The Northwest has always had a negative connotation in the Vedic tradition. Thus, R. Siddhantashastree (1978: History of the Pre-Kali-Yuga India, Delhi: Inter-India Publications, p.11) writes:
“The valley of the five tributaries of the Indus had always been held as
an unholy region because of its occupation by a non-Aryan tribe
antagonistic to the civilized Aryans until the time of Sambarana, (...)
the king of Hastinapura belonging to the Lunar dynasty. He was the first
Aryan to settle in the valley after driving away the aboriginal
non-Aryans to a considerable distance.”
The latter sentence suggests a concession to the Aryan Invasion Theory
(AIT) by positing an antagonism between “Aryans” and “aboriginals”,
contrary to the Puranic narrative revaluated by the same author, which
has the Aryans come from inner India to this peripheral zone and then to
Central Asia. This simply exemplifies the confusion regarding Aryan
origins. Then again, perhaps it is the reader who is misled by this
received wisdom while the author has a different scenario in mind: the
Aryans as natives of a part of India, who came as conquerors to subdue the natives of other parts of the Indian subcontinent, notably the Northwest.
As Shrikant Talageri (The Rigveda, an Historical Analysis, and The Rigveda and the Avesta, the Final Analysis, Delhi: Aditya Prakashan 2000 c.q. 2008) has argued, the ancient Vedic suspicion towards the Northwest is a strong argument against the AIT. Knowing the Brahmanistic veneration for origins, they should have treated the region of their provenance far more positively. Anyway, we note that Siddhantashastree situates this anti-Northwest attitude already in the pre-Vedic age, in the very beginning of Aryan history.
Battle of the Ten Kings
By the time the Vedic seers start composing their hymns, though, the
Northwest is already populated by cognate tribes speaking a Eurasian
("Indo-European") dialect: first, the Druhyu tribe, still remembered in the Rg-Veda as a defeated enemy of the Vedic Pūru tribe, but largely already emigrated to Afghanistan and beyond; then the Anu
tribe, the direct enemy confronted by the Vedic people themselves at
the time the hymns were being composed. Though speaking related
dialects, then probably still mutually understandable, they come into
the Vedic horizon as enemies, as harbingers of evil. They add to the region’s negative aura.
Both the successive enemies, from the Druhyu and the Anu tribe, attack the Vedic Pūru tribe from the Northwest. A confederacy led by the Anu tribe comes to confront the Vedic king Sudās
in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the foremost historical event in the
Ṛg-Veda (7:18-33-83). Unexpectedly, they suffer complete defeat and
relocate to Afghanistan. In the names of the tribes and kings, we
recognize Iranic (and not Dravidian) names, and in their religion, we
recognize the main traits of Mazdeism. The enemies are said to be
“without Indra” and “without the Devas”, who were indeed
demonized in Mazdeism; and “without fire-sacrifice”, because in
Mazdeism, fire is so sacred that one shouldn’t pollute it by throwing
things into it. It seems that then already, near the beginning of Vedic
history, Mazdeism had its distinctive features.
This is all the more remarkable because this was even before Zarathuštra,
the supposed reformer who brought these traits into being. Some three
generations later, another battle confirms the division of power and
territory. In that more even battle, Ṛjāśva, descendant of Vṛṣagira (hence the “Vārṣāgira battle”), and Sahadeva, descendent of Sudās, face the Iranic king who is remembered in history through the mentions and praise he receives in his court priest Zarathuštra’s own hymns: Kavi Vištāspa. Both parties are mentioned in the Veda 1:100, 1:122) and the Avestā.
The proverbial demons, the Asuras (comprehensively discussed in Hale, Wash Edward: Asura in Early Vedic Religion, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1986, and in Krishna, Nanditha: The Book of Demons, Penguin, Delhi 2014 (2007)), originally indicate the class of gods preferentially worshipped by the Anu tribe, but also by the first Vedic seers. Varuṇa, god of the night sky with its orderly succession of constellations, hence god of the world order (ṛta/aša, seen in Persian names like Artaxerxes) is an Asura, a “lord” or “mighty one”. The Iranic, who often replaced /s/ with /h/, called him Ahura Mazda, “Lord Wisdom”. After the Iranic peoples had demonized the Devas/Daēvas, the Indo-Aryans started to demonize the Asuras, and Varuṇa gradually fell into disuse, even if by no means as steeply demonized as Indra by the Mazdeans. At any rate, Vedism and Mazdeism conceived of one another as antagonistic, much as so-called "Hinduism" and Islam do today.
In theological respect, the Iranic religion Mazdeism has often been considered monotheistic, and in popular publications this account still persists. This was not entirely correct (SkjaervØ, Prods Oktor: “Zarathustra: a Revolutionary Monotheist?”, p. 317-350, in Pongratz-Leisten, Beate: Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake IN 2011), it remained a polytheism, and Zarathuštra with his hyperfocus on one god was strictly speaking a “henotheist”, and hardly representative for the common religion. But it was sufficiently close. The Persians became the saviours of the Israelites with their budding monotheism, their preferred god Varuṇa was the moralist in the Indo-Iranic pantheon (as is apparent from RV 7:86), a bit like the Christian god, and the idea of exalting a single god so much above the others shows a would-be monotheist urge. All this allows for the conclusion that Islamic monotheism is but a radicalization of Zarathuštra’s henotheism. His religion, and possibly his personal religious dissent, was at any rate sufficiently different from the Vedic religion to be thematized as a factor in the long-drawn-out conflict described in the Ṛg-Veda.
So, Pakistan, which has a Persianized form of Hindui -Lashkari- as national language, can really be said to be the heir of the proto-Iranic tribes living in that same territory in the Vedic age, or at least to fulfil the same antagonistic role in the Brahmanistic worldview.
Other considerations
The epics give even more flesh to this hostile attitude. In the epics,
the troublesome characters typically come from the Northwest. The Rāmāyaṇa intrigue is caused by Kaikeyī, a co-wife of Rāma’s father coming from the northwestern Kaikeya tribe. Gāndhārī, mother of the enemy Kauravas, and her brother Śakuni, deceiver at dice and evil spirit behind the disrobing of Draupadī, come from Gandhāra in Afghanistan. Mādrī, who triggers the death of king Paṇḍu, cause of the whole war, belongs to the Iranic Madra tribe (apparently related to the Medes).
The first, to my knowledge, to become aware of this dislike’s relevance
to the Aryan Homeland issue, was Shrikant Talageri. The negative aura of
the Northwest was so consistent and unadulterated that this could not
possibly be the venerated land of their ancestors. To the above and
other considerations, he has added a fact he remembers from his own
Saraswat Brahmin community. When it was time for religious fasting, rice
was not eaten, but wheat products were. They did not consider wheat,
which in the Vedic age came from the Northwest, as real food, and
treated it on a par with foreign foods like potatoes. (Talageri
2008:102-106) The wheat-growing Northwest was a foreign country, as
Pakistan now is to India.
For another consideration: a negative designation in Sanskrit is Mleccha, “barbarian”. The word is generally taken to come from Meluhha,
the Mesopotamian name for Sindh, now in Pakistan. So, long before
Pakistan existed, proto-Pakistanis were already called “barbarians” by
orthodox Dravidic religions.
Another Vedic fact, peripheral but symbolically significant, is this. An enemy of the Pauravas is called the Guṅgu tribe (RV 10:48:8). But Guṅgu in Vedic means the firstly-appearing moon, the crescent. And what country has the crescent in its flag?
Territorial claims
The ancient Ānavas lived in West Panjab where they confronted the Vedic king Sudās
in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the first Indo-Pak war. (Then already,
such wars typically ended in Pakistani defeat.) But where did they come
from? Aha, as per Puranic tradition, they immigrated from Kashmir, after
taking Panjab from their Druhyu cousins. Kashmir was known in the Mazdean Videvdād as the Airiiānām Vaējo,
the “seed of the Iranic peoples”, their intermediary Homeland. It was the
place of their ethnogenesis after having migrated westwards from Prayāga as part of Yayāti’s branch of the Lunar Dynasty; much like in 1947, the Mohajirs migrated from the Ganga-Yamuna plain to Pakistan.
This proves, as proofs go in irredentism, that Kashmir belongs with
Pakistan. So, if all else fails, Pakistan can justify its separate
existence, its hostility to India and its territorial demands by
invoking Vedic testimony.
A breakthrough slogan
The Pakistani government ought to highlight this long-standing Hindu
hostility to the Northwest. It would prove that the negative attitude to
the territories now constituting Afghanistan and Pakistan dates back to
the Vedic or even pre-Vedic age. If that implies shedding the AIT, so
much the better.
Moreover, all this would validate its slogan for attracting tourists to Mohenjo-Daro: “Five thousand years of Pakistan!”
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