PENGUIN BOOKS MARCH OF THE ARYANS Bhagwan S. Gidwani was India’s additional director general of tourism and director general of civil aviation till 1978. He served as India’s counsel at the International Court of Justice at the Hague and as representative of India on the council of International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), United Nations from 1978 to 1981. Thereafter, he joined ICAO as director, serving as adviser to foreign governments till 1985. Gidwani is the author of the bestselling novel The Sword of Tipu Sultan which was translated into many languages and also made into a major TV series for which Gidwani wrote the script and screenplay. His previous novel Return of the Aryans, published by Penguin Books India, was also highly successful. March of the Aryans is adapted from that novel. Bhagwan S. Gidwani is based in Montreal and divides his time between international efforts to promote the safety and security of air transport and tourism, and historical writing, research and teaching.

March of the

Aryans

bhagwan S. gidwani

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First published by Penguin Books India 2012 Copyright © Bhagwan S. Gidwani 2012 All rights reserved 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental. ISBN 9780143418986 Typeset in Sabon by Suman Srinivasan

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. www.penguin.co.in

To the land where poets are no more, and the historian never was; To Leila, my wife, who helped so much with research for this book; To Manu, my son; Lori, my daughter-in-law; and their children, Leah, Katy and Jay; To Sachal, my son; Anju, my daughter-in-law; and their children, Neil, Chris and Kyle; To Papu, my niece; and her husband Gulu Chablani for their cheerful assistance; and To all those who will try to keep alive the memory of their roots for generations Waiting to be born

Contents Introduction The Birth of Sindhu Putra Bharatjogi and His Memories Path of Glory: Bharat’s Election as Karkarta Defence of the Clan and Memory Songs Hindu! Hindu! Parliament of Hindu & ‘Song of Hindu’ Sindhu River: Its Source and Destination Go! Build Your Temple! Should Gods Be Educated? Sindhu Putra at Muni’s Rocks The Enemy Within My Land, My People! Times of Karkarta Nandan Saraswati River and Soma Wine To Far Frontiers The Tribes Strike Back A God on the Move! Bharat Varsha Mask of a God? A God Who Pretends to be a God Go! Take Your People and Go! Namaste! The Long March Om! The First Word of God!

ix 1 11 20 32 38 49 69 93 108 119 138 142 157 167 172 176 190 195 215 219 222 229

Messengers from a God Did God Fly Away? Farewell, Bharat! Free, Free at Last! Mahakarta Visitors to Ganga—Mahapati Sindhu Putra To the Land of Tamala Hindus All—Svastika and the Frontiers of Bharat Varsha The Lords of Ganga and Sindhu Death of a God We Are the Aryans! But Why? The Aryans Move—Travel Routes Aryans of Bharat Varsha in Iran Aryans of Bharat Varsha in Iraq Aryans and Kings of Assyria Kings of Egypt and the Language of the Gods Egypt and the Kingdom of Ajitab Aryans in Europe Aryans in Finland, Sweden and Norway Aryans in Lithuania and the Baltic States The Aryans in Germany Epilogue

245 257 271 281 286 292 318

Acknowledgements

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337 358 370 376 390 401 417 433 442 470 531 545 553 577 649

INTRODUCTION This book is adapted from my earlier novel, Return of the Aryans. It tells the story of the Aryans—of how and why they moved out of their homeland in Bharat Varsha (India) in 5000 BCE, their adventures and exploits, the battles and bloodshed forced on them, their trials and triumphs overseas, and finally their return to their home and heritage of India. I have presented this as a work of fiction. Unfortunately, I had no records, written or otherwise, to rely on while writing this book. Strange as it may seem, the fact is that while thousands upon thousands of books have been written on or about India, by foreign and Indian authors, they all relate to the post-Vedic period. Not a single writer has taken the trouble to research or write about the pre-Vedic period from 8000 BCE to 4000 BCE—the period at the dawn of civilization during which Sanatana Dharma was established in India with ideals of human dignity, respect for all creeds, equality, justice and the protection of the environment; or even about the period—5000 BCE—when the Aryans began their movement to distant parts of the world—as far as Germany in the west, and China in the east. Thus, in order to write this book, I have had to rely on oral history tradition—the songs of the ancients from prehistory which still remain somewhat in the traditional memory of the people of Sindh, Angkor, Bali, Java, Burma, China, Bhutan, Tibet, Nepal, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Russia, Lithuania, Greece, Germany and India. The message in these songs is clear—the Aryans originated from India and from nowhere i x introduction

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else. The language is archaic, the idiom strange and the images unfamiliar. Yet, they carry the imperishable remembrance of the Aryan movement and migration from India. It is the substance of these songs that dominates my story.

 While I wish to focus on the story of the Aryans, the hero of my novel is the pre-ancient Hindu. History is rooted in continuity and advance, and it would be strange to believe that Aryans arrived on the world stage without precedents and ancestors. The Aryans of 5000 BCE were born, grew up and died as Hindus. They were anchored in the timeless foundation of the Hindu tradition, and it is inappropriate to consider them ‘strays’, without their cultural precedents, traditional links and spiritual ancestry of the Hindu.

 I cannot say that I found this subject. Rather, the subject found me, and gradually it came to obsess me. The impulse to study the history of the Hindu first came to me as I witnessed the anguish of my uncle Dr Choithram P. Gidwani, president of the Indian National Congress in Sindh under the inspiration of Mahatma Gandhi, and my father, Shamdas P. Gidwani, president of the Sindh Hindu Maha Sabha, when the partition of India was announced in 1947. They both had different political faiths, though they lived under the same roof in Karachi. Both spoke of the cultural continuity of Bharat Varsha (India) and its age-old political and spiritual frontiers. They felt that by a succession of acts of surrender, the leaders of India had agreed to divide the country as they saw no other immediate possibility of securing power in their own lifetime, thus exiling the Indian from his own land. Both also feared the threat to partitioned India from outside, and a far x

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greater menace from within that the spiritual tradition of the race would not be able to keep at bay. When Dr Choithram died, he willed everything to me. The ‘everything’ contained books, an old watch and eighty rupees. (In those days, politicians and their families did not acquire many assets and wealth and they were judged by the ‘magnitude of their non-possession’. It is only in the era after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination that politics became the most lucrative of all professions in India.) He also left me a package containing many hastily scribbled songs about the Aryans. Ever since, I felt a perpetual restlessness to study the subject. Initially, my wife, Leila and I contented ourselves with trying to collect material from various sources. It was in 1978, after I completed research for my novel, The Sword of Tipu Sultan, that I started on the Aryans in true earnest. One version of the Aryans’ history is that they originated not in India but elsewhere. However, historians have not been able to isolate any single region as the home of the Aryans. At last count, the list of locations in the west and the north from where the Aryans could have originated numbered twenty-two. The difficulty historians face in choosing one location from the twenty-two is understandable. None of the twenty-two regions showed even the slightest link with the high civilization and classical art and literature of India. Especially, as all these clearly flowered in India, independently and unrelated to any other region, with no parallels or precedents elsewhere. The main argument supporting the theory that the Aryans originated outside India is that Sanskrit is so similar to Greek and Latin and all the languages now known as Indo-Iranian and Indo-European (including Italic, Germanic, Gothic, Armenian, Tocharian, Celtic, Albanian, Lithuanian and BaltoSlavic). But, is it not possible that these western languages were enriched by the Aryans relocating from India to other regions? And could it not have been Sanskrit that travelled introduction

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to those countless lands instead of the opposite? The second hypothesis of the mainstream historical view is weaker still. It relies on the divergence of skin colour and the physique of the races in India and, in particular, between the north and the south. The link between the pre-ancient Hindu and the Aryans should be clear by now, given the plethora of clues that exist. I have read every word of the Vedas, the Upanishads, ancient epics and other Aryan literature. If the Aryans came from the far north or west, it would be amazing that they, who wrote so much on so many subjects, simply forgot to mention their original homeland.

 It is a perilous undertaking to criticize the mainstream historical view, but it cannot be denied that new discoveries and versions of our shared past deserve to exist. I am not arguing here for a revisionist view of history; I have no political axe to grind. Having said that, let me continue my argument. Initially, it was believed that the entire culture of India had to be refracted through the prism of Aryan life and that only decadence and darkness existed until the Aryans invaded the land. Then, in one of history’s more subtle ironies, came the excavations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa, clearly pointing to a flourishing civilization that existed thousands of years in the past, distinct from all others, independent and deeply rooted in the Indian soil and environment. After these discoveries, no further attempts were made to explain the origins of Hindu civilization in terms of immigration from outside. Faced with this evidence, the histories of the civilization had to admit that the pre-Aryan Indus Valley civilization, with no known beginnings, was highly developed, thoroughly xii

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individual, and specifically Indian. Even so, strangely, it was maintained that the Aryans did not spring from the indigenous culture of India, but were from a different culture and arrived from somewhere else at a later stage. What led to this confusion was evidence of Aryan influence in many foreign lands. But, I submit that this was probably because the Aryans travelled from India to those foreign lands and returned, having left behind, in various regions, the imprint of their language and cultural, social and spiritual affinities. The British, in presenting the Aryan Invasion Theory, had offered no proof. They did not need to. Hundreds of Indian historians, encouraged by the British, rushed to earn their doctorates, promotions, patronage and government-aided jobs and positions for supporting the British theory. Their proof? Largely quoting those very hundreds of articles and books, written by British-aided historians—and asking, how could so many learned books and serious articles by countless British and Indian historians be wrong! Some did murmur that the British theory was aimed at proving to the Indians that they were incapable of governing themselves, had always been ruled by foreigners, and that it was always the foreign invader, like the Aryans (and eventually the British), who brought progress and enlightenment. Hopefully, my presentation updates much of the research from scholarly and historical sources, archaeological records, oral traditions and memory songs to present facts and evidence to show that the Aryan Invasion Theory was not only flawed, but frivolous, brought forth by the British for political propaganda. Hopefully, also, this novel will give a mosaic of a longforgotten past to show that the Aryans did not belong to a different species, culture or race. Their cradle-grounds were the Sindhu, Ganga, Madhya, Bangla and Dravidian civilizations, and there is an unbroken continuity—spiritual, social and secular—between the pre-ancient civilization of introduction

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Bharat Varsha and the Aryans of 5000 BCE.

 Even those who initially suspected that the Aryans might have originated in India, failed to follow up on their hunch. This inability was probably because they could not believe the Aryans would leave their homes, but not to loot, plunder and conquer, or to persecute in the name of dogma and propagate their faith while destroying the gods and idols of others. But like all Hindus, they believed in the ideal of Sanatan Dharma—of respect for all creeds and recognition of spiritual nature of man wherever he is from and acceptance of every culture as an expression of eternal values. To them, as Hindus, it was clear that God wills a rich harmony, not a colourless uniformity based on dogma. The Aryans who left Bharat Varsha were not adventurers or conquerors or even religious crusaders. They were travellers guided by the dream of finding a land that was pure and free from evil. Unfortunately for them, it was a road that led everywhere and finally nowhere, and at last they came to realize that there was no land of the pure, except what a man might make by his own efforts. There is some truth in the assumption that some Aryans came to India from foreign lands. Many Aryans from India married there, and returned with their wives and children. But more so, many locals came with them—and kept coming —inspired by the faith and values of the Aryans of Bharat Varsha. These locals came in large numbers from Iran, Assyria, Sumeria, Egypt, Finland, Sweden, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Russia and Scythia, Turkey, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany and even from Bali, Java, Angkor, Malaysia and Singapore. Intellectually and emotionally, these men and women from foreign lands came to bind themselves together with the xiv

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Aryans of India in a web of common ideas and reciprocal knowledge, with fellowship of spirit, a communion of minds and a union of hearts. It did not take too long for these visitors to be assimilated into India.

 If the reader is looking for a golden age of peace and plenty in the past, this novel will disappoint him. Our ancients were not all heroes or hermits—they did not walk hand-in-hand with gods and angels. As we closely examine prehistory, we find in it a cast of characters as varied as any around today. There was cowardice and courage; hermits and harlots; loyalty and treachery; yogis and tricksters; greatness and stupidity—all existing simultaneously. Nor were the majority of people immersed in matters of the spirit. Some sang, others danced or told stories; some tried out new herbs and medicines, while still others sought to discover the physical laws of nature and find unity in diversity. Some occupied themselves with chiselling stone, drawing pictures, burnishing gold and weaving rich fabrics; many dug wells or built reservoirs; some constructed granaries, dock-yards, huts, cottages; others made water-clocks, cloth-looms, boats, carts, chariots and toys; many more toiled in fields and farms, while a few assisted in making ships to cross the ocean. Even some of the rulers then were no less corrupt than those who are in power today. The only difference is that the means available to present-day rulers to manipulate the masses and spread evil are vast, if not unlimited. As a generalization, however, it can be said that the preancient Hindu had more faith, less superstition, and therefore enjoyed greater laughter and joy in life. The affectionate bonds of the large family nourished him; he did not grow up inwardly torn, largely deprived of love, with his sights introduction

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Cover illustration by Jupiter Thoidingjam

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