Digging into the Human Mind

Michel Danino*

The fluidity of historical interpretation is well known among historians

themselves: it is accepted that there can be no such thing as objective history.
The French philosopher Voltaire was rather scathing in his assessment of the
discipline: History is the lie commonly agreed upon, he wrote. The
assessment of the U.S. historian Will Durant was probably closer to the truth:
Most history is guessing, and the rest is prejudice.1 Depending on the model
they choose (and the best of the day is likely to be obsolete tomorrow), the
scholars readings of events will vary widely.
At first glance, archaeology would appear less immune to such
guesswork. After all, potsherds are potsherds, bones are bones, dating
techniques are now fairly secure, and major events, such as the sacking of a city
or a destructive flood are easy enough to trace on the ground. Yet that ground is
rarely as secure as we might wish. Indeed, archaeology has been at the core of
numerous controversies ever since it became a respectable discipline in the
nineteenth century.
Almost immediately, it proved itself to be an effective weapon in the
colonial arsenal. In North America in the early nineteenth century, colonizers
marvelled at thousands of mysterious ancient earthen mounds throughout the
Midwest, such as Ohios 390-metre long Great Serpent Mound. Most experts
asserted that those colossal earth structures could not have been the work of
savage Red Indians; they were attributed instead to various exotic invaders
Vikings, Hindus, even survivors from Atlantis. For if [American] Indians were
savages, their ancestors would not have had necessary engineering skills. If
such skills were conceded, the moral and intellectual superiority that European
settlers took to be their justification for seizing Native American land would be
manifestly undermined,2 as the British archaeologist Paul Bahn put it. It took

French-born Michel Danino has been living in India since 1977 (now near Coimbatore in Tamil
Nadu). A long-time student of Indias protohistory, he has contributed books and papers in
English and French on issues related to the origins of Indian civilization. His latest works are
The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati (Penguin Books India, 2010) and Indian Culture and
Indias Future (DK Printworld, 2011).
*

Digging into the Human Mind / p. 2

seventy years of often bitter archaeological controversy for the truth to prevail:
the mounds had indeed an indigenous origin. Meantime, native tribes had been
decimated and dispossessed of their lands, and hardly deserved a passing
mention in colonial histories of America.
About the same time, in southern Africa, the imposing stone ruins of
south-eastern Zimbabwe bore witness to an advanced civilization. British
colonizers and scholars variously saw in them the work of King Solomon, the
Queen of Sheba, Phoenicians, Greeks, or Egyptiansanything but an
unacceptable Black civilization. Only in the early twentieth century was it
finally demonstrated that the cities now lying in ruins were wholly indigenous.
Further to the west, in Namibia, the rock paintings of the Brandberg mountain
were attributed to ancient Egyptians or Cretans as late as in the 1960s: the
apartheid regime ruled out an African origin for them; thankfully, it is now
established that the authors of those remarkable paintings were indigenous
Bushmen, not chimerical invaders from the Mediterranean.
From Easter Island to Australias aborigines, more cases of what has been
called colonial archaeology3 could be cited. By establishing that the conqueror
belonged to a more advanced civilization, it helped him in his self-appointed
task of writing the history of the conquered and civilizing them.
Political misuse of archaeology found a notorious illustration when Nazi
ideology engulfed the German archaeological world, with 86 per cent of all
archaeologists active members of the Nazi party. Hitler had put it as plainly as
possible: My demands are not exorbitant. I am only interested ... in territories
where Germans have lived before.4 Archaeology thus became a prime
instrument of Nazi claims: It offered proof that the great civilizations of
ancient Europe had been created by human groups of Germanic racial type
and that the so-called Germanic race was the originator of major innovations
in European prehistory, from the invention of agriculture to that of writing.5
Germany could then justify its invasion of European neighbours: it was nothing
but a reconquest of lands that had once been Germanic in character, language
and culture.
Nazi Germanys ideology, of course, was founded on the Aryan myth:
Germans saw themselves as the purest descendants of the Aryan race. The
monstrous lengths to which they took this false construct need no retelling. The
same myth had been used even earlier by Russia to legitimize her colonization

Digging into the Human Mind / p. 3

of Turkistan: here also, it was nothing but Aryans coming back to their
homeland.6 Archaeologists welcomed the colonization, arguing that Russia is
duty bound to possess central Asia, to restore its Aryan character and to erase a
Turkic element anyhow thought to be temporary and destined to disappear.7
Echoes of these Russian dreams of an Aryan Central Asia, though now
shorn of political ambitions, can be heard in the writings of the Russian
archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi, who in the 1960s discovered in southeast
Turkmenistan the first sites of the so-called Bactria and Margiana
Archaeological Complex (BMAC, also Oxus Civilization), which extends from
the upper reaches of the Amu Darya almost all the way to the Caspian Sea and
dates from the first half of the second millennium BCE. The cities unearthed in
the following decades were quite impressive, but less so Sarianidis insistence
that the BMAC was essentially an Indo-Aryan culture and represented the
Aryan expansion before it reached Iran and India.8 Few archaeologists have
taken this thesis seriously, and many have critiqued it severely.9
A second echo, last year, came in the shape of a dramatic announcement
that archaeologists had found in the Russian steppes bordering Kazakhstan
settlements dating back to about 2000 BCE. While there is nothing surprising
about such finds, the presence of swastikas daubed on artefacts sent everyone
into a tizzy, with extraordinary claims that the settlements could have been
built shortly after the Great Pyramid, some 4,000 years ago, by the original
Aryan race whose swastika symbol was later adopted by the Nazis in the
1930s.10 Leave alone the fact that the swastika is a largely universal symbol,
found also in palaeolithic rock art, and therefore cannot be associated with one
particular culture, the resurrection of the discredited concept of an Aryan race is
deplorable. It is problematic to note in this twenty-first century the persistence
of the quest for an original Aryan homeland, forgetting that the concept of
Aryan has been shown to be profoundly illegitimate.11
In India

Expectedly, India with her vast cultural heritage has been no exception to
the manipulation of archaeological data for ideological purposes. The story
begins with Alexander Cunningham, an official with the East India Company,
who in 1871 became the Archaeological Survey of Indias first director general.
His tireless work produced an inventory of Indias monuments; he is also
remembered for his pioneering Ancient Geography of India. But Cunninghams

Digging into the Human Mind / p. 4

motives were not wholly disinterested, and he made plain his hope that
excavating Indias past would, among other things, show that Brahmanism ...
was of comparatively modern origin, and had been constantly receiving
additions and alterations; facts which prove that the establishment of the
Christian religion in India must ultimately succeed.12 Indeed, in the nineteenth
century, such a deep-rooted conviction of Christianitys superiority to
Hinduism, Buddhism or Jainism was the norm among Orientalists and
European Sanskritists; here, in addition, archaeology was to be harnessed to the
task.13 This anticipates the manipulations aimed at establishing the visit of
Thomas the Apostle to India (see elsewhere in this volume).
A different situation has prevailed in Indias Northeast. Archaeology in
those seven states has been sorely neglected and important finds poorly
highlighted. Yet, by documenting the presence of Hindu and Buddhist temples
and artefacts dating back to a few centuries BCE and CE, they effectively dispel
the widespread but untenable notion that this region was never culturally
attached to India. The seasoned Indian archaeologist A.K. Sharma, who led
several excavations there, remarked with some anguish:
During the pre-independence era, in spite of some archaeological evidences
showing similarities with the rest of the country, the myth of backwardness
was deliberately inculcated and propagated as this facilitated the
Missionaries in conversion of the indigenous people to their faith. In fact,
during conversion, the local tribals were never told that they are being
converted from their faith to another faith and religion, as this might have
aroused suspicion and revolt, instead they were told that they have now
become civilized and will be treated among the civilized people of the
world.14
Though the entire region abounds in archaeological and cultural
wealth, very little has been done so far to unearth the glorious past of the
area. If proper attention would have been paid earlier, as was done in the
case of other parts of the country, the feeling of aloofness and alienation
that was deliberately inculcated by the enemies of the country could have
been avoided. We are responsible for keeping our brothers and sisters of
the North-East in the dark about their glorious past, about their very close
relationships with the rest of the country.15

Digging into the Human Mind / p. 5

The Harappan Case

Indian archaeology has had more than a brush with the Aryan myth, too.
Another director general of the Archaeological Survey of India (from 1944),
Mortimer Wheeler, needed nothing more than a few skeletons in the streets of
Mohenjo-daro to speak of a massacre and issue his famous declaration,
Indra stands accused16Indra being, of course, the chief of the Aryan gods.
Even though further archaeological work ruled out man-made destruction as
the cause of the decline of the Harappan civilization, in effect exploding this
Bollywood-like scenario, we find it repeated still today in some of our history
textbooks.17
The Harappan civilization, the first on Indian soil, has naturally spawned
various kinds of distortion, with competing ideological groups laying claim to
it. John Marshall, a director general of the ASI who excavated at Mohenjo-daro,
was among the first to suggest that it may have been created by Dravidians.
Right from the beginning, the classic confusion between race, culture and
language muddied the waters. In recent decades, scholars like the Russian
expert on the Mayan script, Y.V. Knorozov, the Finnish Indologist Asko Parpola
or the epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan strove to decipher the Indus script
along the lines of a proto-Dravidian language, but their mutually incompatible
proposals made no headway beyond a point. While such attempts are perfectly
legitimate, the recent identifications of supposed Indus signs at numerous
sites in Tamil Nadu are much less so. The 2006 find of a stone axe in SembiyanKandiyur (near Mayiladuthurai in Tamil Nadu) bearing Indus-like signs was
trumpeted in the media and by the Tamil Nadu governments Department of
Archaeology as proof that the Harappan language was an ancient form of
Tamil: the stone axe was the discovery of a century.18 Tamil Nadus then
Chief Minister, M. Karunanidhi, declared at an election rally that recent
archaeological findings of Indus valley scripts in Mayiladuthurai in
Nagapattinam district indicated that the people who lived in Tamil Nadu
belonged to the Dravidian race similar to those who lived in the Indus valley.19
No one protested this indefensible harangue rooted in nineteenth-century race
prejudices. In fact, I. Mahadevan lent his weight to such claims by identifying
further Indus-like inscriptions at other sites and as far as in Thailand.20
Contrary to Mahadevans assertions, none of the purported inscriptions,
when they were distinct enough (which was certainly not the case of the
Mayiladuthurai axe), coincided with a complete known Harappan sign

Digging into the Human Mind / p. 6

sequence. That the Indus script had long been compared with several other
ancient scripts of the world and that such parallels were essentially meaningless
was ignored. Worse, it was overlooked that finding a complete Harappan sign
sequence in Tamil Nadu would no more establish that the Harappan language
was Dravidian than the find of numerous Roman coins in the South proves that
Julius Caesar spoke Tamil. Finally, no explanation was offered for the absence
of any Harappan artefacts and features south of the Vindhyas or for the fact
that, had Harappans migrated to South India after the end of the urban phase,
they would have suddenly reverted from an advanced Bronze Age culture to a
Neolithic one, forgetting all their typical crafts and sophisticated techniques,
pottery designs, ornaments, and urbanism. Cultural continuity from Harappan
times is well documented in North India in diverse fields, but not in the South.
Despite such glaring methodological issues,21 the thesis has prospered
with political support. The political angle in the claim that the Harappan
civilization was Dravidian was conspicuous at the World Tamil Conference
held in Coimbatore in June 2010, when Asko Parpola received an award of a
million rupees from the Tamil Nadu government: the Kalaignar M.
Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Award. On that occasion, Karunanidhi asserted
that Tamil is not only an international language; it is like a mother for all the
languages of the world.22
Such eagerness to drive the colonial AryanDravidian wedge deeper is a
shortcut to the construction of a separate identity. Although largely limited to
Tamil Nadu, we occasionally find the same methodological flaws reflected
elsewhere. Recently the epigraphist M.R. Raghava Varier identified at Edakkal,
in Keralas Wayanad district, Indus-like engravings on rocks, and was reported
as saying, There had been indications of remnants akin to the Indus Valley
civilisation in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, but these new findings give credence
to the fact that the Harappan civilisation had its presence in the region too and
could trace the history of Kerala even beyond the Iron Age.23 This claim rests
on a single engraved sign which happens to resemble one Indus sign; nothing is
said of other engravings, which, naturally, will not match the Harappan script;
no thoughtful comparison is offered between Edakkals Neolithic culture and
the Harappan Bronze Age tradition. The intention is transparent: it is the
imagining of an ancient civilized past for Kerala on par with the Indus
civilization. Perhaps one day we will be told that the Harappans spoke not
Tamil but Malayalam, and sailed from Lothal to Muziris.

Digging into the Human Mind / p. 7

Another claim to a remote antiquity was made in 2001 when the discovery
of a so-called Khambat civilization was announced with great fanfare by the
then government of India. A submerged city had been found by the Indian
National Institute of Ocean Technology in the Gulf of Cambay, a little to the
south of the Narmadas estuary, and it was several millennia older than the
Indus civilization. Structures very similar to [Mohenjo-daros] Great Bath,
Acropolis, temples and granaries had been located,24 it was claimed on the
basis of very faint sonar images. But despite further explorations, the
submerged structures were never proved to be man-made; artefacts dated to
the eighth or ninth millenniums BCE were not stratigraphically secure and there
were technical problems with their dating. It was also forgotten that however
fascinating submerged cities may be, they cannot exist in isolation. A few years
later, the claim was quietly buried and all the data on the finds removed from
the NIOTs website.
Conclusion

Misuse of archaeology, then, may be prompted by a quest for a greater

antiquity (wrongly assumed to confer a greater glory) or for primacy over other
cultures (e.g., the Dravidians are Indias original inhabitants while Aryans
are invaders). The desire for primacy can turn into one for supremacy, as in
the case of Nazi Germany. Even if it does not go so far, it is the open door to
divisive ideologies that concentrate on ethnic (formerly racial), linguistic or
cultural faultlines rather than on shared heritage and cultural integration.
This state of affairs will continue as long as scholarly standards are
allowed to be compromised, often through political influences. While a search
for identity is a legitimate one, it should not be based on jingoism or regional
nationalism. Until much more is known about the origins of the Indus
civilization, let us invite all Indians and all Pakistanis to take pride in it, but not
an exclusive pride. As a guide, the concept of world heritage is far more fruitful.
The past cannot be an exclusive property.
The British archaeologist Robert Layton summarized the problem of
objectivity in archaeology in these terms:
Although strict empiricism, that is, observation of data without the
guidance of a theory is impossible, nonetheless we cannot adhere to a
theory merely because it seems politically expedient or morally right. We
must test our theories against observation. [Bruce G.] Trigger reaches a

Digging into the Human Mind / p. 8

similar conclusion, namely that, although a value-free archaeology is

probably impossible to achieve, the findings of archaeology can only have
lasting social value if they approximate as closely as possible to an objective
understanding of social behaviour. On the other hand, any theory that has
a bearing on the real world may have political implications, if it is used to
formulate or justify policy, even though this consequence may be
unintended by the analyst.25

As archaeologists dig the ground, they also dig into our minds (and their
own). And sometimes these latter findings are equally revealing.

References
1

Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1954, p. 12.
Paul G. Bahn, (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 11314.

Ibid., p. 360.

Quoted by Heirich Hrke, Archaeologists and Migrations: A Problem of Attitude?, Current

Anthropology, vol. 39, no. 1, February 1998, p. 22.

Jean-Pierre Legendre, Laurent Olivier, Bernadette Schnitzler, Quand larchologie tait au

service du nazisme, Archaeologia, no. 442, March 2007, p. 44.

Marlne Laruelle, Mythe aryen et rve imprial dans la Russie du XIXe sicle, 2005, pp. 107 ff.

Ibid., p. 120.

For instance, V. Sarianidi, Near Eastern Aryans in Central Asia, Journal of IndoEuropean
Studies, vol. 27, 1999, pp. 295326.

For instance, B.B. Lal, How Deep Are the Roots of Indian Civilization? Archaeology Answers, Aryan
Books International, New Delhi, 2009, pp. 100 ff.

10

4,000-year-old Aryan city discovered in Russia, The Hindu, 4 October 2010.

11

On the Aryan construct, see Louis L. Snyder, The Idea of Nationalism: Its Meaning and History,
D. Van Nostrand, New York, 1962; Lon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and
Nationalist Ideas in Europe, Sussex University Press, London, 1974; Maurice Olender, The
Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, 1992; Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols:
Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
2006; and John V. Day, The Concept of the Aryan Race in Nineteenth-Century
Scholarship, Orpheus, Sofia, 1994, vol. 4, pp. 1348.

12

A. Cunningham, An Account of the Discovery of the Ruins of the Buddhist City of

Samkassa, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1843, pp. 24147, excerpted in F.R. Allchin &

Digging into the Human Mind / p. 9

Dilip K. Chakrabarti, (eds), A Source-book of Indian Archaeology, Munshiram Manoharlal, New

Delhi, 1979, vol. 1, p. 69.
13

See for instance Rajiv Malhotra and Aravindan Neelakandan, Breaking India: Western
Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines, New Delhi, Amaryllis, 2011; also Michel
Danino, The Dawn of Indian Civilization and the Elusive Aryans, Rupa & Co., New Delhi,
forthcoming, Part 1.

14

A.K. Sharma, Emergence of Early Culture in North-East India, Aryan Books International, New
Delhi, 1993, p. 1.

15

Ibid., p. i. (See also, by the same author, Manipur: The Glorious Past, Aryan Books
International, New Delhi, 1994, and Early Man in Eastern Himalayas Aryan Books
International, New Delhi, 1996.)

16

Mortimer Wheeler, Harappa 1946: the Defences and Cemetery R37, Ancient India,
Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, no. 3, 1947, p. 82.

17

For a recent example, see Michel Danino, A Textbook Case of Howlers, The New Indian
Express, 18 October 2010. For more on colonial distortions in the Indian context, see Dilip K.
Chakrabarti, Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past, Munshiram Manoharlal,
New Delhi, 1997, and The Battle for Ancient India: An Essay in the Sociopolitics of Indian
Archaeology, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2008.

18

T .S. Subramanian, Discovery of a century in Tamil Nadu, The Hindu, 1st May 2006.

19

M. Karunanidhi, MK vows to develop Dravidian culture, as reported by Sify News, 05

May 2006 (http://sify.com/cities/fullstory.php?id=14198547). He not only portrayed
himself as a descendant of this Dravidian race, but said, in the presence of Prime Minister
Dr. Manmohan Singh, I did not enter public life for the sake of power. I joined the
movement of rationalist leaders like Periyar E V Ramasamy to uphold the Dravidian race
and work for its future. The notion of a Dravidian race, however, is least rational.

20

Iravatham Mahadevan, Indus-like inscription on South Indian pottery from Thailand, The
Hindu, 8 April 2001.

21

See Michel Danino, A Dravido-Harappan Connection? The Issue of Methodology, in T.S.

Sridhar & N. Marxia Gandhi, (eds), Indus Civilization and Tamil Language, Department of
Archaeology, Government of Tamil Nadu, Chennai, 2009, pp. 7081.

22

T. Ramakrishnan, President hails role of Tamil ethos in Indian identity and progress, The
Hindu, 23 June 2010.

23

C.S. Narayanan Kutty, Symbols Akin to Indus Valley Culture Discovered in Kerala, Outlook
India, 29 September 2009.

24

Scientists find submerged archaeological sites, Times of India, 19 May 2001.

25

Robert Layton, (ed.), Conflict in the Archaeology of Living Traditions, Routledge, London, 1994,
p. 4 (see p. 13 for more examples of colonial archaeology).