Researchers shocked by huge find of stone tools in India than can change our knowledge of human migration

February 3, 2018 Steve Morrison 4 Min Read

The geographic location of India and its rich Middle Palaeolithic record are ideally suited to addressing these issues, but progress has been limited by the paucity of excavated sites and hominin fossils as well as by geochronological constraints.

About 300,000 years prior today, the ancestors of present-day humans started modifying the way they used to hunt with the use of small and sharp tools that were created by the use of flakes of stones with a technique known as Levallois. The latest study into the stone tools extracted from a particular site located in India could change the basics of what we know about the early human migration and evolution.

The artifacts located by the researchers could be from a period that is way older than earlier estimated by them. The tools reflect a sophisticated style of construction. The tools were found at the southeastern periphery of India at a site named Attirampakkam which is close to the capital city of Chennai in Tamil Nadu. During the excavation, the researchers acquired about 7000 artifacts, most of which were stone tools that were a perfect example of the transition from old ones to the sophisticated version during the ancient era.

This discovery is shocking as the data analysis suggested that the transition from basic to sophisticated version occurred about 200,000 years before the earlier expectation. The style of creating tools is very important to determine the migration and evolution of early humans. The tools are a physical representation of the human intellect at the early evolution stage. It helps the researchers analyze the cognitive ability housed in the brains of a toolmaker.

These tools discovered in India are from Acheulean technology which can be recognized almost instantly from the signature teardrop shape. The handaxe was a particularly important modification during this time as compared to the Oldowan technology. All the signs studied by researchers indicate that the Acheulean technology is a practice from Africa. The first humans who left Africa carried the Acheulean tools with them which happened around 1.9 million years prior today.

The discovery of Acheulean tools in India could be a strong game changer for the researchers as this suggests the migration took way before the earlier estimation. However, it could also suggest that the local early human population in this region developed these tools themselves which could mean that technological development in Asian parts occurred way before African continent.

The following is an abstract from the paper, published in the journal Nature.

Luminescence dating at the stratified prehistoric site of Attirampakkam, India, has shown that processes signifying the end of the Acheulian culture and the emergence of a Middle Palaeolithic culture occurred at 385 ± 64 thousand years ago (ka), much earlier than conventionally presumed for South Asia1. The Middle Palaeolithic continued at Attirampakkam until 172 ± 41 ka. Chronologies of Middle Palaeolithic technologies in regions distant from Africa and Europe are crucial for testing theories about the origins and early evolution of these cultures, and for understanding their association with modern humans or archaic hominins, their links with preceding Acheulian cultures and the spread of Levallois lithic technologies.

The geographic location of India and its rich Middle Palaeolithic record are ideally suited to addressing these issues, but progress has been limited by the paucity of excavated sites and hominin fossils as well as by geochronological constraints. At Attirampakkam, the gradual disuse of bifaces, the predominance of small tools, the appearance of distinctive and diverse Levallois flake and point strategies, and the blade component all highlight a notable shift away from the preceding Acheulian large-flake technologies.

These findings document a process of substantial behavioural change that occurred in India at 385 ± 64 ka and establish its contemporaneity with similar processes recorded in Africa and Europe. This suggests complex interactions between local developments and ongoing global transformations. Together, these observations call for a re-evaluation of models that restrict the origins of Indian Middle Palaeolithic culture to the incidence of modern human dispersals after approximately 125 ka.

Steve Morrison

Steve Morrison is a budding journalist who intends to build a bright career in the media industry. He is a fitness enthusiast who loves to cover the latest news on health, fitness, and lifestyle.

Source: sciexaminer

శ్రీ కౌముది ఫిబ్రవరి 2018

Source: శ్రీ కౌముది

Padmavati: An Indian Story

By Makarand Paranjape

January 12, 2018 at 2:17 PM 

 

The agitation over Padmavati is only partly about history, but mainly about honour. Dishonour is not an option for many, even unto death.

The Queen of Chittor, history’s heroine and the protagonist of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film, has been the subject of much debate and controversy, not to mention threats of dire consequences or even death to those responsible for it. It behoves, therefore, to try to understand the uproar.

Let me, however, clarify at the outset that what follows is not a retelling of the story. In fact, it is not even an exercise in mere re-interpretation. Instead, I would like to offer a hermeneutical methodology or meta-interpretation — how to make sense of Indian stories, especially such stories of incredible courage or sacrifice.

The key is to see these stories, after Frederick Jameson, as allegories, not just national, but civilisational allegories. In other words, Padmavati is not only an Indian story; that would be rather obvious. For there are countless such Indian stories. After all, India is the original home of stories, the veritable Kathasaritasagara. I would argue, in fact, that Padmavati is not an ordinary, but quintessential Indian story. It is the story of India itself. I shall try to demonstrate this in my essay.

Let us try to find out what, keeping this in mind, the Padmavati dispute is really about.

Was Padmavati a historical figure? We don’t know for sure. But what is pretty much uncontested is that Alauddin Khilji did lay siege to Chittorgarh, capturing it in 1303, after eight months of stubborn endurance by the Guhila Rajput ruler Ratan Singh. The earliest account of this military feat is Amir Khusrau’s Khaza’in ul-Futuh. Khusrau, one of the founders of Hindavi literature, better known today for his Sufi songs dedicated to Nizamuddin Auliya, was Khilji’s courtier. What is more, he actually accompanied the sultan on this campaign.

In Khusrau’s account, there is no mention of Padmini, nor of the terrible jauhar, mass immolation, committed by her and the ladies of the fort before it fell into Khilji’s hands. What Khusrau does state is that 30,000 Hindus were “cut down like dry grass” on Khilji’s order. Would Khusrau not have written about Padmini or the jauhar led by her? We cannot be sure, but he does mention that during Khilji’s earlier conquest of Ranthambore, the ladies of that fort performed jauhar rather than be taken as sexual prey to Khilji’s marauding hordes.

Whence springs the legend of Padmini then? The answer is from Malik Muhammad Jayasi’s Padmavat, an Avadhi epic. The poem was composed in 1540, nearly 250 years after the siege of Chittor. Jayasi, moreover, lived in what is today’s Uttar Pradesh, not in Rajasthan. So how did he come to know this story? The likely answer is that he combined the legend of Padmini, which was already prevalent and popular, with known literary antecedents. He, of course, added his own imagination to make the story rich and powerful. Jayasi’s Padmini does commit jauhar to repel Khilji.

The whole story, like the Illiad and the Ramayana, is really one of a conquest which links woman to territory. Padmini, like Helen of Troy and the abducted Sita of Ayodhya, is the trigger of Khilji’s imperial lust not just for a woman, but for territory, and the spoils of war. It would seem that Bhansali’s Padmavati, which most of its supporters or opponents have not yet seen, is based on Jayasi’s fictional rendering. Why then should it bother us so much, threatening to tear apart the social fabric?

The reason is that Padmavati is not about history or Rajput pride or Hindu anxiety or glorification of sati. It is really about splendid, if not solitary, exemplars of resistance. The Muslim conquest of India was as brutal as it was bloody. It also involved temple-breaking, large-scale loot, decimation, enslavement of subdued populations, and, yes, predatory sexual violence and captivity. No attempt to whitewash this history or mitigate its trauma will succeed.

I say this not to ask for retributive corrections or revenge histories; that would be absurd and unfortunate. The wrongs of history cannot be righted by present politics or academics. Itihas, as both legend and history, instead, calls for deep, contextual understanding, combined with corrective self-reflection, so that the errors of the past are not perpetuated into an uncertain future. If I were to slightly tweak what Vishwa Adluri said, “we seek salvation not in, but out of history”. When it comes to Padmini, the legend is more important than history; Padmini quickly escaped from history to be immortalised in legend.

Padmini, like Rana Pratap, who was also from Chittor, symbolises resistance to the Muslim conquest of India. Why are such stories important? Because they show that one part of the Hindu psyche remained undefeated and unvanquished. Indeed, throughout the 800 or so years of Muslim rule, there were always pockets of resistance, some like Chittor, Vijaynagar, the Marathas and Sikh empires, quite glorious and successful. What obtained in India is thus quite different from the other territories of Islamic conquest, whether Arabia, Iran, Africa, Central or South East Asia. In all these places, there are hardly any accounts of such resistance, let alone of jauhar. Padmini is worshipped to this day because she symbolises that die-hard refusal to submit to the evils of greater power.

So, we must understand the difference between Padmini and Padmavati — the historical figure and character in the epic. Though both are related, with the latter based on the former, they are not identical. As to the historical Padmini, unfortunately we know little; she was, as we have seen, soon apotheosised into folklore after the purported jauhar of her martyrdom. Indeed, it was these stories of Padmini’s great sacrifice sung by bards that probably inspired Jayasi.

But that still does not explain why this Muslim Sufi poet, who lived 200 years after the tragic siege of Chittor, chose to write about it. Why did he make it his main theme? I believe that he did so because he too thought he was telling the story of India, the India that he knew and loved. Padmavat, we must acknowledge, is an epic of Hindu-Muslim synthesis and comingling. If anything, it is more Hindu than Muslim. Because it is not simply a tale of Islamist domination and conquest, which was a well-established genre by the time of Jayasi. Nor is it written in Persian, the court language of Muslim rulers, but in Avadhi, the people’s language. In fact, the Padmavat, written about 80 years before what is arguably the most important mediaeval North Indian text, the Tulsi Ramayan, becomes its precursor, readying the vernacular for epic exertions.

Jayasi follows Hindu invocatory and narrative traditions; his epic is steeped in Hindu mythology and metaphor, beginning in Kailash, with a supplication to Shiva. He, moreover, follows Hindu aesthetic and spiritual traditions, chiefly the Kamashastra and the Nath parampara. Dr Anand Kumar, who is working on a new verse translation, believes that Jayasi was an initiated Nath Yogi, though also Chisti Sufi. In that sense, he is a forerunner to the current Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath. The Nath Yogis, like the tantriks, siddhas, alchemists, daoists, and kabbalists before them, sought physical immortality, a quest that has been revived in recent times by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, though it is not fashionable to talk about it, or, at least, to take it literally.

Padmavat is thus also an esoteric yogic manual, explaining the mysteries of the horizontal and vertical axes of transformation, contained in the ancient symbols of both the cross and the swastika. Ida (left, feminine, som) and Pingala (right, masculine, agni) represent the two hemispheres of the brain, or reason and passion respectively. Between these poles and balancing them is the sushumna, the central subtle nadi, the channel of ascension of the coiled kundalini shakti from the muladhara to the sahasrara. This is the riddle that Sigmund Freud rediscovered and solved in his psychoanalysis — Id and Superego, with the Ego playing the balancing role. In tantra yoga, when the kundalini reaches the sahasrara, the practitioner attains immortality. But really the underlying structure of synthesis involves the abolishing of duality. Duality is death; non-duality, advaita, is immortality.

In a brief essay, it is be impossible to explain this symbolism in Padmavat fully. But the whole story is set in motion by the search for Padmini, the perfect or the superior type of woman, who is thus described in the Kamashastra text Anangaranga:

“She, in whom the following signs and symptoms appear, is called Padmini, or Lotus-woman. Her face is pleasing as the full moon; her body, well clothed with flesh, is soft as the shiras or mustard-flower; her skin is fine, tender and fair as the yellow lotus, never dark-coloured, though resembling, in the effervescence and purple light of her youth, the cloud about to burst. Her eyes are bright and beautiful as the orbs of the fawn, well-cut, and with reddish corners. Her bosom is hard, full and high; her neck is goodly shaped as the conch-shell, so delicate that the saliva can be seen through it; her nose is straight and lovely, and three folds of wrinkles cross her middle, about the umbilical region. Her yoni resembles the open lotus-bud, and her love-seed (kama-salila, the water of life) is perfumed like the lily which has newly burst. She walks with swanlike gait, and her voice is low and musical as the note of the kokila bird; she delights in white raiment, in fine jewels, and in rich dresses. She eats little, sleeps lightly and, being as respectable and religious as she is clever and courteous, she is ever anxious to worship the gods, and to enjoy the conversation of the learned.”

Such, then, is the Padmini, the perfect “lotus-woman.” Interestingly, Kalyana Malla, the author of Anangaranga had a Muslim (Lodi) patron. Moreover, Padmini corresponds to sayujya-mukti, the highest state that comes about from merging with the essence of the Lord (or ultimate reality). In this “erotic” text, all the women, whether Padmini, Hastini, Shankhani, Chitrini, represent various types of mukti or liberation from human suffering. So wonderfully woman-, life-, and sex-positive are these texts.

Padmini, therefore, refers not only to a specific historic queen, but the ideal type of woman. She also signifies physical, ultimately spiritual, perfection — whoever unites with her will attain immortality. Here’s where the political angle of Jayasi’s story attains prominence. When we read the text as national allegory, we see the Hindu Rajputs as disunited; they fight each other and are therefore weak. An abused and disgraced Brahmin minister in Ratan Singh’s court takes his revenge by defecting to Alauddin Khilji’s court. It is he who, having overheard from the parrot Hiraman, of the fabulous and unearthly beauty of Padmini, plants the idea of ravishing her in the sultan’s head. In the end, two Rajput brothers-in-arms fight over Padmini, both dying in the process. The great fort of Chittor is about to fall to Khilji. The queen, along with the ladies of the court, mass-immolate in the terrifying act of jauhar.

An empty, charred fort, still smelling of burning human flesh, falls into Khilji’s hands. Jayasi mocks him: the Sultan has only the stones and bricks of the ruined citadel to convert to Islam.

So, here’s the moral of the story: no one gets Padmini in the end. Neither the legitimate, but incompetent spouse, who cannot understand her true value, let alone defend her. Nor the pillaging and plundering conqueror. The fort, itself a symbol of Padmini’s virtue and maidenhead, falls, but the queen does not surrender. She prefers death over dishonour. Another princess, who has been offered as booty to Khilji by a neighbouring Rajput king, is at first married to one of his sons, then handed out to others as a sexual trophy.

In contrast, Padmini is the medieval version of Sati, the ancient spouse of Shiva, who jumped into her father’s yagna rather than submit to him. Daksha was often portrayed as a figure of lust, with a ram’s head. Why was his yajna so intolerable to sati that she destroyed it by jumping into it? Her husband then carried the charred remains of her body all over India, till Vishnu cut off bits of them. Wherever these body parts fell became a Shakti Peeth.

The other great exemplar of India, as the phrase Sati-Savitri suggests, is Savitri, the saviour, the symbol of light and higher consciousness, Tat Savitur Varenyam…hence the pair Sati-Savitri, which we trivialise and mock these days, but which actually represents the dyad of Bharat Shakti as martyr or saviour. Between these two is the whole range of happy spouses, equal partners or in many cases, more than equal, in both kama and artha on the one hand, and dharma and moksha on the other. Of these, Radha Rani is the supreme, as paramour of god.

I would suggest that all these Devis and heroines are archetypes of Mother India herself. Bharat Mata, whom Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya taught us to worship. In Anandamath he gave us a new mantra, Vande Mataram. Sri Aurobindo took it a step farther in Bhavani Mandir by speaking of Bhavani Bharati and Bharat Shakti.

So…Now let’s try to tie up the loose ends.

Why are we so upset over even an imagined slight to Padmini? That is because we cannot tolerate the rape of Mother India by any foreign conqueror or sexual predator, even if such a narrative is justified by an alien theology of imperialism or substantiated by our unfortunate history.

Just as in real life, many a Draupadi might have been disrobed or worse, as the atrocity to Nirbhaya shows, in our great Mahabharata, Vyasa did not permit such a disruption of the moral order. He literally introduced deus ex machina, the unending sari of our heroine, by the grace of Sri Krishna himself. So also in Jayasi’s epic, as in the traditions of bardolatry which he drew on, such an insult to Padmini was never shown, nor can it be tolerated today, even in the name of freedom of expression.

Bharat Shakti, Bharat Mata, Mother India — in her ideal type — will always prefer death to dishonour. Indeed, that is why despite centuries of Islamic onslaught and relentless oppression, Hindu India was not completely subdued.

There were a million Padminis who preferred death over rape and dishonour. There were a million Rana Prataps who ate grass and slept on rocks in the jungles than accept the vassalage of a foreign power.

Both Padmini and Rana Pratap were the swarajya warriors of India.

We have seen the same saga of courage and sacrifice played out over and over again, right up to our own times. India was not, is not, will not be conquered; she is immortal because she will always prefer death to dishonour.

That is why I would argue that the agitation over Padmavati is only partly about history, but mainly about honour. Dishonour is not an option, even unto death, at least for some of us.

That is why Padmavati is not just an Indian story, but the story of India. That is why Padmini, as the symbol of resistance unto death, cannot be compromised or diluted. At least the people of India will not take very kindly to it.

This is an edited version of the author’s presentation at the Indic Thoughts Festival, Goa, 18 December 2017.

The author is Professor of English at JNU. His latest publications include The Death and Afterlife of Mahatma Gandhi (Penguin Random House, 2015), Cultural Politics in Modern India: Postcolonial Prospects, Colourful Cosmopolitanism, Global Proximities (Routledge, 2016), and Transit Passenger/Passageiro em Transito (University of Sao Paolo Press, 2016).

Source: swarajyamag

Kielce, the Post-Holocaust Pogrom That Poland Is Still Fighting Over

After World War II, Jewish refugees found they could never return to their native land—a sentiment that some echo today

 

Women grieving over the coffins of those killed in the Kielce pogrom as they are transported to the burial site in the Jewish cemetery. (U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy Leah Lahav)

By Rachel E. Gross

smithsonian.com
January 8, 2018

The massacre started with a blood libel. That wouldn’t be unusual, except this wasn’t the Middle Ages or even Nazi Germany—it was 1946, a year after the end of World War II.

A few days earlier, an 8-year-old Polish boy named Henryk Błaszczyk had gone missing from his home in Kielce, Poland, a city of 50,000 in southeastern Poland. When Henryk reappeared two days later, he told his family he had been held by a man in a basement. As his father walked him to the police station to recount his story, the boy pointed at a man who was walking near the large corner building at 7 Planty Street.

He did it, Henryk said.

The building, which was owned by the Jewish Committee and housed many Jewish institutions, was home to up to 180 Jews. It did not have a basement. Most of the residents were refugees, having survived the horrors of the death camps that decimated more than 90 percent of the Polish Jewish population. After the war, they had returned to their homeland with the hope that they could leave the past behind them. They had no idea they were about to become the target of anti-Semitic aggression once again—this time from the Polish neighbors they lived alongside.

On the morning of July 4, a small group of state militia and local police approached the building to investigate the alleged kidnapping. As rumors of misdeeds spread, a version of the centuries-old “blood libel” that Jews were kidnapping Christian children for ritual sacrifice, a mob began to assemble. But it was the police and military who started the violence, recounts Polish historian Jan T. Gross in his 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. Though they were ostensibly there to protect civilians and keep the peace, officers instead opened fire and began dragging Jews into the courtyard, where the townspeople savagely attacked the Jewish residents.

That day, Jewish men and women were stoned, robbed, beaten with rifles, stabbed with bayonets, and hurled into a river that flowed nearby. Yet while other Kielce residents walked by, none did anything to stop it. It wasn’t until noon that another group of soldiers was sent in to break up the crowd and evacuate the wounded and dead. In the afternoon, a group of metal workers ran toward the building, armed with iron bars and other weapons. The residents of 7 Planty were relieved; they thought these men had come to help. Instead, the metal workers began brutally attacking and killing those still alive inside the building.

Continue reading .... smithsonianmag

శ్రీ కౌముది జనవరి 2018

Source: శ్రీ కౌముది

Surprise as DNA reveals new group of Native Americans: the ancient Beringians

Genetic analysis of a baby girl who died at the end of the last ice age shows she belonged to a previously unknown ancient group of Native Americans

• What the ancient DNA discovery tells us about Native American ancestry

An illustration of the Upward Sun River camp in what is now Interior Alaska. Illustration: Illustration by Eric S. Carlson in collaboration with Ben A. Potter

Ian Sample Science editor

Wed 3 Jan ‘18 18.00 GMT Last modified on Thu 4 Jan ‘18 00.10 GMT

A baby girl who lived and died in what is now Alaska at the end of the last ice age belonged to a previously unknown group of ancient Native Americans, according to DNA recovered from her bones.

The child, a mere six weeks old when she died, was found in a burial pit next to the remains of a stillborn baby, perhaps a first cousin, during excavations of an 11,500-year-old residential camp in Tanana River Valley in Central Alaska. The remains were discovered in 2013, but a full genetic analysis has not been possible until now.

Researchers tried to recover ancient DNA from both of the infants but succeeded only in the case of the larger individual. They had expected her genetic material to resemble modern northern or southern lineages of Native Americans, but found instead that she had a distinct genetic makeup that made her a member of a separate population.

What the ancient DNA discovery tells us about Native American ancestry

The newly-discovered group, named “ancient Beringians”, appears to have split off from the founding population of Native Americans about 20,000 years ago. While the ancestors of other Native Americans pushed south into the continent as the ice caps thawed, the ancient Beringians remained in the north until they eventually died out.

“This is a new population of Native Americans,” said Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, whose team recovered the girl’s DNA from a dense part of her skull known as the petrous bone. Details of the work are published in Nature.

Working with scientists at the University of Alaska and elsewhere, Willerslev compared the genetic makeup of the baby, named Xach’itee’aanenh t’eede gaay or “sunrise child-girl” by the local community, with genomes from other ancient and modern people. They found that nearly half of the girl’s DNA came from the ancient north Eurasians who lived in what is now Siberia. The rest of her genetic makeup was a roughly even mix of DNA now carried by the northern and southern Native Americans.

Using evolutionary models, the researchers showed that the ancestors of the first Native Americans started to emerge as a distinct population about 35,000 years ago, probably in north-east Asia. About 25,000 years ago, this group mixed and bred with ancient north Eurasians in the region, the descendants of whom went on to become the first Native Americans to settle the New World.

During the last ice age, so much water was locked up in the ice caps that a land bridge reached from Asia to North America across what is now the Bering Strait. Willerslev believes the ancestors of Native Americans travelled to the continent in a single wave of migration more than 20,000 years ago. Those who settled in the north became the isolated ancient Beringians, he said, while those who moved south, around or through the ice sheets, split into the north and south Native Americans about 15,700 years ago.

No 'lost tribes' or aliens: what ancient DNA reveals about American prehistory

But there is another possibility. Ben Potter, an archaeologist on the team from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, suspects that the Beringians split from the ancestors of other Native Americans in Asia before both groups made their way across the land bridge to North America in separate migrations. “The support for this scenario is pretty strong,” he said. “We have no evidence of people in the Beringia region 20,000 years ago.”

The families who lived at the ancient camp may have spent months there, Potter said. Excavations at the site, known as Upward Sun River, have revealed at least three tent structures that would have provided shelter. The two babies were found in a burial pit beneath a hearth where families cooked salmon caught in the local river. The cremated remains of a third child, who died at the age of three, were found on top of the hearth at the abandoned camp.

Connie Mulligan, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, said the findings pointed to a single migration of people from Asia to the New World, but said other questions remained. “How did people move so quickly to the southernmost point of South America and settle two continents that span a huge climatic and geographic range?” she said.

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University, said the work boosted the case for a single migration into Alaska, but did not rule out alternatives involving multiple waves of migration. He added that he was unconvinced that the ancient Beringian group split from the ancestors of other Native Americans 20,000 years ago, because even tiny errors in scientists’ data can lead to radically different split times for evolutionary lineages. “While the 19,000-21,000 year date would have important implications if true and may very well be right, I am not convinced that there is compelling evidence that the initial split date is that old,” he said.

Source: theguardian

శ్రీ కౌముది డిసెంబర్ 2017

Source: శ్రీ కౌముది

Human remains found in northern France last year turned out to be two Indian soldiers who died on the battlefields there during World War 1

They were finally laid to rest this month in a special ceremony there. pic.twitter.com/pe3gZpqXjN

— BBC Asian Network (@bbcasiannetwork) November 21, 2017

శ్రీ కౌముది నవంబర్ 2017

శ్రీ కౌముది నవంబర్ 2017

శ్రీ కౌముది అక్టోబరు 2017

శ్రీ కౌముది అక్టోబరు 2017

The land of soma

Botanical clues show the shared heritage of the Rig Veda and the Avesta.

Written by Rajesh Kochhar | Published:September 22, 2017 12:20 am

Soma is a celebrated plant in the RV as well as the AV where it is called haoma, later shortened to Hom in Pahalvi. (Representative image)

Theories about the homeland of the Aryans have been in news of late because of genetic studies. The theory that ascribes an indigenous origin to the Aryans can be shown to be untenable on very simple considerations based on a comparative study of the Rig Veda (RV) and the related Zoroastrian sacred text Avesta (AV). The Rig Vedic and Avestan languages are essentially the same, with very minor differences in grammar. They share a common vocabulary in the fields of mythology, ritual, culture, and religious practices. There are some phonetic differences but the changes take place according to well-defined rules (Sanskrit s into h, h into z). Ahura in AV (as in Ahura Mazda) is cognate with asura in RV with the same meaning, lord (asura as a demon is a later development.) Yama son of Vivasvan is known to AV. Nabhanedishta is a son of Manu in RV; it becomes a common noun in AV meaning “nearest in relation”.

The Avesta proper consists of three parts: Yasna, Visperad, and Vendidad. Yasna in turn includes 17 hymns, called Gathas, which are attributed to Zarathushtra himself and thus constitute the oldest parts of AV. He describes himself as a zaotar (hotr), while later texts call him athaurvan (atharvan).

Zarathushtra introduces some points of departure from the Rig Veda but does not repudiate the joint Indo-Iranian legacy. Deva and Indra become demons in AV, but Vrtrahana (slayer of Vrtra) who is identified with Indra in RV retains his position in AV as a god in his own right The Rig Vedic and the Avestan people both called themselves Arya, meaning noble. RV and AV are Aryan documents, and therefore need to be read together.

There are no dependable chronological clues in either the RV or the AV. But the common botanical information in them can be used to disceren geography. Soma, for example, is a celebrated plant in the RV as well as the AV where it is called haoma, later shortened to Hom in Pahalvi. A drink of the same name was squeezed from the plant for offering to the gods and for drinking. RV devotes a full mandala to soma, and the longest hymn in RV is addressed to it. There is a striking similarity between the Vedic agnishtoma and the Zoroastrian haoma ceremony, both of which must therefore have originated in the common Indo-Iranian period. From the textual references we learn that soma/haoma was a scented leafless plant with long-jointed finger-like juicy stalks. Though the ritual was elaborate, the process itself was very simple. The stalks and shoots of the plant were crushed either between two stones or in mortar and pestle. The juice was collected, purified and drunk unfermented.

Yasna (10.10) mentions Haraiti Bareza as the soma habitat. Haraiti is identified with Mount Elburz, which earlier denoted the whole range of mountains extending from the Hindu Kush in the east to the Caucasus in the west. RV informs us that soma grew in the mountains. RV (9.46.1) calls soma parvatavrdh ( mountain grown). The Atharvaveda (3.21.10) calls the mountains somaprashtha ( carrying soma on their back). RV (10.34.1) uses the term soma maujavata, the soma from Mujavat, which according to Yaska’s Nirukta (9.8) was a mountain.

Soma was a common plant in the places where the Rig Vedic and Avestian people lived. In RV (8.80), a maiden, Apala by name, plucks Soma twigs by the wayside and chews them with the purpose of becoming attractive to men. Anyone who maltreats haoma is cursed to remain childless (Yasna 11.3). As if aware of this, in RV (8.31.5), husband and wife “with one accord” press out the soma juice, no doubt as a prelude to sexual intercourse. While there is continuity in the Zoroastrian soma ritual, there are clear signs that the Vedic people moved away from the soma habitat. In the Baudhyayana Shrautasutra (6.14) the Adhvaryu asks the seller if the soma came from Mujavat which obviously was still a source of supply. Katyayana Shrautasutra (10.9.30) talks of rationing soma. It enjoins the priests not to give it to a kshatriya or a vaishya even if available, but asks the priests to give them a substitute. Shatapatha Brahmana (4.5.10.2-6) lists the substitutes to be used in the ritual when soma is not available. In course of time, soma became a mythical plant even for medical texts. Sushruta Samhita (29.21-22) and Charaka Samhita (1.4-6) both believe that soma had 15 leaves which appeared one per day during the waxing moon (shuklapaksha) and dropoff one by one during the waning moon (krishnapaksha).

The Brahmana texts reverentially reserve the name soma for the original soma plant and talk of its substitutes. The reverence disappears in later times when the term soma, suffixed with lata or valli (meaning creeper) is applied to different local plants, which like the original soma are leafless.

There is a broad consensus among scholars that the ancient soma/haoma plant be identified with high-altitude varieties of ephedra which have a high alkaloid content. (ephedra grows in plains also but these varieties have no juice.) The botanical identification of soma is however not quite relevant for our present discussion.

There can be no doubt whatsoever that the Rig Vedic and the Avestan people had a common heritage and lived in close proximity to one another. Their joint habitat was the Somaland. Indian plains do not match the RV and AV description of Soma-growing areas. Even otherwise, if India were the Indo-Iranian homeland, it is the ancient Iranians who would have been looking for soma substitutes and not Indians. The conclusion is inescapable: Rigvedic people, like ancient Iranians, must have lived in mountainous areas where the soma plant grew.

Kochhar is the author of ‘The Vedic People’

Source: indianexpress