HORSEPLAY IN HARAPPA
- (excerpts)
The Indus Valley Decipherment Hoax
By Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer
http://www.flonnet.com/fl1720/17200040.htm
(for the rest please go to the above link)
Michael Witzel, a Harvard University Indologist, and
Steve Farmer, a comparative historian, report on media hype, faked data, and
Hindutva propaganda in recent claims that the Indus Valley script has been
decoded.
Last summer the Indian press carried sensational stories announcing the final
decipherment of the Harappan or Indus Valley script. A United News of India
dispatch on July 11, 1999, picked up throughout South Asia, reported on new
research by "noted histo rian, N.S. Rajaram, who along with palaeographist
Dr. Natwar Jha, has read and deciphered the messages on more than 2,000 Harappan
seals." Discussion of the messages was promised in Rajaram and Jha's
upcoming book, The Deciphered Indus Script. For nearly a year, the
Internet was abuzz with reports that Rajaram and Jha had decoded the full corpus
of Indus Valley texts.
This was not the first claim that the
writing of the Indus Valley Civilisation (fl. c. 2600-1900 BCE) had been
cracked. In a 1996 book, American archaeologist Gregory Possehl reviewed
thirty-five attempted decipherments, perhaps one-third the actual numb er. But
the claims of Rajaram and Jha went far beyond those of any recent historians.
Not only had the principles of decipherment been discovered, but the entire
corpus of texts could now be read. Even more remarkable were the historical
conclusions that Rajaram and his collaborator said were backed by the decoded
messages.
The UNI story was triggered by
announcements that Rajaram and Jha had not only deciphered the Indus Valley
seals but had read "pre-Harappan" texts dating to the mid-fourth
millennium BCE. If confirmed, this meant that they had decoded mankind's
earliest literary message. The "texts" were a handful of symbols
scratched on a pottery tablet recently discovered by Harvard University
archaeologist Richard Meadow. The oldest of these, Rajaram told the UNI, was a
text that could be translated "Ila surrounds th e blessed land" - an
oblique but unmistakable reference to the Rigveda's Saraswati river. The
suggestion was that man's earliest message was linked to India's oldest
religious text.1 The claim was hardly trivial, since this was over
2,000 year s before Indologists date the Rigveda - and more than 1,000 years
before Harappan culture itself reached maturity.
Rajaram's World
After months of media hype, Rajaram and
Jha's The Deciphered Indus Script2 made it to print in New
Delhi early this year. By midsummer the book had reached the West and was being
heatedly discussed via the Internet in Europe, India, and the United States. The
book gave credit for the decipherment method to Jha, a provincial religious
scholar, previously unknown, from Farakka, in West Bengal. The book's publicity
hails him as "one of the world's foremost Vedic scholars and palaeographer
s." Jha had reportedly worked in isolation for twenty years, publishing a
curious 60-page English pamphlet on his work in 1996. Jha's study caught the eye
of Rajaram, who was already notorious in Indological circles. Rajaram took
credit for writing most of the book, which heavily politicised Jha's largely
apolitical message. Rajaram's online biography claims that their joint effort is
"the most important breakthrough of our time in the history of Indian
history and culture."
Boasts like this do not surprise
battle-scarred Indologists familiar with Rajaram's work. A U.S. engineering
professor in the 1980s, Rajaram re-invented himself in the 1990s as a fiery
Hindutva propagandist and "revisionist" historian. By the mid-1990s,
he could claim a following in India and in ‚migr‚ circles in the U.S. In
manufacturing his public image, Rajaram traded heavily on claims, not justified
by his modest research career, that before turning to history "he was one
of America's best-known wor kers in artificial intelligence and robotics."
Hyperbole abounds in his online biography, posted at the ironically named
"Sword of Truth" website. The Hindutva propaganda site, located in the
United States, pictures Rajaram as a "world-renowned" expert o n
"Vedic mathematics" and an "authority on the history of
Christianity." The last claim is supported by violently anti-Christian
works carrying titles like Christianity's Collapsing Empire and Its Designs
in India. Rajaram's papers include his "Se arch for the historical
Krishna" (found in the Indus Valley c. 3100 BCE); attack a long list of
Hindutva "enemies" including Christian missionaries, Marxist
academics, leftist politicians, Indian Muslims, and Western Indologists; and
glorify the mob dest ruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 as a symbol of India's
emergence from "the grip of alien imperialistic forces and their
surrogates." All Indian history, Rajaram writes, can be pictured as a
struggle between nationalistic and imperialistic forces.
In Indology, the imperialistic enemy is
the "colonial-missionary creation known as the Aryan invasion model,"
which Rajaram ascribes to Indologists long after crude invasion theories have
been replaced by more sophisticated acculturation models by seriou s
researchers. Rajaram's cartoon image of Indology is to be replaced by "a
path of study that combines ancient learning and modern science." What
Rajaram means by "science" is suggested in one of his papers
describing the knowledge of the Rigveda poets. The Rigveda rishis, we
find, packed their hymns with occult allusions to high-energy physics,
anti-matter, the inflational theory of the universe, calculations of the speed
of light, and gamma-ray bursts striking the earth three times a day. The l atter
is shown in three Rigveda verses (3.56.6, 7.11.3, 9.86.18) addressed to the god
Agni. The second Rajaram translates: "O Agni! We know you have wealth to
give three times a day to mortals."
One of Rajaram's early Hindutva pieces
was written in 1995 with David Frawley, a Western "New Age" writer who
likes to find allusions to American Indians in the Rigveda. Frawley is
transformed via the "Sword of Truth" into a "famous
American Vedic scholar and historian." The book by Rajaram and Frawley
proposes the curious thesis that the Rigveda was the product of a complex urban
and maritime civilisation, not the primitive horse-and-chariot culture seen in
the text. The goal is to link the Rigv eda to the earlier Indus Valley
Civilisation, undercutting any possibility of later "Aryan" migrations
or relocations of the Rigveda to "foreign" soil. Ancient India,
working through a massive (but lost) Harappan literature, was a prime source of
civilis ation to the West.
The Deciphered Indus Script
makes similar claims with different weapons. The Indus-Saraswati Valley again
becomes the home of the Rigveda and a font of higher civilisation: Babylonian
and Greek mathematics, all alphabetical scripts, and even Roman numerals flow
out to the world from the Indus Valley's infinitely fertile cultural womb. Press
releases praise the work for not only "solving the most significant
technical problem in historical research of our time" - deciphering the
Indus script - but for demonstrating as well that "if any 'cradle of
civilisation' existed, it was located not in Mesopotamia but in the Saraswati
Valley." The decoded messages of Harappa thus confirm the Hindutva
propagandist's wildest nationalistic dreams.
(for
the rest of article please go to Frontline at http://www.flonnet.com/fl1720/17200040.htm
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