Book review: 'The Roots of Hinduism' by Aska Parpola

Book: The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization

Author: Aska Parpola

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Pages: 363

Price: Rs 850

It is not the done thing among scholars -- to write about Aryans, Dravidians, Vedic literature and all that. Archaeology is respectable but it is so as long as you do not interpolate it with religious rituals, texts and myths. Historical linguistics is seen as a branch of linguistics, not to be connected with history proper as such. Then there is the issue of Indus Valley civilisation, its undeciphered language, and the mystery of the Shiva-like figure on one of the undecipherable seals.

Finnish scholar Asko Parpola does all these things which are not really considered polite enough in ancient history and archaeology circles. It is alright to infer material cultures from archaeological remains, and speculate about formation of states. But to speak about fertility cults in detail and connect them across similar phenomena in other civilisations and cultures is certainly unfashionable. It is alright to speak of early Aryans and their belief systems in outline, but it is considered a good idea to get into the textual details of the different strata of the Vedic and the post-Vedic corpus.

Parpola is also out to offend the ignorant right-wing ranters who say that Indus Valley civilisation and the Vedic culture belong to the same people, not bothering to explain the many differences for the simple reason that they lack both scholarly diligence and rigour to do so. He firmly believes that the Indus Valley Civilisation is Dravidian despite the undeciphered language, and he believes that the Aryan homeland is somewhere in the Urals and southern Russia to be described as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which then branched off into Indo-Iranian before it became Indo-Aryan.

He is one of the old-fashioned Indologists, who worked his way into the field through textual studies, especially of the Vedas. His doctoral dissertation was the “annotated English translation” of Drahyayana-Srautasutra, which is a study of “the chanter priests in Vedic sacrificial rituals”. Then he went on to study the parallel texts of Latyayana Srautasutra and the Jaiminiya Srautasutra. All of them are connected with the Sama Veda. It has to be noted that the srautasutra belongs along with the grihyasutra and dharmasutra to a post-Vedic period. The srautasutra dealt with the religious rituals, the grihyasutras with the rituals of home and family, the dharmasutras with legal matters. Parpola collaborated with Frits Staal in recording the fire sacrifice as conducted by the Nambudri Brahmins in Kerala. His wife, Marjatta, wrote Kerala Brahmins in Transition (published in 2000), when he was documenting “domestic rituals of Jaiminiya Samavedins by taking photographs and videos of actual and simulated performances” in 1983-85.

At the same time when he started on his doctoral dissertation, Parpola had got into studying the Indus script as a hobby because his childhood friend, Seppo Koskenniemi, who was scientific advisor to the IBM, offered him the use of a computer programme. Parpola’s brother, Simo, a student of Assyriology, joined the team. In the 1980s, his daughter, Paivikii, worked on the computer testing of the methods developed by Seppo. He published Deciphering the Indus script in 1994, where he tried out his thesis of Indus Valley civilisation being Dravidian.

He states the problem in a pretty straightforward fashion: “When did the Indo-Aryan speakers associated with the Rigvedic hymns move from Central Asia to South Asia? This has been, and continues to be, one of the chief problems of Vedic research and Indian history as a whole. If we ignore the impossible hypothesis that the Vedic Aryans were indigenous to South Asia, and some implausibly ancient dates for their existence, we find that current scholarly estimates for the date of their migration vary between about 2000 and 1000 BCE.”

One of the many things he does in this book is use the concept of “loan-words” taken from linguistics to explain the intermingling of the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages and people, and he locates many Tamil loan-words in Rigveda. He puts forward the view that the Sanskrit word 'Om' is taken from Tamil, and he explains how. He says that the word was used as granting permission. While tracing its ritualistic significance, he quotes from the Chandogya-Upanishad: “This syllable is one of permission; for when one permits anything he says om.” And from the Aitareya-Brahmana he cites this passage: “om is the response to a Rigvedic verse (rc), tatha (‘be it so’) to a profane verse (gatha); om is divine, tatha is human.” Parpola explains the distinction in terms of liguistic register: “Distinction is made here between the hieratic speech of the sacrifice, where om is used to express agreement, and ordinary, mundane conversation, where tatha or tathastu is used.” And then he arrives at his own thesis: “I therefore propose that om (with a long o as always in Sanskrit) derives from the Proto-Dravidian am, “yes,” a contracted variant of akum...This usage of am to mean “yes” is still very common in Dravidian languages, for instance Tamil, and in the Jaffna dialect of Tamil in Sri Lanka...”

This proposal of Parpola goes back to 1981, and he has used it in this book to explain the intermingling of languages and peoples of Dravidians and Aryans. Whatever the orthodox may say from either side of the fence, it clears one aspect of the word 'Om' without clearly explaining how the Proto-Dravidian word crossed over into the Vedic language. The aspect of the word that is clear, and which has not been put forth by other scholars, is the meaning of 'Om' as giving permission. The second aspect of 'Om' being a variant of 'am' is a curious one. Parpola would have to offer more by way of explanation to be convincing enough. He makes similar observations for the words 'phalam' and 'sakatam'. The first is a fruit, and he says that it has a Tamil origin. For 'sakatam', he argues that in the Indus valley it referred to an ox-driven cart, which is common in the whole of India to this day.

Earlier in the book, he shows how chariot was a key element in the Indo-European cultures of Anatolia, and how each of the Indo-Europeans languages had developed specific terms for different parts of a chariot.

Parpola travels with ease from the ancient archaeological sites and the cultures associated with them, from the Urals and Anatolia to Indus Valley and south India. The book makes for extremely interesting reading. Though it is meant for the general reader, it is not a popular work. It remains scholarly and detached.