The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c8: Chapter IV. Mohenjo Daro Monuments vis-à-vis Vedic Texts (c. 3500-2500 B.C.)
The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c8
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Chapter IV. Mohenjo Daro Monuments vis-à-vis Vedic Texts (c. 3500-2500 B.C.)
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The Homeric antiquity of Greece lost its prestige about half a century ago on account of the discoveries in Crete. Homer was then found to be not so much the first of a new series as the last of an old. The same "misfortune" has befallen Vedic India today owing to the "inconvenient" discoveries of the Mohenjo Daro-Harappa culture. In the perspective of the "Hindus" who were responsible for the technocracy and spiritual life of that civilization the Vedic *Ṛiṣis* are found to be much too "flat, jejune, modern." Once more has Vedic civilization grown into a regular "problem" of world-culture. This question has bearings not only on the old issues relating to the so-called Indo-Aryan complex but on the new ones also relating to the origins of civilization itself. And the problems are as much anthropologico-geographical as chronologico-historical.
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The relations, both statical and dynamic, as well as formal and contentual, between the Vedas and the "Indus Valley" happen for the time being to be quite mysterious. One reason for this mystery is perhaps to be found in the data themselves. The monuments of Mohenjo Daro complex are as yet non-literary. They speak to us only through "stocks and stones," so to say. On the other hand, the language of the Vedas is almost exclusively literary. The "stocks and stones"
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should appear to be almost unknown to the Vedic *milieu*. On the face of it there is hardly any intellectual nexus between the two complexes. The mind operating behind or through the one set of human creations does not seem to have any affinity with that behind the other.
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One thing, however, is clear. The "stocks and stones" created by the men and women of Mohenjo Daro have their bearings on the life-systems to the East of the Indus, i.e., to India Proper no less than on those to the West, i.e., to Persia, Asia Minor, Egypt and so forth. Janus-like they are double-faced in their forms and contents. Archæology will perhaps have to wait for quite a few decades before the exact orientations of these finds to the East and the West are deciphered.
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But in the meantime it may not be entirely out of the question for the students of social science to attempt reading some meaning into the diverse art-forms—architectural, sculptural, etc.,—such as have been unearthed in plenty. The language of art,—the "geometry" of forms,—is universal. The "stocks and stones" also can be eloquent especially because they have their cognates and agnates. Some of the "stocks and stones" to which the "Hindus" of modern India are used,—no matter how diverse their cranial types and howsoever removed from the Indus Valley they may happen to be,—are the family likenesses of just those antique specimens which have rendered the creations of Vedic *Risis* but the phenomena of yesterday. A psychological affinity between those Indians of 3500 B.C. and the Indians of today as registered in the *élan vital* or creative urge behind many of the art-forms may be considered to be fairly plausible. This is one side of the story.
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From another standpoint, we may have to believe in no distant future that the Vedic *Ṛiṣis* were not without culture-contacts with the *Ṛiṣis* of Mohenjo Daro. May be, some of the items of the Mohenjo Daro complex are actually to be found in certain Vedic strands. Perhaps it may be established somewhat that during certain periods of this culture-contact the Mohenjo Daro monuments and the Vedic texts supplemented each other. In other words, the archæology of the Mohenjo Daro finds may have a part of its literary background in the Vedas, while the archæological monuments corresponding to Vedic literature may have in part to be detected in the finds of Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and allied regions. The antiquity of Vedic life and thought may altogether have to be pushed farther back towards the third or fourth millennium B.C.
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All this guess-work is to be treated for the present as nothing but conjecture, pure and undefiled. But that the history of the achievements of Hindu culture finds itself today in the most complicated melting-point there is no doubt. The beginnings of a new indology are already in sight.¹
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¹ W. Wuest: “Ueber die neuesten Ausgrabungen im nordwestlichen Indien” (*Zeitschrift der deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft* Vol. LXXXI. R. Chanda: “Survival of the Prehistoric Civilisation of the Indus Valley” (*Memoirs of the Archæological Survey of India*, Calcutta 1929). B. Svarup: “Harappa Seals and the Antiquity of Writing in India” (*Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society*, Patna, Vol. IX.) S. V. Venkatesvara: “Vedic Iconography” (*Rupam*, Calcutta April-October, 1930). L. Renou: *Bibliographie Védique* (Paris, 1931).