Studies in the Origins of Buddhism c13.15

c13.15

It has been suggested that the Indus Civilisation perished through the violence of insurgent Aryans. The Rg-Vedic references to the destruction of ‘pur’s have been taken to be references to the walled-cities and forts of the Pre-Aryans.¹⁰ The fight of Indra with ‘dāsas’ and ‘dasyus’ is interpreted as the struggle of the Aryans against the Non-Aryans.¹¹ Piggott has even seen in Indra’s exploit of releasing the waters a reference to the Aryan destruction of the bunds built to protect the Harappa cities from flood.¹² Pt. K. Chattopadhyaya has, however, conclusively shown that ‘dāsa’ and ‘dasyu’ refer to demons as traditionally understood, not to Non-Aryan human beings.¹³ Indra as a god naturally fights against demons who are as naturally conceived to be foes of Rite, dark and mis-shapen, of strange speech, and evil. Their ‘forts’ and ‘cities’ are nothing but a poetic and fanciful representation of clouds in the interests of myth. Of course, it may be conceded that the Aryan invasion must have created for some time a picture of confused struggles and perhaps even the myth and fancy of the conflicts between gods and demons may contain an indirect and imaginative echo of a more actual and historical conflict. But it is clear that the RS contains no direct reference to the fight of the Aryan race against a ‘dark-skinned’, ‘snub-nosed’, aboriginal people called Dāsas and Dasyus. There is no doubt of the existence of a highly civilized non-Aryan people in India at the time of the Aryan invasion and of the conflicts which must have ensued between the two subsequently, but we do not on that account need to turn myth directly into history. The fact of the matter is that prior to the discovery of Indus Civilisation, the modern historians of India were inclined to picture her pre-Aryan inhabitants as dark and savage—very much like ‘demons’!—so that in the description of demons they readily discerned their own picture of the pre-Aryan aborigines of India! As to the racial composition of the Indus Valley people it is difficult to generalize at present. They appear to have been a mixed population, including Proto-Australoids, Mediterraneans, and Mongoloids.¹⁴ The description of the Indus Civilization as Dravidian, as is sometimes done,¹⁵ does not seem to have any positive evidence in its favour as yet.