Discovering India Anew: Out of Africa to Its Early History (Second Edition)
By Alan Machado (Prabhu)
Orient BlackSwan, 356 pages, Rs 750

Alan Machado (Prabhu), having graduated from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, worked in the engineering industry in various capacities and countries, including Australia and Europe. His previously published books include ‘Sarasvati’s Children’ (1999), ‘Shades within Shadows’ (2012), ‘Slaves of Sultans’ (2015) and ‘Goa’s Inquisition’ (2022).

‘Discovering India Anew’ reconstructs the history of Indian peoples, taking off from where the history of Indians really begins: Africa. Exploring their earliest journey out of Africa through the colonisation of South Asia by different genetic groups to the end of South Asia’s first urban civilisation, Harappa, and the arrival of the Indo-Aryans, the author asks a fundamental question: Who are we Indians? The book draws on fields as diverse as archaeology, archaeobotany, palaeoanthropology, genetics, climatology, historical linguistics and literary sources to study the evolution of Homo sapiens and their dispersal across the globe, against the backdrop of global climate changes. It discusses the forager-farmer conflict and maps out a linguistic history of India. And much more.

Through an anecdotal narrative style, the author artfully opens new windows into our past, and highlights how the narrative told by myth and bias contrasts with the alternate history revealed by modern scientific investigations.

This astonishing story of human grit will fascinate scholars and researchers of history as well as the historically inclined, curious reader.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

Tales Languages Tell
What the Earliest Texts Reveal

The earliest evidence for Indo-Aryan languages in South Asia appears only around 3.5 ka, after that of the other language families. Unlike the other families, however, they have a considerable body of texts dating to this early period, the oldest in South Asia. They contain important information on the diffusion of the Indo-Aryan speakers into South Asia, and of the people who were already living there. The texts, however, being mainly related to priestly functions, are preserved in the language of an elite section of society and provide only a limited view of the larger world. For instance, we learn of the dasas and dasyus only from the few references made to them, and of contemporary Indus languages from the words borrowed from them. It is from this small window that we have to infer much of the rest.

Rgvedic scriptures have been classified into three periods: the early period (1700–1450 bce) which contains hymns referring to the Yadu-Turvasa and Anu-Druhyu tribes; the middle period (1450–1300 bce) which focuses on the Bharata chieftain Sudas and his rivals the Trasadasyu and Puru tribes; and the late period (1300–1200 bce) which focuses on the emergence of the Kuru super tribe (Masica 1991; Witzel 1999a, 1999b, 2000). Later OIA literary tradition reflects a movement of Indo-Aryan speakers from the Punjab eastward to the Ganga-Yamuna doab, while the archaeological record reveals a southward expansion from the north Indus into Sindh by the middle Rgvedic period, followed by eastward movements into central India and the Deccan. These migratory routes paralleled each other and eventually met in the fourth century bce in the central Ganges Valley. Linguistic evidence indicates that by then differences had arisen in the dialects, classified as the innerand outer Indo-Aryan, spoken in the two regions. The OIA literary tradition considers outer Indo-Aryan as an aberrant form, and its speakers as beyond the pale of Vedic society. The Satapatha Brahmana terms the regions they inhabited as mleccha (non-Vedic, barbarian), possibly derived from Meluhha (south Sindh). Mleccha regions included Sindh, Saurashtra, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bihar, Bengal and Odisha. This regional division represented by the north-central and southwest-east languages corresponds to a long-standing historical division between the Aryavarta, or land of Vedic orthodoxy, and the mleccha-desa, lands where non-Aryan languages were spoken and Vedic rituals not observed.

The Rgveda is composed in Vedic Sanskrit, an Indo-European language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch (Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani). Some 383 words, 4% of this text, are of non-Indo-Aryan origin, borrowed from languages spoken c1450 bce in the Punjab (Witzel 2000). Relating mostly to agriculture, animals, plants, music and names of persons, clans/tribes, places and rivers, these loanwords are suggestive of a people moving into a new and unfamiliar environment, and interacting with populations who already have agriculture. The names of things peculiar to South Asia (Munda: banana-kadali, cotton-karpasa, pepper-marica, mongoose-nakula; Dravidian: palm-tala, lotus-kamala, kumuda, kuvalaya, nalina, sandalwood-candana, peacock-mayura) are either borrowed or coined and suggest an encounter with something new.

These words were borrowed from Harappan languages. Four have been identified: a pre-Rgvedic Para-Munda substrate in the Punjab; a northern Indus language; a southern Indus language, Meluhhan, the source of some forty words referring to Harappan products traded in Mesopotamia and recorded in its texts; Dravidian words in the middle and late Vedic period (Witzel 1999a).

The earliest foreign elements found in the Rgveda are Austro-Asiatic in appearance (names of individuals, tribes, geographical features) and belong to a prefixing language(s) (Kuiper 1948: 5). Prefixes are common in Munda and other Austro-Asiatic languages, but unknown in Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and Burushaski. Variously termed Proto-Munda, Para-Munda or Harappan, there is reason to believe that it was once the predominant language family spoken in the Indus Valley in the second millennium bce. Its influence may have extended to southeast Iran, Baluchistan and Makran. A possible link between Sumerian and Kherwani, a Munda language, has been suggested based on the presence of thirty-four words common to both languages (Diakonoff n.d.; 1997: 56).

River and geographical features mostly remain constant in the forever-changing flux of population movements. Their names can open windows into the early linguistic history of a region and are often ancient and contain clues on the identities of the earlier inhabitants of a territory. River names may be adopted directly from the local language (Kausiki, Kosi), or transformed from a local name (Ganga, Kubha, Sutudri). They may be translations (Sadanira), or new but related to the old name (Vitasta). Some reflect transfers from an older place of migration (Sarasvati, Gomati, Sarayu). Many of the names of rivers listed in the Rgveda are Vedic, but as their modern names show these were probably not their pre-Vedic names: Sutudri (Sutlej), Vipas (Beas), Parushni (Ravi), Asikni (Chenab), Vitasta (Jhelum), Sarasvati (Ghaggar), Drishadvati (Chautang), Kubha (Kabul), Gomati (Gomal), Krumu (Kurram). Sutudri, possibly of Munda origin, became Satadru (‘flowing in a hundred channels’) before being renamed Sutlej. The visambal/pal (vaisambhalya/phalya) was Sankritised to saras-vati. A number of river names (Ganga, Gandak, Narmada, Godavari, Alakananda, Mandakini) contain elements that can be reconstructed from Munda words related to water and river (da, dak, gandak) (Witzel n.d.).

Dravidian place names locate Dravidian speakers at the very crossroads of ancient population movements into and through South Asia. They trace a route from the Iranian plateau to Sindh, suggesting they were in Iran before Indo-Aryan speakers. Dravidian loanwords appear in Rgvedic texts from c1450 bce. They have no association with agriculture, a clear indication that the language of the northern Indus people was not Dravidian.

The main contact between Dravidian and Indo-Aryan speakers appears to have taken place in the mleccha-desa lands of Sindh, the southwest, and the Deccan where Dravidian speakers appear to have once formed a significant part of the population before the arrival of the outer Indo-Aryan groups. These areas are now occupied by the speakers of Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati and Sindhi. These languages contain traits that suggest an early Dravidian influence in the form of lexical and structural borrowings, and place and river names.

[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]