Until recently, European historians and politicians, especially the British, could not reconcile with the idea of India being a single united ‘nation’, and cast serious doubts about India’s unity, integrity and nationhood. A few of them had gone to the extent of saying that India is not a nation, a sentiment which has recently found resonance amongst a few prominent Indian politicians too. The Europeans cannot be faulted much because they are conditioned by Europe’s own experience of disintegration.

Equal to the size of India, Europe (minus the erstwhile Soviet ruled States), in spite of having tremendous commonality of religion, race, colour, creed and language, has not been able to stay together, thereby splitting into small nationalities and is still in the process of divisiveness as evidenced by the break-up of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and the impending danger to the United Kingdom.

The Europeans could never imagine that with India’s bewildering diversity – 1.4 billion people with all the major religious groups, 121 major languages including 23 national languages and 1599 other languages (more than 19500 mother tongues), 28 federal States and 8 union territories including Jammu and Kashmir, and 3000 castes and 25,000 sub-castes ~ the sub-continent could survive as one nation. Winston Churchill, Britain’s war-time Prime Minister who could not hide his hatred for the Indian people openly declared that Indians were incapable of governing themselves and if given independence, disintegration would be imminent.

Fortunately, nothing like that happened and all of them have been proved wrong. Even after 75 years of Independence, India continues to remain a vibrant democracy and a strong nation making great strides in economic, social and military development aspiring to be a world power.

This has been possible mainly because of India’s commitment to the wonderful Constitution of India, considered to be the longest and best written constitution of the world. The Indian Constitution is held in such high esteem that the famous political scientist, Sir Earnest Barker began his Introduction to Social and Political Theory with the reproduction of the Preamble to the Constitution of India, saying that the highest noble principles of governance have been enshrined in the Indian Constitution.

The Indian Constitution places great emphasis on the unity and integrity of the nation making it a ‘Union of States’ with a strong Centre and not a loose Federation. In addition to the Preamble, the Fundamental Rights, the Directive Principles of State Policy and the Fundamental Duties seek to promote harmony and progress. Article 51A of the Constitution lists the Fundamental Duties, one of which is to “promote harmony and the spirit of common brotherhood amongst all the people of India transcending religious, linguistic and regional or sectional diversities.”

It is the great resilience and tolerance of the Indian people that has contributed to the unity amidst fascinating diversity. It is the spirit of togetherness and tolerance, mostly conspicuous by its absence in the European land mass, which has bound together the Indian people of diverse regions and culture while extreme individualism and separatism have marked the evolution of European nationalism. Ancient Greece had a number of city states but they were confined to a very small area in the Mediterranean.

The concept of sovereign nation-state in the West originated in the late 18th and the 19th century in the wake of the French Revolution (1789- 1799) and the American War of Independence (1775-1783). In sharp contrast, India and China, owing to their continuing civilizations of more than 5000 years, have been sovereign nations since time immemorial in spite of invasions, temporary upheavals and redrawing of national borders.

There is a generic difference between the Western concept of nationalism and the Indian view of national unity. The Indian concept emanates from and is integrated into the idea of universality ~ unconditional universal love and universal welfare and also harmony with nature enshrined in the Vedic principles: Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (the world is one family). Sarvebhavantu sukhina, sarvebhavantu niramaya (wellness to everybody), bahujana sukhaya bahujana hitaya (happiness and benefit to all) and the Shanti mantra ~ shantirantariksham … Prithvi shantirapa… vanaspataya shantir vishvedeva… (Peace everywhere to the inner world and outer space). India has welcomed everybody.

The invaders, the immigrants, the nomadic tribes, Zoroastrians, the Jews, the Shias, the Sunnis, the Ahmediyas, the Bohra Muslims and the Christians have found a home in India. The discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization and unfolding of the glories of ancient India go to show that the concept of one nationhood of Bharatvarsha from Kashmir to Kanyakumari existed even before the Vedic days.

The decline (or destruction!) of the Indus-Valley Civilization, rechristened as the Harappan Civilization (3000-1700 BCE), was followed by waves of migration believed to be from Central Asia by nomadic tribes who called themselves Aryans. No scientific evidence is available to ascertain the exact cause for the fading out of this expansive urban civilization, very akin to the Mesopotamian civilization. According to one theory, the urban centres were wiped out and went underground following a tsunamic earthquake and floods. But this does not explain the destruction at the same time of hundreds of cities and towns spreading over Gujarat, Sind, Baluchistan, and entire Punjab up to the borders of Afghanistan and Haryana up to Delhi.

The second theory advanced by archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, which was in circulation till the 1950s, has been that the powerful Aryan tribes who came in hordes invaded the Harappans and destroyed their urban centres, forcing them to flee and killing those who fought.

This is also not a probability because there was no evidence of a fight anywhere within the urban centres. In 1964, the American Indologist George F. Dales had a hard look at the skeletons and the ruins and discarded this theory altogether. He wrote: “There is no destruction level covering the latest period of the city [Mohenjo ~ daro], no sign of extensive burning, no bodies of warriors clad in armour and surrounded by the weapons of war[and] the citadel, the only fortified part of the city, yielded no evidence of a final defence.”

The third theory which has found favour with modern historians and Indologists has been that the Harappan Civilization was not destroyed by invasion and an almost consensus opinion has been that owing to a very long period (may be over a century) of drought, the Harappans had to abandon and evacuate the cities and towns which were no longer sustainable, and migrate to the rural areas of Sind, Punjab, Gujarat, and Haryana and later got absorbed into the Indo-Aryan milieu. Interestingly, some of the symbols and traits of the Harappan civilization have been found in the Dravidian civilization.

The Aryans started arriving in several waves since 1900 BCE and during the intervening centuries, friendly interactions with the indigenous people having post-Harappan culture and adoption of various indigenous skills like the plough had been a distinct possibility.

Braving the difficult and dangerous Khyber Pass through Afghanistan, thousands of Indo-Aryan pastoral tribes crossed over to India with their horses and cattle and initially settled in the Punjab region. With increase in population and fresh arrivals, they expanded to the Gangetic plains where they consolidated their position by 1500 BCE. During the second urbanization, 16 Mahajanapads (republics, kingdoms or empires) and hundreds of Janapads (smaller kingdoms or councils) were established.

They also introduced the Panchayati system, democracy at the grassroots level, making India the ‘Mother of Democracy’. From pastoralists, the Indo-Aryan groups became first the agriculturists (a transition from nomadic pastoralists in mountain desert to the paradise of monsoons is surprisingly not recorded anywhere) and then the rulers and masters for the major part of the sub-continent. Who are these Indo-Aryan people who ruled India for about 3000 years? Where was their original homeland?

Why did they migrate and come to India? What was their language and culture? What were their mission and objectives? These questions and the answers have led to endless debates and controversies. Hundreds of books, theses and articles have been written on the origin and lives of the Indo-Aryans. One group of scholars and historians firmly believe that the Aryans are indigenous to India; they have always been here since the Harappan Civilization.

The fact that the world’s most perfect language, Sanskrit was composed in India, which became the mother of all Indo-Aryan and Indo-European languages, goes to show that the Indo-Aryans found in Eurasia had migrated from India and not vice-versa. This theory has been seriously challenged and toppled by the Western scholars citing various new evidences of physical and cultural affinities found in the Caucasians. A consensus opinion is veering round the theory that these people belonging to the Sintashta and Andronovo culture branched out of southern Russia towards India and another to Anatolia and the Mediterranean. According to Friedrich Max Muller, the distinguished German Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, who compiled the Vedas, it seemed that the Aryans had a ‘mission to link all parts of the world together by chains of civilization, commerce and religion’.

They were ‘the rulers of history’. Another contemporary historian writes: “Given the vast spread of the Indo-Aryan languages, an Aryan homeland was soon being sought somewhere in the middle of the Eurasian landmass. Most scholars favoured steppes of southern Russia and Ukraine or the shores of the Caspian. Nomadic pastoralists, the Aryans needed plenty of room. Thence, in a series of sweeping migrations, spread over many centuries, they supposedly took their language, plus their gods, their horses, and their herds, to Iran and Syria, Anatolia and Greece, Eastern Europe and Northern India” ( John Keay, India: A History, page 21). While this is generally accepted as the true story, equally puzzling have been certain events and developments ~ the presence of pastoral tribes, tall with sharp features like the Todas in the Nilgiris; tribes with Aryanlike features in the interior of Karnataka, who are still following their original pre-historic culture and religion; certain remote villages in Andhra Pradesh where the villagers converse only in Sanskrit; large concentration of the Indo-Aryan people in the far South ~ Andhra, Karnataka, Kerala and Sri Lanka and widespread study of Sanskrit from Kashmir to the Kerala coast ~ which give credence to the theory that the Aryans had always been there and were indigenous like the Harappans and filled the vacuum created by the decline of the Indus-Valley Civilization. Swami Vivekananda, the greatest exponent of Hinduism in modern times, believed that ‘the IndoAryans were indigenous to India, and had not come from anywhere else’.
(The writer is a former Dy. Comptroller & Auditor General of India and a former Ombudsman of Reserve Bank of India. He is also a writer of several books and can be reached at brahmas@gmail.com)