---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michel Danino
(This same journalist had earlier written a review of my book.
Michel)
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/lostthe-river/394147
/
Lost on the river
Rrishi Raote / New Delhi May 8, 2010, 0:20 IST
Trust nobody when they say they can tell you about India. Unless
the teller is a storyteller, and can offer you an essence
distilled into a myth. When the subject is so oceanic in scale,
nothing factual is going to be adequate and only the purely
fictional can be entirely true.
Myths, though, as Michel Danino points out in the prologue to
his elegant new book on the historical, not mythological, river
Saraswati, despite their explanatory power no longer have
currency.
Instead, we have a variety of tunnel visions. Troublingly, some
of those are perpetrated by historians - the very people who are
supposed to construct our past on firm ground. It's not rational
to expect a single, simple narrative which accommodates all the
facts we possess about our past. But us laypeople might at least
expect that those who study the past go willingly down every
possible avenue in search of a more complete picture.
They don't. One case that shows up the whole mess is that of the
uncertain relationship between the Aryans and the Harappans. Who
were the Harappans? Who were the Aryans? Where did the Aryans
come from? How did they come - as a raging flood, a steady flow
or a tiny trickle? Did they come at all? If they came, what
happened to the Harappans - did they die, get pushed aside,
coexist or intermix? Or none of the above? Are we asking the
right questions?
Answer in each case: no clear idea. In his book The Lost River
(Penguin 2010) Danino goes looking for the Saraswati using every
source of information at his command. This includes Harappan
archaeology, the Rig Veda and myths, colonial European accounts
of the region, what modern historians and linguists have to say,
even what scientists like geologists, hydrographers and
climatologists have learnt about the land, water and climate
along the path of the erstwhile river - which, Danino says, was
the great ancestor of the modern rain-fed (but nearly always
dry) Ghaggar-Hakra system, stretching between Punjab and the
Rann of Kachchh.
Multidisciplinarity is the key. Many tunnel visions can be
overlapped to reveal a more total picture. The net result of
Danino's vast and canny bird's-eye survey is to show beyond
reasonable doubt that the Saraswati really existed, that it
followed a certain path, how and by what stages it was likely to
have come into being and dried up, and how the river related
both to Harappan civilisation and to whatever came after -
whether it was Aryan or a further-evolved Harappan.
It's hard to believe that such crucial questions as that of the
Aryans and of ancient India's geography still remain moot. The
Aryans may yet turn out to have been a modern myth with roots in
colonial times. But why haven't these and other contentious
questions already been tackled with all the tools and resources
at modern scholars' disposal? Don't we want to know who we are?
The trouble with leaving all such investigation and telling to
professional historians is that they are not free to think along
multiple planes. Historians still look at written evidence
first, because they are trained to see all evidence as a "text"
to be read. In order to read between the lines they use a lot of
literary theory, and they tend to see history as a cumulative
enterprise more than a revolutionary one. This is all very well
but it does mean that physical evidence, like the findings of
archaeologists and scientists, is far too often neglected or
misunderstood.
What we need, I say, is more Danino - more amateur scholars who
can study and summarise a range of evidence and offer
category-breaking syntheses. (Instead we keep making
specialists.) We need a new sort of university system which
encourages and rewards multidisciplinary work. Without such
civilised appurtenances, despite what we may think, we will
remain bound to our modern myths.
(rrishi.raote@bsmail.in)
From: Michel Danino
(This same journalist had earlier written a review of my book.
Michel)
http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/lostthe-river/394147
/
Lost on the river
Rrishi Raote / New Delhi May 8, 2010, 0:20 IST
Trust nobody when they say they can tell you about India. Unless
the teller is a storyteller, and can offer you an essence
distilled into a myth. When the subject is so oceanic in scale,
nothing factual is going to be adequate and only the purely
fictional can be entirely true.
Myths, though, as Michel Danino points out in the prologue to
his elegant new book on the historical, not mythological, river
Saraswati, despite their explanatory power no longer have
currency.
Instead, we have a variety of tunnel visions. Troublingly, some
of those are perpetrated by historians - the very people who are
supposed to construct our past on firm ground. It's not rational
to expect a single, simple narrative which accommodates all the
facts we possess about our past. But us laypeople might at least
expect that those who study the past go willingly down every
possible avenue in search of a more complete picture.
They don't. One case that shows up the whole mess is that of the
uncertain relationship between the Aryans and the Harappans. Who
were the Harappans? Who were the Aryans? Where did the Aryans
come from? How did they come - as a raging flood, a steady flow
or a tiny trickle? Did they come at all? If they came, what
happened to the Harappans - did they die, get pushed aside,
coexist or intermix? Or none of the above? Are we asking the
right questions?
Answer in each case: no clear idea. In his book The Lost River
(Penguin 2010) Danino goes looking for the Saraswati using every
source of information at his command. This includes Harappan
archaeology, the Rig Veda and myths, colonial European accounts
of the region, what modern historians and linguists have to say,
even what scientists like geologists, hydrographers and
climatologists have learnt about the land, water and climate
along the path of the erstwhile river - which, Danino says, was
the great ancestor of the modern rain-fed (but nearly always
dry) Ghaggar-Hakra system, stretching between Punjab and the
Rann of Kachchh.
Multidisciplinarity is the key. Many tunnel visions can be
overlapped to reveal a more total picture. The net result of
Danino's vast and canny bird's-eye survey is to show beyond
reasonable doubt that the Saraswati really existed, that it
followed a certain path, how and by what stages it was likely to
have come into being and dried up, and how the river related
both to Harappan civilisation and to whatever came after -
whether it was Aryan or a further-evolved Harappan.
It's hard to believe that such crucial questions as that of the
Aryans and of ancient India's geography still remain moot. The
Aryans may yet turn out to have been a modern myth with roots in
colonial times. But why haven't these and other contentious
questions already been tackled with all the tools and resources
at modern scholars' disposal? Don't we want to know who we are?
The trouble with leaving all such investigation and telling to
professional historians is that they are not free to think along
multiple planes. Historians still look at written evidence
first, because they are trained to see all evidence as a "text"
to be read. In order to read between the lines they use a lot of
literary theory, and they tend to see history as a cumulative
enterprise more than a revolutionary one. This is all very well
but it does mean that physical evidence, like the findings of
archaeologists and scientists, is far too often neglected or
misunderstood.
What we need, I say, is more Danino - more amateur scholars who
can study and summarise a range of evidence and offer
category-breaking syntheses. (Instead we keep making
specialists.) We need a new sort of university system which
encourages and rewards multidisciplinary work. Without such
civilised appurtenances, despite what we may think, we will
remain bound to our modern myths.
(rrishi.raote@bsmail.in)
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