Een nieuwe theorie moest het blanke Europese imago redden: de Indogermanen hadden het opgenomen tegen de starre, geestloze inheemse beschaving van Harappa om de hoge Vedische cultuur te vestigen.
In In Search of the Cradle of Civilization wordt met verve en deskundigheid verdedigd dat de Indo-Europese taal inheems was, en dat de hypothese van een Arische invasie (zeker als beschaver) geen enkele feitelijke grond heeft. Het boek, geschreven door deskundige academici uit Indië en de USA, is sterk onderschat, niet in het minst door zijn status onder New Age adepten.
Belangrijkste element in het boek is het eerherstel voor de oude Harappa-beschaving. Stilaan zal Eurpoa moeten wennen aan de gedachte dat geen enkele oude beschaving uit Europa komt.
Een minder punt van het boek is de suggestie - als nabootsing van dezelfde ethnocentrische Europese theorieën - dat alle beschaving uit Indië komt. Dit doet een beetje denken aan afro-centrische reakties tegen de Europese pretenties van Bernal e.d.
Hier een lang citaat om het de kwaliteiten van het werk te illustreren. Bedenk wel dat het boek veel meer feitelijke gegevens onderzoekt:
PS: ik zal de volgende weken slechts sporadisch op het internet kunnen.In his book Prehistoric India, Piggott expressed the consensus of scholarly opinion at the time when he noted that possibly Hindu society owed more to Harappa than to the Sanskrit-speaking invaders. Yet he, and others, conveniently overlooked the fact that there is nothing in the above catalogue of religious elements that would irrefutably demonstrate that the Harappans and the Vedic Aryans were entirely different cultures.
On the other hand, when we drop the Aryan invasion model, we find that there is in fact good reason to assume the identity of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization with the Vedic culture. In that case, the alleged survivals in Hinduism of symbolic elements and ritual practices from the "pre-Aryan Harappans" turn out to be simple continuities within the same civilization. In other words, Harappan tree worship or the Mother Goddess cult did not surreptitiously sneak into Hinduism but have been an integral part of the Hindu religion since ancient times. We also want to emphasize that the Vedas preserve the priestly religion of the times. one would expect that the common people may have entertained slightly divergent beliefs and practices, as they do in rural India today.
There is strong supportive evidence for the Vedic nature of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. This concerns the fire altars found at several Indus sites. It must be appreciated that at the core of the Vedic religion is sacrifice. It was thought to duplicate the cosmic process itself, since all things of the world are sacrificed in the fire of time. Sacrifice, however, involves ritual and, for the Vedic priests, ritual meant the construction of altars out of bricks. Sun-dried or burnt bricks were common in the Indus-Sarasvati towns.
The Vedic altar was regarded as a miniature representation of the cosmos and was assembled piece by piece. The single most important sacrificial ritual in Vedic times and later was the fire ritual (agni-shtoma or agni-hotra). The Vedic literature is pervaded by a rich mythological symbolism revolving around the central notion of the sacrificial fire, which was understood to be a representation of the sun and, by further extension, of the blinding radiance of the transcendental reality.
Sacrificial altars have been excavated in Indus towns over a large area, from Baluchistan in the west to Uttar Pradesh in the east and Gujarat in the south. In the citadel at the site of Kalibangan, which lies at the confluence of the famous Sarasvati and Drishadvati Rivers of Vedic lore, seven rectangular fire altars were found. They stood in a row, aligned north-south, beside a well. This parallels the six Vedic dhishnya hearths that are lined up in the same way; the seventh hearth could be one of the additional hearths used for cleaning the ritual implements. Circular and ovoid altars also have been discovered. Some of them contained the ashes of charcoal and offerings of beads and gold. One altar has five layers, just as a Vedic fire altar would.
When we assemble all the available pieces of the puzzle, we obtain a discernable pattern—not yet complete but certainly adequate enough to demand a new way of looking at India's ancient history. When we look with open eyes and an open mind at the puzzle, as it slowly but surely is emerging from piecemeal archaeological reconstruction, we find increasing certainty that the Indus-Sarasvati civilization was not pre-Aryan but essentially Vedic.
There is nothing in the Rig-Veda that starkly contradicts what we know about ancient India from the archaeological excavations. On the contrary, there are many parallels in geography, culture, and chronology between the Vedic society, as mirrored in the hymns, and the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, as reflected in the archaeological artifacts. These two bodies of evidence strongly suggest the conclusion that the two civilizations were one and the same. In other words, we may with reasonable certainty assume that the Indus-Sarasvati civilization was thoroughly Vedic or, conversely, that the Rig- Veda and the other related sacred hymns, were the product of the religious genius of the people who created the urban civilization of the Land of the Seven Rivers.