Fatherland, Holyland, Motherland

New genetic research on skeletal remains from Rakhigarhi site is being used to negate Aryan migration theory and prove that Harappans were indigenous to the subcontinent

- Shweta Desai

IN the chilly Delhi winter of 2008, scholars of Indic ideology gathered in the hallowed halls of the India International Centre for a major conference on the origins of the Saraswati River. This mystical and mythical river, along with the Ganga and Yamuna, forms the holy trinity considered to be the cosmic core of Hindu civilisation.

Unlike the Ganga and Yamuna, which flow through numerous streams and tributaries in northern India, the Saraswati has vanished, leaving little trace of its origins. However, its existence is central to the belief of Hindu nationalists that Vedic culture is deeply rooted in the advanced Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC), which is said to have thrived for millennia along the banks of the Saraswati River.

At the two-day conference, scholars from disciplines such as archaeology, geology, history, seismology and life sciences presented papers building on discoveries made over the last century. These findings, they claimed, proved beyond doubt that Hindu civilisation was ancient, indigenous to the subcontinent and emerged along the banks of the Saraswati River.

The conference put forth a hypothesis that the ancient IVC developed on the banks of the Saraswati, not the Indus River. It suggested that this group of people gave birth to Vedic culture, which appears to be the precursor to the existing Hindu civilisation. Most significantly, it sought to debunk the widely accepted Aryan Invasion Theory, calling it imaginary and negating the idea of any large-scale migration of peoples into India. The Aryan Invasion Theory, propounded in the 1940s by British archaeologist William Mortimer Wheeler, posits that a group of Indo-European-speaking nomadic peoples from the Central Asian steppes, known as the Aryans, migrated to the Indian subcontinent around 1200 BCE, invading or replacing the IVC.