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February 9, 2003
REVIEWS: Exploding old myths
In his latest book, Qadeem Hindustan ki taareekh ke chand goshay (Indology), Rashid Malik has tried to jolt many a writer and musicologist out of their deep slumber. A historian and creative writer with a penchant for musicology, he has challenged a number of obsolete concepts about the origin of the Aryans as well as the so-called filial relationship between ragas and raginis. One of his books on the quantum of Amir Khusrau’s contributions to the refinement of our classical music, though appreciated by some discerning readers, also drew a flak from the generally uneducated and biased musicologists.
According to Malik ‘Indology’, a new discipline, deals with the pre-history of the subcontinent. It is a prescribed study for the students of history in colleges and universities in various foreign countries but has yet to create a place in the syllabi of history in Pakistani educational institutions. The term has been coined in consonance with terms such as ‘Egyptology’, ‘Assyrialogy’, ‘Tibetology’, ‘Sinology’ and ‘Sindhology’.
Malik throws some light on the treatises of various scholars who in their discourses have laid much emphasis on studying the different languages, cultures and histories of different people in the world. The book under review is a revised and expanded version of a series of articles already published in Pakistan’s prestigious literary magazine Fanoon.
Discussing secular scriptures of the subcontinent, Malik mentions certain sacred Hindu books such as the Rig Veda, Sam Veda, Yajur Veda and the Ather Veda. Very few historians or students of history in Pakistan know much about them and yet they are often used as sources for re-writing the subcontinent’s history. Undue reliance on the credence of these books has been a misleading element. Malik is of the opinion that the linguistic basis should not be taken as an incontrovertible evidence of the veracity of these books and their peripheral literary genres.
Upanishad and other Sutras cannot be relied upon unless they are corroborated by evidence from other sciences such as archaeology, anthropology, palaeontology and so on.
A portion of the book also deals with the perennial controversy over the Aryan race. While deliberating on their origin, the writer wonders whether languages can be made the basis of ethnicity. Arguing that the Aryan theory is based on language, he raises the question about the origin of the Sindhis.
Can the Sindhi speaking people be called a race? Here he points out that a similar question has been raised by the Lahore-born Indian historian Romila Thapar about the United States where various ethnic groups such as Spanish, Italians, Africans and Asians speak English.
“Can all American citizens be bracketed in one ethnic unity?” She has asked. Malik claims that the question was first formulated in the 19th century before which you do not come across the word ‘Aryan’ or any term similar to it in any book written either in Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, Tamil or any other language. The word had only occurred 36 times in the jungle of words (approximately 153,000) of Rig Veda. He argues that the formulation of this theory is a figment of imagination of the British Indologists, who wanted to create a wedge between the people of the north and south of the subcontinent.
“When the British East India Company had established its hegemony in South Asia, its directors did not like the idea of the Aryans being called the native people. They were not pleased with the fact that the Aryans spanned outside the boundaries of the subcontinent towards the west to colonize Middle East, Greece, Egypt and other European countries, including Britain,” is the thrust of Malik’s research. The Company asked Max Muller to get the British rulers and the people out of this dilemma. So obligingly this scholar of Sanskrit formulated the new theory that Aryans, in fact, were Europeans who invaded India and drove the Dravidians (an expression introduced by one of the Christian missionaries in 1830) towards the south.
After Independence, in August 1947, this idea was given a new turn as a host of nationalist Indian historians came up with the notion that no Aryan invasion of the subcontinent ever took place and that the Aryans were native to the Indian soil.
In the chapter on raginis, Malik has exploded the myth of ragas, raginis and their offspring. Aptly describing the theory as another myth, he has questioned the wisdom of its formulation by Hindu musicologists and anthropologists. Supported by hard evidence, he proves that ragas only existed in the subcontinental melodic diction. Their concept was introduced in our music somewhere around the 10th century. Before that the word ‘raga’ was not even mentioned in any book on music. Raginis and their offspring found their way in our melodic diction in the literature produced after the 14th century. Both the terms have been retained in melodic literature for metaphoric uses.
Here one can quote from The ragas of Northern Indian music by Nazir A. Jairazbhoy, who supports the contention of author Rashid Malik. He writes: “This was the period when poetic imagination had free rein and ragas were associated with the Hindu deities, colours, stars and other natural and supernatural phenomena, culminating in the raga-mala paintings in which the rags and raginis are represented in their visual symbolic form.”
The protagonists of the raga-ragini concept claim that seven-note raginis can be derived out of ragas based on five or six notes. This is unfathomable even to an unenlightened person. He has the right to ask, “how can a pentatonic raga give birth to a heptatonic ragini?” The basis of this belief is a combination of myths associated with Hindu religion.
Rashid Malik has taken great care in searching out and listing a large number of references from many books, some of which are not even easily available. He has painstakingly produced a book which would be useful to both the students of ancient history of the subcontinent as well as those of music.
Qadeem Hindustan ki taareekh ke chand goshay (Indology — a few peeps into ancient Indian history)
By Rashid Malik
Fiction House, 18 Mozang Road, Lahore
Tel: (042) 7237430
312pp. Rs200
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