Spiritual Musings

@KingSitri

Katılım Temmuz 2021

25 Takip Edilen6 Takipçiler

@darab_farooqui The biggest rebuttal is if the seal was Elamite, there would be proof of Yoga practices in Iran and neighboring regions, which there aren’t any

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Darab Farooqui@darab_farooqui·2d

The Ministry of Culture posted the Pashupati seal and called it the "Shiva-Pashupati seal." People rightly called it out. The label is the problem. The name is the conclusion. Marshall once offered proto-Shiva as a reading. The official name declares it. And since Hindutva is the governing ideology, this connection of Hinduism onto the IVC never stops. Then one historian, having rightly attacked the label, added that the seal might be Proto-Elamite. That is the problem in reverse. The correction to an overclaim should not be another overclaim. She refused the government's identity for the seal, which was right, then offered her own, which was the same mistake facing the other way. "Out of India", the Hindutva claim that the IVC was already Vedic and that Hinduism comes straight down from it unbroken, is the theory the label leans on. Scholars find it easy to demolish. What survives are debatable continuities, mostly from Marshall. 1. The Pashupati seal, read as proto-Shiva. 2. Conical stones and ring-stones, read as lingam and yoni. 3. Terracotta figurines, read as a mother goddess, a forerunner of Shakti. 4. The pipal tree, still sacred. 5. Bull veneration, the swastika, the Great Bath as ritual bathing. Then the dissimilarities. These are not small. They are structural. 1. Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, has no established link to the IVC. The script is undeciphered. 2. The horse is central to the Vedas. In the IVC it is thin and disputed. 3. The IVC buried its dead. Hinduism cremates. (Though practice on both sides was more mixed than the clean contrast suggests.) 4. The IVC butchered and ate cattle. 5. The IVC was urban. Planned cities, drainage, standard weights. The Vedic world is pastoral, tribal, rural. It does not remember such cities. 6. The IVC was literate. Vedic religion was deliberately oral. After the IVC fell, South Asia goes non-literate for centuries. 7. The Vedic gods, Indra, Agni, Varuna, Mitra, are not in IVC iconography. 8. Varna, set out in the Purusha Sukta, has nothing in the IVC to map onto. 9. Karma, rebirth, moksha appear only in the Upanishads, deep into the first millennium BCE. Nothing of them in the IVC. 10. And there is a long gap. Harappan collapse around 1900 BCE, and the things tied to Hinduism come much later. And there are more. However, we have to be careful here. We are reading other people's work, not doing it. The dissimilarities are not all equally hard. Some are close to decisive. The urban and the burial contrast are softer, and specialists still argue over them. One distinction matters more than the rest, and it is about logic, not evidence, so we can hold it. Most of the dissimilarities are with the Vedic side of Hinduism. Most of the continuities are with the older folk side. But then Proto-Elamite. Here the historian did the thing she was objecting to. A little evidence, then the same kind of dissimilarities she would have used against the government. The Indus script is not Proto-Elamite. That can be said. Past that, the language is unknown. Dravidian, Elamo-Dravidian, these are arguments, not findings. Some scholars doubt the symbols are language at all. So it may be worse than undeciphered. What can we actually hold? The script is unread. So we know that we don't know what the IVC's language and religion were. There is a lot of scholarship for what it is not. There is not enough for what it is. The Ministry was wrong to name it Shiva. The historian was right to say so, and wrong to then name it proto Elamite. Both named what cannot be named. Anyone claiming a positive identity, on either side, is claiming more than the evidence allows.

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