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Dani Interview: Full Text

These interview excerpts have been formatted for easy printing. Ahmad
Hassan Dani was interviewed at his Islamabad, Pakistan residence by
Site Producer Omar Khan on January 6, 1998.

Contents
1 A Dravidian Language?     4 Aryans?
2 Cultural Connections      5 Connections to Hinduism?
3 An Agglutinative Language 6 Evolution of the Writing

1. A Dravidian Language?

Q: What do you think about the theory today that the Indus language
was a Dravidian language and that there is a connection between the
Indus culture and today's South Indian culture?

This is generally believed by those who are now working, particularly
my friends like Asko Parpola, Professor Mahadevan, and the Russians
Professors who have worked on this subject. They have all been working
on the assumption that the language of the Indus people was Dravidian,
that the people who build the Indus Civilization are Dravidian. But
unfortunately I, as well as my friend Prof. B.B. Lal in India, have
not been able to agree with this.

Today the Dravidians are living in South India and we always say if
they were the builders of the Indus Civilization and if they migrated
from here because of some reason or the other, then something of that
civilization they should carry into the south except just the
language. But so far we have not been able to find any trace of the
Indus Civilization in the whole of South India. It is there is
Gujarat, it is there in Malabar, but not in the area where Dravidian
is spoken today. Not a single evidence has been found.

Recently when Asko Parpola came about three months ago to Pakistan, he
said no Professor, what about Gujarat? Certainly in Gujarat we have
got the Indus Civilization, right about to the mouth of the Narmada,
right up to the mouth of the Tanti we have got this civilization.
There is one more place on the Narmada we have got the Indus
civilization, but not south of it. He said that this shows that people
have been there. I said even then I will not agree.

2. Cultural Connections

But let me correct myself. There is one particular aspect which does
survive, not only in South India, but also in Sri Lanka. This came to
my mind when the year before last I was in Sri Lanka at the time of
their general election and they had a music performance. In the music
performance they were having the dance, and with their drum or dholak,
and it at once reminded me of my early life, for I was born in Central
India, and I had seen this kind of dance. Not with tabla, tabla is a
later comer in our country. It at once reminded me that we have got
this dholak in the Indus Valley Civilization. I don't know about the
dance, but at least the dholak we know. We have not stringed
instruments in Indus Valley Civiliztion. We have got the flute, we
have got cymbals, we have got the dholak. Exactly the same musical
instrruments are played today in Sri Lanka and South India. So I would
like to correct myself: to say that nothing is surviving in South
India [is wrong]; this is the only instrument which is surviving there
according to me from the Indus Civilization.

Q: What kind of traces would you like to have that would make you
think that there is more of a connection between the Dravidians and
the ancient Indus?

A: If not the urban, the urban life, at least some pottery, some seal,
some material of ivory or any material which we find in the Indus
Civilization should be found there rather than in North India. In
North India, we know it gradually went later on. But nothing has been
found in South India as far as a material object is concerned. As far
as the literary object or material is concerned, that we have not been
able to know because we haven't been able to read the Indus script.

Q: I was just in Madras. As you know, tigers were very important in
the Indus civilization. I noticed that in Madras wherever they are
constructing a house, they put a tiger mask in front to ward off the
evil spirits. Perhaps this is a trace of an Indus Valley period
belief?

A: No, the tiger is also very important in Central India, where I have
been living myself, very important. In fact, one of the most important
animals in the Indus Civilization is the bull. You visit my museum, I
have a painted pottery, not excavated by me, in Islamabad, and all
around we have got a bull. Although we do not worship animals in
Pakistan, but we do respect the bull because of its utilitarian
nature. Bull is used for carriage, in the bullock cart, for plowing,
and we have got bull festivals every year. The bull is not the sacred
animal in that part of India, it is the cow.

3. An Agglutinative Language

On the other hand, I have been talking to Prof. Parpola that certainly
this is an agglutinative language, there is no doubt. That has been
accepted by all of us. Dravidian is an agglutinative language. But at
the same time Altaic is an agglutinative language, and certainly we
know that there was a connection beween Turkmenistan [in Central Asia]
and this region. Turkmenistan is a region where Altaic languages are
spoken. Even in the pre-Indus period we have a connection. In what we
call the Kot Diji period, we have a connection between Indus
Civilization and excavations in Turkmenistan. So if we insist on an
agglutinative language being used inthe Indus period, why not connect
it with Altaic, rather than just with Dravidian? Why not connect it
with Sumerian, which is also an agglutinative language? In fact, when
I was in Korea, I found that their language is agglutinative, which I
did not know before. Just because of agglutinative language, it is not
necessary that it is connected with Dravidian. But unfortunately, our
history has been so written in the time of the British that earlier we
tried to trace out history from the Aryans, and we thought that before
the Aryans were Dravidians, that was the idea. So when the Indus
Civilization was discovered, it was thought if it is not Aryan, it
must be Dravidian, that was the general assumption. But it is not
necesssary.

4. Aryans?

Q: Do you think that the Indus Valley people could have been Aryans
before the Rgvedic Aryans, another group of Aryans who had come down
much earlier and created their own civilization?

A: Whatever we know of the Aryans, from the literary records, in the
Rgveda, the earliest book or the first nine books of the Rgveda, do
not speak at all of any urban life. They speak of only rural life,
villages, and as the Indus Civilization is an urban civilization,
therefore to talk of any Aryan association with the urban life seems
to me rather unthinkable.

If you read the entire book of the Rgveda and you will find it is
totally rural life, not nomadic, they were agricultural no doubt,
living in small villages. At the same time, they had no concept of
irrigation, they had no use of dams on the rivers; in fact their god
Indra is the destroyer of the dams. Hence the type of agriculture and
the type of urban life the Indus Civilization people built up was
beyond the conception of the Aryans or even the earlier Aryans.

This is very important from our angle. If at all, in the Aryan book,
the earliest book whatever we know if today, whatever we have been
able to gather from other Aryan languages, not just Sanskrit, from old
Iranian, there is nothing of urbanity, nothing of irrigation, nothing
called building the dams. All these three are basic factors in the
development of the Indus Civilization.

Q: So who would these people have been then? It is becoming
mysterious.

Certainly it is very mysterious. So far a large number of scholars
have been trying to build on the basis that the language is Dravidian,
the people are Dravidian. Unfortunately, I have not been able to
agree, nor has my friend Prof. B.B. Lal. Those who have excavated in
both Mohenjodaro and Harappa, Lal has excavated in Harappa and I in
Mohenjodaro, somehow our concept is entirely different. I know South
India very well, I have been living in that part, I have excavated in
Mysore and also in other places in South India, of course before 1947.

Although I have told you about the music and you have told me about
the tiger, it may be possible, it may not be possible, but even then
the two are so different that it is after a long, long time that we
find urbanization taking place in South India. Tamil literature does
not give us any information about a literary form before the first
century or at the earliest the second century B.C. We do not have any
evidence of damming in the Kaveri river, for example, the most
important river in Tamil country, earlier than first or second century
B.C.

5. Connections to Hinduism?

Q: You don't think that there are some profound connections with later
Hinduism, like bathing in the water, or the yogic figure on some of
the seals?

This has no doubt been the intepretation given by Sir John Marshall
given in his book [193031] when he wrote and described the religion of
the Indus people. But that was because he knew the Hindu religion and
society, and on that basis he interpreted, and called it, for example,
the prototype of Shiva, and about talked about the yoga and so on. But
today we know that there is a very great difference between the two.
Certainly yoga continued, but it is possible that it continued even
later on [outside Hinduism] for it is simply a question of meditation.
For example, when I talk about the meditation derived in Islam today
among the Sufis, and when I say it is derived from Buddhism, all the
Muslims say no, it is nonsense to say that, but I know it is a
derivation. It is quite possible something may have continued, but
very little is known.

For example, image worship was known in the Indus Civilization but not
known to the Aryans. The Aryans were the conquerors, but the people
may have continued that. Similarly, yoga probably was not known to the
Aryans in the earlier phases, but later it did penetrate into their
society, maybe taken from surviving traditions among the common
people. But who were those people, we do not know.

6. Evolution of the Writing

Q: Your excavations of the pre-Indus people, at Rehman Dheri and so
forth, what do you think the implications are for understanding the
Indus people?

In Rehman Dheri, we do have town planning, we have pottery which shows
continuity between Rehman Dheri and the Indus Civilization. With
terracotta there is a change, no doubt, but there is some continuity,
in designs there is some continuity with what we call the Kot Diji
[pre-Indus] and the Indus Civilization. This is no doubt true. But we
do not find any seal, we do not find any writing. We have got, no
doubt, the forms, engravings, or just scrapings on the pottery. But we
do not have a system in the pre-Mohenjo-daro period. The system only
evolved in the Indus Civilization. Certainly the shapes are there
[earlier]; when you write you have to borrow from the older shapes,
that is no doubt true. Even the weight system we do not find earlier.
Weights, measure and the writing, the base of the economy is not there
earlier, although town planning and architecture is there earlier.
Pottery, stoneware, some playthings also continue, but what makes the
Indus Civilization is the political economy is not found beforehand.

So even today I call it pre-Indus Civilization and Indus Civilization,
although many of my friends call it the early Indus Civilization.
We do not know how the writing evolved. I think it was as the trade
developed, writing was necessary. Writing was already known in
Mesopotamia. So if I am trying to develop writing in my country, it is
not necessary that I should use your symbol. I will give you an
example. I went to Korea, and there I started reading a Korean book.

The moment I saw their alphabet I said what is this alphabet? They
said this is an alphabet invented by our King in the 15th century A.D.

I said nonsense, I can tell you the whole origin from my country! But
what has happened, they have not taken the syllables from my country,
but based on that they have evolved their own symbols, perhaps done
even better, with verticals and horizontals. Where we have got
circles, they don't have circles at all. Wherever there was a curved
circle, they made it a vertical. I said I can trace this.

So if writing in the Indus Civilization is derived from Western Asia,
it is not necessary that the symbols come from that place. We can use
our own symbols. But the basic principle comes from there.

Q: Although now I think the evidence is more that the writing here was
an indigenous development.

Could be, it is possible. But indigenous development on the basis of
the basic principle [from Western Asia]. Because we do not find
development from the pictograph right up to the logo-syllabic writing
that we know was used in the Indus Civilization. We do not find the
earlier one, which is known to us in Mesopotamia, it is known to us in
Egypt. Here we find directly logo-syllabic writing. Hence, they must
have known about the logo-syllabic writing then in use in Mesopotamia
with whom they had trade connections, and then evolved their own, on
the same basis. This is what I am maintaining: that as we do not find
from the simple pictograph developing into logo-syllabic in Indus
Civilization, but we find it in Mesopotamia, and therefore some wise
man, some intellectual here in this region must have known that here
is a system of writing, why not evolve our own on the same basis.

Q: It may just be that we haven't excavated enough to find the
development.

Quite possible, that is no doubt true, tomorrow we may find something
and change our opinion.

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