Blogging about reading Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus": #4

It looks like blogging on other topics might have to be put on hold for a while.

Doniger writes,

"Much of what we now call Hinduism may have had roots in cultures that thrived in South Asia long before the creation of textual evidence that we can decipher with any confidence. Remarkable cave paintings have been preserved from Mesolithic sites dating from c. 30,000 BCE in Bhimbetka, near present-day Bhopal, in the Vindhya Mountains in the province of Madhya Pradesh.

My first reaction was: did I sleep though the Indian history class in high school when they might have discussed this?  30,000 year old cave paintings that I hadn't even heard before?  This being in India, are those paintings well protected?  Have by now people already scribbled on them the equivalent of "sriram wuz here?"

India is filled with all kinds of mysteries!  One of them is the unresolved question of where and how did the Hinduism as we refer to originate:

There were other early settlements in India, notably the culture of Baluchistan, in the westernmost part of what is now Pakistan, dating to before 6000 BCE. But from about 2300 BCE the first urbanization took place, as great cities arose in the valley of the Indus River, 150 miles south of Baluchistan, also in Pakistan. The material remains of this culture, which we call the Indus Valley Civilization or the Harappan Civilization (named after Harappa, one of two great cities on the Indus, the other being Mohenjo-Daro), present a tantalizing treasure chest of often enigmatic images that hover just beyond our reach, taunting us with what might well be the keys to the roots of Hinduism.

Damn those people for not leaving behind clear records for us--maybe we need to outsource decoding this to Martians ;)

For the resemblances between some aspects of the IVC [Indus Valley Civilization] and later Hinduism are simply too stunning to ignore. As the Late Harappan culture declined, its survivors must have carried some of it into the Ganges-Yamuna basin. ... [The] process of urbanization moved gradually south from the Indus cities to the site of Kaushambi, near modern Allahabad in the Gangetic plain, and to the surrounding villages. ... The Indus Civilization may not have simply gone out like the flame of a candle or, at least, not before lighting another candle.
...
We can see the possible survival, in transformation, of a number of images. ... These patterns, and the rough outlines of other images that we have considered, perhaps even the stone lingas and the voluptuous women, may have gradually merged with the culture of the people of the Veda.

Which then leads us to the question of where these Vedic people came from. Who were they?  How did they relate to the IVC people? To the Dravidians?

Frustrating because the Vedic people left behind the sounds of knowledge (Vedas) but otherwise they cleaned up before they turned the house over. Not a scrap remains of their existence.

But, before that, what triggered the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization?  Interestingly enough, Scientific American has this today:

The decline of Bronze-Age civilizations in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia has been attributed to a long-term drought that began around 2000 BC. Now paleoclimatologists propose that a similar fate was followed by the enigmatic Indus Valley Civilization, at about the same time. Based on isotope data from the sediment of an ancient lake, the researchers suggest that the monsoon cycle, which is vital to the livelihood of all of South Asia, essentially stopped there for as long as two centuries.

The monsoon did not fail for merely a season or two: " the regular summer monsoons stopped for some 200 years."

Ouch!

If a lack of monsoons did spell the end of the Indus Valley civilization, says Hodell, “it is an example — and there are other examples of this — of how ancient societies have had to contend with climate. There are some lessons for us and our future, in which we will have to deal with anthropogenic climate change”.

Hmmm ...  Jared Diamond now gets another piece of evidence that adds to the thesis of Collapse.

Source