Welcome to the show, everyone. I'm Eleanor Finch, here with Simon Carver. And Simon, I want to start today by looking at a map. Specifically, a map of August 1947. Because when Sir Cyril Radcliffe sat down with a pencil and a map to draw the borders of a partitioned India and Pakistan, he wasn't just dividing provinces, fields, and families. He was, quite literally, cutting a scalpel through 5,000 years of shared history. It's mind boggling when you think about the sheer speed of it Eleanor Radcliffe had never even been to India before he was given just a few weeks to draw those lines And by splitting the land the British essentially forced a rich deeply interconnected subcontinent to choose between two competing national narratives Suddenly you had the two nation theory promoted by Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League arguing that South Asian Muslims and Hindus were two distinct nations that couldn't coexist in a single state And that theory didn't just emerge from a vacuum in 1947 Its genesis goes back much further But it really hardened as Indian nationalism itself became intricately linked to a majoritarian Hindu identity in the late 19th century When Jinnah and the Muslim League pushed for Pakistan and leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru championed a secular but Hindu majority India they set off a chain reaction The partition left Pakistan on either side of India – East and West Pakistan – before East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971 But it also left behind a massive identity crisis Today even with that division India is still home to about 14 of the world's Muslim population 14 which actually means India has one of the largest Muslim populations on earth even after the partition It really shows how messy and artificial those lines actually are But the physical split created this bizarre geopolitical custody battle over ancient history Take the Indus Valley civilization Harappa and Mohenjo Daro These are some of the oldest urban centers in human history dating back to 2500 BC But when the border was drawn the actual Indus River and those key archaeological sites ended up inside Pakistan Exactly The heart of India's ancient history was suddenly located outside of India's political borders and the naming of the new nations itself was a highly calculated move When Nehru insisted on keeping the name India in English for the secular successor state rather than choosing a name like Hindustan it was a deliberate claim to that ancient Indus heritage It was as some historians might put it a quiet geopolitical statement to the Pakistani side We are still the custodians of this entire civilizational story even if the river itself flows through your territory It's like keeping the family name and the family heirlooms in the divorce, even though the house they came from went to your ex. It immediately set up this intense rivalry over who gets to claim the ancient past. If your nation's identity is built on being the natural heir to this grand ancient civilization, what happens when the actual physical dirt of that civilization belongs to another country? you have to start rewriting the story to fit the new borders. And to make that new story fit, you have to look at who supposedly founded that civilisation. This brings us directly to one of the most persistent and dangerous myths in global history – the Aryan invasion theory. In the 19th century, European orientalists, most notably the German philologist Max Muller, noticed striking structural similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and German. They realised these languages belonged to a single family, which they termed Indo-Aryan or Indo-European. But then, Muller and others made a fatal intellectual leap. They confused a language family with a biological race. Right They took grammar and turned it into genetics It's like finding out that people in England and Jamaica both speak English and concluding they must have identical ancestors from some mystical mountain And this linguistic slip up became incredibly toxic In Europe the Nazis took this Aryan concept ran with the idea of a Caucasian master race coming down from the Caucasus mountains and used it to justify horrific atrocities But meanwhile back in India colonial administrators used the exact same theory to justify British rule They basically said well the Aryans invaded and conquered India thousands of years ago so we British are just the latest wave of superior European cousins doing the exact same thing It was a highly convenient colonial justification But then in a fascinating bit of ideological gymnastics early Hindu nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries flipped that colonial narrative completely on its head This is where the political ideology of Hindutva comes in popularised by figures like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar Instead of accepting that Aryans were foreign invaders who downgraded by moving into India they claimed that Aryans were actually indigenous to India This is the Out of India theory It's the ultimate no-you of history. They basically argued, no, we didn't get invaded. We are the original Aryans, and our Vedic culture was so incredibly advanced that we actually went westward and spread our civilization to Europe. And those Europeans? They actually degenerated into barbarians because they lost touch with their Indian roots. It's a complete 180-degree turn to claim global cultural dominance. It is a complete inversion And to make this theory work early racial theorists like Herbert Hope Risley a British colonial census commissioner started doing anthropometric measurements of Indian people in the late 19th century He was literally measuring people's noses and analysing skin tones to determine how much pure Aryan or indigenous Dravidian blood they had Risley claimed that lighter skinned upper caste Indians had more Aryan blood while darker skinned southern Indians were Dravidian This colonial pseudoscience was eagerly adopted by nationalists because it allowed them to construct a racial hierarchy that validated their own social structures It's incredibly dark how these arbitrary physical measurements were weaponized to divide people And it shows how desperately these groups wanted a clean simple origin story If you can prove you are the direct genetically pure descendant of the original indigenous rulers of the land then you have an exclusive divine right to run the country Anyone who doesn't fit that profile—whether they're Muslim Christian or of a different caste—suddenly gets branded as an outsider or an invader who doesn't belong in the nation This is precisely why the work of Romila Thapar is so monumental and so incredibly contested Thapar is one of the world's most distinguished historians of ancient India She actually won the Kluge Prize from the US Library of Congress which is essentially the Nobel Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities And for decades she has used rigorous textual analysis and archaeological evidence to systematically dismantle both the colonial Aryan invasion theory and the nationalist out of India myth And because she did that, she became public enemy number one for the modern Hindutva nationalists. Just a few years ago, the administration at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi actually demanded that she submit her CV to prove she deserved her emeritus status. Can you imagine asking a global legend of history who won the Kluge Prize for her CV? It was a blatant attempt to humiliate and silence her because her historical research doesn't line up with their political mythology. It was an appalling display. But what is it that she actually argues that makes them so angry? Well, Tharpar re-examined the ancient texts, like the Rig Veda, and the archaeological records, and argued that there was no sudden violent Aryan invasion. Instead, she showed that the transition was a slow, gradual process of migration, pastoralist movement, and deep cultural and linguistic intermingling. She pointed out that the word Hindu itself isn't even an ancient religious term. It comes from Sindhu, the Sanskrit name for the Indus River. Persian travellers couldn't easily pronounce the initial S, so they called the people living near the river Hindus. So the word Hindu was originally just a geographical description. It meant the people who live by the Indus. And the Greeks did the exact same thing. They couldn't pronounce the Persian H, so they turned Hindu into Indus and India. It's incredible how a geographical label coined by foreigners eventually became the cornerstone of a rigid religious and political identity. And Thopper's view of how Vedic culture actually formed is so much more interesting than a simple conquest. She says it was an amalgamation of cultures. You had pastoralists coming from Central Asia through Iran, bilingual communities speaking both Indo-Aryan and local Proto-Dravidian languages, and they mingled over centuries to create Vedic Sanskrit. Exactly. It was a complex, organic synthesis, not a pure, isolated genesis. And as the Harappan cities gradually declined, not from invasion, but likely due to climate shifts and drying water systems, people migrated eastward toward the Gangetic Valley, shifting from urban centres to a more rural, pastoral lifestyle, absorbing local customs as they went. I love the analogy that our guest lecturer Divya used to describe this. She said Indian identity isn't a single pure ingredient. It's like a pizza. The base, the crust, is Dravidian. The sauce spread all over it is Iranian, from those ancient migrations. And then you have all these diverse toppings. Burmese, Austroasiatic, Central Asian, Tibeto-Burman. If you try to scrape off all the toppings to find one pure ingredient, you don't get a better pizza. You just ruin the whole thing. That is a perfect analogy Simon But for a political party like the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party the BJP a pizza is too complicated to sell at a political rally They want a single uniform identity – one nation one culture one language They are trying to impose Hindi on regions like Tamil Nadu Karnataka and Kerala which have entirely different linguistic roots But they are completely ignoring the lessons of history It was precisely that kind of language imposition that caused East Pakistan to break away and become Bangladesh in 1971 And this desperate political need for a simple unified and ancient origin story brings us to a literal physical hunt the hunt for a dried up goddess In the Rig Veda there are numerous hymns dedicated to a magnificent flowing river called the Saraswati She is described as the greatest of rivers a mighty lifeline of the Vedic people But today if you look at a map of north western India and Pakistan there is no Saraswati River It's a dry semi arid region Right so if you're a nationalist trying to prove that the Vedic people are older than the Harappan civilization and that they lived in this exact region since the dawn of time you need that river to be real You need to prove that the Saraswati wasn't just a myth but a massive physical river that watered a glorious ancient empire And this has led to actual archaeological expeditions funded by the state where groups of people travel in buses looking for the lost riverbed Our guest mentioned seeing buses filled with people wearing orange with signs on the front saying HUNTING FOR THE SARASWATI DIGGING UP TRENCHES IN THE DESERT It has become a deeply symbolic quest but the geological and hydrological reality is far more complex Rivers in this region are not static permanent channels This is a highly tectonically active zone Over thousands of years earthquakes and shifting tectonic plates diverted the tributaries of the ancient Gagar Hakra river system One channel shifted west to feed the Indus while another shifted east to become the Yamuna a tributary of the Ganges The river system quite literally fractured and dried up due to geological shifts and climate change So the river did exist in some form but it changed and disappeared because of tectonic plates not because of some mystical event But nationalists have tried to rename the entire Indus Valley civilization as the Indus Saraswati civilization It's another attempt to reclaim the heritage that Pakistan got in the partition If the Indus is in Pakistan but you can find the Saraswati in India then suddenly you've brought the cradle of civilization back within your own modern borders Precisely. It's using archaeology and physical science as a political tool to validate a national myth. And as historians, we have to look at this with a critical eye. There is a fundamental difference between myth, religion and history. Myths are incredibly important cultural narratives. They give people meaning, values, and a sense of belonging. But when you start bending and distorting physical, historical evidence to force it to fit a myth for political gain, you enter very dangerous territory. It's like trying to make a highly complex messy beautiful history fit onto a bumper sticker or a campaign slogan Whenever a politician points to a distant golden era when everything was perfect and blames a specific group of outsiders for ruining it we have to step back The past was just as messy diverse and complicated as the present is today There was no single pure ancient monoculture There was always intermingling always migration always change And maybe that's the real beauty of the story I think that's a very wise place to leave it, Simon. History is a tapestry of complex threads, not a single solid block of stone. Thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time. Goodbye everyone. Take care.
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