BOOK REVIEWS
HISTORY'S NEW HORSEPOWER
Sunday, 16 June 2013 | Pioneer
Exotic Aliens
Author: Valmik Thapar, Romila Thapar, Yusuf Ansari
Publisher: Aleph, Rs 595
The lion, with this book, has become a tool in the hands of an eminent historian to rejuvenate the now discredited Aryan invasion/migration theory. The loser, in the process, is not just the lion but the very idea of history, writes UTPAL KUMAR
There is something about Romila Thapar, one of the eminent historians in the country, which provokes this reviewer to read her work. Maybe it has something to do with habit — and old habits die hard. As a student of history, I would reach out for her books. But the more I read, the more questions would come up than answers. And a pattern would emerge: She, for instance, would begin by saying that since there was no Harappan seal with a horse mark on it, this animal in all likelihood didn’t exist in the subcontinent. But thereafter in the book, this assumption would become the proof of its absence in India which, for her, made it so easy for the invading Aryans to overpower the already disintegrating Harappans and push the Dravidians down south. It’s another matter that now Harappan horse seals have been discovered at numerous sites. Scientific investigations have shown that both the Harappans and the Aryans belonged to the same racial groups. That Harappa wasn’t such a localised civilisation, as it was earlier made out to be. That the Aryan-Dravidian divide wasn’t at all real, so the very idea of distinguishing a fair Aryan and a dark Dravidian falls flat. In the wake of all this, Thapar did something remarkable: She changed the term Aryan invasion into Aryan migration and kept the rest of the theory intact!
So, when she writes the book, Exotic Aliens: The Lion and the Cheetah in India, along with her nephew Valmik Thapar and Yusuf Ansari, the obvious question comes up: What would the historian do in a book dealing with lions? The answer is there within the first few pages of the book: Lions would do what horses failed to deliver — in making the Aryans look aliens to the Indian landscape! The crux of the argument is that lions, along with cheetahs — like the much despised Aryans — were in all probability not the original inhabitants of the subcontinent and were imported from outside.
In Exotic Aliens, the historian doesn’t miss any opportunity to bolster her theory with the help of thepanthera leo (earlier it was horse!), as she says that the “iconic meaning of the lion had clearly not been appropriated by the Harappans”. She then goes on to add that many centuries later the Rig Veda, the first of the Vedic texts, records the reverse condition. “It refers to the thunderous roar of the lion,simha, which lives in the hills and is a beast that kills, but the Rig Veda doesn’t know the tiger, vyaghra. A possible explanation could be that the geographical context of the earliest hymns of the Rig Veda was beyond the far northeast of India and impinges on northeastern Iran and the Oxus valley,” writes Thapar.
The linking of the lion with the Aryan invasion/migration theory does a great harm to this otherwise well-researched book. Because if the Aryans and Harappans were of the same racial stock, and if there never was an invasion/migration, then lions too couldn’t be termed aliens. The entire theory, thus, is put on its head. Divyabhanusinh Chavda, an authority on Asiatic lions and best known for his book The Story of Asia’s Lions, claims that at one point in history lions roamed the Asian continent from Palestine to Palamau in Bihar. Over the centuries, these animals were wiped out, and they are now confined to a small population in Gujarat’s Gir forest. This decimation wasn’t too surprising given the fact that lion killing in this country was not long ago regarded as an ultimate act of valour, particularly among the royal classes, which even Valmik Thapar mentions in this book.
There are interesting stories in this book about how Muslim rulers in India — from Balban and Firoze Shah Tughlaq to Akbar and Jahangir — were obsessed with wild animals. So we are told about Qutb-ud-din Mubarak, the third Khilji monarch (1316-20), possessing “two to three thousand deer-hunting panthers, which would make Akbar’s claim of 1,000 panthers look like an amateur collection!” We are told that in Akbar’s reign (1556-1605) the cheetah assumed a position at the Mughal court which even noblemen would have envied. We are told that the Maharaja of Rewah supposedly killed no less than 483 tigers just before and after Independence! We are informed about a rare book, published in 1920 by Madhav Rao Scindia, the then Maharaja of Gwalior, called A Guide to Tiger Shooting, in which every detail of the state management of a tiger hunt is not just stated but illustrated to ensure that the big cat has no chance whatsoever to escape.
Then, there was one Colonel A Smith who had claimed to have shot 50-300 lions around Delhi and Haryana during the turbulent period before and after the 1857 uprising — and this is where not one lion was found in 1931 by one Major Brown, who himself conceded: “The lion was once very numerous in Haryana but not one (is) to be found.”
No doubt, the book is a source of great information on wildlife, particularly the lion and the cheetah. It also tells us about the obsession of the rajas and nawabs for them and how their fortunes fluctuated with every new ruler. Alas, the book had not involved itself with the Aryan affair! The issue gets knottier when, in the garb of the lion, there’s an attempt to dilute the past to influence the present, to create rift among people on the basis of race, colour and geography. Of all species, lions don’t need this. They are just about surviving in Gir. Efforts should be made to make them flourish, rather than get perished in an ensuing ideological battle.