‘Earliest Indians were migrants…India has been connected to the world from the very beginning,' says historian Audrey Truschke

A quarter of humanity today is made up of South Asians, and for the rest of the world, their lives are constantly being shaped by South Asian culture—be it through films, spices, yoga or religion. US-based historian Audrey Truschke begins her monumental work tracing 5,000 years of Indian history with this crucial reminder to her readers about the impact the subcontinent has made upon the globe for millennia.
Truschke's India: 5,000 Years of History on the Subcontinent (published by the Princeton University Press) begins with the much-discussed and debated Indus Civilisation, and goes right up till the post-Independence period, including the caste wars of the 1990s and the rise of the Hindu right.
Throughout her re-telling of Indian history, Truschke reminds her readers of the vital connections that India has maintained with the world from the very beginning of its existence, through migration, trade and cultural exports. The earliest of Indians, as she reveals, were migrants who built the foundations of urban civilisation and shaped the oldest literary tradition of the region in the form of the Vedas. She also underlines the necessity of understanding the past of the subcontinent through the lens of the marginalised, particularly through the voices of women and the oppressed castes.
In an interview with indianexpress.com, Truschke talks about her findings of the Indus Civilisation, the use of literature written by women to tell the story of Buddhism, as well as the dark side of the history of Hindu nationalism.
Excerpts from the interview:
Q. Your book title suggests that it is about 5,000 years of Indian history. How and why did you decide on this specific number?
Audrey Truschke: For the last century, the conventional beginning of Indian history has been about 4,600 years ago with the Indus Civilisation. That is where I begin my narrative. We rounded up for the title, because publishers like round numbers, so that is where the 5,000 comes from.
I do not adhere to this time frame strictly, however. I do start in earnest with the Indus Civilisation, which began around 2600 BCE. But before that, I give a brief account of how people populated the subcontinent in the first place. And that story goes back 1,20,000 years.
Q: Why do you choose to begin with the Indus Civilisation?
Truschke: The beginning of Indian history geologically goes back millions of years when the subcontinent was formed; the Himalayas are still rising today from the crashing together of two tectonic plates. Human history in India goes back a more modest 1,20,000 years. I begin the book with recorded human history, devoting attention in earnest first to the Indus Civilisation, which was robust enough that it left behind significant material evidence for us to work with.
Not all of the past is recoverable. But history is a positivist discipline. We work with the evidence we have. And so there is no value judgment that the Indus Civilisation was somehow more important than other groups of people doing other things in India around the same time. It is simply that they are the ones for whom we have significant material evidence to reconstruct their lifestyles.
Q: We know that there is a lot of politics around the Indus Civilisation lately, with different political parties trying to appropriate it around religious or regional lines. How do you respond to that?
Truschke: I think every single political party in India will be disappointed with my take on the Indus Civilisation. I know there is a huge push right now for it to be a Dravidian civilisation. There is no positivist evidence that shows that. It is plausible, but a lot of things are plausible.
The bottom line is we don't know much about who the Indus Civilisation people were. We know they built cities. We know how they lived. We know a fair amount about their diet. These are certain things that are recorded in the material and skeletal records. But we don't fundamentally know who they were, except that they were from northwestern India.
That was a long time ago, and we really don't know how the Indus people map onto modern linguistic, political, and ethnic groups. For those who are making modern political claims, that comes with all the limits of political claims. But insofar as some people are trying to make a historical claim, they need to be a little bit more realistic about the evidence.
Q: There is a section in your book where you speak about the first Indians. Could you elaborate a bit on who the first Indians were?
Truschke: I am taking from Tony Joseph there, who has an excellent book called The Early Indians. The first Indians were not actually the first Homo Sapiens to set foot on the Indian subcontinent. That would be the group that came 1,20,000 years ago. But they all died out. About 65,000 years ago, another migrant group came. They came eastwards roughly from Africa and entered the subcontinent, and some of those people survived. They have left behind a genetic lineage that is shared by some, not all, modern Indians. It is especially strong in South India.
We call them the first Indians because they are the first ones to make it.
Q: You also write that you have included a diverse representation of voices, especially those of women and the oppressed castes, in your telling of Indian history. Could you give a few examples?
Truschke: Like many historians right now, I too think it is so important to have a more diverse set of voices when we are looking at the past. The thing is, it is hard because the people who tend to be recorded tend to be members of dominant social groups. In South Asia, that means they tend to be men, they tend to be upper caste, and they tend to be Hindu. I am looking for people who don't fit that bill. I think it is important to find diverse voices to explain key shifts in South Asian history.
For example, when I cover the advent of Buddhism about 2,400 years ago, I cite from the Therigatha, which is a collection of poems and hymns by Buddhist women, collected in the early centuries BCE.
Later on, I bring in female voices, for example, when I talk about the Hindu reform movements and criticisms of Hinduism that arose in the 19th century. I do talk about some of the men, such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Vivekananda, but I also talk about Pandita Ramabai, a Brahmin woman who later converted to Christianity.
It is harder to bring in voices from the oppressed castes. From ancient India, for instance, we have very little to nothing that was actually written by Shudras and Dalits. It is not until later that we get texts authored by Shudras and Dalits, but I at least try to bring in texts about them. For example, I have a section where I am talking about caste in the 17th century, and I talk about some Shudra kings. I also print part of a Telugu drama written around 1700 CE. It is written by an upper caste individual, but it depicts a Brahmin in a very poor light. It depicts this Brahmin who is lusting after a Dalit woman and is abusing his Brahmanical privilege. He cites Sanskrit verses to her and plays with religion to try to lure the Dalit woman. This is not a Dalit voice, but at least it is a Dalit character. You work with what you have for the historical evidence.
There is no getting around the fact that dominant groups are better represented in the South Asian historical record. That is true of all histories in all parts of the world, but that does not absolve historians of doing the hard work of trying to recover what we can, both about and from the perspective of less-discussed, less-represented groups.
Q: You also write that India, throughout its ancient and medieval history, has had global connections. Could you elaborate on some of the key historical moments when India's connections with the world were of key importance?
Truschke: India has been connected to the world from the beginning and throughout. How people get to India is a story of repeated migrations. The Indus Valley Civilisation had extensive trade connections with Mesopotamia and, possibly through Mesopotamia, with ancient Egypt.
The people belonging to Vedic society, which was founded and flourished after the Indus Civilisation, were also migrants. They came from outside into northwestern India and composed the Vedas. The Vedas are an Indian composition, but the language group of that community does have roots from outside originally.
People, things, and ideas also left the subcontinent. And South Asia then has some remarkable cultural exports starting in the few centuries before the turn of the CE era. Of course, Buddhism is probably the most well-known one, which travelled both on the sea trade routes and along the Silk Roads, surviving ultimately largely outside of the subcontinent. There are also stories, such as the Panchatantra, and games like chess and Parcheesi that are still popular across the West today. Then there is Sanskrit that travels east to Southeast Asia. All of this attests to India and the subcontinent more broadly being part of an interconnected world.
Q: We know that history in India has become a major topic of debate. How would you say your book addresses the current politics around history in the country?
Truschke: Firstly, I think my book is pretty staunchly, openly, and decidedly a non-nationalist history, down to the title. As I say in the introduction, the India that I refer to in the title is not the modern nation state of India. The modern nation state of India was born yesterday from a historian's perspective. It is less than a century old. I use India in the title and throughout most of the book, until the last couple of chapters, in its historic sense of the subcontinent. It is a geographical designation, and it very much includes Bangladesh, Pakistan, and southern parts of Afghanistan. I realise that is going to be a little uncomfortable for a lot of readers who are really used to India being the modern nation state with militarised borders, an army, and a set of nationalist symbols.
The second way in which I address nationalism—and I think this will be particularly important for younger readers, under the age of about 30 or 35—is by giving a fair amount of the history of Hindu nationalism. I think Hindu nationalists do not like talking about their own history. There are some dark parts of that history, the Nazi loving stuff, the fascist stuff, the fact that it is largely a European import, and the fact that it was unpopular for most of its existence. Forty years ago, no respectable Indian would touch Hindu nationalism. I think that is very hard to understand if you are 30 years old and living in Hyderabad or Bombay or Delhi or Ahmedabad or wherever, and Hindutva is what you know. My book charts that history, among many other facets of Indian and South Asian histories.
Adrija Roychowdhury leads the research section at Indianexpress.com. She writes long features on history, culture and politics. She uses a unique form of journalism to make academic research available and appealing to a wide audience. She has mastered skills of archival research, conducting interviews with historians and social scientists, oral history interviews and secondary research.
During her free time she loves to read, especially historical fiction.
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