Sanghacheta Ghosh
At an idle pandemic Sunday night this November, I re-watched a 2014 movie ‘Children of War’ which is based on the background of ‘Bangladesh Liberation War’[1] and bloodcurdlingly frames how a 1971 West Pakistan, as an act of despotism over their eastern wing, i.e., then East Pakistan or today’s Bangladesh, which was not only geographically, but, also linguistically, culturally, religio- demographically and politically distant, strangled the latter with dismantling establishments, imprisonment, internal displacement, mass murder of the resistant Bengalis, both the Muslim-majority and interspersing Hindu-minority, and such other ethnically-fuelled strategies. Another suffocating arm of this atrocity, which could be dubbed as the nastiest war crime, was West Pakistani militia-enforced systematic genocidal-rape[2] of Bengali women which was tailed on by thousands of unwanted pregnancies, births of a generation of war-babies, and a prolonged, unfortunate series of abortions, infanticides, suicides, compulsive-prostitution and the other linked violations of human-rights.
Curiously enough, the Bengali nationalists, delegating the perpetrated, paradoxically, were convicted of committing the same violence against the women who belonged to another minority-community of Bihari-Muslims who supported West Pakistan. But, that’s nothing newly eyebrow-raising; as-a-matter-of-fact, in patriarchy, during normalcy and somewhat extra in more turbulent phases whenever a centre of power attempts to imperiously control over a larger population group, anti-female atrocity has been one of the most favourite staple weapons unleashed in favour of the power-mongers[3]. Though, are that gender-atrocity all naturally endowed or, a later innovation and, gradually acquired and iron-strengthened, through millennia-aged unhealthy habits over the course of sapiens-history?
The colonial and early-post-colonial Indologists[4][5], with very few exceptions[6][7], who heavily depended on ancient scriptural expositions, that could have been linguistically ‘aliens’ sometimes, and their individual interpretations, which would be inexorably altering with time, place and enquiring person, had advocated that patriarchy and its subset, gender-stereotyped atrocity, are post-Vedic, or, to the earliest, later-Vedic, social symptoms – and this opinion has managed to survive as a popular notion even now. However, unlike the abstract anticipations made by the two history analysing techniques of mythology/literature and linguistic, the other story-teller pair, specifically archaeology and genetics, which involve tangible antique articles, inorganic or organic, opine otherwise[8][9] – the seeds of excessive intra-(casteism) and inter-(patriarchy) gender inequalities had always been there in the very social setting of the Yamnaya pastoralists, the progenitors of the Aryans.
Archaeologists, trailing down the dispersal-routes around Europe and Asia of the Yamnaya-pastors, came across numerous ‘Kurgans’ or burial mounds, once used and then abandoned by them. Nearly 80% of these typical funerary-mounds strikingly contained male sapiens-skeletons, bearing mortal bone-injuries suggesting vicious physical-conflict scars, buried with central importance, accompanied by domesticated horse-remains, demolishing wheeled-carts and ferocious war-wares as their prized possessions[10]. Considering this deadly combination, in-Kurgan arrangement and other circumstantial evidences, archaeologists suggested that there was a major scene-shift on the world-canvas around 3000 BC with the unfolding Bronze Age. Aided by lethal metal-artilleries, destructive war-wagons, incorporated with a new invention, wheels, and pulled by the newly domesticated horses, and their cattle herds, the Yamnaya, the ancestors of the Indo-Eurasians, who were primarily nomad-herders, for some reason or other, started migrating from the Iranian Zagros Mountain Steppe-region veining over Europe and Asia, except the far-East. En route, they exchanged ideas, technologies and pathogens with, obliterated different previously thriving local/regional, predominantly agrarian, seemingly non-violent and matriarchal cultures, collectively nicknamed as the proto-Indo-Eurasian cultures, and displaced them with unprecedented social-arrangements, sharply differentiated into strict status-hierarchies of private-property, family-concept, male-nepotism and extreme power-centration owing to singular alpha-males or few families or tiny groups or, even possibly, individual females.
However, as it’s impossible for a woman to give birth to an enormously large number of children, these tentative ancient alpha-females lost into the pre-historic mist of oblivion, whereas the alpha-premiers and their kin-men, who thoroughly enjoyed the better share of available social-resources including conjugal-partners, were successful to pass on their genes, the survival currency, right down to the present[11].
Recent years’ torrent of reproducible genomic-statistical studies, the hardest of the four tools to be denied of, covenant with these archaeological-inferences and themselves, amazingly overlap. Y-chromosome analyses, implying direct paternal lineage, reveal that current European and Indian population, to a lesser extent, are preponderantly direct descendants of a Yamnaya-related gene-pool that is narrowly diversified (christened as ‘Star Clusters’) and was absent on this vast landmass ~5000 thousand years ago. Contrastingly, its counterpart, direct maternal lineage implying mitochondrial DNA (mt-DNA) analyses, results to largely diverse region-specific ancestries, some of which could be traced back to before the Bronze Age[12][13].
So, what do these genetic data speak of the Indian scenario, the foundation of the Aryan Empire? Yes, ‘empire’, because the organisation, at least ideationally, mirrored multiple characteristics[14], perceived as imperial by modern conscience, if not all. As for examples, the Aryans, as they regarded themselves in their primitive-literature, the Vedas, conscientiously strove to infinitely increase the radius of their conquered land that invariably met resistance from several ‘native’ tribes which they overcame mostly through bloodshed and often chicaneries. Myths of a universally altruist ruling-body, not necessarily comprised of only one empress/emperor, of ‘divine-inheritance’, were improvised – the Brahmins–Kshatriyas dyad in this case.
Religio-cultural sets of ideas were such devised and made consecrated and dominant to glue the ‘ethnic’ entities, subdue evolutionary ‘we’/‘they’ xenophobia, ubiquitous in all animal-bands irrespective of species, and furnish feelings of commonness, that after a point, despite of continuous mutual hostility between the ‘newcomers’ and the ‘autochthonous’, the latter willingly tried to somehow squeeze themselves into the varna–jati hodgepodge; mythological literature and Vedic-education perpetuated the system’s permanence and the sundry[15].
Now, what likely might have happened in the initial-days of the would-be empire is the prominently stratified Aryan-population set foot on the Indian-mainland, the elite-males and their close-relatives, owning tremendous socio-political power, collided with and defeated the ‘indigenous’ for land, absorbing a faction of local-males as muscle-labourers, and, procure and procreate with local-females as womb-labourers making them unavailable for their own clan-men to mate with for innumerable subsequent generations. The Modern Indian Cline genetic-profile too is so deeply dyed with gender-atrocity colours that majority of it yields direct, paternal (especially of the north-Indian ‘higher’-castes) and maternal lineages from the Yamnaya and pre-Bronze era Ancient Indians (a populace consisting of two leading heads, the Indus Periphery Cline and Ancient South Indians), respectively[16][17], to be oversimplified. Naturally, the contemporary ‘Aryavarta’-ideology revalorisation-missionaries are repeatedly finding their victims in the female-members of their target-opponents – Muslims[18][19], Dalits[20] and the other subalterns. Unfortunately, our well-assimilated patriarchal, gender-atrocious Aryan-heritage is undoubtedly going to stay there for really very long, if not the eternity.
References:
[1]Anonymous. (2020). The Bangladesh Liberation War. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Liberation_War on 4.11.2020.
[2]Anonymous. (2020). Rape during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_Bangladesh_Liberation_War on 4.11.2020.
[3]Millet, K. (2000). Sexual Politics. Champaign, USA: University of Illinois Press.
[4]Altekar, A. S. (1938). The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization: From Prehistoric Times to the Present Day. Benaras, India: The Benaras Hindu University Press.
[5]Keay, F. A. (1918). Ancient Indian Education: An Inquiry into Its Origin, Development and Ideals. London, UK: Oxford University Press.
[6]Scharfe, H. (2002). Education in Ancient India. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
[7]Bhattacharya, S. (1938). Prachin Bharote Nari O Samaj. Kolkata, India: National Book Agency Private Limited.
[8]Anthony, D. W. (2007). The Horse, The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton, USA: Princeton University Press.
[9]Reich, D. (2018). Who We are and How We got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
[10]Anthony, D. et al. (2016). A Bronze Age Landscape in the Russian Steppes: The Samara Valley Project (Monumenta Archaeologica 37). Los Angeles, USA: The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.
[11]Gimbutas, M. (1956). The Prehistory of Eastern Europe, Part 1: Mesolithic, Neolithic and Copper Age Cultures in Russia and the Baltic Area (American School of Prehistoric Research, Harvard University, Bulletin No. 20). New Haven, USA: Peabody Museum.
[12]Lippold, S. (2014). Human Paternal and Maternal Demographic Histories: Insights from High-Resolution Y Chromosome and mtDNA Sequences (Investigative Genetics 5). London, UK: BioMed Central.
[13]Keinan, A. & Reich, D. (2010). Can a sex-Biased Human Demography Account for the Reduced Effective Population Size of Chromosome X in Non-Africans? (Molecular Biology and Evolution 27). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
[14]Harari, Y. N. (2014). Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. London, UK: Penguin Random House.
[15]Joseph, T. (2018). Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From. New Delhi, India: Juggernaut Books.
[16]Silva, M. et al. (2017). A Genetic Chronology for the Indian Subcontinent Points to Heavily Sex-Biased Dispersals (BMC Evolutionary Biology 17). London, UK: BioMed Central.
[17]Reich, D. (2009). Reconstructing Indian Population History (Nature 461). London, UK: Nature Research.
[18]Anonymous. (2020). 2017 Unnao Rape Case. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Unnao_rape_case on 4.11.2020.
[19]Anonymous. (2020). Kathua Rape Case. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathua_rape_case on 4.11.2020.
[20]Anonymous. (2020). 2020 Hathras Gang Rape and Murder. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Hathras_gang_rape_murder on 4.11.2020.
About Author:
Research Scholar, Department of Education, University of Kalyani.
E-mail: sanghachetag@gmail.com
