The Concept of Pakistan in the Vedas

(Law Animated World, Hyderabad, 30 Oct. 2015)

The three most famous sculptures from Mohenjo Daro, on the Sindhu/Indus river, seem illchosen to represent the Pakistani publicity campaign 5000 years of Pakistan. The kingpriest apparently is an officiant of a stellar cult, and at any rate of a cult other than Islam, so
according to the Pakistani state ideology, raison dtre for Pakistans very existence, he was a
leading figure in a false religion belonging to Jahiliyya, the age of ignorance. Like the
seated yogi surrounded by animals, iva Paupati, he must be burning in hell now. As for
the dancing girl, stark naked and in a defying pose, in todays Pakistan she would be stoned
to death right away.
And yet, that Pakistani slogan does make sense. Bear with us, we will take the reader through
a convoluted array of scriptural and historical data, and you will see why this conclusion is
anything but far-fetched. Indeed, it is inevitable.

Foreign
The Northwest has always had a negative connotation in the Vedic tradition. Thus, R.
Siddhantashastree (1978: History of the Pre-Kali-Yuga India, Delhi: Inter-India Publications,
p.11) writes: The valley of the five tributaries of the Indus had always been held as an unholy
region because of its occupation by a non-Aryan tribe antagonistic to the civilized Aryans
until the time of Sambarana, (...) the king of Hastinapura belonging to the Lunar dynasty. He
was the first Aryan to settle in the valley after driving away the aboriginal non-Aryans to a
considerable distance.
The latter sentence suggests a concession to the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) by positing an
antagonism between Aryans and aboriginals, contrary to the Puranic narrative revaluated
by the same author, which has the Aryans come from inner India to this peripheral zone and
then n to Central Asia. This simply exemplifies the confusion regarding Aryan origins. Then
again, perhaps it is the reader who is misled by this received wisdom while the author has a
different scenario in mind: the Aryans as natives of a part of India, who came as conquerors
to subdue the natives of other parts of India, notably the Northwest.
As Shrikant Talageri (The Rigveda, an Historical Analysis, and The Rigveda and the Avesta,
the Final Analysis, Delhi: Aditya Prakashan 2000 c.q. 2008) has argued, the ancient Hindu
suspicion towards the Northwest is a strong argument against the AIT. Knowing the Hindu
veneration for origins, they should have treated the region of their provenance far more
positively. Anyway, we note that Siddhantashastree situates this anti-Northwest attitude
already in the pre-Vedic age, in the very beginning of Aryan history.

Battle of the Ten Kings

By the time the Vedic seers start composing their hymns, though, the Northwest is already
populated by cognate tribes speaking an Indo-European dialect: first the Druhyu tribe, still
remembered in the Rg-Veda as a defeated enemy of the Vedic Pru tribe, but largely already
emigrated to Afghanistan and beyond; then the Anu tribe, the direct enemy confronted by the
Vedic people themselves at the time the hymns were being composed. Though speaking
related dialects, then probably still mutually understandable, they come into the Vedic horizon
as enemies, as harbingers of evil. They add to the regions negative aura.
Both the successive enemies, from the Druhyu and the Anu tribe, attack the Vedic Pru tribe
from the Northwest. A confederacy led by the Anu tribe comes to confront the Vedic king
Suds in the Battle of the Ten Kings, the foremost historical event in the Rg-Veda (7:18-3383). Unexpectedly, they suffer complete defeat and relocate to Afghanistan. In the names of
the tribes and kings, we recognize Iranian (and not Dravidian) names, and in their religion, we
recognize the main traits of Mazdeism. The enemies are said to be without Indra and
without the Devas, who were indeed demonized in Mazdeism; and without fire-sacrifice,
because in Mazdeism, fire is so sacred that one shouldnt pollute it by throwing things into it.
It seems that then already, near the beginning of Vedic history, Mazdeism had its distinctive
features.
This is all the more remarkable because this was even before Zarathutra., the supposed
reformer who brought these traits into being. Some three generations later, another battle
confirms the division of power and territory. In that more even battle, Rjva, descendant of
Vrs agira (hence the Vrs gira battle), and Sahadeva, descendent of Suds, face the Iranian
king who is remembered in history through the mentions and praise he receives in his court
priest Zarathutras own hymns: Kavi Vitspa. Both parties are mentioned in the Veda 1:100,
1:122) and the Avest.
The proverbial demons, the Asuras (comprehensively discussed in Hale, Wash Edward: Asura
in Early Vedic Religion, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1986, and in Krishna, Nanditha: The Book
of Demons, Penguin, Delhi 2014 (2007)), originally indicate the class of gods preferentially
worshipped by the Anu tribe, but also by the first Vedic seers. Varun a, god of the night sky
with its orderly succession of constellations, hence god of the world order (rta/aa,
seen in

Persian names like Artaxerxes) is an Asura, a lord or mighty one. The Iranians, who often
replaced /s/ with /h/, called him Ahura Mazda, Lord Wisdom. After the Iranians had
demonized the Devas/Davas, the Indians started to demonize the Asuras, and Varun a
gradually fell into disuse, even if by no means as steeply demonized as Indra by the
Mazdeans. At any rate, Vedism and Mazdeism conceived of one another as antagonistic, much
as Hinduism and Islam do today.
In theological respect, the Iranian religion Mazdeism has often been considered monotheistic,
and in popular publications this account still persists. This was not entirely correct (Skjaerv,
Prods Oktor: Zarathustra: a Revolutionary Monotheist?, p. 317-350, in Pongratz-Leisten,
Beate: Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism, Eisenbrauns , Winona Lake
IN 2011), it remained a polytheism, and Zarathutra with his hyperfocus on one god was
strictly speaking a henotheist, and hardly representative for the common religion. But it was
sufficiently close. The Persians became the saviours of the Israelites with their budding
monotheism, their preferred god Varun a was the moralist in the Indo-Iranian pantheon (as is
apparent from RV 7:86), a bit like the Christian god, and the idea of exalting a single god so
much above the others shows a would-be monotheist urge. All this allows for the conclusion
that Islamic monotheism is but a radicalization of Zarathutras henotheism. His religion, and

possibly his personal religious dissent, was at any rate sufficiently different from the Vedic
religion to be thematized as a factor in the long-drawn- out conflict described in the Rg-Veda.
So, Pakistan, which has a persianized form of Hindi as national language, can really be said to
be the heir of the proto-Iranian tribes living in that same territory in the Vedic age, or at least
to fulfil the same antagonistic role in the Hindu worldview.

Other considerations
The epics give even more flesh to this hostile attitude. In the epics, the troublesome characters
typically come from the Northwest. The Rmyan a intrigue is caused by Kaikey, a co-wife of
Rmas father coming from the northwestern Kaikeya tribe. Gndhr, mother of the enemy
Kauravas, and her brother akuni, deceiver at dice and evil spirit behind the disrobing of
Draupad, come from Gandhra in Afghanistan. Mdr, who triggers the death of king
Pan d u, cause of the whole war, belongs to the IranianMadra tribe (apparently related to the
Medes).
The first, to my knowledge, to become aware of this dislikes relevance to the Aryan
Homeland issue, was Shrikant Talageri. The negative aura of the Northwest was so consistent
and unadulterated that this could not possibly be the venerated land of their ancestors. To the
above and other considerations, he has added a fact he remembers from his own Saraswat
Brahmin community. When it was time for religious fasting, rice was not eaten, but wheat
products were. They did not consider wheat, which in the Vedic age came from the Northwest,
as real food, and treated it on a par with foreign foods like potatoes. (Talageri 2008:102-106)
The wheat-growing Northwest was a foreign country, as Pakistan now is to India.
For another consideration: a negative designation in Sanskrit is Mleccha, barbarian. The
word is generally taken to come from Meluhha, the Mesopotamian name for Sindh, now in
Pakistan. So, long before Pakistan existed, proto-Pakistanis were already called barbarians
by orthodox Hindus.
Another Vedic fact, peripheral but symbolically significant, is this. An enemy of the Pauravas
is called the Gugu tribe (RV 10:48:8). But Gugu in Vedic means the firstly-appearing moon,
the crescent. And what country has the crescent in its flag?

Territorial claims
The ancient navas lived in West Panjab where they confronted the Vedic king Suds in the
Battle of the Ten Kings, the first Indo-Pak war. (Then already, such wars typically ended in
Pakistani defeat.) But where did they come from? Aha, as per Puranic tradition, they
immigrated from Kashmir, after taking Panjab from their Druhyu cousins. Kashmir was
known in the Mazdean Videvdd as the Airiinm Vajo, the seed of the Iranians, their

intermediary Homeland. It was the place of their ethnogenesis after having migrated
westwards from Prayga as part of Yaytis branch of the Lunar Dynasty; much like in 1947,
the Mohajirs migrated from the Ganga-Yamuna plain to Pakistan.
This proves, as proofs go in irredentism, that Kashmir belongs with Pakistan. So, if all else
fails, Pakistan can justify its separate existence, its hostility to India and its territorial demands
by invoking Vedic testimony.

A breakthrough slogan
The Pakistani government ought to highlight this long-standing Hindu hostility to the
Northwest. It would prove that the negative attitude to the territories now constituting
Afghanistan and Pakistan dates back to the Vedic or even pre-Vedic age. If that implies
shedding the AIT, so much the better.
Moreover, all this would validate its slogan for attracting tourists to Mohenjo-Daro: Five
thousand years of Pakistan!

Dr. Koenraad Elst

(This paper was rejected by another Indian journal on the sole ground that defending the
Pakistani claim on Kashmir is considered treason, and officialdom should not be deemed
capable of understanding that this is only done tongue-in-cheek.)