Ebook: The Horse and the Aryan Debate

Article // Journal of Indian History and Culture. — 2006. — No.13 — Pp. 33-59."The presence or absence of the horse in the Indus-Sarasvati civilization has been a bone of contention for decades, especially in the context of the Aryan invasion theory. The argument is familiar: the Rig-Veda uses the word ashva over 200 times, ergo the Vedic society must have been full of horses, ergo the Harappan civilization, from which the noble animal is conspicuously absent, must be pre-Vedic and non-Aryan. The horse must therefore have been brought into India around 1500 BCE by the invading Aryans, who used its speed to crushing advantage in order to subdue the native, ox-driven populations. This line of reasoning is regarded as so evident and foolproof that it is taken to be the final word on the issue; as a result, we find it confidently repeated in reference books and history textbooks dealing with India’s prehistory.
However, on closer view, there are serious flaws at every step of the argument — and indeed several concealed steps. I will first examine the physical evidence of the horse from various Harappan sites, both in terms of skeletal remains and depictions, before turning to problems of methodology that have compounded the confusion, in particular the double-edged use of negative evidence, and the persisting colonial misreadings of the Rig-Veda".