A calendar for the year 2024 claiming that it is published under the aegis of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur is available on social media.
As in previous years, the 2024 calendar is used as a platform to propagate false narratives of Indian ancestry. Widely shared on social media, this calendar was produced with creative inputs from the faculty of the Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge Systems and is titled “India of the Ages: The Mother of Language, Culture and Civilization”.
The top officials of the institute, including the director and registrar, are named as members of the advisory board. The calendar ends with a note saying: “IIT Kharagpur has immense pleasure in presenting the Calendar of the Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS) for the year 2024 … The pool of evidence presented here is just the tip of an iceberg, which is based on detailed investigation, iteration and mutual calibration of facts and the correlations between facts from history, conducted by IIT Kharagpur.”
As in previous years, this calendar also uses a baffling mixture of symbols and images to advance an account of Indian ancestry based on the premise that the Vedic Aryans were indigenous to the Indus Valley region and had been active for more than 20,000 years, who, according to their interpretation, became the progenitor of the culture across the world by extending westward. This ‘out-of-India’ theory propagated in the calendar flies in the face of all the available evidence generated by a spectrum of scientific and sociological studies.
IIT Kharagpur 2024 calendar by The Wire on Scribd
The calendric narrative violates the evidence generated from archaeo-genetics, archaeology, linguistics, zoology, botany, geography, and theology. Peer-reviewed studies suggest that the pre-Indian state’s cultural beginnings are associated with the Harappans, the earliest settlers belonging to a greater Indus Valley civilisation, whose culture extends from 7,000 to 2,000 BCE. Some of them were originally from the Iranian plains as evidenced by the genetic studies and others could be the original inhabitants with genetic connections with much earlier migrants from Africa.
Ironically, an excerpt in the 2024 IIT Calendar from Swami Vivekananda’s book Problem of India and its Evolution mentions that the Vedic Aryans reached from elsewhere, which goes against the messaging of the calendar makers themselves. But it is a retribution of sorts that Swami’s own words quoted from his book imply that the ‘out of India’ supposition is quite far-fetched and grossly wrong.
Swami’s quoted statement reads like this, “When the Aryans reached India, they found the climate so hot that they could not work incessantly, so they began to think; thus, they became introspective and developed religion.” He is further quoted as “Another branch of Aryans went into the smaller and more picturesque country of Greece…”. Swami Vivekananda made this insightful statement when the knowledge about the Vedic Aryans was sketchy. The archaeological excavation in the Indus Valley started only in 1925, led by John Marshall and his Indian associates, marking the beginning of the scientific understanding of the origin of the Indus settlers.
Spread around the Indus River, Kutch, Saurashtra, and parts of Baluchistan and the Makran Coast, the original settlers in the Indus Valley engaged in agriculture and trade, designing well-laid-out townships with a good water management system. Centred on farming, they were also good at seagoing and transacting goods with the parallelly flourishing distant ancient settlements like Mesopotamia and Egypt in the Middle East. All these communities including the Harappan society slowly declined because of increasing aridity and declining rainfall which became critical around 4000 years ago.
The scientific evidence collected later also suggests that during the late Harappan period, about 4000 years ago, the Rigvedic people entered the Indian subcontinent through present-day Iran and Afghanistan. These pastoral migrants and their grazing animals including horses came in from the Caspian steppes into the Indus Valley region, in batches, to mingle with the earlier dark-skinned settlers of the Indus Valley. Weaving linguistics and history together, Peggy Mohan in her recent book, ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants’ shows how these emigrants from the Eurasian plains, consisting only of males mingled with the original inhabitants and married the women in those indigenous communities.
The author explains how this interaction made it possible to gain retroflex sounds from the archaic Dravidian language of the original settlers in the entire sound system of Sanskrit, the language of the Vedic emigrants. She compares this with an analogous scenario of the emigration of the patrilineal Namboothiri Brahmins of North India to Kerala in the Middle Ages and how the interaction infused Sanskrit words in Malayalam, the local language. A similar transformation must have happened to the archaic Sanskrit when it met with the local language spoken by the Harappans when it was brought to the Indus Valley by the Vedic Aryans.
What is glaringly missing in the calendar is the inputs from the genetic studies expected of a product of an IIT – a highly rated academic institute in India. The recently conducted genetic studies have provided a solid justification for the theory of Aryan migration from the Eurasian steppes to India. These studies resulted in a revolutionary understanding of the origin of the Aryan nomads who reached the Indus Valley. Interestingly, the Y chromosome (haplogroup R1a1a) of some of the Brahmanical groups in India still share a common genetic ancestral lineage with Eastern Europeans. The batches of nomads, mostly males, who shared the genomic material must have moved east out of the Caspian grasslands, who were adept at taming horses and mastered building horse-drawn chariots, essential for a nomadic life. Around 1,900 BCE, about 4000 years ago, these people broke up and one group proceeded towards what is now Iran, and the other to India, as also implied by Swami Vivekananda, as referred earlier.
Those who entered India, around 1,500 BCE (about 3500 years ago), established the dominant civilisation in the north-west. By then, many of the older Harappan settlers’ colonies must have been fragmented and they had become marginalised. The newly settled people, the so-called Aryans, who were worshippers of fire likely to have been better at conducting rituals and more creative intellectually. In another study, the DNA separated from the skeleton of a woman from a 5,000-year-old in the village of Rakhigarhi, in the Hisar District of Haryana, the lineage shows no detectable ancestry from the Caspian steppe pastoralists or Anatolian or Iranian farmers, suggesting initial farming in South Asia may have arose indigenously rather than necessarily from large-scale migration from the west. These oldest settlers may have more genetic commonality with much earlier migrants from Africa.
These defenders of the ‘out-of-India’ hypothesis, in their enthusiasm, even remarked in one part of their commentary in the calendar that “the geological continuity between the Pallakad (Sic) Gap in India and Ranotsara Gap in Madagascar is now fully substantiated evidence. The evidence hints at possible demographic migratory linkages between Africa and India from pre-history”. This is a breathtaking statement. What they are referring to is the Gondwana Supercontinent that existed 450 million years ago when Africa, India, South America, and Australia were part of one super-continental mass.
This ancient supercontinent broke up about 180 million years ago into landmasses we recognize today: Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica, the Indian subcontinent and the Arabian Peninsula. How could the connectivity between the Palakkad Gap in southern India and the Ranotsara Gap in Madagascar in a geologically remote period offer a migratory path for humans – a time when even mammals were absent, not to speak of humans? The Homo sapiens—began their migration out of Africa some 60,000 years ago, not billions of years as the calendar makers propose. The goof-up does not end there and the calendar goes to the extent of calling the Paleolithic hominid communities as ‘civilization’ – at a time when humans subsisted by hunting and scavenging wild animals using stone tools. India hosts several archaeological sites from where evidence of Palaeolithic communities dated to several millions of years has been obtained, particularly from the Narmada Valley in central India.
This year’s IIT calendar also, like previous attempts, repeats the hoax that the unicorn, an iconic Indus Valley seal, belongs to the Vedic period. This time, the text that accompanies an image of a unicorn in the 2024 calendar claims that the seal depicts a “9-square or Navagraha Vedic Mandala” –representing the arrangement of nine planets! I can only quote Meera Nanda in an earlier article who discussed in detail this unicorn obsession of modern seekers of the cradle of civilization, “With an undisciplined mythic imagination, combined with a commitment to making India the “cradle of civilisation,” there is no end to the ‘evidence’ that can be invented”.
Let us for a moment forget about the questionable interpretation of the ancestry part, but I want the readers to go to March in this calendar of 2024 that is available on the internet and see for themselves the map of India published by the calendar makers and compare it with the political map issued by the Survey of India. The map published in the calendar shows that the parts of Jammu-Kashmir fall on the opposite side of the border shared by Pakistan. A mundane point, but it tells a lot about the slapdash style of the makers of this calendar and the sources they used in formulating a dubious narrative of Indian ancestry.
The IIT Kharagpur on their website now disowns this calendar. The institution, however, is now running a ticker on its website saying it has nothing to do with the calendar. “The IKS Calendar of 2024 (India of the Ages), purported to be published by the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, presently under circulation in social media, is NOT an officially published calendar of IIT Kharagpur. Accordingly, the institute, or any of its authorities, owe no responsibility whatsoever for the veracity of its contents or any other issues arising from that place. The institute bears No Knowledge of the content that is represented in an individual capacity,”
This is a serious issue but they do not disclose why they are disowning it. Are they disowning it because it contains disinformation and misinformation on Indian ancestry? If that is the case, then the calendars of the previous years which followed the same template also need to be disowned. Would they come clean on the veracity of the published material in the earlier calendars and disown all the previous ones, too?
C.P. Rajendran is an adjunct professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.
