Tag Archives: Veda

Rice in the Vedas

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“Come to think of it, this is a complicated question.” Neil finally observed.
They were stretched out on a flat rock by the water’s edge. Neil thought of taking his shoe off and dipping his feet in the water, but decided against it. It was still quite cold, and the water might be near freezing. Besides, he could not remember when he last changed his sock, and was conscious that his socks might smell. It had happened to him before.
Mabel was sitting next, and she had taken her shoes off. She had feet that, to Neil, looked as it they had been encased in shoes all her life. Her toes were sort of clustered tightly together, each crowding onto the other and all trying to join up with each other at a point in front of the feet. That’s how painters often drew buildings and roads – where things further would look smaller, and all parallel lines would be inclined so that they join up at some point further up. This brings the perception of depth, of distance. In that sense, Mabel’s toes were three dimensional and followed the European renaissance painter’s preferences.
Neil’s own toes came from a different theory. Not being encased in shoes early in his life, the toes propagated, or tried to, like branches on a tree – each striving to enter into uncharted territory and get much of the space around it as its own. His toes were independent, and not necessarily democratic. Her toes where, he thought, more like groups of elderly Japanese tourists – always clustered together, never venturing too far out where he or she could get separated, and always wearing a sign that identifies him or her as belonging to the group.

Mabel shook her feet and curled her toes a bit, and looked across at him. Sun was still bright and it fell on them sideways, casting a longish shadow over the grass.
“I thought you liked complicated questions”. She teased.

Neil remembered finally. He had changed his sock yesterday. He took his shoe off and peeled off his socks. Then he extended his feet and compared his against hers. His were brown. His toe nails were less pedicured. Some of the toe nails looked as it thy might benefit from a bit of clipping. And, his toes were free. He could even flex then and fan them out, like a Japanese hand fan. They were almost diametrically opposite, from her toes.
Mabel watched and laughed, seeing his toes fanned out as it it were the fingers on a hand. “That’s funny.”
“Yeah. I could always do that, from my childhood days.”
Neil contemplated the question again.
“You see, there are some unknown issues here. I do not know when folks identifiable as Aryans, first arrived in different parts of India. I am not at all sure that they were invaders or visitors and not from the indigenous crowd. So, the date of their emergence would be important. Next, we also need to pin them on a map, along with dates. Then we need to know when each of those regions started farming of rice, if ever. I know rice was more wild than cultivated in their early days. It is possible that some folks just collected the wild rice seeds for eating, while some also attempted to farm it. They might have had a mixed diet of wild and farmed rice. They might have boiled them, or might have roasted them, or might even have eaten it raw, grinding the seeds down to a powder in their molars.”
Neil closed his eyes and tried to imagine a bunch of early semi-nomadic folks at the edge of a jungle, couching in the open by a small seasonal stream of water, washing early rice seeds in the water and attempting to eat them. He tried to imagine that crowd having one of two distinct people that got to be known as Aryans. The picture did not evolve properly in his minds eye. He ended up opening his eyes and squinting at the clear blue sky above, and the small flock of trumpeter swans that crossed his vision, long necks extended and in single file, each riding the wake of the slip stream of bird in front, honking loudly in their passage.
Mabel watched him, wearing a bemused smile.
“So, what do you think? He ate rice or not?”
Neil turned away and looked her in the eye. He had an urge to give her a smooch. It was nice, spending the last two nights together. He was beginning to get used to her habits including the fact that she liked sleeping on her belly – a very odd way of sleeping, he thought.
“I am tempted to guess in the negative. But am not sure. It is possible that folks that lived in the forest environment ate a mixed diet of home grown as well as wild food. I know some of them hunted anything that had fur on it, and would cook and eat it. They were not fussy those days. But – rice – I don’t know. I have never read about anyone that might have investigated this issue. And I have not read the Vedas in their original Sanskrit, and don’t even know if rice in mentioned as a cultivated crop in those verses.”
Mabel snaked closer. She was not feeling particularly cold. She had taken off her parka and set it aside. She snaked an around around his head, and pulled him closer. “Perhaps you know someone that can answer that ?”

Neil thought of two persons who might just do that. One was a woman he knew from his school days, who studied Sanskrit and the Vedas. She was a professor in a University in India. She might be able to help. The other person was someone involved with preservation of indigenous strains of rice, since many of the original strains were already lost through disuse and neglect. He might know something about it.

“Yes, I know some folks. We can consider asking them, though not sure if the question will be considered important by those folks.
I meanwhile have in my iPad a pdf document on the subject of preservation of varieties of rice in the eastern part of India. Let me show you.”
He took it out from their backpack and played with it for a few moments. The screen came to life. He opened the application iBooks and finally opened the item he was looking for. The screen got filled with a picture of various strains of rice, the stock of each having some kind of an identifying tag. They were of varying shades of a warm color – from beige to almost red. The article heading below the picture said “Valuing Folk Crop Varieties for Agroecology and Food Security.” It was dated October 2009.
He showed it to Mabel.

Mabel took the iPad. She was interested in its capacity to hold so much of interesting documents which would need multiple book racks and likely would overflow a house. She had been toying with the idea of getting one herself. She did not read as much as Neil did, but still, she did like to read stuff. She had gotten used to navigating through the gadget, because Neil often gave it to her.

She read through the article, nodded at Neil, and then closed the article, going back to the book shelf for eBooks instead of pdf files. There, she found books that were of her interest. One was about the geology of British Columbia. Before she knew Neil, this was not an interesting subject. But that was then. Now, we was very keen on it.
There were other books of interest too. Backwoods of Canada was one. She had read part of it one day. She remembered reading about the Strickland Trail, written by one of the early pioneering women. The article was written in the 1830s, almost 180 years ago. She liked reading books like this, and she found in incredible that Neil had this book too. After all, he was born in India and had come to Canada relatively recently.
She was also interested to read about Annie Wood Bessant, a very interesting woman, and elected member of parliament in the UK and among the first to agitate for equality of rights and pay for women in the workforce. She was among the earliest of the true feminists and spiritual independents that broke from the Judea-Christian mold and carved a niche for herself and all free thinkers of the future. Mabel did not know anything about her before she met Neil. But Neil knew a lot about her, since she eventually left Europe and settled in India, and was among the earliest of the leaders for India’s independence from British rule.
She did not know about a lot of things before she met Neil. Neil thought that her fascination with him was more because she was impressed by what he had read, rather than because she liked him as a person. Mabel would laugh at that. Neil might know things about the external world, but he knew nothing much about women.
He had a lot to learn, and she intended to broaden his horizon there.

She looked into his eyes, up close, and kissed his nose. “Thank you. Yes, I agree that folk rice varieties are the best. In fact, I’d even add that the folk human varieties are not bad themselves.
I have one right here reclining on a stone next to me.”

Neil ignored the comment about himself, feeling a bit flustered. “You know, the saline resistant strains of rice that had … “
He did not get a chance to complete the sentence.
Mabel had rolled herself on top of him and smothered him with kisses.

The Vedas, the Aryans and issues of early rice cultivation in eastern India would have to wait.

Who is an Aryan?

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“This question has been with me ever since my childhood. Am I an Aryan ? Till date, a clear answer has eluded me.” Neil told Mabel. They were walking towards a coffee shop next to the movie theater. It was Friday. The weekend was ahead of them. They had just seen a movie. Later, he was going to take her to a Chinese restaurant. Meanwhile, they were going to have a coffee and yap a bit. It was still early for dinner.
Neil was enjoying her company, and her keen interest on things that Neil liked. He knew he was a bit different, and shared hobbies that were not particularly popular among folks he met or went out with. Among the expatriate Indian community, the issue of the Indus Valley Civilization, and the origin of the so called Aryans, was one such issue. The current debate in the academic circles on this issue, raging for a good generation now, was of intense interest to Neil. He had even tried to befriend a few experts on this topic.
But he never found another person among his friends, either of Indian descent or Canadian, or even American from his time in Florida, that was aware or interested, in this topic. This was a source of some frustration, for Neil.
Mabel was walking with her arm around his waist. She turned and smiled at him. Mabel was about the same height as Neil, five ft ten inches. The only thing was, she was wearing a few inches of heels, while he was not. Anyhow, this was something he had to get used to – finding her eyes at the same horizontal plane as himself. “So, are you an Aryan ?” She asked.
Neil smiled back and pulled her closer, still walking along the pavement, heading for the coffee shop. “The thing is, what exactly is an Aryan has not been properly settled yet. Conversional wisdom says that an Aryan was an invader in India, an ethnically different man than the locals. However, this view is getting a lot of scrutiny these days, and the answer is likely a lot more complicated. But, my interest in it is more to do with finding the facts. I am tending to lean towards the view that Aryans were part of the indigenous population, although a small trickle of outsiders might have come, mingled, and settled there, adding some flavor to the local culture, a long time ago.”
“Hmm ? How long ago?”
“Well, the time period under question relates to the dating of the Vedas, the original compositions of huge verses, that are often considered the original pillars of Hinduism. The dating itself is under debate. Conventional wisdom says 1,500 BC. But new thoughts appear to push that back by another thousand to 1,500 years, going back 2,500 or 3,000 BC, say five thousand years from now.”
They turned and walked into the coffee shop.
“Wow. You have to tell me about all this. I want to know. To me, sadly, Aryans only mean blue eyed blond crew cut soldiers that marched for Hitler and devastated half the world during the last world war.”
They took two cups of coffee and sat at a table. The coffee shop was almost full. It was attached to a large book store. People could take a book or a magazine, without paying for it, and sit down in the coffee shop to read.
Since the age of internet and eBooks, as well as online ordering of books through Amazon, local book stores have taken a major hit in their business, and are going through a continuous process of change, trying to stay in business and expanding the range of merchandise on sale.
Their table was near the magazine stack. Neil could see some of the magazines nearest to him. At least two of them were on tattooed women. It showed women with pierced nose, pierced eyebrow and pierced lower lips, not to mention ear lobes. They sported extraordinary multicolored tattoo on themselves, on their back, shoulder, arm, legs, and even on the back of their necks.
Neil disliked the idea of permanently disfiguring the body in the name of beauty. But, he was careful not to impose his opinion on others. To each his own. Thankfully, Mabel wasn’t one of them.
Mabel watched him glancing across the Magazine covers, his face displaying a tiny inadvertent frown. She chuckled. “I can see you are not too fond of full body tattoo.”
Neil turned back to her and smiled. “Well, no, I am not. Anyhow, about Aryans, I shall tell you little by little, so as not to overwhelm you with too much information. Suffice it to say that India is a very old civilization, and it has been in the cross roads of human movements ever since anatomically modern humans walked out of Africa. For me, the prime interest is to know a bit more about my ancestry. Therefore, the issue of who were the Aryans and what was the range and lifestyle of the Indus Valley civilization and how they interacted with each other and what influenced the later evolution of the faith system known as Hinduism, and its brother religions the Jainism and Buddhism, and other smaller sects, is of interest to me on an academic level. I am otherwise not too religions, you know.”
“Yes, I know. You were the first and the only person that told me the origin of the Aryan people were not Germany, and that Hitler borrowed the term from ancient Hindus, and likely unjustifiably. That is something I am unlikely to forget.”
Neil finished his coffee. He pulled her hand and watched her palm and her fingers carefully. He was not a palmist, but knew the basics from his childhood. She had a longish and smoothly semicircular lifeline, which did not quite connect with her head line. The line of destiny, or the fate line, was moderate and not as long as his own fate line from his right hand.
Mabel watched him. “Don’t tell me you can read palm too.”
“Well, I can see you are attracted to an older man from India.”
Mabel laughed out loud and cuffed him playfully. She too had finished her coffee. “One does not need to read my palm for that.”
They got up and left the coffee shop, heading for his car that was parked nearer to the movie theater.”
——————————————
I wrote this much and leaned back.
Should the ice age lady appear at their Chinese restaurant and share a Won Ton soup or something ? Or was I going to be spending more time with the non-Germanic Aryans that might have been brown skinned Indians wearing a loin cloth and bathing by the bank of the now vanished Saraswati river?
Or perhaps I was going to coax Neil into talking about his Y-chromosome ?
More I thought about it, more I felt that any sensible Canadian girl should by now get up and leave. These were likely taboo items for a date – essentially a first date between a young attractive woman and her boy friend.
But, I was not writing a book that would fit conventionality. I was writing it for my own pleasure, and for improving my unconventional writing style. Besides, I was writing on things that I liked.
I spent some time thinking about the difference between conventionality and conventionalism. Eventually I ended up scratching my head and looking up at the ceiling.
I had not yet been able to make up my mind on who the writer of the story should be. After all, this was not just a story of the present time about an expatriate Indian living in Canada. It was a story about writing a story, and that story was to have multiple centuries, millennia, spanned across it, with participants from different historical era and regions.
And yet, who was writing the story, itself was not yet clear in my mind. I could make myself the writer, and write this part in first person, like now.
Or, I could write in third person, describing the writer as Tony. Tony was, of course, the westernized version of my own pet name, which was Tonu.
Or, the writer could be Tonu.
I had used all three versions in different chapters by now. And yet, I could not decide.
Meanwhile, Mabel and Neil had gotten off the starting point, without achieving much of a plot. The ice age woman of central Asia was hovering at the periphery, mysteriously appearing and disappearing. She had a child with her. In one of the episodes, she is supposed to have sacrificed herself while in danger of attack from wild animals, in order to let the child survive. They carried the mitochondria, that was to come down copy by copy and generation by generation, all the way to me, or rather, to Neil. How they would eventually fit into the plot, I was not yet sure. The writer could keep hallucinating about the ice age woman, but how does one connect her with Neil?
Could it be that Neil too can see her in his minds eye? Could it be that she was a figment of not just my imagination, but also of Neil’s? Neil himself was a product of my imagination, as was Mabel.

Ohh well. I decided to slice an English cucumber and eat it with salt. Dinner is still an hour away. My wife had prepared some lasagna.