Children of the Indus

[Proudpakistaniguy]

My friend I believe we got off on the wrong foot. What you are saying is essentially correct that the people of Pakistan (Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis and Balochs) are not one homogeneous group of people but different ethicities. India has a lot more ethnicities then that and they are not homogenous either. It think that you have misunderstood the article and the discussion that is taking place here.

To be honest i did not even read the article in op. I was reading the comments and just responded to post of Pakistanforever where he said Pakistani are totally different and then you started quoted my posts so may be we are addressing two different things. I dont diagree with your ethnic percentage in India evnethough india is hugely populated and even these percentage make a lot of people

 

[Tergon18]

To be honest i did not even read the article in op. I was reading the comments and just responded to post of Pakistanforever where he said Pakistani are totally different and then you started quoted my posts so may be we are addressing two different things. I dont diagree with your percentage evnethough india is hugely populated and even these percentage make a lot of people

Still these percentages form very little as compared to the Pakistani Punjabis and Sindhis therefore, overall shouldnt even matter. Pakistanforever hadn't originally read the article either and he misunderstood the entire thread and his original post has been deleted I guess. That is what led to some people misunderstanding the entire point of this thread.

 

[Proudpakistaniguy]

Still these percentages form very little as compared to the Pakistani Punjabis and Sindhis therefore, overall shouldnt even matter. Pakistanforever hadn't originally read the article either and he misunderstood the entire thread and his original post has been deleted I guess. That is what led to some people misunderstanding the entire point of this thread.

yes true and my comment had relevance to his post and not the actual topic and otherscomments

 

[Indus Pakistan]

Still these percentages

10% of USA is African American. That does not make USA a African country. The Indian Punjabi are less than 2.7% of India. The Sindhi migrants in India are like 0.01% of India. So the common link is restricted to tiny percentage.

 

[Tergon18]

Also, I disagree with the term 'Children' of the Indus. This is just Gandhian talk that was started by the non-violence Swadeshi movement leaders, being 'children' of some great mother. Such talk perhaps befits the Gangetic or the Dravidic man but not the Indus man. I am yet to see Europeans or Middle-Easterners call themselves some sort of simple-minded, helpless, innocent children being controlled by a foreign power which really was the origin of this phrase when first coined by Gandhi or the Swadeshis. As Aitzaz Ahsan himself has eloquently put:

'The Vedic man is boisterous and consumerist. The Gangetic man is frugal. You can see the distinction between the Indus person and the Indian person stretching far back into history, reflected in the epic myths themselves'

A proper term would be, Sons of the Soil or of the Motherland/Fatherland. Falling into weak Gandhian talk would not suit us and it would be better if we rather upheld the traditions of our ancestors.

 

[Tergon18]

@Tergon18

Yaar, I'm not able to comment on the other Harappa/IVC thread that you have tagged me in due to not having enough 'privelege points'. Do you know how I can get them or comment there since I have a reply to Joe Shearer on that thread.

 

[Zibago]

Yaar, I'm not able to comment on the other Harappa/IVC thread that you have tagged me in due to not having enough 'privelege points'. Do you know how I can get them or comment there since I have a reply to Joe Shearer on that thread.

Keep posting and in two months and after 2000 losts you will be senior i just became and elite member from simply goofing around

 

[Bharat Muslim]

Part of British Punjab, you mean. They shouldnt have been amalgamated with Punjab in the first place since they speak totally different languages and have a different culture. Haryana? Not modern day Haryana since they speak a Central Indo-Aryan language and none of the five rivers of Punjab pass through it. However they were the border of the Indus Valley Civilization, so in a roundabout way they could be. About Himachal, its unlikely that it was part of the Indus Valley Civilization or the Rig Vedic Indo-Aryan period due to the geography and lack of sites there. Also Himachalis form only 0.5% of India's population so it should'nt matter anyway.

Preity Zinta is a Himachali.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Yaar, I'm not able to comment on the other Harappa/IVC thread that you have tagged me in due to not having enough 'privelege points'. Do you know how I can get them or comment there since I have a reply to Joe Shearer on that thread.

I am not very sure what you want to say, but do feel free to go ahead and say it. To be honest, I lost interest in this thread when I saw the drift of your arguments. I disagree with them - cordially - and have absolutely no use for the false statistical inferences that you have drawn, as has also @Zibago . There are other reasons, however, for my absence.

For the past few days, I have been engaged in tiresome and really worthless discussions, first, on the mysterious absence of the PAF during the Kargil crisis, which is not mysterious at all, and has been very reasonably explained by an eminent Pakistani figure and pillar of the air force establishment in his time; only the fanboys are unhappy and have been going on and bloody on trying to show that in some mysterious alchemic way, it was actually a huge plus for the air force to have stayed out. On disengaging, with difficulty, from this mire, I found myself facing a tribal champion who insists that his tiny little district was the pivot around which south Asia rotates, if we are to believe him, at an increasingly more rapid rate.

You will understand, therefore, if I look at this present discussion with a somewhat jaded vision.

But do go ahead and say what you will, and if you are inclined to be gracious about it, allow me to decide if I should engage in a third Sisyphean struggle.

Ramzan Kareem.

 

[Winchester]

Yaar, I'm not able to comment on the other Harappa/IVC thread that you have tagged me in due to not having enough 'privelege points'. Do you know how I can get them or comment there since I have a reply to Joe Shearer on that thread.

A mod can get you into that thread

@waz @Horus Can you guys let Tergon18 access this thread https://defence.pk/threads/dholavira-the-zenith-of-harappan-town-planning.372591/page-5#post-8367016 in the senior's cafe.

His input is very much needed there considering some of the Bharati claims being made there.

 

[Kamikaze Pilot]

The Indus man

The Indus Saga: From Pataliputra to Partition, which was received with an uproar in Pakistan in 1996, is now published in India.

Charmy Harikrishnan
September 26, 2005 | UPDATED 14:44 IST

Circa 1980. General Zia-ul Haq's iron rule. In one of Pakistan's jails, Aitzaz Ahsan, lawyer and member of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), was poring over The Discovery of India, another political prisoner's tryst with history some 40 years earlier.

Triggered by Jawaharlal Nehru's book but not quite agreeing to his "romantic vision of the oneness of India", Ahsan went on a journey to reclaim the story of his homeland.

The 59-year-old's argument is compelling but controversial: Pakistan is not an aberration brought about by Partition. The distinction between the Indus region and the Gangetic region, as Ahsan refers to Pakistan and India, are primordial and natural.

"The Pakistani is always taught that he is unIndian," says Ahsan. "But somebody had to tell him who he was."

So Ahsan tells him that he is the Indus Man, liberal, tolerant, heir to a civilisation and a heritage that includes the Vedas. The Indus Saga: From Pataliputra to Partition (Roli), which was received with an uproar in Pakistan in 1996, is now published in India.

"Partition was really the recreation of the Indus region," says Ahsan, who was Pakistan's leader of the Opposition from 1996 to 1999. Unfortunately, it did not mean that all of Ahsan's Indus men stayed back at home and celebrated while Nehru and Jinnah unfurled two different flags. It was a bloody crossing from the banks of the Ganga to that of the Indus and vice-versa. When Ahsan travels back to the Bronze Age, he treads on the slippery ground of the riverbank and history gives way to hypothesis.

The Indus Civilisation was not just a cluster of settlements in Pakistan, as he assumes, but extended all the way to Dholavira and Lothal in Gujarat. He even says fundamentalist priests ruled the Indus cities when that is still in the sphere of surmise. Perhaps the book's relevance is best summed up in Ahsan's parting shot: "It may inspire others to study the region in detail."

For all his journeys across centuries, Ahsan's concerns remain contemporary. "My party PPP is at the butt end of military tactics," he says. "Democracy is the only solution." That is for his next book, Divided by Democracy, co-written with Lord Meghnad Desai. There Ahsan returns to his Indus man-the modern one who missed his tryst with democracy.

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/...a-from-pataliputra-to-partition/1/192904.html

 

[Tergon18]

View media item 16922
First of all there is nothing like Indus based civilization that exist in pakistan settlements are found mostly on border of India and major discoveries are happening in India only, modern day pakistani panjabis dont have any claim on this. I am from Rakhigarhi, haryana and its in heart of modern India closer to Delhi.
Also most of the findings point that sanatan dharma was followed worship of shiva linga, if you look the picture closely you will see the tributaries of indus river that is currently in India only were the major population of so called indus civilization. Its indian civilization not some alien civilization if you want to claim it you should also
accept the fact that 99% modern pakistanis are converted by force, raped by barbarians.

The Indus Valley Civilization is not found on the border of India, the two major sites are in Central Pakistan (Harappa, Punjab and Mohenjodaro, Sindh). Also Delhi is by no measure the 'heart of India', that would be Madhya Pradesh, goegraphically speaking. The Indus Valley Civilization predates Hinduism and no proof of any of the modern gods/practices of Hinduism being followed by the IVC people has been found. 90% or so of the Indus Valley Civilization was in modern day Pakistan and the main sites are in Pakistan as well. So yes Pakistanis are indeed the inheritors of this civilization. Having the very North-Western most parts of India in it doesnt change anything. The people of Ganga and Dravida were still uncivilized and had no culture while the Indus Valley flourished so your claim of Indians being the inheritors of it is laughable. And no the ancestors of Pakistanis werent converted by force, it was tradition that if a tribal chief converted to Islam, the rest of the tribe would follow too but mostly they converted by the efforts of numerous Sufi saints in the 12th-14th centuries, mainly. Almost every village of Pakistan has a grave/shrine of a Sufi saint in it. If forcible conversion had taken place, all of India wouldve been Muslim by now, but thats not the case is it? Even still, the heartland of Muslim Empires and Islam in 'India' was Delhi and Uttar Pradesh yet both of these regions had a heavy Hindu majority. That should should really show you why your 'forcible conversion theory' is BS. 'Raped by barbarians?' Such stupid claims and language isnt acceptable on a civilized forum. Stop trolling.

 

[Tergon18]

I am not very sure what you want to say, but do feel free to go ahead and say it. To be honest, I lost interest in this thread when I saw the drift of your arguments. I disagree with them - cordially - and have absolutely no use for the false statistical inferences that you have drawn, as has also @Zibago . There are other reasons, however, for my absence.

For the past few days, I have been engaged in tiresome and really worthless discussions, first, on the mysterious absence of the PAF during the Kargil crisis, which is not mysterious at all, and has been very reasonably explained by an eminent Pakistani figure and pillar of the air force establishment in his time; only the fanboys are unhappy and have been going on and bloody on trying to show that in some mysterious alchemic way, it was actually a huge plus for the air force to have stayed out. On disengaging, with difficulty, from this mire, I found myself facing a tribal champion who insists that his tiny little district was the pivot around which south Asia rotates, if we are to believe him, at an increasingly more rapid rate.

You will understand, therefore, if I look at this present discussion with a somewhat jaded vision.

But do go ahead and say what you will, and if you are inclined to be gracious about it, allow me to decide if I should engage in a third Sisyphean struggle.

Ramzan Kareem.

I am not sure what you are implying here, whether my statistics about the populations are false or the inferences that I have drawn from them are false. Your original comment about the various 'dances' of the sub-continent uniting them came off as highly idealistic, romantic and downright hilarious. The icing on the cake was that you didn't even bother to leave an 'Indus' dance form and detail us exactly how it was related to those of the Ganges and Dravidia regions. Do their hands move in a particular direction? Or their hips sway in an identical fashion? We may never know.

Secondly, about the other thread in which I can't comment on. The Indo-Greek Kingdom proper, didn't go as eastward as to Mathura. Offshoots of it, however carried raids as far upto Mathura. It's main/original territories and the various raids carried out by it's offshoots were seperate. The capital of the Indo-Greeks under Menander the First was Sakala (Sialkot) in modern-day Punjab and regional capitals such as Taxila and Charsadda existed.

You do note in your comment the historical seperation of the Indus territories from those of the Ganges and Dravidia (South of the Vindhyas) regions by acknowledging the seperation of the Gandharans, Indo-Parthians and the Shahis from the Guptas and the other Ganges-Dravidia kingdoms however then go onto claim that implying any sort of dualism between them is absurd, without even bothering to explain why. That, according to me, is truly absurd.

Furthermore, your claim of the Harappans being of the same ethnic stock as modern-day Indians and Pakistanis apart from Pashtuns is dubious and has no base in genealogy or anthropology. About 85% or so of the Indus Valley Civilization was based in modern day Pakistan and at the time when it flourished, the Ganges and Dravida regions were still uncivilized with no culture. We do know that the Ganges and Dravida regions only got civilized in the Middle Iron Age stages (800-500 BC), when proper axes were invented to clear the forest regions and before that it was just a forested region inhabited by uncivilized tribes.

Your statement saying that no new genetic stock has entered the sub-continent from out of it (in the last 10,000 years) is where we have to draw the line, really. At this point you are just going on without providing any sources or citations for your claims, indulging in pseudo-scientific statements.

https://www.google.com.pk/url?sa=t&...tNQ2n2gUvh12ev9Xg&sig2=GU68-hqZ2X3Dc_eaarKJOQ

This is the Harvard Genealogical Study of India which has taken samples from vast communities across the sub-continent and it has found two major components, the ANI (which is related to Europeans, Central Asians and Iranians) and the ASI (unique to India). The ANI component peaks in the Pakistani samples while mostly being found in North-Western Indians and the ASI peaks in South Indians while mostly being found in Central and Northern Indians. Furthermore, the admixture between these two distinctive groups is dated to 3000-500 BC, so your claim goes down the drain.

 

[Soulspeek]

You are confusing Sikhs for Punjabis in India. Punjabi is a broad term and include both hindu and muslim punjabis. The 2% population you are quoting is only of Sikhs in India. Punjabis are spread all over India and there is no count of them as we do not do ethenic census in India.

As per 2009 census of Pakistan, there were 9.35 Crore Punjabis in Pakistan where there were 4.40 crore Sikhs in Punjab. If you add the number of ethenic punjabis spread all over India, we would have appx same number of Punjabis in India.

Moreover, India is a subcontinent sized country. So naturally Punjabis would be small in number in comparison to 1.25 billion population of India. Still it would be quite a sizeable population vis a vis Pakistani Punjabis.

The Harappa DNA Project has taken the largest samples from not only South Asia but across the Middle East, Central Asia as well. It is also the most cited or referenced to study by all genealogists when studying South Asia. Have you actually even seen it? Do you think genetic studies are a sham? The sample sizes are given as well. It is obvious that people in the North-West would have different genetics than say people of the North, Centre, South or East of a country especially when this region was the corridor through which all invasions took place and has remained historically seperate from the Gangetic and Dravidic regions (other than 80 years under Ashoka, 400 or so under Mughal/Turkic, 98 under British) I have already explain in excruciating detail in a previous comment about exactly how the baradaries are 'similar', please refer to that. Anyway as I have stated before I'll say this again: Punjabis form only 2% of India, Sindhi form only 0.3% of India (realistically) and Mahajirs form only 6% of Pakistanis. Those are the only similarities between us and they form only 8% of us.

This theory that ancient people of present Pakistan practiced different kind of monotheist Hinduism or were Buddhists is actually crap. It is a way removing the guilt that your ancestors were polytheist. It goes against the tenents of Islam. So to absolve your ancestors of shirk, your historians came up with this wonderful but false theory that they were monotheists.

My friend I believe we got off on the wrong foot. What you are saying is essentially correct that the people of Pakistan (Punjabis, Pashtuns, Sindhis and Balochs) are not one homogeneous group of people but different ethicities. India has a lot more ethnicities then that and they are not homogenous either. It think that you have misunderstood the article and the discussion that is taking place here. No one is denying conversion to Islam in and around the 12th to 14th centuries. What I had simply stated was that 'Hinduism' isnt a uniform religion of sorts like Abrahamic religions and it varies heavily from region to region. Not to mention the fact that the name Hinduism was first used by the British in the 19th century to refer to the different pracrices and gods of the people of the Ganges and Dravidia regions. The people of the Indus prior to conversion to Islam did not practice the exact same creed/religion that was given the name of Hinduism and the one that is practiced today. It was an earlier, Vedic form of Hinduism. Sindhi Muslim tribes were historically seperate than Sindhi Hindu tribes being more rural/agricultural based while Sindhi Hindus were urban traders. The clans (Bhutto, Abro, Junejo etc.) arent found in Sindhi Hindus. Jatts of Punjab form only 1% of India (since Punjabis form only 2% of India) so why should it even matter in the first place. Rajput isnt an ethnicity since anyone couldve been made a Rajput by the Brahmanical order around the 1st century AD. Most Rajput subclans (gots) of Pakistan like Khokhar, Kharral, Sial, Wattoo, Gheba etc. arent found in India and are completely native to Pakistan (the Indus Region). And no one is claiming Arab/Turkic/Iranian ancestry either as you said earlier.

I am again (its for the 4th time now I think) going to present to you with some statistics which should lay to rest all the issues you may have with the article or this discussion

Punjabis form only 2% of Indians
Sindhi refugees form 0.3% of Indians (realistic estimate)
Mohajirs, from UP/Bihar/Delhi/Deccan, form only 6% of Pakistanis.

Please try to understand these simple facts. Otherwise I will just have to keep repeating these percentages until you finally realise why your argument doesnt have much substance.

 

[Tergon18]

You are confusing Sikhs for Punjabis in India. Punjabi is a broad term and include both hindu and muslim punjabis. The 2% population you are quoting is only of Sikhs in India. Punjabis are spread all over India and there is no count of them as we do not do ethenic census in India.

As per 2009 census of Pakistan, there were 9.35 Crore Punjabis in Pakistan where there were 4.40 crore Sikhs in Punjab. If you add the number of ethenic punjabis spread all over India, we would have appx same number of Punjabis in India.

Moreover, India is a subcontinent sized country. So naturally Punjabis would be small in number in comparison to 1.25 billion population of India. Still it would be quite a sizeable population vis a vis Pakistani Punjabis.



This theory that ancient people of present Pakistan practiced different kind of monotheist Hinduism or were Buddhists is actually crap. It is a way removing the guilt that your ancestors were polytheist. It goes against the tenents of Islam. So to absolve your ancestors of shirk, your historians came up with this wonderful but false theory that they were monotheists.

First of all, I didnt take only Sikh Punjabis (even though they form the majority of Punjabis in India). However even if we add up the Hindu Punjabis and the diaspora, we can come up with a very liberal statistic of 2.5-3.5% The population of Pakistani Punjabis would still be rather more than Indian Punjabis. The Indian Punjabi population number that you have used is from a 2011 census, while the Pakistani one is from a 2009 census. However you seem to be missing the entire point of this discussion. We are not comparing the number of Indian Punjabis to the number of Pakistani Punjabis. We are comparing the number of Indian Punjabis to the rest of Indians and the number comes off as very small and therefore very few of us are similar.

Secondly you have just pointlessly created a strawman and accused me of 'wanting to absolve myself of any guilt (lol)' without taking into consideration history or anything. The Rig Veda, which as I have stated in a previous comment with example, takes a monotheistic tone and it was formed entirely at the Indus in modern-day Pakistan while India (the Ganges and Dravidia regions) were still uncivilized, forested regions. The Ramayana and Mahabharata were formed later at the Ganges Region and they have different themes than the Rig Veda. I never stated that they were fully monotheistic but rather, they had monotheistic influences. Had I needed to absolve myself of all sort of shirk, I wouldve stated that they already followed Abrahamic religions or that they were Arabs or something which is just absurd. As for Buddhism, the Gandharans and the Indo-Greeks who ruled over the Indus Region were both Buddhists and infact Buddhism was the dominant religion in the Ganges region as well until the 1st-4th centuries when Hinduism was promoted and reinforced by the Brahmins. Even the word 'Hindoo-ism' shouldnt be used since it was only invented by the British in around the 19th century to refer to the various and diverse gods/practices of the people ranging from the Ganges to Dravidia regions. It isn't some sort of uniform religion like the Abrahamic religions.