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On the 'right' side of history at 95

He learnt PowerPoint at 84, computers when he was in his 70s and continues to stoke controversies at 95. Gargi Gupta meets archaeologist BB Lal for whom age is really just a number

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At nearly 95, archaeologist BB Lal could well be the brand ambassador for productive old age. The star speaker at an international seminar on the Indus-Saraswati civilisation held in New Delhi recently, Lal was sharp, succinct and cogent as he read out his paper - he'd turned down the offer to read sitting down.

The PowerPoint presentation, projected on the screen behind him with photographs and short emphasis points, he'd made himself too. "He learnt PowerPoint at the age of 84," says his son Rajesh Lal, who escorted him to the venue. "Even the computer he learnt when he was well into his seventies."

"I started out at five words a minute and still cannot do more than 20. But I am happy - my thinking is not faster than that," Lal smiles.

Lal's short presentation made a focused argument - that there was no archaeological or literary evidence to support the Aryan Invasion theory or even its watered down version, Aryan migration, which said that the Aryans, central Asian nomadic tribes, invaded, or migrated to India around the second millennium BC. Rather, the evidence from the Bogazkoy tablets and Baudhayana Shrauta Sutra point to its exact opposite - that the inhabitants of the area around what is now Punjab migrated out, at least as far as Turkey. Lal has made the same point before in his 2009 book, How Deep Are The Roots of Indian Civilisation?, and again in The Rigvedic People published in February this year.

Non-historians may dismiss this as an interesting hypothesis about the very, very ancient past, not of significance now. They'd be wrong - Lal's thesis is a hot potato, going right to the heart of a fierce ongoing debate between Hindu, "nationalist" historians and "secular", Marxist ones.

The Aryan invasion thesis, first expounded by British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler was for long the dominant view. The counter view, that the Aryans were indigenous, began to gain credence in the 1990s, picked up by nationalist Hindu political outfits and historians. With a BJP-coalition government at the centre now, the issue has become extremely touchy. Look at how the Haryana government's recent proposal to excavate Saraswati river sites created a splash in the media.

Interestingly, Wheeler was Lal's mentor at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) when he joined as a 22-year-old trainee in Taxila back in 1944. "I strayed into archaeology," says Lal, narrating the fascinating story of how he, academically bright and coming from middle-class, government servant stock, relied on scholarships and took tuitions to fund his higher education. Lal had wanted to be a mathematician but fell ill before the exams and so didn't do well. He scored highest in Sanskrit and took it up, because he got a scholarship.

ASI happened by accident too when Wheeler, who'd taken over as director-general in 1943, appealed to universities inviting student volunteers - Lal, who'd specialised in epigraphy, art and architecture of ancient India in his MA, was chosen by his Allahabad University teachers. He may have stumbled upon archaeology, but seems to have taken to it early, rising to become head of excavations at the age of 27, and later director-general. His excavations of at the pre-Mauryan site of Sisupalgarh in Orissa and Kalibangan, a Harappan site, are significant. For instance, in Kalibangan, the excavations threw up a ploughed agricultural field dating back to 2800 BC.

On the Aryan question, however, Lal is considered firmly on the "right" side of the argument, not just for his advocacy of "indigenous Aryans", but more so for his excavations of Hastinapur, Indraprastha and other sites said to be associated with the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana in the mid-50s.

Lal is a pioneer in India in this area, comparable to Biblical archaeology in the West. But his Mahabharata digs are significant for another reason - his discovery of a kind of pottery, called Painted Grey Ware and a culture (dating back to second millennium BC) that used it. Lal associates this with the epic and even calculates a date for the battle - 900 BC."Not everything mentioned in them may be correct to the letter. But there is a basic story at the back of it, which is true," Lal argues.

This sounds pragmatic, almost reasonable, but secular historians who foreground India's syncretic culture see it as an attempt to embed Hinduism into ancient Indian history. Lal has no sympathy for such opinions: "The Marxist historians...it is their faith to oppose anything about ancient Hindu culture," he says dismissively.

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