It is a really overwhelming experience to watch documentary videos on India; most of them by the reporters and journalists belonging to the western world. The BBC documentary, “The Story of India” featuring Michael Woods, is one such brilliant piece of journalism. I would rate that as one of the genuine attempts to panoramically cover the vastness of India: past and the present, the truths and the myths, the zenith and the nadir, the epic and the drama although I did not understand the real intentions of the brain behind the lens.
The prime motive of the western preaching right from day one and that day one would probably the days of Columbus or probably Alexander or even before that, is that to downplay the greatness of India. So, the option was to keep denigrating every single aspect that is Indian in nature. Nevertheless there were some attributes of India that escaped the western pejoration because of their impeccability. From the early scribes of the western world to the present day press stood still with the hands tied. The golden key to these problems lied and lies very much inside India. The two aspects that helped western historians overcome such uncommon hurdles were the contented nature of the people of subcontinent who refused to question the wrong doers and the cunningness of the British imperialist to exploit the innocence of such people. The idea that was put forward besides degrading the nation and culture in whole aspects was that anything that was great and flawless was not indigenous, not Indian, and was foreign to India.
My earlier post, “Saraswati Saga” is a clear example of how easy a job it was for the western historians to make history so preposterous. Now here comes yet another twist: “all the people in the south Indian states are the direct descendents of the people from Africa”. There is nothing wrong in this claim and it is very much possible that Indians came from Africa. In the documentary, Woods along with some professors from MKU try to establish this fact by genetic analysis and they find the gene M-130 which is indigenous to the Africans in a village near Madurai (The story of Virumandi Andithevar’s family tracing its root 70,000 years back). What is more astonishing is that the whole village is M-130 because of the preservation of the genetic pool in the village by marriage of the people with their first cousin (of course, the tradition). This was how the orang asli DNA analysis in Malaysia concluded too. So, the first migration in human history was from Africa to India.
But, how did our adventure seeking ancestor travel this far, Ships, Boats or just logs of wood? No, the answer that is put forward by the protagonists of this theory is the coastal migration. The Out-Of-Africa theory suggests that all species originated from a single mitochondrial African mother. They started migrating outward through the Bab-el-Mandap straits of the Red sea. That was their gateway out in to the vastness of Asia, Europe and Australia to spread their haplotype M gene. The M value seems to increase from Saudi to India where maximum mutation occurred.
The theory states that these people settled in India and elsewhere, learnt the art of agriculture, turned the teepees to colossal civilizations, fought wars, conquered new lands, defended their own land, excelled in art of sculpting, painting, poetry, medicine and devised rules for better way of living. They lived as masters in a land foreign to them. But why did not they do the same in Africa? As for the question of nature’s bounties, Africa now has plenty of resources still to be exploited why not then? Why travel so much distance to struggle and develop a different habitat when your home has so much to offer to you?
Why did they move? What was the motive behind such big migrations? What was driving them from one place to other? If it was greed, power and adventure that drove the Europeans crazy to travel, occupy and rule over other lands, what was driving the Africans? Drying up of the melted ice caps, failure of monsoons or probably the tilt of the earth on its axis was stronger than it ever was ( it was stronger 9000 years ago than now). This is what the Sahara pump theory tries to explain but without sufficient concreteness.
What startles me is that there are no takers for the fact that India was once attached to Africa as a part of the Gondwana land along with Australia and Antarctica before actually drifting apart and colliding with Asia to give rise to the lofty Himalayan ranges . The conclusion is, humans were not there then. No one for sure knows how the earliest life form on earth was, how it survived the climatic conditions, the mutations, how the amino acids were preserved and transmitted and how it is affecting us today. All these are answered by mere hypotheses.
In the article titled, “The Great Human Migration -Why humans left their African homeland 80,000 years ago to colonize the world”, Guy Gugliotta states affirmatively that "We were all Africans."
The fresh water lake (near Herto) in Ethiopia, the dead ends in Israel, the unusual skull, Blombos cave, pinnacle point in South Africa, the tools at Jwalapuram are the strongholds of the out-of Africa Theory.
You know what I feel about this theory? Here,
The Japanese were the inventors and first masters of Atom bomb deployment and that the Americans were totally ignorant or probably incapacitated to build one such marvel.
Believe me, this is how the present is beckoning the history of the future!
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