THE%20SINDH%20STORY

Sindhu Mata
THE VEDAS and the Puranas speak of Sindh in terms of gods and kings. But,
how about the land, the people, and the culture of ancient Sindh?
The outside world knew ancient India only by ancient Sindh and the adjoining
coastal areas. And it had the strangest notions about the people here.
Herodotus, the great Greek historian, wrote: “All the Indian tribes I have
mentioned copulate in the open like cattle; their skins are all of the same colour,
much like the Ethiopians. Their semen is not white like other people’s, but black
like their own skin. The same peculiarity is to be found in the Ethiopians. Their
country is a long way from Persia towards the south and they were never subject
to Darius.”
Strabo, another Greek historian, wrote: “Indians had never been invaded and
conquered by a foreign power.” It is good to hear great ancient historians
confirm that India had till then never been conquered by a foreign power. As for
copulation in the open, Herodotus was obviously referring to prehistoric times
when men were yet to build houses. Why, even in Elizabethan England,
Shakespeare tells us, many Englishmen loved to romance in “fields of rye”.
But the “black semen” story reminds us. When the Chinese in the past century
heard the Englishmen say that the heart was on the left, they were sure their own
hearts must be on the right --- since they were so very different from the British!
The Greeks were great artists; but scientific temper was alien to their ethos. On
one occasion, several Greek philosophers had gathered to discuss how many
teeth a woman had. Since men had thirty-two teeth, and women were “inferior”,
they all had decided that the latter had fewer --- twenty-eight --- teeth. Not one of
them had suggested that they might open a woman’s mouth and count the teeth
in it.
However, good old Herodotus did not know that his own great Greek
civilization was the fruit of a marriage between lower Sindh and eastern
Mediterranean. And Homer, the great Greek poet, actually mentioned “Sintians”
on the island of Lemnos, who “spoke a strange tongue” (Iliad 1: 594).
Writes Pococke, an authority on India’s influence on Greece: “At the mouth of
the Indus dwell a sea-faring people, active, ingenious and enterprising, as when,
The Sindh Story; Copyright © www.panhwar.com
23