More than 140 million years ago, when India was part of Gondwana, which was an immense supercontinent that broke away from a single supercontinent. India was attached to Africa, and it broke away from Gondwana as the Indian Ocean filled in between its African origin. When India broke away from Africa, the subcontinent collided with Eurasia about 50 million years ago, giving rise to the Himalayas. The Indus Valley Civilization emerged from land once attached to the African continent where the Dravido-Harappans resided. That land separated from Africa, and subsequently, the vast tectonic plate (subcontinent of India) crashed into Asia and produced the world’s largest mountain range, the Himalayas which separates the Tibetan Plateau from India. Between 7000 and 5000 BCE the Dravido-Harappans migrated and set up the first village farming communities in these fertile regions. Over millennia Dravido-Harappan communities developed and interacted with other people, sharing skills and technologies such as pottery, metallurgy, town planning and farming. By 2500 BCE, this region became the largest, if not the greatest civilization of the ancient world.
The original homeland of the Dravido-Harappan speaking people was the Sahara zone of Middle Africa (before the Sahara became a desert). The ancestors of the Dravido-Harappans are called the Proto-Saharans. The Sahara is far bigger than the United States of America, and was once a land of lakes, rivers, forests, green fields, farms, villages, towns, and cities. Wildlife was abundant in this region. Cattle grazed meadows, and horse-drawn chariots sped over highways. It was a great land that was only a part of an even greater black world.
The climate changes in the Sahara forced African people to spread into Western Asia and other parts of Africa. The Dravido-Harappans were ship builders and expert sailors. The presence of an elevated bow and stern on many boats depicted in the Saharan rock art and the peculiar “bowstring,” astern and “fuse” for the rudder oar, indicate these ancient ships were used for navigation on the open seas. Reed or plank boats are still made by Dravidian people in India during the modern era.
Archaeological evidence points out that the oldest modern man of Asia, dating back 100,000 years, was a Black man. Modern man was born in Africa more than 200,000 years ago in the Great Lakes Region (East Africa). The first Indians were Black people of Sudanese-Egyptian (Kemite) origin (i.e., Dravido-Harappans). The Dravido-Harappans settled Asia between 3000-2800 BC. From here the Dravido-Harappans spread into Central Asia, China, South and Southwest Asia.
The Indus Valley Civilization was in present-day Pakistan and Western India and had a population of over 5 million people. The empire ruled a huge territory, larger than the combined areas of ancient Egypt (Kemet) and Mesopotamia. Its western border was near the present-day Iran-Pakistan border. The territory also stretched to the western elbow of the Ganges River and formed a rough triangle. The Indus River fed the Indus Valley Civilization in much the same way the Nile River fed the Pharaonic culture, and the Two Rivers fed the Sumerian and Akkadian cultures. The Indus and its tributaries covered almost 100 miles of Pakistan and Northwestern India. Within the vast territory, more recent archaeological excavations have found 1,000 settlements.
The inhabitants of this civilization, the Dravido-Harappans have “crisp hair, curled locks, flat noses, and thick lips.” These Black people reflect the African hegemony in India. This African civilization was spread over a vast area from Ganga Valley to the Iranian frontier into Central Asia. The people were considered as Indus, referring to Ethiopians, which meant dark-skinned people by the Greeks. According to ancient Greeks like Homer and Herodotus, the inhabitants of the Sudan, Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Western Asia, and India were all Ethiopians or “dark-skinned people.”
“I only made passing reference in the work to Blacks scattered outside of Africa over the world, not from the slave trade, but from dispersions that began in prehistory. This fact alone indicates the great tasks of future scholarship on the real history of the race. We are actually just on the threshold, gathering up some important missing fragments. The biggest jobs are still ahead.”
– Dr. Chancellor Williams, author of The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race From 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D., p. 44
The Great Indus Valley Civilization
The Indus Valley is often neglected, and little attention is paid to the accomplishments of the ancient Dravido-Harappan people who during their time and space built complex ancient cities like Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. Both ancient cities had an estimated population of 40,000 people according to the excavations. Excavations at these sites also revealed that the Dravido-Harappans, African migrants, were skilled planners and builders. For example, these two cities featured rectangle, wide grid roads, large homes (often two or more storeys high), citadels, great baths, and granaries. Avenues ran north to south and east to west. The main boulevards were 35 feet wide, with shops and restaurants lined them. The cities of the Indus Valley were renowned for their urban planning, baked brick houses, elaborate drainage systems, and water supply systems. They may have had the first sanitation system with a through drainage system to remove sewage. Heated baths and fresh drinking water were supplied by a network of over 700 unique wells. City engineers and masons also built bathrooms in every home. By 2500 BC, the Dravido-Harappans developed a flushable toilet system connected to a sophisticated sewage system.
“Virtually every household was equipped with what much of the modern western world still thinks of as ‘modern conveniences.’ In addition to the trash chutes, each household had bathrooms with drains which carried waste to the sewers under the main streets,” African American Historian Wayne B. Chandler said. “Almost every dwelling had its own private well from which fresh water was drawn. Apparently, prosperity was not as elusive to the Harappans as it was to their contemporaries in Egypt and Sumer.”
It was interesting to find out there was evidence of dentistry being practiced by these ancient African people as far back as 7000 BC. There was evidence of healers curing tooth disorders with blow drills, and herbal compounds, mineral and metal substances were used for medical treatment during this time. In addition to having dentistry, the Dravido-Harappans also carried out plastic surgery during ancient times, as early as 2000 BC. Later, ancient Indo-African physician Sushruta, who was credited with being the father of plastic surgery around 600 BC, whose books and teachings eventually made their way to Europe centuries later. By at least 200 BC, South India was producing high quality steel, using a method Europeans would later call “the crucible technique.” High grade steel was extracted from mixing and heating wrought iron, charcoal, and glass until the iron melted and absorbed the carbon. This metal was used by Indo-African physicians for cataract surgery performed with a tool called the Jabamukhi Salaka, which is a curved needle used to loosen the lens and push the cataract out of the field of vision. Greek scientists of the ancient world traveled to India to see and replicate these surgeries.
The Dravido-Harappans exported gold, copper, timber, ivory, and cotton, which was the Dravido-Harappan’s main trading commodity, to Mesopotamia and imported bronze, tin, silver, lapis lazuli, and soapstone. To maintain this extensive East-West trade network, they had advanced skills in ship building, sailing, and overland transportation. They domesticated animals like cats, dogs, cattle, and buffalos and may have domesticated pigs, camels, horses, asses, and elephants. The Indus Valley Civilization at its peak held an estimated population of over 5 million people, and it was larger than their contemporaries like Egypt and Mesopotamia of the ancient world. The advances rooted in this civilization are reflected in the genius of the people of India, both in Asia and in the diaspora.
The Indus Valley began to decline when climate change decimated the Dravido-Harappan’s homeland. Archaeological evidence suggests that severe drought and a decline in trade with Kemet (Pre-Greek Egypt) and Mesopotamia, both their Nubian relatives, caused the collapse of the Indus Valley Civilization. For instance, this decline, caused by aridification and climate change, first occurred around 2200 BCE. As a result, the land territory of the Indus Valley produced no grain; inundated tracts produced no fish; and irrigated orchards produced no wine or syrup. Hunger followed starvation, and surpluses and trade declined. A second drought occurred from 1200 to 850 BCE to end the remnants of the Great Indus Valley Civilization.
The Dravido-Harappan people appeared to have developed and thrived without warfare or violence, because seals uncovered do not depict battles, a captive or a victor, and there is no evidence anywhere of armies or warfare, slaughter, or man-made destruction in any of the Indus Valley settlements, at any phase during this magnificent civilization. The Indus Valley Civilization was highly organized, and their inhabitants were involved in trade over vast distances from Central Asia to Mesopotamia for centuries. It was after the climate change where the war-like Aryans (Indo-Europeans) drove the Dravido-Harappans into Southern India. The Aryans were nomads, scavengers, and thieves who exploited abandoned Dravido-Harappan urban centers of the Indus Valley Civilization.
Excavations of artifacts from the late third millennium BC indicate horse-riding invaders raided villages in Baluchistan to the west of the Indus Valley. The Aryan incursion had begun. By 1800 BC more invaders from the Western Stepped streamed in. The Dravido-Harappan villagers and townspeople crowded into the cities for safety. Excavations from Mohenjo-Daro show that increased population density led to mansions being transformed into tenements where large rooms were divided into smaller rooms. The defenses at Mohenjo-Daro were strengthened, and the inhabitants blocked one of the four gateways to the city, which unfortunately wasn’t enough to protect their people, city, and homeland because the Aryan invaders engulfed the Indus Valley and slaughtered many Dravido-Harappans in the process.
The Rig Veda, the Aryan traditional account, claims that Indra, their war deity, destroyed hundreds of the Dravido-Harappans’ fortified places.
“The Rig Veda, ancient sacred hymns of India, tells of the fierce struggles between these Whites and Blacks for the mastery of India. It sings of Aryan deities who rushed furiously into battle against the Black foe,” Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois said. “The hymns praise Indra, the White deity, for having killed fifty thousand Blacks, ‘piercing the citadel of the enemy’ and forcing the Blacks to run out in distress, leaving all their food and belongings.”
Archaeological evidence displayed the violent manner of the deaths the Dravido-Harappans’ experienced by the Aryans.
Archaeologist Sir Ernest Mackay discovered two skeletons lying on a short flight of brick steps and two more just outside the steps. Mackay recorded that “There seems no doubt that these four people murdered . . . It can be regarded as almost certain that these skeletal remains date from the latter end of the occupation of Mahenjo-Daro and are not later intrusions.” Mackay also described another group of nine skeletons, five of them children, lying “instrangely contorted attitudes and crowded together,” as thought “thrown pell-mell into a hurriedly made pit.”
The Aryan conquest of the Indus Valley Civilization did not come easy because the Dravido-Harappans amassed armies, some numbering 10,000 people to battle the invaders. The resistance resulted in a thousand-year struggle for the supremacy to rule India. More and more Dravido-Harappans migrated eastwards. Fleeing Aryan repression, they rebuilt their arts and sciences. Ultimately, many of them ended up in Central and South India where they are concentrated today. Where the Aryans conquered, they impose the Hindu caste system on the indigenous people, which was an early form of Apartheid. The system divided the population into Brahmins, Khyshatriyas, Vaishas, Sudras, and Outcastes. The Aryans became the Brahmins, the top caste, and the Dravido-Harappan people became the Sudras and the Outcastes. The Outcastes were some peoples of Aryan and Dravido-Harappan admixture. This system, with modifications, is still in prevalent during the modern era. Color and shade prejudice is still a feature in the Indian subcontinent.
“The unrelenting obsession with fair Skin in India has been a focus of many discussions for years.” – Dr. Rufus O. Jimerson, The Greatness of Black India: Out of Nubia/Kemet to Overcoming White Supremacy
The Aryans seized most of Pakistan and Northwest India by 800 BC and have gradually taken control of the entire country of India.
“When we speak of 400,000,000 Negroes, we mean to include several of the millions of India who are direct offspring of that ancient African stock that once invaded Asia. The 400,000,000 Negroes of the world have a beautiful history of their own, and no one of any other race can truly write it but themselves. Until it is completely and carefully written, for the guidance of our children and ourselves, let us think it.”
– The Honorable Marcus Garvey, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa
A Dravidian, the Ancient Inhabitant of India
“The original inhabitants of India were dark-skinned and closely resembled the Africans in physical features. They founded the Indus Valley Civilization which, according to historians, was one of the world’s first and most glorious. Aryan tribes invaded India, destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization, and employed a cunning, deceptive religious ideology to enslave the indigenous people. Those who fled to India’s forests and hills later came to be called “tribals,” V.T. Rajshekar, noted South Indian Journalist said. “As these native Indians were gradually overcome, captured and enslaved they were kept outside village limits and “untouchability” (Dravidians, Black Untouchables, Dalits, meaning “downtrodden”) was enforced on them … The native people of India (currently known as “Untouchables, Tribals and Backward Castes”) were not Hindus. They were Animists – Nature Worshippers. Since India’s Dalits were once autonomous tribal groups, each group was known by its own tribal name. The Aryans created “caste” out of these tribal divisions by hierarchically arranging them in ascending degrees of reverence and descending degrees of contempt … Aryans based their whole philosophy on color (varna). The four-fold caste system is based on skin (varna) color. The natives are dark-skinned and the Aryans light.”
The Dalits who comprise 18 percent of the Indian population face ongoing segregation in schools and restaurants, police violence, sexual violence, and lack access to drinking water on par to African Americans in Jim Crow America.
Pakistan and Western India saw its first Black empire fall, the Indus Valley Civilization. Following the Great Indus Valley was the Mauryan Empire, which was formed around 321 BCE and ended in 185 BCE. At its height, the Mauryan Empire covered the land territory of present-day Pakistan, Central and Northern India, and parts of Iran. From this dynasty arose a Black king who would reshape Indian history, and his name was Asoka “the Great.”
“Asoka was the greatest and noblest ruler India has known, and indeed one of the greatest kings of the world.” – A.L. Basham
India would experience many magnificent “transformations,” spurned and perpetuated by the Black race, which gave India her first civilization and culture.
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