The recent controversy over the Pashupati seal — that remarkable 4,300-year-old artifact from Mohenjo-daro depicting a seated figure in yogic posture, surrounded by animals native to the Indian subcontinent — has laid bare something uncomfortable about how a certain strand of Western academia approaches Indian civilizational history.
When India’s Ministry of Culture shared a post celebrating the seal as a symbol of civilizational continuity, controversial Rutgers Prof. Audrey Truschke did not engage with the substance. She dismissed it. “This isn’t Shiva,” she declared, asserting instead a proto-Elamite connection — a claim that raises far more questions than it answers.
Let us begin with the most obvious one: geography.
Ancient Elam was centred in what is today southwestern Iran. Elephants, rhinoceroses, and water buffaloes — three of the animals depicted on the Pashupati seal — are not native to that region. They are, however, native to the Indian subcontinent.
Amish Tripathi, one of India’s most widely-read authors and a student of ancient Indian history, made the point with surgical economy:
“Elephants, water buffalos and rhinoceroses are not native to ancient Elam. They are native to India. Also, the figure is seated in a yogic posture. Is Yoga also Elamite now?”
The question is rhetorical, but the logic is ironclad. If a seal is to be connected to a civilizational tradition, the fauna it depicts is not an incidental detail. It is among the most direct forms of evidence available. Truschke’s comparison simply does not survive this basic scrutiny.
Then there is the posture. The figure on the seal is seated in what Dr Lavanya Vemsani — a specialist in Hindu traditions — has identified as Mulabandhasana, a demanding yogic posture achievable only by accomplished practitioners. As she put it:
“The Pashupati seal depicts Shiva sitting in Mulabandhasana, which only accomplished yogis perform, surrounded by animals indigenous to India — tiger, elephant, rhinoceros.”
The posture is not incidental; it is the compositional centrepiece of the seal. Dr Vemsani was equally unsparing on the Elamite comparison itself:
“The Elamite seal is a depiction of an anthropomorphic bull sitting in vajrasana. Not even 1% of similarity exists between them to merit comparison.”
The question that Truschke conspicuously does not address is this: if the iconography is Elamite, why is the central figure seated in a posture that belongs to an unbroken Indian contemplative tradition stretching from this very period to the present day?
India’s Ministry of Culture framed the civilizational stakes plainly, “The yogic posture, Shaivite symbolism, and spiritual ethos seen in the Pashupati Seal continue to thrive in India’s temples, daily worship of Shiva, yogic traditions, and cultural life even today.”
“From the Vedic period to contemporary Bharat, this civilizational thread has remained alive and unbroken.”
Whatever one makes of the ministry’s political motivations in sharing the post, the underlying observation is not propaganda — it is an empirical claim about continuity that any serious scholar of Indian religious history would have to engage with, not bat away.
These are not fringe grievances from nationalist agitators. They are the entirely reasonable observations of scholars and commentators applying the most elementary standards of evidentiary reasoning. When your comparative claim requires you to ignore the zoological record, the posture, the surrounding iconography, and the geographic logic simultaneously, you are not correcting a misconception. You are substituting one for another.
What makes Truschke’s intervention particularly worth examining is the rhetorical framing she deployed alongside it.
“Indian history is amazing, wonderful, and fantastic — it’s well worth getting it right.”
This is a masterclass in condescension dressed as magnanimity. Linguist and columnist Avatans Kumar identified the presumption embedded in that framing with precision:
“This academic historian tells us that Indian history is well worth getting right. But for us to get it right, we need to receive her wisdom — because we lowly Hindus do not have access to our own itihasa and tradition. Who gave her this agency?”
It is a pointed question, and it deserves a straight answer. The orientalist project, at its core, was always about the right to define — to name, classify, and adjudicate the meaning of non-Western cultures from a position outside and above them. The colonial administrators are gone. The epistemological presumption has not entirely followed.
Kumar has written more broadly about the structural problem this episode exemplifies:
“The perception and presentation of Hinduism, Hindu texts, and traditions in academia are at odds with the ground reality. The overriding orientalist and colonial discourse about India fosters a dubious and distorted outsider narrative at the cost of an authentic insider one.”
The Pashupati controversy is a small but telling illustration of exactly that dynamic in action.
None of this is to say the seal admits of only one interpretation, or that scholarly debate about Indus Valley iconography is illegitimate. It emphatically is not. The question of whether the figure represents a proto-Shiva, a deity in the yogic tradition, or something else entirely is a live and legitimate academic question. Reasonable scholars disagree. What is not a legitimate scholarly move is to dismiss the most contextually coherent interpretation — grounded in indigenous fauna, indigenous posture, indigenous spiritual continuity — while invoking a geographically and iconographically remote parallel as though it settles the matter.
As Dr Vemsani observed, there is something revealing about the persistence of such comparisons:
“It scares the folks peddling false constructions of Indian history. Whether they realize it or not, Indian history is no longer based on their constructs. Truth is emerging.”
That may read as polemical. But the underlying point stands independent of the rhetoric. A new generation of Indian scholars — trained in both Western academic methods and indigenous epistemological traditions — is no longer content to have the terms of their own history set elsewhere. That is not a threat to good scholarship. It is, in fact, a precondition for it.
The Pashupati seal has survived 4,300 years. It will survive this controversy too. Whether Western academia emerges from it with its credibility intact is a rather more open question.
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