a discussion on OIT

[Guest guest]

 

 

 

 

Klaus

Klostermaier

Introduction

Tacitus, the classical Roman writer, claimed to have described past

events and personalities in his works sine ira et studio, free from

hostility and bias. This motto has guided serious historians through the

ages, and it became their highest ambition to write history 'objectively',

distancing themselves from opinions held by interested parties.

The ideal was not

always followed, as we know. We have seen twentieth century governments

commissioning re-writings of the histories of their countries from the

standpoint of their own ideologies. Like the court-chroniclers of former

times, some contemporary academic historians wrote unashamedly biased accounts

of events and redesigned the past accordingly.

When, in the wake of

World War II the nations of Asia and Africa

gained independence, their intellectuals became aware of the fact that their

histories had been written by representatives of the colonial powers which

they had opposed. More often than not they discovered that all traditional

accounts of their own past had been brushed aside by the 'official'

historians as so much myth and fairytale. Often lacking their own

academically trained historians-or worse, only possessing native historians

who had taken over the views of the colonial masters-the discontent with

existing histories of their countries expressed itself often in vernacular

works that lacked the academic credentials necessary to make an impact on

professional historians.

The situation is

slowly changing. A new generation of scholars who grew up in post-colonial

times and who do not share the former biases, scholars in command of the

tools of the trade-intimacy with the languages involved, familiarity with the

culture of their countries, respect for the indigenous traditions-are

rewriting the histories of their countries.

Nowhere is this more

evident than in India.

India

had a tradition of learning and scholarship much older and vaster than the

European countries that, from the sixteenth century onwards, became its

political masters. Indian scholars are rewriting the history of India

today.

The Aryan Invasion

Theory and the Old Chronology

One of the major points of revision concerns the so called 'Aryan

invasion theory', often referred to as 'colonial-missionary', implying that

it was the brainchild of conquerors of foreign colonies who could not but

imagine that all higher culture had to come from outside 'backward' India,

and who likewise assumed that a religion could only spread through a

politically supported missionary effort.

While not buying into

the more sinister version of this revision, which accuses the inventors of

the Aryan invasion theory of malice and cynicism, there is no doubt that

early European attempts to explain the presence of Indians in India had much

to with the commonly held Biblical belief that humankind originated from one

pair of humans- Adam and Eve to be precise (their common birth date was

believed to be c.4005 BCE)-and that all peoples on earth descended from one

of the sons of Noah, the only human to survive the Great Flood (dated at 2500

BCE). The only problem seemed to be to connect peoples not mentioned in

Chapter 10 of Genesis ['The Peopling of the Earth'] with one of the Biblical

genealogical lists.

One such example of a

Christian historian attempting to explain the presence of Indians in India is

the famous Abbé Dubois (1770-1848), whose long sojourn in India (1792-1823)

enabled him to collect a large amount of interesting materials concerning the

customs and traditions of the Hindus. His (French) manuscript was bought by

the British East India Company and appeared in an English translation under

the title Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies in 1897 with a Prefatory

Note by the Right Hon. F. Max Müller. Abbé Dubois, loath 'to oppose [his]

conjectures to [the Indians'] absurd fables' categorically stated:

It is practically admitted that India was inhabited very soon

after the Deluge, which made a desert of the whole world. The fact that it

was so close to the plains of Sennaar, where Noah's descendants remained

stationary so long, as well as its good climate and the fertility of the

country, soon led to its settlement.

Rejecting other

scholars' opinions which linked the Indians to Egyptian or Arabic origins, he

ventured to suggest them 'to be descendents not of Shem, as many argue, but

of Japhet'. He explains: 'According to my theory they reached India from the north, and I should place the

first abode of their ancestors in the neighborhood of the Caucasus.'

The reasons he provides to substantiate his theory are utterly

unconvincing-but he goes on to build the rest of his migration theory (not

yet an 'Aryan' migration theory) on this shaky foundation.

Max Müller

(1823-1903), who was largely responsible for the 'Aryan invasion theory' and

the 'old chronology', was too close in spirit and time to this kind of

thinking, not to have adopted it fairly unquestioningly. In his Prefatory

Note he praises the work of Abbé Dubois as a 'trustworthy authority. . .which

will always retain its value.'

That a great deal of

early British Indology was motivated by Christian missionary considerations,

is no secret. The famous and important Boden Chair for Sanskrit at the

University of Oxford was founded by Colonel Boden in 1811 with the explicit

object 'to promote the translation of the Scriptures into Sanskrit, so as to

enable his countrymen to proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to

the Christian Religion'.Max Müller, in a letter to his wife wrote in 1886:

'The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the

fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is

the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure,

is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3

000 years.'

When the affinity

between many European languages and Sanskrit became a commonly accepted

notion, scholars almost automatically concluded that the Sanskrit speaking

ancestors of the present day Indians were to be found somewhere halfway

between India and the

Western borders of Europe-Northern Germany, Scandinavia, Southern Russia, the

Pamir-from which they invaded the Punjab.

(It is also worth noting that the early armchair scholars who conceived these

grandiose migration theories, had no actual knowledge of the terrain their

'Aryan invaders' were supposed to have transversed, the passes they were

supposed to have crossed, or the various climates they were believed to have

been living in). Assuming that the Vedic Indians were semi-nomadic warriors

and cattle-breeders, it fitted the picture, when Mohenjo Daro and Harappa

were discovered, to also assume that these were the cities the Aryan invaders

destroyed under the leadership of their god Indra, the 'city-destroyer', and

that the dark-skinned indigenous people were the ones on whom they imposed

their religion and their caste system.

Western scholars

decided to apply their own methodologies and, in the absence of reliable

evidence, postulated a timeframe for Indian history on the basis of

conjectures. Considering the traditional dates for the life of Gautama, the

Buddha, as fairly well established in the sixth century BCE, supposedly

pre-Buddhist Indian records were placed in a sequence that seemed plausible

to philologists. Accepting on linguistic grounds the traditional claims that

the Rigveda was the oldest Indian literary document, Max Müller allowing a

time-span of two hundred years each for the formation of every class of Vedic

literature, and assuming that the Vedic period had come to an end by the time

of the Buddha, established the following sequence that was widely accepted:

Rigveda c.1200

BCE

Yajurveda,Samaveda,Atharvaveda, c. 1000 BCE

Brahmanas, c. 800 BCE

Aranyakas,Upanishads, c. 600 BCE

Max Müller himself

conceded the purely conjectural nature of the Vedic chronology, and in the

last work published shortly before his death, The Six Systems of Indian

Philosophy, admitted: 'Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns,

whether 1500 or 15 000 BCE, they have their own unique place and stand by

themselves in the literature of the world' (p.35). There were, even in Max

Müller's time, Western and Indian scholars, such as Moriz Winternitz and Bal

Gangadhar Tilak, who disagreed with his chronology and postulated a much

earlier age for the Rigveda.

Indian scholars

pointed out all along that there was no reference in the Veda of a migration

from outside India, that all the geographical features mentioned in the Rigveda

are those of north-western India and that there was no archaeological

evidence whatsoever for the Aryan invasion theory. On the other side there

were references to constellations in Vedic works whose timeframe could be

calculated. The dates arrived at, however, 4500 BCE for one observation in

the Rigveda, 3200 BCE for a date in the Shatapatha Brahmana,

seemed far too remote to be acceptable, especially if one assumed-as many

nineteenth century scholars did, that the world was only about 6 000 years old

and that the flood had taken place only 4 500 years ago.

Debunking the

Aryan Invasion Theory: The New Chronology

Contemporary Indian scholars, admittedly motivated not only by academic

interests, vehemently reject what they call the 'colonial-missionary Aryan

invasion theory'. They accuse its originators of superimposing-for a

reason-the purpose and process of the colonial conquest of India by the

Western powers in modern times onto the beginnings of Indian civilisation: as

the Europeans came to India as bearers of a supposedly superior civilisation

and a higher religion, so the original Aryans were assumed to have invaded a

country on which they imposed their culture and their religion.

A recent major work

offers 'seventeen arguments: why the Aryan invasion never happened'.6 It may

be worthwhile summarising and analysing them briefly:

The Aryan

invasion model is largely based on linguistic conjectures which are

unjustified (and wrong). Languages develop much more slowly than assumed

by nineteenth century scholars. According to Renfrew speakers of

Indo-European languages may have lived in Anatolia

as early as 7000 BCEThe supposed

large-scale migrations of Aryan people in the second millennium BCE

first into Western Asia and then into northern India (by 1500 BCE) cannot be maintained

in view of the fact that the Hittites were in Anatolia already by 2200

BCE and the Kassites and Mitanni

had kings and dynasties by 1600 BCEThere is no

memory of an invasion or of large-scale migration in the records of

Ancient India-neither

in the Vedas, Buddhist or Jain writings, nor in Tamil literature. The

fauna and flora, the geography and the climate described in the Rigveda

are that of Northern India.There is a

striking cultural continuity between the archaeological artefacts of the

Indus-Saraswati civilisation and subsequent Indian society and culture:

a continuity of religious ideas, arts, crafts, architecture, system of

weights and measures.The

archaeological finds of Mehrgarh (copper, cattle, barley) reveal a

culture similar to that of the Vedic Indians. Contrary to former

interpretations, the Rigveda shows not a nomadic but an urban

culture (purusa as derived from pur vasa = town-dweller).The Aryan

invasion theory was based on the assumption that a nomadic people in

possession of horses and chariots defeated an urban civilisation that

did not know horses, and that horses are depicted only from the middle

of the second millennium onwards. Meanwhile archaeological evidence for

horses has been found in Harappan and pre-Harappan sites; drawings of

horses have been found in paleolithic caves in India; drawings of riders on

horses dated c. 4300 BCE have been found in Ukraina. Horsedrawn war chariots

are not typical for nomadic breeders but for urban civilisations. The racial

diversity found in skeletons in the cities of the Indus civilisation is

the same as in India

today; there is no evidence of the coming of a new race. The Rigveda

describes a river system in North India

that is pre-1900 BCE in the case of the Saraswati river, and pre-2600

BCE in the case of the Drishadvati river. Vedic literature shows a

population shift from the Saraswati (Rigveda) to the Ganges (Brahmanas and Puranas), also

evidenced by archaeological finds. The astronomical

references in the Rigveda are based on a Pleiades-Krittika

(Taurean) calendar of c. 2500 BCE when Vedic astronomy and mathematics

were well-developed sciences (again, not a feature of a nomadic people).

The Indus cities were not destroyed by invaders but

deserted by their inhabitants because of desertification of the area.

Strabo (Geography XV.1.19) reports that Aristobulos had seen

thousands of villages and towns deserted because the Indus

had changed its course. The battles

described in the Rigveda were not fought between invaders and

natives but between people belonging to the same culture. Excavations in

Dwaraka have lead to the discovery of a site larger than Mohenjodaro,

dated c. 1500 BCE with architectural structures, use of iron, a script

halfway between Harappan and Brahmi. Dwarka has been associated with Krishna and the end of the Vedic period. A continuity in

the morphology of scripts: Harappan, Brahmi, Devanagari. Vedic ayas,

formerly translated as 'iron,' probably meant copper or bronze. Iron was

found in India before

1500 BCE in Kashmir and Dwaraka. The Puranic

dynastic lists with over 120 kings in one Vedic dynasty alone, fit well

into the 'new chronology'. They date back to the third millennium BCE

Greek accounts tell of Indian royal lists going back to the seventh

millennium BCE.The Rigveda

itself shows an advanced and sophisticated culture, the product of a

long development, 'a civilisation that could not have been delivered to India

on horseback' (p.160). Painted Gray

Ware culture in the western Gangetic plains, dated ca 1100 BCE has been

found connected to (earlier) Black and Red Ware etc.

Let us consider some

of these arguments in some detail. As often remarked, there is no hint in the

Veda of a migration of the people that considered it its own sacred

tradition. It would be strange indeed if the Vedic Indians had lost all

recollection of such a momentous event in supposedly relatively recent times-

much more recent, for instance, than the migration of Abraham and his people

which is well attested and frequently referred to in the Bible. In addition,

as has been established recently through satellite photography and geological

investigations, the Saraswati, the mightiest river known to the Rigvedic

Indians, along whose banks they established numerous major settlements, had

dried out completely by 1900 BCE-four centuries before the Aryans were

supposed to have invaded India.

One can hardly argue for the establishment of Aryan villages along a dry

river bed.

When the first

remnants of the ruins of the so-called Indus civilisation came to light in

the early part of our century, the proponents of the Aryan invasion theory

believed they had found the missing archaeological evidence: here were the

'mighty forts' and the 'great cities' which the war-like Indra of the Rigveda

was said to have conquered and destroyed. Then it emerged that nobody had

destroyed these cities and no evidence of wars of conquest came to light:

floods and droughts had made it impossible to sustain large populations in

the area and the people of Mohenjo Daro, Harappa

and other places had migrated to more hospitable areas. Ongoing

archaeological research has not only extended the area of the

Indus-civilisation but has also shown a transition of its later phases to the

Gangetic culture. Archeo-geographers have established that a drought lasting

two to three hundred years devastated a wide belt of land from Anatolia

through Mesopotamia to Northern India around

2300 BCE to 2000 BCE.

Based on this type of

evidence and extrapolating from the Vedic texts, a new story of the origins

of Hinduism is emerging that reflects the self-consciousness of Hindus and

which attempts to replace the 'colonial-missionary Aryan invasion theory' by

a vision of 'India

as the Cradle of Civilisation.' This new theory considers the

Indus-civilisation as a late Vedic phenomenon and pushes the (inner-Indian)

beginnings of the Vedic age back by several thousands of years. One of the

reasons for considering the Indus

civilisation 'Vedic' is the evidence of town-planning and architectural

design that required a fairly advanced algebraic geometry-of the type

preserved in the Vedic Shulvasutras. The widely respected historian of

mathematics A. Seidenberg came to the conclusion, after studying the geometry

used in building the Egyptian pyramids and the Mesopotamian citadels, that it

reflected a derivative geometry-a geometry derived from the Vedic Shulva-sutras.

If that is so, then the knowledge ('Veda') on which the construction of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro is based, cannot be later than

that civilisation itself. (Kishore's note: It is widely established in

professional circles that Mayan's

architecture is based on mayanmatam of South India.

The altars of Harappa are in accordance with

Vedic stipulations)

While the Rigveda

has always been held to be the oldest literary document of India and was considered to have

preserved the oldest form of Sanskrit, Indians have not taken it to be the

source for their early history. The Itihasa-Purana served that

purpose. The language of these works is more recent than that of the Vedas

and the time of their final redaction is much later than the fixation of the

Vedic canon. However, they contain detailed information about ancient events

and personalities that form part of Indian history. The Ancients, like

Herodotus, the father of Greek histo-riography, did not separate story from

history. Nor did they question their sources but tended to juxtapose various

pieces of evidence without critically sifting it. Thus we cannot read Itihasa-Purana

as the equivalent of a modern textbook of Indian history but rather as a

storybook containing information with interpretation, facts and fiction.

Indians, however, always took genealogies quite seriously and we can presume

that the Puranic lists of dynasties, like the lists of paramparas in

the Upanishads relate the names of real rulers in the correct

sequence. On these assumptions we can tentatively reconstruct Indian history

to a time around 4500 BCE.

A key element in the

revision of Ancient Indian History was the recent discovery of Mehrgarh, a

settlement in the Hindukush area, that was continuously inhabited for several

thousand years from c. 7000 BCE onwards. This discovery has extended Indian

history for several thousands of years before the fairly well dateable Indus civilisation.

New Chronologies

Pulling together available archaeological evidence as it is available

today, the American anthropologist James G. Schaffer developed the following

chronology of early Indian civilisation:

Early

food-producing era (c. 6500-5000 BCE): no pottery. Regionalisation

era (5000-2600 BCE): distinct regional styles of pottery and other

artefacts. Integration era

(2600-1900 BCE) : cultural homogeneity and emergence of urban centres

like Mohenjo daro and Harappa.Localisation era

(1900-1300 BCE ) blending of patterns from the integration era with

regional ceramic styles.

The Indian

archaeologist S.P. Gupta proposed this cultural sequencing:

Pre-ceramic

Neolithic (8000-600 BCE) Ceramic

Neolithic (6000-5000 BCE)Chalcolithic

(5000-3000 BCE ) Early Bronze Age

(3000-1900 BCE) Late Bronze Age

( 1900-1200 BCE)Early Iron Age

(1200-800 BCE)Late Iron

cultures

According to these

specialists, there is no break in the cultural development from 8000 BCE

onwards, no indication of a major change, as an invasion from outside would

certainly be.

A more detailed 'New

Chronology' of Ancient India, locating names of kings and tribes mentioned in

the Vedas and Puranas, according to Rajarama looks somewhat like this:

4500 BCE: Mandhatri's

victory over the Drohyus, alluded to in the Puranas.

4000 BCE Rigveda (excepting books 1 and 10)

3700 BCE Battle of Ten Kings (referred to in the Rigveda) Beginning of

Puranic dynastic lists: Agastya, the messenger of Vedic religion in the

Dravida country. Vasistha, his younger brother, author of Vedic works. Rama

and Ramayana.

3600 BCEYajur-, Sama-, Atharvaveda: Completion of Vedic Canon.

3100 BCE Age of Krishna and Vyasa. Mahabharata

War. Early Mahabharata.

3000 BCEShatapathabrahmana, Shulvasutras, Yajnavalkyasutra, Panini,

author of the Ashtadhyayi, Yaska, author of the Nirukta.

2900 BCE Rise of the civilisations of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia

and the Indus-Sarasvati doab.

2200 BCE beginning of large-scale drought: decline of Harappa.

 

2000 BCE End of Vedic age.

1900 BCE Saraswati completely dried out: end of Harappa.

 

Texts like the Rigveda,

the Shatapathabrahmana and others contain references to eclipses as

well as to sidereal markers of the beginning of seasons, which allow us by

backward calculation, to determine the time of their composition. Experts

assure us that to falsify these dates would have been impossible before the

computer age.

Old verses new? Or

scientists verses philologists?

We are left, at present, with two widely differing versions of Ancient

Indian History, with two radically divergent sets of chronology and with a

great deal of polemic from both sides. Those who defend the Aryan invasion

theory and the chronology associated with it accuse the proponents of the

'New Chronology' of indulging in Hindu chauvinism. The latter suspect the

former of entertaining 'colonial-missionary' prejudices and denying

originality to the indigenous Indians. The new element that has entered the

debate is scientific investigations. While the older theory rested on

exclusively philological arguments, the new theory includes astronomical,

geological, mathematical and archaeological evidence. On the whole, the

latter seems to rest on better foundations. Not only were the philological arguments from the very beginning

based more on strong assertions and bold guesses, civilisations both

ancient and contemporary comprise more than literature alone. In addition, purely philologically trained

scholars-namely grammarians-are not able to make sense of technical language

and of scientific information contained even in the texts they study.

Consider today's

scientific literature. It abounds with Greek and Latin technical terms, it

contains an abundance of formulae composed of Greek and Hebrew letters. If

scholars with a background in the classical languages were to read such

works, they might be able to come up with some acceptable translations of

technical terms into modern English but they would hardly be able to really

make sense of most of what they read and they certainly would not extract the

information which the authors of these works wished to convey to people

trained in their specialities. The situation is not too different with regard

to ancient Indian texts. The admission of some of the best scholars (like

Geldner, who in his translation of the Rigveda, considered the best so far,

declares many passages 'darker than the darkest oracle' or Gonda, who

considered the Rigveda basically untranslatable) of being unable to make

sense of a great many texts-and the refusal of most to go beyond a

grammatical and etymological analysis of these-indicates a deeper problem.

The Ancients were not only poets and litterateurs, but they also had their sciences

and their technical skills, their secrets and their conventions that are not

self-evident to someone not sharing their world. Some progress has been made

in deciphering medical and astronomical literature of a later age, in reading

architectural and arts-related materials. However, much of the technical

meaning of the oldest Vedic literature still eludes us.

The Rigveda-a

code?

The computer scientist and Indologist Subhash Kak believes he has

rediscovered the 'Vedic Code' which allows him to extract from the structure,

as well as the words and sentences of the Rigveda, and the considerable

astronomical information which its authors supposedly embedded in it.The

assumption of such encoded scientific knowledge would make it understandable

why there was such insistence on the preservation of every letter of the text

in precisely the sequence the original author had set down. One can take

certain liberties with a story, or even a poem, changing words, transposing

lines, adding explanatory matter, shortening it, if necessary, and still

communicate the intentions and ideas of the author. However, one has to

remember and reproduce a scientific formula in precisely the same way it has

been set down by the scientist or it would not make sense at all. While the scientific

community can arbitrarily adopt certain letter equivalents for physical units

or processes, once it has agreed on their use, one must obey the conventions

for the sake of meaningful communication.

Even a non-specialist

reader of ancient Indian literature will notice the effort to link macrocosm

and microcosm, astronomical and physiological processes, to find

correspondences between the various realms of beings and to order the

universe by establishing broad classifications. Vedic sacrifices-the central

act of Vedic culture- were to be offered on precisely built geometrically

constructed altars and to be performed at astronomically exactly established

times. It sounds plausible to expect a correlation between the numbers of

bricks prescribed for a particular altar and the distances between stars

observed whose movement determined the time of the offerings to be made.

Subhash Kak has advanced a great deal of fascinating detail in that

connection in his essays on the 'Astronomy of the Vedic Altar'. He believes

that while the Vedic Indians possessed extensive astronomical knowledge,

which they encoded in the text of the Rigveda, the code was lost in later

times and the Vedic tradition was interrupted.

India, the cradle of

(world-) civilisation?

Based on the early dating of the Rigveda (c. 4000 BCE) and on the

strength of the argument that Vedic astronomy and geometry predates that of

the other known Ancient civilisations, some scholars, like N.S. Rajaram,

George Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley, have made the daring

suggestion that India was the 'cradle of civilisation'. They link the

recently discovered early European civilisation (which predates Ancient

Sumeria {Kishore's note- it is established by scholars that Sumeria owes itself to the South Indian

Andhra culture ; ref the Paper by Samyukta Koonaiah and others }and Ancient

Egypt by over a millennium) to waves of populations moving out or driven out

from north-west India.

Later migrations, caused either by climatic changes or by military events,

would have brought the Hittites to Western Asia, the Iranians to Afghanistan and Iran

and many others to other parts of Eurasia.

Such a scenario would require a complete rewriting of Ancient World

History-especially if we add the claims, apparently substantiated by some

material evidence, that Vedic Indians (kishore's note : as well as the South

Indians)had established trade links with Central America and Eastern Africa

before 2500 BCE. It is no wonder that the 'New Chronology' arouses not only

scholarly controversy but emotional excitement as well. Much more hard

evidence will be required to fully establish it, and many claims may have to

be withdrawn. But there is no doubt that the 'old chronology' has been

discredited and that much surprise is in store for the students not only of

Ancient India, but also of the Ancient World as a whole.

Sorting out the

questions:

The 'Revision of Ancient Indian History' responds to several separate,

but interlocking questions that are often confused.

The

(emotionally) most important question is that of the original home of

Vedic civilisation, identified with the question: where was the (Rig-)Veda

composed? India's

indigenous answer to that question had always been 'India', more precisely 'the Punjab'. The European, 'colonial missionary'

assumption, was 'outside India'.

(Kishore's note: While many scholars may agree that the Rg Veda has been

composed in India or at worst, in Afganistan, they still want to stick

to Aryan Immigration theory which holds no archaeological or other

evidence The linguistics have been developed on the premise that the

Aryans have moved from west to east and not vice versa. The direction of

borrowings is dependent upon this subjective conjecture and it simply

means that there would be no

contradiction if the assumption were to be that the movement was from

east to west and accordingly, the linguistics could be refashioned.)The next

question, not often explicitly asked, is: where did the pre-Vedic

people, the 'Aryans' come from? This is a problem for

archeo-anthropologists rather than for historians(or for linguists-

Kishore) . The racial history of India shows influences from

many quarters. A related, but

separate question concerns the 'cradle of civilisation', to which

several ancient cultures have laid claim: Sumeria,

Egypt, India (possibly also China could be mentioned,

which considered itself for a long time the only truly civilised

country). Depending on what answer we receive, the major expansion of

population/civilisation would be from west to east, or from east to

west. The famous lux ex oriente has often been applied to the

spread of culture in the ancient world. India was as far as the 'Orient'

would go. It is rather

strange that the defenders of the 'Aryan invasion theory', who have

neither archaeological nor literary documents to prove their assumption,

demand detailed proof for the non-invasion and refuse to admit the

evidence available. Similarly, they feel entitled to declare 'mythical'

whatever the sources (Rigveda, Puranas) say that does not agree

with their preconceived notions of Vedic India.

Some conclusions:

If I were to judge the strength of the arguments for revising Ancient Indian

History in the direction of 'India as Cradle of Civilisation' I would rate

Seidenberg's findings concerning the Shulvasutra geometry (applied in the

Indus civilisation; Babylonian and Egyptian geometry derivative to it)

highest. Next would be the archeo-astronomical determination of astronomical

data in Vedic and post-Vedic texts. Third is the satellite photography based

dating of the drying out of the Saraswati and the archeo-geographical finding

of a centuries long drought in the belt reaching from Anatolia through

Mesopotamia and Northern India. Geological

research has uncovered major tectonic changes in the Punjab and the foothills

of the Himalayas. At one point a section

rose about sixty metres within the past 2 000 years.

'Vasishta's Head', a

bronze head found near Delhi, was dated through radio-carbon testing to

around 3700 BCE- the time when, according to Hicks and Anderson, the Battle

of the Ten Kings took place (Vasishta, mentioned in the Rigveda, was

the advisor to King Sudas). A further factor speaking for the 'Vedic'

character of the Indus civilisation is the

occurrence of (Vedic) altars in many sites. Fairly important is also the

absence of a memory of a migration from outside India in all of ancient Indian

literature: the Veda, the Brahmanas, the Epics and the Puranas. Granting that

the Vedic Samhitas were ritual manuals rather than historic records, further

progress in revising Ancient Indian History could be expected from a study of

Itihasa-Purana, rather than from an analysis of the Rigveda (by

way of parallel, what kind of reconstruction of Ancient Israel's History

could be done on the basis of a study of the Psalms, leaving out Genesis and

Kings? Or what reconstruction of European History could be based on a study

of the earliest Rituale Romanum?)

An afterword:

Hinduism today is not just a development of Vedic religion and culture

but a synthesis of many diverse elements. There is no doubt a Vedic basis. It

is evident in the caste-structure of Hindu society, in the rituals which

almost every Hindu still undergoes (especially initiation, marriage and last

rites), in traditional notions of ritual purity and pollution, and in the

respect which the Veda still commands. There is a large area of Hindu worship

and religious practice for which the Veda provides little or no basis:

temple-building, image worship, pilgrimages, vows and prayers to gods and

goddesses not mentioned in the Veda, beliefs like transmigration,

world-pictures containing numerous heavens and hells and much more which appear

to have been taken over from non-Vedic indigenous cultures. There have been

historic developments that led to the developments of numerous schools of

thought, sects and communities differing from each other in scriptures,

interpretations, customs, beliefs.

Apart from its Vedic

origins Hinduism was never one in either administration, doctrine or

practice. It does not possess a commonly accepted authority, does not have a

single centre and does not have a common history. Unlike the histories of

other religions, which rely on one founder and one scripture, the history of

Hinduism is a bundle of parallel histories of traditions that were loosely

defined from the very beginning, that went through a number of fissions and

fusions, and that do not feel any need to seek their identity in conforming

to a specific historic realisation. While incredibly conservative in some of

its expressions, Hinduism is very open to change and development under the

influence of charismatic personalities. From early times great latitude was

given to Hindus to interpret their traditional scriptures in a great many

different ways. The ease with which Hindus have always identified persons

that impressed them with manifestations of God has led to many parallel

traditions within Hinduism, making it impossible to chronicle a development

of Hinduism along one line. The presentation of a history of Hinduism will be

a record of several mainstream Hindu traditions that developed along

individual lines; only very rarely do these lines meet in conflict or merge

to generate new branches of the still vigorously growing banyan tree to which

Hinduism has been often compared.

[Guest guest]

-

>> " kishore patnaik " <kishorepatnaik09

>

> > 4. It is rather strange that the defenders of the 'Aryan

invasion

> > theory', who have neither archaeological nor literary documents

to prove

> > their assumption, demand detailed proof for the non-invasion

and refuse

> > to

> > admit the evidence available.

>

> =========

> Rg Veda supports the invasion scenario.

>

 

No, it does not.

 

It is a bronze-age text that doesn't know of iron. But iron

implements were already produced in Uttar Pradesh, bordering on the

Yamuna-Saraswati heartland of the RV, from at least 1800 BC onwards:

 

http://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/tewari/tewari.pdf

 

I have no astronomical data from the RV itself (the Orion myth used

by Jacobi and Tilak to date it to 4000 BC is not compelling

evidence), but in post-RVedic literature a number of astronomy-based

dates can be established for the late 3rd and middle 2nd millennium

BC. Most explicit is the Vedanga Jyotisha, in Paninian post-Vedic

Sanskrit, dated by astronomically illiterate philologists to 200 BC,

which explicitly dates itself to ca. 1350 BC (astronomer Narahari

Achar has argued for another interpretation, but that would date the

VJ to 1800 BC!). Likewise another astronomical treatise, the

Parashara Samhita, lost but reconstructed from quoted fragments,

dates to the same period. All this reasonably pushes the RV to

beyond 2000 BC, into the Harappan age.

 

That doesn't mean the (probably multi-lingual) Harappan civilization

was Vedic. They existed in the same time-bracket, but not in the

same place. The Vedic heartland was on the eastern border of the

Harappan cities' area, in the westernmost part of the monsoon area, a

different milieu in climatic and agricultural respects.

 

The message of the geographical data in the RV is crystal-clear, on

condition that we apply the philological insights (mainly due to

Oldenberg) in its internal chrnology. Save for a handful of hymns

convincingly shown to be later interpolations, the internal sequence

is as follows:

old: book 6,3,7;

middle: 2,4;

late: 5,1,8,9,10.

 

This chronological distinction makes a lot of difference in

interpreting the historical data mentioned in the hymns. Thus, it is

routinely claimed that " the RV knows the horse-drawn chariot with

spoked wheels " , hence must postdate the invention or importation

thereof. But in fact, only the late books know this technology. The

early references (3:53:17 ff.) are clearly about the bullock cart,

those to chariot races and to the fabrication process of the chariot

are all in the late books. (Note that the several references to the

fabrication process exclusively mention *indigenous* Indian trees as

material for the axle, the chariot body etc., whereas the Egyptians

when importing chariot technology from Syria also continued to import

the needed wood from Syria.) At least half the RV predates the

chariot.

 

When we tabulate the names of rivers, mountains, lakes, flora and

fauna and group them according to old, middle and late period, we see

a totally consistent picture of a shift from east to west. The old

books know of Ganga and Yamuna, not of the Indus and the rivers to

its west. The middle books are centred on the Saraswati and know of

the Panjabi rivers. But only the late books know of Afghanistan and

its flora and fauna: sheep, camels, boars.

 

In the Aryan Invasion scenario, we should expect exactly the reverse:

first Afghanistan, later inner India. But that is not what we get in

the RV. Not at all.

 

We also see the Indian origin of the Iranians, the Vedic people's

western neighbours from the beginning, located in Panjab, or then

rather Sapta Sindhu (their own Hapta Hendu, enumerated as on of the

16 lands of the Iranians themselves) and later on in Afghanistan.

Book 1, late period, describes the Varshagira battle between the

Vedic people, let by Sahadeva, Somaka and Rjashva, against the

Iranians, which took place west of the Indus near the Bolan pass

(which leads to the Helmand/Haraxvaiti valley where Zarathushtra

flourished). Shrikant Talageri in his forthcoming book (and to some

extent already in his 2000 book The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis)

shows how the Avestan culture coincides in time with the *late* Rg-

Vedic period, e.g. by the preference in verse form or by the type of

personal names. Thus, the old period has no animal-referring names,

these are typical of the late period, such as the above-mentioned Rj-

ashva, and they are also common among the Avestan protagonists, e.g.

Zarath-ushtra and his patron Visht-aspa. The late name-types are

also the typical IA names in the Mitanni and Kassite records.

 

The Aryan invasion theory could only handle these data with special

pleading: first, in Central Asia, the proto-Indo-Iranians, the common

ancestor of Vedic, Avestan and Mitannic people, had these name-types,

the latter two groups preserved this name system, the early Rg-Vedic

people lost it, and then a few centuries later reinvented it.

Occam's razor applies: the simpler explanation is the OIT. In the

late-Vedic period, the Iranians, linguistic cousins who shared some

cultural developments with their Vedic eastern neighbours, and the

pre-Mitannic Indo-Aryans, who were a branch of the Vedic people

themselves, migrated westward. Since leftovers of Indo-Aryan

vocabulary in Mesopotamia, attested at a time when Indo-Aryan already

was no living language there anymore, have been securely dated to the

17th (Kassite) and 15th (Mitanni) century BC, their origin in India

must be dated to the preceding centuries, and this clearly pushes the

RV-period into the 3rd millennium BC.

 

Since India was obviously an emigration country, it is perfectly

likely that more Indo-Aryan groups went westward and ended up

elsewhere. Without committing myself to these hypotheses, I would

think this could explain the presence of Indo-Aryan in the Pontic

region (Sindoi) and, as I learned on this list, in Mordvin and other

Uralic languages.

 

Likewise, the Iranians need not have been the first emigrants. NW

India was a demographic power-house without parallel. Archaeologists

have remarked on the stability and relative peacefulness of the

Harappan civilization. This must have led to constant population

growth and emigration pressure, quite unlike anything within reach of

the Pontic region or other purported Urheimats. So, other IE tribes

may have their origin in India in the 4th millennium BC. The RV

carries a memory of the victory of one Mandhatr over the Druhyu

tribe, another cousin people of the Vedic Pauravas. The Puranas give

the whole story, with Mandhatr, a Ganga-based brother-in-law of the

Paurava dynasty, coming to help them against the troublesome Druhyus,

who ended up driven westward, leaving for foreign lands and setting

up kingdoms there. Of course, the Puranas are an intractable mix of

Dichtung und Wahrheit (fabulation and truth), but in this case they

may be on to something.

 

At any rate, while many types of evidence remain to be discovered or

properly understood (deciphering the Indus script, if it is a script,

would be helpful), and while scholars must be able to live with the

uncertainty of conflicting or incomplete evidence, we must face the

pieces of evidence that we already have. One of these is the

geographical information in the RV, which is plentiful and

consistently points in only one direction: the RV people were

familiar with the western Ganga plain (Uttar Pradesh), had settled

between Yamuna and Saraswati (Haryana), and later expanded into

Panjab and ventured beyond the Indus into Afghanistan.

 

Aryan Invasion diehards could still argue that the Aryans had invaded

from the west in 5000 BC or so and then in the RV period moved

westward again. But that would be a scenario radically different

from the AIT as we know it. And so far it has no evidence to support

it.

 

Kind regards,

 

Koenraad Elst

[Guest guest]

Vj by Lagadha has internal evidence to show that it is a book belonging

to atleast 3750 bce (you can pre date it by a cycle of 2700 years!) It

was written somewhere near Sri nagar.

 

 

 

Kishore patnaik

[Guest guest]

>It is a bronze-age text that doesn't know of iron. But iron

>implements were already produced in Uttar Pradesh, bordering on the

>Yamuna-Saraswati heartland of the RV, from at least 1800 BC onwards:

 

An interesting point to note for anyone dating the RV to 1500 BC.

 

 

<That doesn't mean the (probably multi-lingual) Harappan civilization

<was Vedic. They existed in the same time-bracket, but not in the

<same place. The Vedic heartland was on the eastern border of the

<Harappan cities' area, in the westernmost part of the monsoon area, a

<different milieu in climatic and agricultural respects.

 

Could the rishis who composed the hymns of the RV have been an elite religio-philosophic society that was originally settled closer to the mountains and the sources of the great rivers? In more recent historical times there appears to have been a tradition for certain rishis to live in that region. Could it be the case in early Vedic times, as appears to have been the case in later historiical times, that members of that elite religio-philosophic society were accepted, because of their special knowledge, into the general population of north western India; the bulk of that general population being the forerunners of the “Harappan” civilization who were settled on the river plains of that region? This religio-philosophic class, which the Mohenjodaro priest/king sculpture could be representative of, could even have been the catalyst that gave rise to the Harappan urban phase and also could have been the social thread that kept Indian culture alive after the demise of the Harappan urban phase. As a class they would have probably been more distinguishable by their general presence, possession of a higher knowledge and their more strict adherence to religious rites and rituals than by any racial or ethnic characteristics. Prakrit languages and very possibly other languages like Munda and Dravidian would have been spoken by the people of the region during the “Harappan” period; however, culturally, due to the powerful influence of this elite religio-philosophic class, the Harappan civilization would have been predominantly Vedic-Indian with languages derived from Sanskrit becoming the dominant languages.

 

I am presently engaged in developing a theory as an alternative to the PIE theory for how the phenomena referred to as the family IE languages originated. It is based on the idea of small groups of very learned men, rather than large groups of migrating people, going forth from India and being accepted into the societies of non-IE speaking people who allow those learned men to restructure and influence, not totally scrap, the language and cultures those societies.

 

I believe we have become to dependent on the still highly theoretical PIE theory and should start searching for alternatives to explain the origin and spread of IE languages.

 

Any comments welcome, Bruce Duffy.

 

 

 

 

 

..

[Guest guest]

Interesting. Keep it up and post whatever you conveniently can.

 

kishore patnaik

 

 

, Bruce Duffy <bwduffy wrote:

>

>

>

>

> >

> >

> >

> >

> >> >It is a bronze-age text that doesn't know of iron. But

iron

> >> >implements were already produced in Uttar Pradesh, bordering on

the

> >> >Yamuna-Saraswati heartland of the RV, from at least 1800 BC

onwards:

> >

> > An interesting point to note for anyone dating the RV to 1500 BC.

> >

> >

> > <That doesn't mean the (probably multi-lingual) Harappan

civilization

> > <was Vedic. They existed in the same time-bracket, but not in the

> > <same place. The Vedic heartland was on the eastern border of the

> > <Harappan cities' area, in the westernmost part of the monsoon

area, a

> > <different milieu in climatic and agricultural respects.

> >

> > Could the rishis who composed the hymns of the RV have been an

elite

> > religio-philosophic society that was originally settled closer to

the

> > mountains and the sources of the great rivers? In more recent

historical times

> > there appears to have been a tradition for certain rishis to live

in that

> > region. Could it be the case in early Vedic times, as appears to

have been the

> > case in later historiical times, that members of that elite

> > religio-philosophic society were accepted, because of their

special knowledge,

> > into the general population of north western India; the bulk of

that general

> > population being the forerunners of the ³Harappan² civilization

who were

> > settled on the river plains of that region? This religio-

philosophic class,

> > which the Mohenjodaro priest/king sculpture could be

representative of, could

> > even have been the catalyst that gave rise to the Harappan urban

phase and

> > also could have been the social thread that kept Indian culture

alive after

> > the demise of the Harappan urban phase. As a class they would

have probably

> > been more distinguishable by their general presence, possession

of a higher

> > knowledge and their more strict adherence to religious rites and

rituals than

> > by any racial or ethnic characteristics. Prakrit languages and

very possibly

> > other languages like Munda and Dravidian would have been spoken

by the people

> > of the region during the ³Harappan² period; however, culturally,

due to the

> > powerful influence of this elite religio-philosophic class, the

Harappan

> > civilization would have been predominantly Vedic-Indian with

languages derived

> > from Sanskrit becoming the dominant languages.

> >

> > I am presently engaged in developing a theory as an alternative

to the PIE

> > theory for how the phenomena referred to as the family IE

languages

> > originated. It is based on the idea of small groups of very

learned men,

> > rather than large groups of migrating people, going forth from

India and being

> > accepted into the societies of non-IE speaking people who allow

those learned

> > men to restructure and influence, not totally scrap, the language

and cultures

> > those societies.

> >

> > I believe we have become to dependent on the still highly

theoretical PIE

> > theory and should start searching for alternatives to explain the

origin and

> > spread of IE languages.

> >

> > Any comments welcome, Bruce Duffy.

> >

> >

> >

> >

> >

> >

> >

> >

> > .

> >

> >

>