Questioning
the Aryan Invasion Theory and Revising Ancient Indian History
By Klaus Klostermaier
http://www.icj.iskcon.net/6_1klostermaier.htm
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.2
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 neighbourhood of the Caucasus.'3
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'.4
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.'5
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. 1000BCE 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 higher 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 BCE
The 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 BCE
There 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.7
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.8
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 Rajarama9
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 BCE Yajur-, Sama-, Atharvaveda: Completion of Vedic Canon.
3100 BCE Age of Krishna and Vyasa. Mahabharata War. Early Mahabharata.
3000 BCE Shatapathabrahmana, 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,
civilizations 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.10
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.11
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 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 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'.
- 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. 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.
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