The Colonial Paradigm of Indian History

The Steel Frame

It is a tribute to the persistence and tenacity of the colonial overlords that dominated the Indian subcontinent for a relatively short period of 200 years that the prevailing paradigm on the origins and chronology of our civilization is largely constructed by them. Such a paradigm which we shall define as the Colonial Paradigm, while substantially erroneous, is posited on certain assumptions. The key assumption is that the civilization that remains extant has been brought into the area by migrating races such as the Aryans, and in fact some would argue, that such a statement holds also for the so called Dravidians of India. According to such a narrative everything that was worth preserving has been handed down to us over the centuries by migrations, within the last 3 1/2 millennia, into the subcontinent, from somewhere else. It is also true that the history that is taught the children of India today is vastly at variance with the puranic accounts handed down to us over several millennia.

It is to state it without any embellishments, a revised history that is completely at odds with the traditional history of India. Even so great an effort as the History and Culture of the Indian people edited by RC Majumdar, the most famous of Indian historians at the time of Independence accepts the basic framework of the History of India as revised by the British colonialists. Fifty years after independence the narrative has not changed and the banner of the colonial version of history is now borne by the Indian left including the Communists and the rump of the Congress party left behind after successive defections from its fold and whose only common ideology is the adulation of the family of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, despite the fact that the current generation of that family share neither the scholarship that he exhibited in his writings, not the deep sense of commitment that he felt for the betterment of his people and the democratic principles enshrined in the constitution which he was so keen to preserve.

A substantial percentage of Indians now feel they have a stake in the preservation of this false history and when confronted with the reality of their acquiescence to a false and revised history of their own land by a very recent arrival on the scene, react with irrelevant responses such as “why blame the British” (the issue is not one of blame, for after all we are in great admiration of the British for the extraordinary sagacity they displayed in prolonging their imperial rule by every artifice imaginable) and in any event it is not about the British at all. One possible reason for such a stance by the Indic in our view is the so called Societal Stockholm Syndrome, which we have elaborated upon elsewhere. Another possible explanation is that long centuries of servitude as a Dhimmi in Dar ul Islam have robbed the Indic of the capability to think and reason for himself , with the result that he has internalized the notion that what others say about his history has to be more accurate than the narrative contained in the epics and the Puranas from which we derive our values and culture. We have also dealt with the systematic approach that the British used to remake the weltanschuung of the Indic and to create an international image of the Indic that is much at variance with reality , and the success they achieved in the resulting internalization of these views by the Indic himself in our essay titled the South Asia File.

In this monograph we will study the motivations of 2 classes of individuals. One category belonged to individuals who made it a lifelong passion to study the Indic people and their achievements in sciences and the arts and in the process undertook a dangerous and long journey in order to satisfy their curiosity. The other category belongs to those who were influenced considerably by the work of the Indic ancients. The study is startling in that the current disdain with which the Indic is held in the post colonial era is a development that occurred mainly in the last 200 years and that for most of our recorded history the Indic has been held in high esteem by the denizens of the globe. It appears the British had no small part in assiduously cultivating such a picture of the Indic. We say this because substantial numbers of scholars from Britain have expressed their disdain for the contributions of the Indics in unequivocal terms. But the pattern of spending a lifetime studying the Indics for a lifetime and imbibing their knowledge and then subsequently belittling their achievements was first exhibited by the Afghan scholar Al Biruni ( a very rare instance of such behavior in the ancient and medieval world) is more prevalent in recent times. To the extent that the contributions of the ancient Indics are held in high esteem by the occidentals, after the advent of colonial conquest, it is because it was understood that these were contributions made by the so called Aryans immediately after arrival in the subcontinent and that such a creative and inventive spark was extinguished shortly thereafter . Exemplifying such a viewpoint , we quote W W Rouse Ball, the historian of mathematics [1]

“The Arabs had considerable commerce with India, and a knowledge of one or both of the two great Hindoo works on algebra had been obtained in the Caliphate of Al-Mansur (754-775 AD)though it was not until fifty or seventy years later that they attracted much attention. The algebra and arithmetic of the Arabs were largely founded on these treatises, and  I therefore devote this section to the consideration of Hindoo mathematics.The Hindoos like the Chinese have  pretended that they are the most ancient people on the face of the earth, and that to them all sciences owe their creation. But it is probable that these pretensions have no foundation; and in fact no science or useful art (except a rather fantastic  architecture and sculpture) can be definitely traced back to the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula prior to the Aryan invasion. This seems to have taken place at some time in the fifth century or in the sixth century when a tribe of Aryans entered India by  the North West part of their country. Their descendants, wherever they have kept their blood pure, may still be recognized by their superiority over the races they originally conquered; but as is the case with the modern Europeans, they found the climate trying and gradually degenerated”

We remind our readers that such an unabashedly racist sentiment was expressed as late as the beginning of the 20th century, after the renaissance and the enlightenment.

We begin our story by turning our attention to the question of why India has been a subject of such intense interest at least over the prolonged period of over 2 millennia.

Why was India such a subject of intense study for over a period of 2 millennia?

That India has been a subject of exhaustive study and ubiquitous interest to a wide variety of peoples from all corners of the ancient and the modern world throughout the millennia is certainly not indispute. To begin with we like to understand the various motives behind this intense interest. Was it merely intellectual curiosity? Was it really the intention to study these subjects in order that they may be critiqued extensively and then rubbished as inconsequential to the progress of humankind ? Was it a curiosity into the origins of the European languages and history, given that the oldest and most prolific literature of antiquity was in Sanskrit and Pali? We feel the answers were unique to each individual. But certain patterns are emerging among indologists particularly of British and German origin.

There are many reasons for this intense and sustained interest, not least among them being the considerable prowess of the ancient Indic in matters of scholarship, relating to the exact sciences. The Indian university system of the ancient era was world renowned and attracted students from a wide variety of countries. They were strung across the northern Indo Gangetic plain starting from Takshashila on the western end to the famed universities of Nalanda, Odantipura and Vikramshila in present day Bihar.

Indology is a name given by Indologists to the academic study of the history, languages, the sciences and cultures of the Indian subcontinent. Strictly speaking it encompasses the study of the languages, scripts of all of Asia that was influenced by Indic culture. As one can imagine this encompasses almost all of present day Asia except perhaps the very northernmost reaches of Siberia. Indology as viewed by its practitioners in Europe and America is analogous to Entomology, the science of insects, in more ways than one. In both instances the subjects of the study have little say in the matter and the scope of the study. The study is always carried out to be of benefit to the people who undertake the study and there is little or no benefit to the subject of the study who may end up sacrificing his life for the ’cause’.

Indological studies or the study of the Indic people in a scholarly and serious manner can be broken up into 6 major categories in some cases with overlapping time periods.

Regions of the world where interest in Indic studies was predominant:

1. Babylonian and Greek (2500 BCE to 150 BCE). The Semitic and Mediterranean world had ubiquitous contacts with the Indic. We are in the long drawn out process of researching this phase of Indology. Our knowledge of the facts, are meager at the moment. But the more we learn about the Greeks who for the most part hailed from Asia Minor,like the Trojans of Homer, the more it is apparent that they learned a lot of their sciences from the Indian subcontinent

This came to a virtual stop during the heyday of the Roman Empire when it became the paramount Mediterranean power after the fall of Carthage. Rome remained a major trading partner of India but ceased to be interested in Indic scholarship. The Byzantines or the Eastern Empire centered in Constantinople, even though it has sufficient contacts ceased to evince interest after the advent of the adoption of Christianity, as India came to be associated increasingly with the Pagan practices that they were trying hard to extinguish in Europe.

2. China and the Sinic Civilization. (2500 BCE – 1200 CE) The interaction between the Indic and Sinic civilizations has been one of long standing, reaching back to the ancient era, and it has been a two way street, contrary to popular misconceptions. The interaction has been ubiquitous and consistent. India has borrowed much from the Sinic civilization ranging from the mundane to the sublime and vice versa. There is much work yet to be done to study the extent of this interaction, an area that was merely of tertiary interest to the European.

3. Arab and Non Arab Islamic studies of India (most of the Islamic savants who studied India did not speak Arabic as their native tongue, but were descended from converted central Asian and Indic civilizations (700 CE to 1200 CE). In fact it can safely be said that the Arab savants had enormous respect for the capabilities of the Indics as did the Greeks like Pythagoras and Apollonius of Tyanneous before them. The glaring exception to this statement is the cognitive dissonance exhibited by Al Biruni , the most well known amongst the Islamic indologists, who spent a considerable portion of his life in India while expressing scathing contempt and stereotyping of Hindus in his remarks about Indians in general. That there is a contradiction between spending a great portion of one life learning from a people and then trashing them unequivocally does not seem to bother AlBiruni. Furthermore , Al Biruni even though a native of Khorasan (Khwaresm), was raised in Ghazni and spoke a dialect of Farsi known as Dari, which is spoken even today in Afghanistan. These areas of Afghanistan were in fact freshly Islamized after the last of the Hindu Shahi Kingdoms were defeated not very much earlier. The point being Al Biruni was no stranger to Hindu scholarship or culture prior to coming to India. Such an attitude of studied indifference and condescension even after a lifetime of imbibing Indic knowledge, became more and more prevalent after the advent of the colonial era and the norm rather than the exception .

The scholarly exchanges with the Khilafat came to a halt after the sack of Baghdad and Damascus by Hulagu, the grandson of the Mongol Great Khan Chinghiz, the most victorious conqueror of all time. It was also severely impacted when vast numbers of Indics were taken in slavery, especially able bodied men and women, and those with skills in the arts and sciences and equally large numbers were killed at the rate of 100,000 a day during and after a battle. So great were the numbers of Indian slaves who flooded the slave markets of Damascus that the price of slaves dropped dramatically and would seriously impact the economics of slavery as a profitable activity. Some have estimated the sustained decimation of the Indic population over the 5 centuries of Islamic domination of the subcontinent to be in the neighborhood of over 70 million people and for the first time India, always a highly densely populated country in relative terms to the rest of the globe, suffered a drop in population. The scholars retreated farther and farther to the south until they reached Kerala, which is where the Kerala School of astronomy and mathematics flourished for at least 300 years, producing such stalwarts as Nilakanta Somayaji, till the 1700’s.

4. Pre- British colonial Catholic church dominated study of India. It may be surprising to learn that one of the first pioneers in European Indology was the 12th Century Pope, Honorius IV. Then as now, the primary focus of the study was not the scientific acquisition of knowledge but to arm themselves with enough facts to be able to convert the Indic population to Christianity.

5. British colonial Indology (1780 CE – 2000 CE) which was in reality dominated by German scholars. Interest in Indology only took shape and concrete direction after the British came to India, with the advent of the discovery of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones in the 1770’s. Other names for Indology are Indic studies or Indian studies or South Asian studies.

The extraordinary level of interest by German scholars in Indic matters is a very interesting narrative in its own right and we need to reflect upon the highlights of this phenomenon. The German speaking people experienced a vast increase in intellectual activity at about the same time that Britain colonized India. We do not understand the specific factors that came into play during this time, other than to remark on the tremendous intellectual ferment that was running concurrently during the French revolution, and the keen interest that Napoleon showed in matters scientific including the contributions of the orient. Clearly the remarks that Sir William made about Sanskrit as well as the high-level of interest that he provoked in the Sanskrit language, contributed to the overall sense of excitement. But why was it Germany and not Britain as the center of research on the Oriental contributions. The answer lies in the intense search for nationhood that was under way in Germany during that period. When Sanskrit was discovered, and it dawned on the Germans that the antiquity of Sanskrit was very great, and that Sanskrit and German were somehow related, the Germans suddenly had an answer to the question of their own ethnic and linguistic origins. Sir Henry Maine an influential Anglo Indian scholar and former Vice Chancellor of Calcutta university, who was also on the Viceroys council, pronounced a view that many Englishman shared about the unification of Germany.

“A nation has been born out of Sanskrit”

From the beginning, the great interest that Germany showed in Sanskrit had to do with their own obsessions and questions regarding their ethnic and linguistic origins. It had very little or at least far less to do with the origin of the ancient Indic, about whom they had considerably less interest. And yet, that does not stop the proponents of the AIT in India, whose knowledge of European history appears to be rudimentary at best, from asserting that AIT is an obsession of nationalistic Hindus. Such is the fate and the perversion of history that conquered nations can aspire to Different aspects of this fascinating chapter, on the postulation of an Aryan race and its corollaries the Indo European, Indo German are described for instance by various authors Trautmann [2], Rajaram [3] and Arvidsson [4] and very recently by Prodosh Aich [5]. The interesting but the curious aspect of this phenomena is that while the concept of the Aryan race has pretty much been discarded by most of the modern generation of the European world, It lingers on in the narrative of Indian History, a relic of the heyday of Europe’ s dominance on the world scene, when racist theories were abundant to explain this dominance as being a consequence of their heritage as an Aryan people.

In contrast to the Germans and the French , whose interest in matters Indic was catalyzed by their observance of the ubiquitous presence of the Indic civilization in South East Asia, the British had a particular reluctance to study the nature and extent of the Indic civilization. First and foremost amongst their reasons for this neglect was the reluctance to admit that a subject people had any worthwhile civilization to speak of, let alone one that was of far greater antiquity to their own. Britain was the last of the 3 countries in Europe to have a chair in Sanskrit, and it was almost 50 years after the death of Sir William that England got around to establishing a chair at Oxford, the famous Boden chair.

One of the criticisms leveled at the new breed of Indian historians who wish to uncover the authentic history of India after the morass of inconsistencies to which it has sunk is that they are motivated by political considerations and the further charge is made that they are ‘nationalistic’. Apart from the question of any violation of ethics by being nationalistic not being apparent to me, this is to us a perplexing charge to make since it is apparent that political motivations have been always dominant in the pursuit of Indological studies during the colonial era, right from the outset since the time of Sir William Jones, when he discovered the existence of Sanskrit. One such political motivation was the need for the European to define his identity outside the framework of Semitic traditions which dominated the religious life of Europe. The notion that the North European Viking owed much of his civilization to the Mediterranean Semite was not palatable to most of the elite among the countries of Northern lands of Europe for reasons which we do not have the time to go into now. So, the discovery of Sanskrit was accompanied by a big sigh of relief that the languages of Europe did not after all derive from Hebrew but from an ancestor language which was initially assumed to be Sanskrit. In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of Sanskrit by Sir William Jones, there was a great gush of admiration and worship of the sublime nature of the Sanskrit texts such as Sakuntala. But as the European realized that the present day practitioners of Sanskrit were not blonde and blue eyed (remember ideas of racial superiority were dominant in 18th century Europe despite the advent of the enlightenment and the renaissance) this was found to be equally unpalatable.

The European indologist therefore came upon the ingenious explanation that the Sanskritic culture of the subcontinent was not native to the subcontinent but was impregnated by a small band of nomadic Viking like marauders who then proceeded to transform themselves within the short space of 200 years into the intellectual class of India. This hypothesis (because that is what it was) had of course no basis in fact, but it served the purpose and killed several birds with one stone. It denied India the autocthonous legacy of the dominant culture of the subcontinent, and helped create a schism in the Indian body politic, and further implied that the native Indics were incapable of original thought and certainly was not capable of producing a language like Sanskrit. It filled the obsessive need during those decades that the European had for an ancestor that was not Semitic in origin. Lo and behold the ancestor did not come from India but from a long lost Shangrila of whom there were no survivors (so that their hypothesis could never be contradicted). Thus was born the mythical Aryan, whose only qualification was that he should hail from a land that was anywhere but India, preferably from a region not very densely inhabited or conscious of their antiquity. Further it gave the excuse for the British to claim that they were indeed the later day version of the Aryans destined to lord it over lesser, more unfortunate people by reason of the fact that they were Aryans. See for instance (Trautmann (1997) or Chakrabarti (1997))

In short, the study of India, during the colonial era has always been accompanied by a healthy dose of imperialist dogma and by disdain for a people who they felt could so easily be vanquished in battle by handful of Englishmen. This is in addition to the normal human tendency to exhibit a degree of the ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome or the propensity to devalue the acquisition of knowledge by people and civilizations other than their own. This is a train of thought that needs to be explored further, but we do not wish to be sidetracked from the main topic. We hasten to add that the fundamental scholarly impulse and intellectual curiosity that drives most scholars still motivates a substantial section of the indologists, regardless of nationality, despite much pressure from European academia to toe the line and not to stray from the conventional wisdom . But this stream of objective scholars died out pretty soon after and became almost extinct in the nineteenth century, and in general, with a few exceptions amongst the French, the European Indologists toed the party line that Indic contributions were shallow and insubstantial.

In fact the British presence in India was steadily increasing long before the Battle of Plassey in 1757 CE, but so great was the insularity of the colonial overlord that it took almost three hundred years for a relatively well educated scholar like Sir William Jones to show up in India after Vasco da Gama landed of the coast of Goa in 1492 CE, and notice the similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages.

Prodosh Aich has done extensive research into primary sources and has come to the conclusion that the vaunted linguistic scholarship of Sir William was to put it mildly much exaggerated. We shall examine the background of Sir William especially his early years to see wherein lay the truth.

But the discovery of Sanskrit by Sir William and the coming of the British had a terminally fatal effect on the conduct of scientific studies in India. It cut off the Indic from his own native source of traditional learning and replaced it with the traditions of a land far away with which he had no physical contact, and could not relate, with the result that literacy fell to 6% at the turn of the 20th century. Education was tightly controlled by the government and all support to schools that did not teach English was summarily stopped, except in states that were ruled by a local Maharajah such as Travancore Cochin, Baroda and Mysore. India was turned into a vast Gulag where no ideas other than those of the British were allowed to penetrate and the Indian was effectively barred from traveling to foreign lands, except on a one way trip to a distant land as indentured labor, lest they return with the subversive notions of freedom and democracy which as Churchill remarked on more than one occasion were not applicable to the subject populations of their Colonies. So great was the travel restriction that the Indic internalized this consequence of the rule of the Colonial Overlord, to be a characteristic of the assumed native propensity to aversion of adventure and exploration. There was no money allocated for research and no encouragement of savants, who had little opportunity to pursue further research. So the steady supply of Indic scientists which lasted till about 1780 CE finally died out and Indic science was almost extinguished from the land.

This is not to say that there have been no benefits accrued from the change in the medium of instruction to English. Due to the fortuitous circumstance that a substantial part of the new world now spoke English, placed Indic youngsters at an advantageous situation when it came to getting admission to graduate studies in North America. This coupled with the investment in higher education made by Jawaharlal Nehru India’s first Prime Minister catapulted India into the leadership ranks of countries who were players in the new Information Technology. But the negatives remain. The vast majority of the Indian population is not a participant in this new bounty, because they do not have the access to the expensive schools that purvey access to such an education.

The most telling impact of the newly coined endeavor called philology , that was the result of this unwanted gush of attention engendered ever since the discovery of Sanskrit, was the manner in which the Indic was viewed by the rest of the world and even more importantly the internalization of the British and European view of India by the average literate English educated Indic. Till then the Indic was widely respected throughout the world and his geographical origin was synonymous with scholarship.

Today, it is commonplace in India to deride somebody who expresses pride in his tradition and his civilization as being jingoistic. The Colonial overlord went to extraordinary lengths to undermine the Civilizational commonalities amongst the people of India by various and diverse means. Anything that had a negative impact was played to the hilt. The antiquity of Indian history was systematically whittled away and the new dates had to conform to the notion that India did not contribute anything of value to civilization and that all she knew in the area of science and mathematics, was learned from the Greeks.

The Indian was uniformly characterized as a shiftless indolent individual with very few redeeming qualities So great was the change and so lasting in its effect that today vast numbers of Indian youth have almost the same opinion of India and Indic traditions that the Colonial overlords had, of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. There has been a massive change in the psyche of the Indic, much of it for the worse, a fact that was brought out in vivid portrayals by V S Naipaul when he coined the phrase ‘the wounded civilization’ in his references to the subcontinent.

Examples of the internalization of the European views of India abound in India today. Even eminent Indian historians like RC Majumdar have expressed some of these views in writing without substantiating how they arrived at such conclusions. We give below a sample. It is ironic that these viewpoints are usually expressed by Indics rather than non Indics.

Table 1: the general British view of the Indic during the Colonial Era

From such a viewpoint it was indeed a short step to assume as Karl Marx did, that the Indic was destined to be ruled by others. The germ of such a vast change in psyche was the goal of Thomas Babington Macaulay and he would have been rather pleased to see the consequences of his minute on education where he proposed changing the medium of instruction to English in the 1830’s in order to produce a class of Brown Englishman who would occupy positions intermediate between those of the Colonial overlords and the unwashed masses of the subcontinent. In the same vein, HH Wilson, the first occupant of the Boden Chair in Sanskrit, wrote as follows,

> “From the survey which has been submitted to you, you will perceive that the practical religion of the Hindus is by no means a concentrated and compact system, but a heterogeneous compound made up of various and not infrequently incompatible ingredients, and that to a few ancient fragments it has made large and unauthorized additions, most of which are of an exceedingly mischievous and disgraceful nature. It is, however, of little avail yet to attempt to undeceive the multitude; their superstition is based upon ignorance, and until the foundation is taken away, the superstructure, however crazy and rotten, will hold together.”

Power over a vast area like India does strange things to people, one of which is the loss of ‘common sense’ , not to mention the loss of humility, and one can see the process of creating the mythological Indian has already begun as early as 1833, the process of remaking the Indic mindset had commenced in earnest.

There is an immense irony in this state of affairs and that is that India is well on its way to becoming the largest English speaking nation in the planet. If present trends continue the number of English speaking people residing in India will exceed that of the Unites States within 20 years. The implications are enormous. For instance, India will become the largest producer of English books in the planet, a state of affairs that may already be true because of the huge market of South and South East Asia.

6. Indic studies by native Indics when the Indic tradition miraculously resurrected itself shortly after the beginning of the twentieth century from an almost comatose condition (1900 CE to the present)

So we come to the sixth and current period of Indological studies. The European, with few exceptions continued to study the Indic past as if the present day practitioners did not exist. In this the indologists tried to emulate Egyptology and the study of Meso American civilizations. In both these instances, the Europeans could say anything they liked without being challenged by survivors of the tradition and get away with it, because there were no survivors after the routine scourging of native populations using the well entrenched twin techniques

• first with the sword and then the Holy book to erase all prior traditions, as well as inflicting upon them diseases which effectively decimated their populations. They studied India in the same vein, making untenable assumptions and hypotheses and then indulged in circular arguments that anything that does not fit the assumption that they made, is invalid.

But the Hindu is a strange creature, imbued with the genetic longevity of the cockroach and the intellectual hardiness that comes from millennia of tradition devoted to scholarship. Indics were the first to codify the principle of acquisition of knowledge known now by the name of Epistemology and they resisted the imposition of a history and a narrative that was substantially at variance from their Puranic traditions. These principles of acquisition of knowledge are alluded to in my booklet on Dhaarmik traditions and include Perception and Observation (Pratyaksha), Anumaana (inference), Comparison and Analogy (Upamaana), shabda ( acceptance, though not necessarily uncritical acceptance, of the Word as manifested in the ancient scriptures, Arthapaati (implication) and anupalabdi (non apprehension and skepticism in the face of non-apprehension).

The systematic approach, combined with the methodology of learning recommended by the Upanishads namely, the triune method of shravana, manana and nididhyasana forms the core of the approach to all kinds of knowledge , whether It be Paara Vidya or Apaara Vidya (see Glossary). The term Shravana refers basically to hearing, but also includes reading, discussions and the like. Manana is contemplation of what has been studied or heard. Nididhyasana is concentration on the subject to the exclusion of everything else. It may not always be possible or advisable to practice multitasking, which has become de rigueur in this age of rapid technological change. Usually, the initial knowledge about anything has to be acquired through a guru, because he is the dependable authority on the subject. Manana and Nididhyasana depend on one’s own effort, with some guidance from the guru. The role of the teacher is only as a guidepost. The journey has to be undertaken by us with our own efforts. It is this comprehensive approach to the acquisition of knowledge that has given the edge to the Hindu Vis a vis other civilizations over the millennia and is catalyzing the reclamation of the high ground in the field of Indic studies. This is not to say that the Modern Indic should ignore the work done by others in this field , but it does mean the converse that indologists outside India, can no longer ignore the legitimate claims to scholarship of Indic savants in the study of their own History. Let us hope that as we go from here that he, the Western Indologist will abandon the politically motivated approach that he has taken till hitherto and will accord the discerning Indic savant the same consideration and apply objective criteria to the studies undertaken by those who are not of a European background. Certainly it means that he should eschew the use of the convenient and stereotypical characterization of anything that he does not like as being a product or a conspiracy of the Hindutva or a Hindu nationalist.

In reality, there is a basic contradiction in the western characterization of the Hindu and the pejorative use of the word Hindu nationalist. The Hindu faith or Sanaatana Dharma has often been characterized in my view with adequate justification, as being too eclectic and all encompassing. In fact in the quote above Hayman Wilson characterizes it as being ‘heterogeneous and contradictory’. And yet, there is the constant and ubiquitous drumbeat in the use of the word Hindu nationalist, which implies an exclusionary stance and narrow mindedness. To the followers of Plato and Socrates in the Occidental world, I ask, well, which is it, eclectic and all encompassing weltanschuung, or exclusionist and narrow minded.

Eurocentrism and Mathematics

For some, their Eurocentrism (or Greco-centrism) is so deeply entrenched that they cannot bring themselves to face the idea of independent developments in early Indian mathematics, even as a remote possibility.

The geographical location of India was a key factor in the exchanges which India had with varius regions of the world. This enabled her from the very beginning to play an important role in the transmission and diffusion of ideas. The traffic was often two-way, with Indian ideas and achievements traveling abroad as easily as those from outside entering her own consciousness. Some sources even credit Pythagoras with having traveled as far as India in search of knowledge, which may explain some of the close parallels between Indian and Pythagorean philosophy and religion.

These parallels include:

a belief in the transmigration of souls;

the theory of four elements constituting matter;

the structure of the religio-philosophical character of the Pythagorean fraternity, which resembled Buddhist monastic orders; and The contents of the mystical speculations of the Pythagorean schools, which bear a striking resemblance of the Hindu Upanishads.

According to Greek tradition, Pythagoras, Thales, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Democritus and others undertook journey to the East to study philosophy and science. By the time Ptolemaic Egypt and Rome’s Eastern empire had established themselves just before the beginning of the Common era, Indian civilization was already well developed, having founded three great religions – Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – and expressed in writing the massive literature (of the Veda, the Brahmanas, the Upanishads, the Purana,) as well as fundamental theories in science and medicine. There are scattered references to Indian science in the literary sources from countries to the west of India after the time of Alexander.

Transmittal of Knowledge – Was there theft of Intellectual Property

There is another point to be made about the direction in which knowledge was transmitted. Many have been the individuals from other parts of the world who studied at Indian universities like Nalanda, Takshashila, Vikramshila, and Odantipura till the 12th century. It was a rare instance where they would go back and denigrate the knowledge they had so acquired or the land they acquired it from, and in fact went out of their way to eulogize the education they received at these locations which were studded all along the Gangetic valley, but particularly so in Vihara (Bihar). However all this changed during the16th century when the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) sent highly educated (for those days) individuals, the number sometimes exceeding 70 or 80 at times at any given point in time, whose sole purpose was to extract as much information from the people who practiced such skills, like Jyotish Pandits and engage in intellectual property theft. What defines such activity as theft? If the recipient  does not acknowledge the source of his teaching then it is fair to call it theft.

Differing standards for Claims for transmission of knowledge

In fact no study of this kind would be complete without a reference to the differing standards by which Occidentalists have concluded whether a particular discipline was imported or exported out of the Occident. We quote C K Raju [6]

“However, we have also seen that the standard of evidence is not uniform, but varies with the claim being made. The standard of evidence required for an acceptable claim of transmission of knowledge from East to West, is different from the standards of evidence required for a similar claim of transmission of knowledge from West to East. Thus there is always the possibility that similar things could have been discovered independently, and that western historians are still arguing about this. even in so obvious a case as that of Copernicus. Finally we have seen that this racist double standard of evidence is not an incidental error, but is backed by centuries of racist tradition, religious exhortations by Popes, and by legal interpretations authoritatively handed down by, say the US Supreme Court.”

Priority and the possibility of contact always establish a socially acceptable case for transmission from west to  East, but priority and definite contact never seems to establish an acceptable case for transmission from East to West, for there is always the possibility, that similar things could have been discovered independently.

“Hence to establish transmission we propose to adopt a legal standard of evidence, good enough to hang a person for murder. Briefly we propose that the case for any must be established on the grounds of

1. Motivation,

2. opportunity,

3. Circumstantial evidence and

4. Documentary evidence.

The importance of epistemological continuity has been repeatedly stressed above; any such claim must also take into account epistemological issues”

Examples abound, especially when it comes to areas such as Mathematics, Astronomy and Linguistics and the discovery of the origin of scripts. In particular we cite the instance of David Pongee’s PhD thesis titled “Materials for the Transmission of Greek astrology to India”. Notice he does not ask whether such a transmittal ever happened. That is a given, a hypothesis that needs not be proven. This is another example of a circular argument. Assume the answer in your initial hypotheses and then claim that it is an incontrovertible fact

The inconsistencies in the current narrative of Indian history

What are the major contentions and the resulting contradictions in the Occidentalist (an Occidental who studies the civilizations and the linguistics of the languages of the orient) chronology of India.

Table 2  The inconsistencies in the current narrative of Indian history

In discussing the individuals, one is struck by the generally, high intellectual caliber of the scholars who form the bulk of the Indologists. And yet a very high percentage were loathe to discard the prevalent racist dogma of the day , that the Indics were incapable of a high level of intellectual effort and that therefore the only explanation (of the high level of civilization in the Indian subcontinent relative to the rest of the ancient world) was that such a circumstance could only have been possible if an alien civilization had transplanted it from somewhere else, The Occidental was unable to free himself from the bondage and blindness resulting from the prejudice that the Indic was incompetent to make these discoveries

It is also becoming increasingly clear that the initial assumptions regarding the competence and scholarship of such well known people as Sir William, Max Mueller, Franz Bopp, and many others have to be reevaluated and that the vast majority of the so called Sanskrit scholars were indifferent to mediocre scholars in the Sanskrit language and were rather presumptuous in their pronouncements on the nature , antiquity and significance of the literature that was now available to them . The extensive forensic investigation that Prodosh Aich has carried out and reported in his book called “Lies with long Legs”, on the competency of these scholars yields some shocking facts including misrepresentation of their earned degrees and consigns most of these individuals to the category of mediocre imposters

Explanatory notes

The dates associated with most of the gentlemen we will identify should be regarded only as approximate at least to the nearest decade, as there were no accurate birth records prior to the 18th century. Unlike in ancient India where a birth was sometimes recorded with the appropriate Nakshatra, tithi, maasa and Samvatsara , such access to a calendar was not easily available to the ordinary folk in Europe till well into the enlightenment and in fact the Gregorian calendar was defective till 1540 CE. As such the birthdates of most European individuals other than royalty, prior to the nineteenth century, must be regarded with circumspection and merely as an approximation.

One final comment before we begin. It is estimated that the total manuscript wealth available in India today is in the order of 5 million according to the National Mission for Manuscripts was established in February 2003, by the Ministry of Tourism and Culture, Government of India. A unique project in its program and mandate, the Mission seeks to unearth, preserve, catalog, index and make available for research the vast manuscript wealth of India.

These manuscripts cover a variety of themes, textures and aesthetics, scripts, languages, calligraphies, illuminations and illustrations. Together, they constitute the ‘memory' and the DNA, of India's history, heritage and thought. These manuscripts lie scattered across the country and beyond, in numerous institutions as well as private collections, often unattended and undocumented. The National Mission for Manuscripts aims to locate, document, preserve and render these accessible—to connect India's past with its future, its memory with its aspirations. The electronic catalogue or database contains data on about three hundred thousand (300,000) manuscripts, and the database is steadily increasing day by day.

This is the case despite heavy losses due to wars, destruction and natural decay. Out of this staggering number about 1 million have been catalogued in India and perhaps another 200,000 abroad in various libraries such as the Bodleian Libray in Oxford. This is by far the largest extant literature from the ancient world for any civilization. There is nothing even remotely comparable anywhere else. In one field alone, namely astronomy, the late David Pingree found so many manuscripts that he called the resulting effort at cataloguing a Census, s Census which took several volumes to compile

And yet we are told repeatedly that the ancient Indics were deficient in historical record keeping. Our riposte is the query ‘relative to whom are we deficient ?’. Where else in the world do we find a literature going back to 4000 BCE. It is no wonder that scholars have found the study of India to be such a fertile field and continue to find it so even today.

Figure 1 The DeviMahatmya MS in Sanskrit, an example of a manuscript on palm-leaf, Bihar or Nepal, 11th c., 32 ff., 5x31 cm, 2 columns, (3x27 cm), 5 lines in an early Bhujimol script, borders marked with double lines with orange pigmentation between lines, 1 miniature in text.

Binding: Nepal, 11th c., carved wooden covers, decorated with 10 miniatures, poti with hole for the

binding cord.

Provenance:

1. Monastery in Nepal (ca. 11th c.-);
2. Sam Fogg cat. 17(1996):40.

(7992 words)

Appendix A

Meaning of History & Itihaasa

Historians and philosophers have been contemplating the meaning of history since, well, since the beginning of history! A simple definition of history is” remembering the past “or Knowledge of what has happened from the start until the present. It is also the knowledge of the past since record keeping was initiated. The purpose of studying history in school is to teach the student understanding of what has taken place so that we may build upon and understand how a nation functions and how it came to be.

We also study the history of other nations and how their histories interact with our history. A greater awareness of history results in a more enlightened and educated citizenry. Knowledge of our past helps us understand the present and prepare for the future. Knowing the history of the world helps the individual respect and appreciate one’s own form of government and society as well as become better informed about differences in the Civilizational ethos of other peoples of the world

“The word history comes from Greek ἱστορία (istoria), from the Proto-Indo-European \wid-tor-, from the root \weid-, "to know, to see"(this is a hypothesis). This root is also present in the English word wit, in the Latin words vision and video, in the Sanskrit word veda, and in the Slavic word videti and vedati, as well as others (The asterisk before a word indicates that it is a hypothetical construction, not an attested form.)

The Ancient Greek word ἱστορία, istoría, means "knowledge acquired by investigation, inquiry". It was in that sense that Aristotle used the word in his Περί Τά Ζωα Ιστορία, Peri Ta Zoa Istória or, in Latinized form, Historia Animalium. The term is derived from ἵστωρ, hístōr meaning wise man, witness, or judge.

We can see early attestations of ἵστωρ in Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes' oath, and in Boiotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either "judge" or "witness," or similar). The form historeîn, "to inquire", is an Ionic derivation, which spread first in Classical Greece and ultimately over all of Hellenistic civilization. The Ionic origin indicates a cognate meaning with its Indo Iranian predecessor. It was still in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late 16th century, when he wrote about "Natural History". For him, historia was "the knowledge of objects determined by space and time", that sort of knowledge provided by memory (while science was provided by reason, and poetry was provided by fantasy).

The word entered the English language in 1390 with the meaning of "relation of incidents, story". In Middle English, the meaning was "story" in general. The restriction to the meaning "record of past events" arises in the late 15th century. In German, French, and most Germanic and Romance languages the same word is still used to mean both "history" and "story". The adjective historical is attested from 1561, and historic from

1. Historian in the sense of a "researcher of history" is attested from
2. In all European languages, the substantive "history" is still used to mean both "what happened with men", and "the scholarly study of the happened", the latter sense sometimes distinguished with a capital letter, "History", or the word historiography (more commonly in use in India)” [7]

The original meaning of Itihaasa had a more precise sense than the word History. The etymology attested to by Panini indicates itiha to mean ‘thus indeed , in this tradition’[8].

One of the earliest references to Itihaasa in the literature of antiquity is in Chanakyas’s Arthashastra.

Our investigations lead us to believe that the Maurya empire for which he was the preceptor began in 1534 BCE. He defines Itihaasa, in the context of the syllabus prescribed for training of a Prince, with the following words;

पुराणिमितवृत्तमाख्याियकोदाहरणं धमर्शास्तर्मथर्शास्तर्ं चेतीितहासः > Puraana (the chronicles of the ancients), Itivrtta (history), Akhyayika (tales), Udaaharana (illustrative stories), Dharmashastra (the canon of Righteous conduct), and Arthashastra (the science of Government) are known by (comprise the corpus of Itihaasa ) History

-Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Book 1, Chapter 5

Thus, History (Itihaasa) in this definition takes on the meaning more akin to the sense of Historiography and is perhaps even more eclectic and appears to indicate a superset of political science and History as we use them today. We feel vindicated therefore in calling this a conference on Indian History, since we seem to ascribe the same broad meaning that Kautilya did 3 millennia ago.

In the MB , which is itself considered Itihaasa, is the following verse in Adi Parva 1.267,268, that a knowledge of the Itihaasa and Purana is essential to the proper understanding the Veda

tathA hi mahAbhArate mAnavIye ca – itihAsa-purANAbhyAM vedaM samupabRMhayet bibhety alpaśrutAd vedo mAm aya > ṃ prahariṣyati iti, pUranAt purANam iti cAnyatra. na cAvedena vedasya bRMhaNaM sambhavati nah y aparipUrNasya kanaka-valayasya trapuNA pUraNaM yujyateतथ् िह महाभारतॆ मानवीयेच “इितहासपुराणाभ्य़ां वॆदो समुपबृंयेत िबभॆत्य अल्पौुता दं वॆदो मामयं ू ह िरंयित “ > इित पूरणात् पुराणम इित चन्यऽ । > न च वॆदॆन वॆदःयॄमणं सम्भवित न ह्यपिरपूणर्ःय कनक वलयःय ऽपुणा पुराणमुपयुज्यतो। > > This is why the Mahabharata (Adi-Parva 1.267,268) and Manu-Samhita state, "One should complement one's understanding of the Vedas with the help of the Itihasas and the Puranas." And elsewhere it is stated, "The Puranas are called by that name because they are complete."

The quintessential quote is that of Kalhana in the Rajatarangini, who is regarded as a modern in Indian parlance

धमार्थर्काममोक्षाणामुपदेशसमिन्वतं । > पुरावृत्तं कथायुक्तिमितहासं ूचक्षते ।। > “Dharmaartha-kaama-moskshaanaam upadesa-samanvitam | > Puraa-vrttam, kathaa-yuktam Ithihaasam prachakshate ||” > > History will be the narration of events as they happened, in the form of a story, which will be an advice to the reader to be followed in life, to gain the purusaarthas namely Kama the satiation of desires through Artha the tool, by following the path of Dharma the human code of conduct to gain Moksha or liberation.

Clearly there is an emphasis on the traditions and on the utilitarian aspect of History, embedded in the etymology of Itihaasa. The reason we draw emphasis to the ambiguity in the use of the word History is that, in our usage in this conference, while we adhere to the broader usage of the word History, we have separated the Civilizational aspects in distinct sessions.

APPENDIX B

THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE VEDIC EPISTEME

To those who are relatively unfamiliar with the Hindu Dharma , the vast panoply and canon of Hindu Shastras is both bewildering and overwhelming. Just as there is order in the cosmos, an order that needs effort and diligence to discover and comprehend, so also it is the case with the discovery of the ontology and structure of the Dharma, an effort which I might add is more than rewarding. Shastra is a Sanskrit word used to denote education/knowledge in a general sense.

The word is generally used as a suffix in the context of technical or specialized knowledge in a defined area of practice. For example, Astra Shastra means, knowledge about —Handling of weapons“, Astra means weapons, and Shastra is their

knowledge.

The scripture of the Hindu is broadly divided into Shruti (Sanskrit श्रित, that which is heard and Smriti (स्मररित) that which is remembered.

Shruti, the main body of the Hindu canonical scripture, comprises the following:

The Veda or Vedas–the Rig-Veda , the Sama-Veda, the Atharva-Veda, the Yajur-Veda, comprise the Samhitas–texts of prayers and hymns, charms, invocations and sacrificial formulae. The Rig Veda is the Book of Devotional Verse, the Yajur Veda is the Book of Sacrificial Formulae, the Sama Veda is the Book of Chants, and the Atharva Veda is the book of Mystic-therapeutic Priest craft. Their composition precedes their arrangement into the four Samhitas by a long period of oral transmission. The word Veda is derived from the root word Vid or Knowledge and is cognate with the English words wisdom, wit:

The Upanishads

The Bhagavad Gita (the Song Celestial) is actually a part of the Mahabharata epic (The Great Bharata epic) but by universal consent and acclaim has attained the status of Shruti over time because of the eternal verities that it espouses. The scene develops as a dialogue between Sri Krishna (the 7th Avatar of lord Vishnu) and Arjuna , the Pandava prince and is set in the backdrop of the Mahabharata War (The Great Bharata War) which takes place in the battlefield of Kurukshetra not too far from the environs of present day Delhi. The iconic significance of this historic dialogue between the Lord (the manifestation of Brahman) and his disciple (a metaphor for all of humanity) to the Indic throughout the ages till the present day is so immense and so timeless and relevant in its message, that hyperbole would not suffice to describe the same. It remains indeed a stirring call to the observance of Dharma in one‘s own life.

The date for the Mahabharata war remains unsettled to this day but compelling arguments can be made for dating it to the end of Kaliyuga circa 3100 BCE. We will describe some of the methodologies and the results of these attempts later in the FAQ Smriti comprises the rest of the scriptures.

There are eighteen main Smritis, each one named after its principal author [2];

Manu Smriti Yajnavalkya Smriti Parasara Smriti Vishnu Smriti Daksha Smriti Samvarta Smriti Vyasa Smriti Harita Smriti Satapata Smriti Vasishtha Smriti Yama Smriti Apastamba Smriti [2]

Incidentally, the number 18 crops up ubiquitously in Vedic literature and Indian astronomy, and has special significance,as do other multiples of 9, such as 27,108,360,432

Gautama Smriti Devala Smriti Sankha-Likhita Smriti Usana Smriti Atri Smriti Saunaka Smriti

They can also be classified according to the following taxonomy:

The Upa-Vedas

ArthaVeda (the sciences of Economics, Commerce, Geopolitics and Sociology)

Dhanurveda (the science of War)

GandharvaVeda (the science of Music)

AyurVeda (the science of Medicine)

and can be broadly categorized into:

Dharma Shastra (the laws)

Mahakavya (the Epics; they include Mahabharata and the Ramayana )

Purana (the fables or writings)

Sutra (proverbs or aphorisms)

Agama (the philosophies; including Mantra, Tantra, and Yantra)

Dyasana or Darshana (the philosophies; including the Vedanta)

The Vedangas provide the infrastructure and disciplines needed to study the VedaVyakarana (the Grammar of Language and Sanskrit in particular was first codified by Panini in his Epoch making work, the Ashtadhyayi. We will have more to say about this extraordinary individual later under the topics of Mathematics and his possible discovery of Zero and the study of Linguistics. Panini was undoubtedly one of the earliest, if not the first among all grammarians in the history of the world).

Jyotishi (Astronomy and Astrology)

Nirukta (Etymology and Linguistics)

Shiksha (Phonetics) Chandas (Meter, chanting of poetry)

KalpaSutra (Ritual procedures)

To conclude this brief survey of the ancient scriptures, let us remind ourselves that the bulk of the literature has been lost due to a variety of reasons over the millennia that have elapsed since they were first composed (see Figure )

Then there are the 3 Vedic appendices The Aranyakas The Brahmanas The Puranas

To quote Swami Sivananda —The Friendly Treatises“

The Puranas are of the same class as the Itihasas (the Ramayana , Mahabharata, etc.).They have five characteristics (Pancha Lakshana), namely, history, cosmology (with various symbolical illustrations of philosophical principles), secondary creation, genealogy of kings, and of Manvantaras. All the Puranas belong to the class of Suhrit-Sammitas, or the Friendly Treatises, while the Vedas are called the Prabhu-Sammitas or the Commanding Treatises with great authority. Vyasa is the compiler of the P uranas from age to age; and for this age, he is Krishna-Dvaipayana, the son of Parasara. The Puranas are classified into a Mahâ–(—great“) and an Upa–(—lower, additional“) corpus. According to Matysa Purana, [5] they are said to narrate five subjects, called Pancha Lakshana pañcalakṣaṇa (—five distinguishing marks“):

Sarga–The creation of the universe.

Pratisarga–Secondary creations, mostly re-creations after dissolution include,

Vamśa–Genealogy of gods and sages.

Manvantara–The creation of the human race and the first human beings.

Vamúânucaritam–Dynastic histories.

Manavantras is the period of Manu‘s rule consisting of 71 celestial Yugas or 308,448,000 years.

The Puranas were written to popularize the religion of the Vedas. They contain the essence of the Vedas. The aim of the Puranas is to impress on the minds of the masses the teachings of the Vedas and to generate in them devotion to God, through concrete examples, myths, stories, legends, lives of saints, kings and great men, allegories and chronicles of great historical events. The sages made use of these parables to illustrate the eternal principles of religion. The Puranas were meant, not only for the scholars, but for the vast majority of the populace who found the Darshanas too abstract and who could not, for whatever reason, study the Vedas.

The Darsanas or schools of philosophy are very abstract. They are meant mainly for those with an introspective temperament. The Puranas can be read and appreciated by everybody Religion is taught in a very easy and interesting way through the Puranas. Even to this day, the Puranas are popular. The Puranas contain the history of remote times. They also give a description of the regions of the universe not visible to the ordinary physical eye. They are very interesting to read and are full of information of all kinds. Children hear the stories from their grandmothers. Pundits and Purohits hold Kathas or religious discourses in temples, on banks of rivers and in other important places. It is the tradition for bards to recite these stories in song and poetry.

Eighteen Puranas

There are eighteen main Puranas and an equal number of subsidiary Puranas or Upa-Puranas. The main Puranas are:

Srimad Bhagavata Purana

The Srimad Bhagavata Purana chronicles the legends of the various Avataras of Lord Vishnu. There are ten Avataras of Vishnu. The aim of every Avatara is to save the world from some great danger, to destroy the wicked and protect the virtuous. The ten Avataras are: Matsya (The Fish), Kurma (The Tortoise), Varaha (The Boar), Narasimha (The Man-Lion), Vamana (The Dwarf), Parasurama (Rama with the axe, the destroyer of the Kshatriya race), Ramachandra (the hero of the Ramayana –the son of Dasaratha, who destroyed Ravana), Sri Krishna, the teacher of the Gita, Buddha (the prince-ascetic, founder of Buddhism ), and Kalki (the hero riding on a white horse, who is to come at the end of the Kali-Yuga).

In short the Bhagavata Purana is the chronicle of the Indic peoples since the dawn of history ever since the human species evolved into mammals from the oceans and waters of the planet.

The object of the Matsya Avatara was to save Vaivasvata Manu from destruction by a deluge. The object of Kurma Avatara was to enable the world to recover some precious things which were lost in the deluge. The Kurma gave its back for keeping the churning rod when the Gods and the Asuras churned the ocean of milk. The purpose of Varaha Avatara was to rescue, from the waters, the earth which had been dragged down by a demon named Hiranyaksha. The purpose of Narasimha Avatara, half-lion and half-man, was to free the world from the oppression of Hiranyakasipu, a demon, the father of Bhakta Prahlada. The object of Vamana Avatara was to restore the power of the gods which had been eclipsed by the penance and devotion of King Bali. The object of Parasurama Avatara was to deliver the country from the oppression of the Kshatriya rulers. Parasurama destroyed the Kshatriya race twenty-one times.

The object of Rama Avatara was to destroy the wicked Ravana. The object of Sri Krishna Avatara was to destroy Kamsa and other demons, to deliver His wonderful message of the Gita in the Mahabharata war, and to become the centre of the Bhakti schools of India. The object of Buddha Avatara was to prohibit animal sacrifices and teach piety. The object of the Kalki Avatara is the destruction of the wicked and the re-establishment of virtue.

Vishnu Purana, > Naradiya Purana, > Garuda (Suparna) Purana, > Padma Purana, > Varaha Purana, > Brahma Purana, > Brahmanda Purana, > Brahma Vaivarta Purana, > Markandeya Purana, > Linga Purana, > Siva Purana, > Skanda Purana and > Agni Purana. > Bhavishya Purana, > Vamana Purana, > Matsya Purana, > Kurma Purana, > > Itihaasa (epic history or Mahakavya ) Ramayana , Mahabharata (the Bhagavad Gita is a part of this monumental epic) When one adds up all of the above, it constitutes a substantial corpus of the record of the Indic civilization ever since the mists of time and it can safely be asserted with a great deal of certitude that this is probably the largest body of extant work, assembled by man in the ancient era.

Fables and Allegories

Panchatantra

Popular literature in Prakrit Languages

The Popular literature consists of the works produced in the Prakrit languages, other than Sanskrit, such as Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Bengali, and so on by eminent scholars over a period of more than three thousand years. Included in this category are both the translations from the Sanskrit and also original works. Since it is not possible to deal with the entire list we are mentioning a few important works.

Tamil is the oldest of the South Indian languages and in terms of antiquity it may be as old as the Sanskrit itself. A lot of devotional literature was composed in Tamil by the Nayanars and Alvars in the early Christian era. The Sangam literature is a true reflection of the greatness of Tamil as an excellent medium of devotional literature.

Any Telugu literature prior to Nannayya Bhattarakudu‘s Andhra Mahabharatamu (1000 to 1100 CE) is not available, except by royal grants and decrees. So, Nannayya is known as Aadi Kavi (the first poet).

The advanced and well-developed language used by Nannayya suggests that this may not be the beginning of Telugu literature. Andhra Mahabharatamu was later furthered by Tikanna Somayaji (1205-1288), to be finally completed by Yerrapragada (14th century). Nannaya, Tikanna and Yerrapragada are known as the Kavitraya or the three great poets of Telugu for this mammoth effort. Other such translations like Marana‘s Markandeya Puranam, Ketana‘s Dasakumara Charita, Yerrapragada‘s Harivamsam followed.

Literary activities flourished, during the rule of Vijayanagara dynasty. Krishnadevaraya‘s time (16th century) is considered the golden age in the history of Telugu literature. The king, a poet himself, introduced the Prabandha (a kind of love poetry) in Telugu literature with his Amukta Malyada. His court had the Ashtadiggajas (literal: eight elephants) who were the known to be the greatest of poets of that time.

Tyagaraja (1767-1847) of Thanjavur composed devotional songs in Telugu, which form a big part of the repertoire of Karnatak music.

In Kannada, another South Indian language, the Virasaiva movement led to the composition of Vachakam containing the sayings of Basava.

In the north notable works in the vernacular languages included the Ramacharitmanas of Tulsidas and the Sursagar of Surdas, both in Hindi, Chatanyamrita of Sri Chaitanya and Mangal kavyas in Bengali, the devotional compositions of Namdev in Marathi, the poems of Mirabai in Gujrathi, the Gitagovinda of Jaidev and so on. Both the epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were translated into many local languages.

The PramAna or Episteme underlying the practice of knowledge acquisition by the Indic

Indics were the first to codify the principle of acquisition of knowledge known now by the name of Epistemology and they resisted the imposition of a history and a narrative that was substantially at variance from their Puranic traditions. These principles of acquisition of knowledge are alluded to in my booklet on Dhaarmik traditions and include Perception and Observation (Pratyaksha), Anumaana (inference), Comparison and Analogy (Upamaana), shabda (acceptance, though not necessarily uncritical acceptance, of the Word as manifested in the ancient scriptures, Arthapaati (implication) and anupalabdi (non apprehension and skepticism in the face of non-apprehension).

The systematic approach, combined with the methodology of learning recommended by the Upanishads namely, the triune method of shravana, manana and nididhyasana forms the core of the approach to all kinds of knowledge , whether It be Paara Vidya or Apaara Vidya (see Glossary). The term Shravana refers basically to hearing, but also includes reading, discussions and the like. Manana is contemplation of what has been studied or heard. Nididhyasana is concentration on the subject to the exclusion of everything else. It may not always be possible or advisable to practice multitasking, which has become de rigueur in this age of rapid technological change. Usually, the initial knowledge about anything has to be acquired through a guru, because he is the dependable authority on the subject. Manana and Nididhyasana depend on one's own effort, with some guidance from the guru. The role of the teacher is only as a guidepost. The journey has to be undertaken by us with our own efforts.

I enclose the following excerpt from my book the Dhaarmik Traditions, to emphasize the fact that there is no great schism between the Dharma and Science. Since the whole object of Dharma is the acquisition of higher knowledge (Para Vidya), and the same principles apply whether we study PAra Vidya or ApAra Vidya, the Indics were never subject to the dead hand of a higher authority, telling them what was appropriate or inappropriate, and certainly there were no injunctions such as the Papal injunctions forbidding them on pain of death to pursue a line of inquiry. That is why we never come across the likes of an incident such as that of Galileo Galilei where he was forced to recant his heliocentric theory of th e solar system on pain of being beheaded

What do Hindus understand by religion and what do they call their religion?

The word religion as it is understood in the west and in the Judeo Christian Islamic world does not translate very easily into any Indian language because of the baggage of dogma and unquestioning belief that the word religion invokes in the west. The closest word to Religion is Dharma which roughly translates into responsibilities and duties of an individual to the society at large. These duties are accompanied by a set of ethical values, but the emphasis in Hinduism is on introspection to determine the path most suitable for each individual. Hindus call their Dharma the Sanatana Dharma, the Eternal Dharma to distinguish it from other Dharmas such as Buddhism and Jainism and Sikhism

In the words of Sir John Woodruffe:

—It has been asserted that there is no such thing as Indian Religion, though there are many Religions in India. This is not so. As I have already pointed out (Is India Civilized?) there is a common Indian religion which I have called Bharata Dharma , which is an Aryan religion (Aryadharma) held by all Aryas whether Brahmanic, Buddhist or Jaina. These are the three main divisions of the Bharata Dharma. I exclude other religions in India, namely, the Semitic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Not that all these are purely Semitic. Christianity became in part Aryanized when it was adopted by the Western Aryans , as also happened with Islam when accepted by such Eastern Aryans as the Persians and the Aryanized peoples of India. Thus Sufism is either a form of Vedanta or indebted to it.“ > > The general Indian Religion or Bharata Dharma holds that the world is an Order or Cosmos. It is not a Chaos of things and beings thrown haphazard together, in which there is no binding relation or rule. The world-order is Dharma, which is that by which the universe is upheld (Dharyate). Without Dharma it would fall to pieces and dissolve into nothingness. But this is not possible, for though there is Disorder (Adharma), it exists, and can exist only locally, for a time, and in particular parts of the whole. Order however will and, from the nature of things, must ultimately assert itself. And this is the meaning of the saying that Righteousness or Dharma prevails. This is in the nature of things, for Dharma is not a law imposed from without by the Ukase of some Celestial Czar. It is the nature of things; that which constitutes them what they are (Svalakshana-dharanat Dharma). It is the expression of their true being and can only cease to be, when they themselves cease to be. Belief in righteousness is then in something not arbitrarily imposed from without by a Lawgiver, but belief in a Principle of Reason which all men can recognize for themselves if they will. Again Dharma is not only the law of each being but necessarily also of the whole, and expresses the right relations of each part to the whole. This whole is again harmonious, otherwise it would dissolve. The principle which holds it together as one mighty organism is Dharma. The particular Dharma calls for such recognition and action in accordance therewith. Religion, therefore, which etymologically means that which obliges or binds together, is in its most fundamental sense the recognition that the world is an Order, of which each man, being, and thing, is a part, and to which each man stands in a definite, established relation; together with action based on, and consistent with, such recognition, and in harmony with the whole cosmic activity. Whilst therefore the religious man is he who feels that he is bound in varying ways to all being, the irreligious man is he who egoistically considers everything from the standpoint of his limited self and its interests, without regard for his fellows, or the world at large. The essentially irreligious character of such an attitude is shown by the fact that, if it were adopted by all, it would lead to the negation of Cosmos that is Chaos. Therefore all Religions are agreed in the essentials of morality and hold that selfishness, in its widest sense, is the root of all sin (Adharma). Morality is thus the true nature of man. The general Dharma (Samanya Dharma) is the universal law governing all, just as the particular Dharma (Vishesha Dharma) varies with, and is peculiar to, each class of being. It follows from what is above stated that disharmony is suffering. This is an obvious fact. Wrong conduct is productive of ill, as right conduct is productive of good. As a man sows, so he will reap. There is an Imminent Justice. But these results, though they may appear at once, do not always do so. The fruit of no action is lost. It must, according to the law of causality, which is a law of reason, bear effect. If its author does not suffer for it here and now in the present life, he will do so in some future one. Birth and death mean the creation and destruction of bodies. The spirits so embodied are infinite in number and eternal. The material universe comes and goes . . . The appearance and disappearance of the Universe is the nature or Svabhava of That which it ultimately is. Its immediate cause is Desire, which Buddhism calls Trishna–or Thirst that is desire or thirs for world-enjoyment in the universe of form. Action (Karma) is prompted by desire and breeds again desire. This action may be good (Dharma) or bad (Adharma) leading to enjoyment or suffering. Each embodied soul (Jivatma) will be reborn and reborn into the world until it is freed from all desire. This involves the doctrine of Re-incarnation. These multiple births and deaths in the transmigratory worlds are called Samsara or Wandering. The world is a Dvandva, that is, a composite of happiness and suffering. Happiness of a transitory kind may be had therein by adherence to Dharma in following Kama (desire) and Artha (the means) by which lawful desires may be given effect. These constitute what Brahmanism calls the Trivarga of the PurushArtha , or three aims of sentient being. But just as desire leads to manifestation in form, so desirelessness leads away from it. Those who reach this state seek Moksha or Nirvana (the fourth PurushArtha), which is a state of Bliss beyond the worlds of changing forms. For there is a respite from suffering, which Desire (together with a natural tendency to exceed moderation), brings upon men. They must, therefore, either live with desire in harmony with the universal order, or if desire less, they may (for each is master of his future) pass beyond the manifest and become That which is Moksha or Nirvana. Religion, and therefore true civilization, consists in the upholding of Dharma as the individual and general good, and the fostering of spiritual progress, so that, with justice to all beings, true happiness, which is the immediate and ultimate end of all Humanity, and indeed of all being, may be attained. > > Anyone who holds these beliefs follows the Bharata Dharma or common principles of all Indic beliefs. > > Thus as regards God we may either deny His existence (Atheism) or affirm it (Theism) or say we have no sufficient proof one way or another (Agnosticism). It is possible to accept the concept of an eternal Law (Dharma) and its sanctions in a self-governed universe without belief in a personal Lord (Ishwara). So Samkhya, which proceeds on intellectual proof only, does not deny God but holds that the being of a Lord is —not proved“.

I am in general agreement with the postulation of Indic Dharma by Sir John Woodruff, although I would balk at the use of words such as Aryan or Brahmanism neither if which is precisely defined. There is generally no need to invent such new words when there are perfectly good words available such as Vedic and the Hindu Dharma.

NOTES

[1] W W. Rouse Ball in 'A short account of the History of mathematics' Dover Publications,1960, (originally appeared in 1908, page.146

[2] Trautmann, Thomas, "Aryans and British India", 1997, University of California press

[3] Rajaram, Navaratna "The Politics of History, Voice of India, 1995

[4] Stefan Arvidsson 2006:38 Aryan Idols

[5] Prodosh Aich Lies with Long Legs, 2006, Samskrti, New Delhi

[6] C K Raju "Cultural Foundations of Mathematics", Centre for Studies in Civilizations(PHISPC), Pearson

Education, 2007,page 313

[7] Wikipedia

[8] Katre,S.M., "Dictionary of Panini",, Published by Deccan College, Part I, 1968

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