Colonial paradigm of Indian History

Volume II of the series on Distortions in Indian Indian History Papers

presented

th

at 7 international Waves

in Orlando Florida, June 28,2009 during session on History Session Chaired By Kosla Vepa

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Volume II

A workshop on The Colonial paradigm on Indian History

Sunil Bhattacharjya Sachi Dastidhar Jagat Motwani Narayan Joshi Kosla Vepa This is part of a series series on the Distortions in Indian history

Volume I was titled “Astronomical Dating of Events Events & Select Vignettes Vignettes from Indian history” Edited by Kosla Vepa PhD ISBN 978-1-4357-1120-4 978-1-4357-1120-4 http://www.lulu.com/content/2060969

INDIC STUDIES FOUNDATION WWW.INDICSTUDIES.US

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstracts ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………04 Full length Papers ............................. ............................................ ............................... ............................... .............................. ............... 8 History of India Distorted: Who Did? Why? What should be done? ............................. ............................... .. 9 The Colonial Colonial Paradigm Paradigm of Indian History History .............................. .............................................. ............................... ............... 37 ............................................. .............................. ............................. .............. 54 Mahabharata-History Mahabharata-History or Myth? .............................. ............................. 62 The "Dotted Record" and its impact on ancient Indian Chronology .............................

Some slides from History Tutorial ............................. ............................................ .............................. .......................... ........... 75 Index

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Abstracts History of India Distorted: Who Did? Why? What should be done? BY DR. JAGAT K. MOTWANI

IF YOU WANT TO WEAKEN A NATION, CONFUSE ITS IDENTITY, DISTORT ITS HERITAGE, BELITTLE ITS ACHIEVEMENTS, HIGHLIGHT ITS FAILURES, DIVIDE IT INTO AS MANY FRAGMENTS AS POSSIBLE, TARNISH ITS ANCIENT SCRIPTURES, AND REWRITE ITS HISTORY.

This paper will discuss how the East India Company did all this with help of imported disguised missionaries – Max Muller, Sir William Jones, Macaulay and others – to translate Vedic scriptures with their hidden agenda to infuse ethnic inferiority complex in minds and hearts of  Indians. They confused our ethnic identity, and the antiquity and originality of the Vedas and its language Sanskrit by introducing the two intertwined theories, 'Aryan invasion of India'  and 'The Indo-European Family of Languages,'  by which they created rift between the North and the South.

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EMPIRE’S LAST CASUALTY: INDIAN SUBCONTINENT’S VANISHING HINDUS AND NON-MUSLIMS

DR. SACHI G. DASTIDAR, DISTINGUISHED SERVICE PROFESSOR, AND CHAIR, POLITICS, ECONOMICS & LAW DEPT., STATE UNIV. OF NEW YORK, OLD WESTBURY, NY 11426

The book/presentation is the study of effects of Islamization on a pluralistic, multi-religious society: eastern Bengal of the Bengal Province of Colonial British India — now the third largest Muslim-majority nation on earth. It focuses on changes brought about since the multi-religious, progressive province was partitioned in 1947 and its effect on the non-Muslim minorities, pluralism and tolerance, which is hardly known to the outside world. After the Britishmandated 1947 partition eastern part of Bengal became Muslim-majority East Bengal, later called East Pakistan, a part of Islamic Republic of Pakistan. She became Bangladesh after a bloody 1971 independence war. Western Bengal remained with pluralistic India as the West Bengal State. That 1971 war was also an anti-Hindu genocide and killing of pro-tolerant Muslims by Islamic Pakistan’s Army and its Bengali- and Urdu-speaking Islamist allies, paralleling genocides in Rwanda and Nazi Germany. In Bangladesh 3 million people were killed in 9 months. Very little literature exists on the effects of partition on East Bengal, especially about its effects on non-Muslim (Hindu) minorities although the number of Hindus killed and displaced from the Islamized East Pakistan/ Bangladesh is many times larger than that of the western India/Pakistan. In both India and Bangladesh there is a taboo on discussion of the plight of Bangladeshi Hindu (and other) minorities in Islamized Bangladesh. Strangely communist-run Bengali-speaking Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura are run by Bangladeshi Hindu refugee elites. Nevertheless partition has had serious consequences, yet avoided by researchers of the Left and Right for political reasons. I am the first scholar to break an Indian/Bengali taboo by writing about the life of minorities in post-partition Islamized Bangladesh when my Bengali article appeared in 1989 in Desh. Since then I have written several books and articles. By-product of  my academic work is a foundation, www.probini.org www.probini.org,, which now helps education for the poor and orphaned in Bangladesh, West Bengal and Assam allowing me access to marginalized peoples. 5

Empire’s Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent’s Vanishing Hindu and Other Minorities reveals that

49 million Bangladeshi Hindus are missing from the land (Bangladesh Census) — larger than all but 26 of 189 nations (163) listed in World Bank’s April 2003 World Development Indicators database — and between 1.4 and 3.1 million (larger than 75 nations in that database) have been killed through the process of Islamization — but hardly known to the world. (A companion book of English short stories, Living among the Believers: Stories from the Holy  Land down the Ganges, was released In India in 2006.) The presentation wil include a slide show .

Sachi G. Dastidar, Ph.D. 718-343-0189 [email protected]

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Abstract - Colonial paradigm of Indic history 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. Such a paradigm which we shall define as the Colonial Paradigm, while substantially erroneous, is posited on certain assumptions.

The key assumption originally enunciated by Hegel and hence known as the Hegelian Hypothesis , also known as the cul de sac theory is that the Indic civilization that remains extant has been consistently and periodically impregnated from other regions of the planet, and that the Aryans were merely the quintessential example of such invasions. The second assumption implicit in all the assertions made by Occidentals about Indics is that no date for any significant scientific advance should be attributed to them prior to the Golden age of Greece beginning in 600 BCE

According to such a narrative everything that was worth preserving has been handed down to us over the centuries by migrations, into the subcontinent, from somewhere else. It is also true that the history that is taught the children of India India today is vastly at variance with the puranic 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, Majumdar, the most famous of 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 substantially. Within the relatively short time span of 200 years, a mere bagatelle by Indic standards, he managed to rewrite the penal code, altered the language of commerce and intellectual discourse, reengineered the social structure into a far more rigid hierarchical system while convincing the Indic that it was essentially part of their own tradition, and recast the entire History of the subcontinent into a form consistent with his imperial role. But the most damaging damaging consequence has has been the alteration alteration of the mindset mindset of the Indic,, where these views have been internalized by the Indic.

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FULL LENGTH PAPERS

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HISTORY OF INDIA DISTORTED: WHO DID? WHY? WHAT SHOULD BE DONE? by Dr. Jagat K. Motwani

If you want to weaken a nation, confuse its identity, distort its heritage, belittle its achievements, highlight its failures, divide it into as many fragments as possible, tarnish its ancient scriptures, and rewrite its history.

ALL THIS THE BRTISH COLONIALISTS DID. They changed the names of our our country and its people – India and Indians. They They chose the name “Indians”,to identify identify the native American Indians, in present times. My kindergarten children were ridiculed by by their White American classmates by vocal and and physical gestures as of the native American A merican Indians. It is hard to understand why all post-independence governments have been indifferent to and unconcerned about restoring the tr aditional name of over country. Ceylon did, Burma did and several other countries did. Traditional name of the country opens up various chapters of the ancient history. Bharat is given only in the constitution. It has remained as a paper name. Only a few countries – Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and one or two more – at the United Nations know about Bharat. If I tell any America that I am from India, the response would be ”What?” The government of India, itself, has been promoting its foreign-given name “India” by naming its internationally related agencies, agencies, such as ‘Govt. of India’, ‘Air India’, ‘State Bank of India’, Embassy of  India, etc. Colonizing governments, in order order to completely erase the name of the colonized colonized country, have changed the names of its mountains, rivers, lakes, etc which may reflect the heritage and culture of its natives. Ganga has been changed to Ganges, Sindhu to Indus, Lake Mansarover to Lake Mapam Yutso, Gandhar to Kandahar, Pryag to Allahabad, etc. Pakistan changed the name of Ram Baug, in Karachi to Araam Baug. I remember my childhood playful times in Ram Baug. A book, entitled as “ Five Thousand Years of  Pakistan” was published in 1950 when Pakistan was only three year old, and Islam about 1500 years old. Most of the book talks about Muslin dynasties, tombs, forts, Masjids, etc. Pakistan is very shrewd. It got it authored by R. E. M. Wheeler, Archeological Advisor to the Government of Pakistan, and Sometimes Director General of Archeology in India. It got it published by the Royal India and Pakistan Society, London. But inside, it clearly shows its ethno-political agenda. In the Preface, Fazlur Rahman, the then Minister of Commerce and Education, Govt. of Pakistan wrote:

“It (the book) includes one of the great civilizations of Asia – the Indus Civilization of the third and second millennia B.C.; it shares with the borderland of Afghanistan the primarily glory of that remarkable and individual Buddhist art which flowered there in and after the second century A.D.”

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Rahman mentions Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, but not with Bharat. By the way, the flowering of  the Indus Valley civilization was long long (may be 3000 years years or even longer) longer) before the advent advent of Islam. Rahman further writes in the Preface: “Its achievements after the arrival of of Islam, extended from the tiled mosques mosques of Tatta to the Moghul fortress of Lahore and the Chhota Sona Masjid of Gaur, are more vividly familiar. The story of these things is worth telling, in every school and university of the land. The heritage of Pakistan must be kept alive if the future is to grow strongly and healthily out of it. It will be no good to tie new leaves on to dead tree.” I would like the readers note the last line: “It will be no good to tie new leaves on to dead tree.” For Rahman, Hindu (Vedic) civilization is the dead tree. Therefore, in Rahman’s opinion, the new leaves of  the present history of Pakistan should not be tied to the dead tree of the Hindu history. This is the way the conquerors highlight their culture by erasing the culture of the conquered. c onquered. I have, have, in my library, library, three three other books, published by Pakistan to show show the same attitude •

Ihsan H. Nadiem, “Moenjodaro: Heritage of Mankind”, (1994).

Jansen, Michael, Maire Mulloy & Gunter Urban (eds.). Forgotten Cities on the Indus: Early  Civilization in Pakistan from the 8th to the 2nd Millennium BC. (1991).

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Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization. Oxford: American Institute of Pakistan Studies (1998).

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There may be even more such books. I have limitations to know all. Pakistan has been trying to grab more than its legitimate legitimate heritage. Why is India not doing to preserve preserve its own legitimate legitimate heritage? In a way, Pakistanies may be right to claim the heritage connected with the Indus Valley civilization, because most of them are converts. The original names of the countries, ruled over in ancient times, have been drowned too deep into the ocean of history where they have been disfigured or erased by colonial historians. Name a few, the countries, just in north-west of Bharat, with their names suffixed with ‘stan’ or ‘ istan’, in Central Asia – Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Tadzhistan (Tajikistan), Turkmenistan, Turkistan or Turkestan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan – were part of Vishaal Vishaal Bharat (Greater India). Sthan is a Sanskrit word. word. I have been able to secure secure scanty information about few countries countries – Kirghizistan, Tadzhikistan, and Kazakhstan – to show distant connection of their heritage with ancient Indo-Aryan culture. Mallory (p.53) talks about the archeological records indicate expression of Indo-Iranian ritual in Kirghizistan and Tadzhikistan. He remarks:

“Indeed, it is in the eastern Andronovo Andronovo variants such as the Bishkent culture of of south Tadzhikistan that one encounters again the probable expression of Indo-Iranian ritual in the archeological record. At the cemetery of Tulkhar, male burials were provided with small rectangular hearths, reminiscent of the

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typical Ahavaniya, the rectangular fire-altar of early Indic priests, while females were provided round hearths, comparable to the Garhapatya, the female-associated hearth fire of the Indo-Aryan house.”

Most of its elements, as described by Dr. Alma Kunanbay, an anthropologist and ethnographer in ‘ The Soul of Kazakhstan (2001)1, seem to be similar to those of Hinduism. On page 60, Dr. Alma K unanbay talks about Kazakhs’ close relationship with nature and their response to nature’s influences. She also discusses their veneration of mountains, caves, rivers, and lakes. She mentions that the Kazakhs worshipped deities of fire, sky, earth, water, and fertility. It is surprising to see that the name of the “protectress of fertility”, as noted by Kunanbay, is ‘Umay’ – very close to ‘ Uma’, wife of Shiva, the god of  fertility (Shiva Lingam). Dr. Kunanbay describes the burning incense at a sacred place (p.72), solar deities (Surya Devta), and “Mother Earth” (p.53), and describes Kazakhstan, as “the spiritual cradle”. Spirituality and knowledge ( gyan) have been significant ingredients of the Kazakhstan’s philosophy – similar to those of Vedic philosophy. Their reverence of fire is incorporated into many rites and rituals. All these seem similar to Hindu religious rituals and philosophy. Dr. P. Poonai , in Origin of Civilization and Language (p.66), writes that excavations at the site of Anou on the plains of Turkmenistan have revealed that early emigrants from the Indus valley had settled there We know ancient Vedic connection of Pakistan, Baluchistan, and Afghanistan. All this evidences the presence of Vedic Indo-Aryans in Central Asian countries. Iran was the land of Aryans. Its name Persia was after aft er the name Parsooram, warrior with axe of the Mahabharata. For other countries, India culturally and some administratively colonized, read my paper, “Vishaal Bharat: Borderless World of Vedic Culture”  in “ Astronomical Dating of Events & Select Vignettes  from Indian History”  (vol. 1, 2008), edited by Dr. Kosla Vepa. I don’t blame others. They should be commended for their patriotism. Pakistan has been doing lot of  writing about the glory of the Indus Valley civilization – Mohenjodaro and Harappa – to connect it with the heritage of Pakistan. Max Muller, Sir William Jones, Macaulay, etc., missionaries in disguise, were deputed to India by the East India Company as Sanskrit scholars. They translated our ancient scriptures – Vedas, Upanishads, Epics, and other literature like Shakuntala. In fact, they themselves didn’t, rather they couldn’t. They hired poor English-knowing Brahmins. They financially lured them to interpret the Vedas the way they wanted. They didn’t respect the historic facts facts given in the Vedas, saying they were myths and product of the sentiments and subjectivity of of Hindus. I will try to show contradictions implicit in what different historians have said. According to them the Vedas were composed by invading Aryans, not by the natives of ancient India. Then, where is the question of the sentiments and subjectivity of Hindus?

Colonial ink: Global and too hard to get erased 1

The essays in “The “The Soul of Kazakhstan” are written by Dr. Kunanbay, photographs by Wayne Eastep, and edited  by Gareth L. Steen. It is published by Easten Press, New York.

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Histories have been written by victors, the colonialists. Their pen had colonial power to write what they wanted to, with the purpose to infuse in the Indian psyche ethnic inferiority complex, so that their culture is superior. They succeeded. Impressions, implanted by first histories, become too deep and hard to get erased. Post-independence sixty years seem to be not enough for the nation – particularly India had been under bondage for over a millennium – to wake up from colonial soothing anesthesia. This has happened not only with the history of India, but with the histories of several countries, colonized by the West, particularly by the Britain. Peter B. Clarke (ed.), in The World’s Religions (p. 123) writes:

“In the area of doctrine, problem arose in the 19 th century, when European scholars scholars began to translate and interpret Zoroastrian texts, challenging the traditional view of them. As a result, various reform movements were founded in Bombay, and still remain at variance with one another.”

Zoroastrians (Parsees) as well as Indians couldn’t raise their voice against the mighty colonialists. As the time passed, most of the new generation generation got too brainwashed to be able able to see any wrongs in the history. Zoroastrians, known as Parsees in India, immigrated into India in about 7 th century A.D. to escape religious persecution in their native country Iran. They feel pain remembering what has happened to their society. Bharat has given a heart-felt-welcome-home to all who needed, Jews, Parsees (Persians), Buddhists from Tibet, and others. India has not coerced them to change their religion. Some, not many Jews have migrated to Israel, after it got securely established as the Jewish nation.

Vedas, Shastras, Epics: Mythology?

Western scholars view our Vedas, Shastras, and Epics as mythology. Even worse, that one Indian politician recently said that the Ramayana is a fiction. Such people, like him, pride in posing themselves as liberal, and superior to the common lot. They don’t understand how they are confusing our national ethos even more, by endorsing what biased European historians have written about our sacred Vedas. Fortunately now, since wide spread of democracies, some European historians have come out to cry about the abuse, histories of the European colonies have suffered.. Historian Herbert Butterfield has said about the condition of the history:

“Wrong history is being taught in all countries, all the time, unavoidably; while we have great need of  history, our first need is to unlearn most of what we have been taught.”

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Herbert J. Muller, in ‘The Loom of History’ (1958: 28), writes that on a national scale, history becomes the kind of prejudice and conceit. Paul Valery called history the most dangerous product ever concocted by the chemistry of the brain. European historians have shortened the ages of the Vedas, particularly of the Rig Veda and the epics. They write that the Vedas were composed in about 1000 B.C. by the alleged invading Aryans, not by the then native Hindus, though they knew that they were composed at least a couple of thousands of years before the alleged Aryan invasion of India. They have also written that Sanskrit was brought in India by the invading Aryans. From where, they are unable to tell. They have done all this only to validate their  Aryan invasion of India . ill-based theory of  Aryan In order to validate what they have said about Sanskrit, they created another ill-based theory of  ‘IndoEuropean Family of languages’ , according to which, some time in the very remote past, the speakers of  Sanskrit, Latin and Greek lived under the same roof, mothered by some language, they have not been able to find the name of. How can they find the name of the language which was never spoken? They call it Proto-Indo-European (PIE). They write that later, the speakers of the three languages languages dispersed and took three different routes – Sanskrit speakers went to India, Latin speakers to Italy, and Greeks marched to Greece. The historians have not explained why they had to disperse and how they thought of the three different destinations for themselves. Some historians say t hey dispersed around 3000 B.C., some others 6,000 B.C. This should be noted that the scholars do not have consensus on:

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The name of their mother. They called it PIE.

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The name of their original abode .

3.

The time when they left their original abode, and.

How can they have have consensus on the matters related to the PIE which did not exist? They have not told told what were the native languages of India, Italy, and Greece before they got Sanskrit, Latin and Greek respectively and what happened to them.

Birth of Linguistics

In order to prove – that the three languages had common common parentage. and grew up together for long prior to their dispersion – they have created Linguistics, science of of language. To me, it can’t be a science. Linguistics, like a genuine science, is not based on appropriately and adequately proven facts. It is based on hypothetical and vague assumptions. For example, a few selected (not randomly) words have been picked up from the three languages Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, and they have been stretched too far to show philological resemblance resemblance among them, on the basis of ‘comparative historical historical linguistics’. For example:

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Word for hundred compared

Latin

centum

Greek

hekaton

Germanic

hundred

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Sanskrit cata

I am not, you may be able to make sense from what Malmakjaer has written to prove philological resemblance of the word ”hundred” between languages:

“The discovery that [k] remains in some Indo-European languages but became [s] in S anskrit ended the belief that Sanskrit was the oldest and closest language to the proto-form or parent language. Further investigation would reveal that this change [k > s] occurred before a front vowel, in this case [e] which later merged with [a] in Sanskrit.”

Malmakjaer (p.198) shows interchangeable letters between Latin and Spanish, for example, Latin ‘p’ becomes ‘b’ in Spanish, ‘t’ becomes ‘d’ and ‘k’ becomes ‘g’:

Latin

Spanish

cupa

cuba

[p] > [b]

vita

vida

[t] > [d]

amica

amiga

[k] > [g]

Such kind of interchange of letters happens only between the languages of the same family, not between a European language and an Indic language. I know that as per the Linguistics, there are some inter-changeable letters in Hindi itself, such as, ‘b’ becomes ‘v’, for example ‘veer’ and ‘beer’, and ‘s’ becomes ‘h’, for example Sindu/Hindu, Sindhi/Hindi, soma/homa, etc. But such letter inter-change happens in the same language or between two very close languages of the same Indic family. It doesn’t happen between an Indic language and a European language.

Malmakjaer (p.195) compares compares a few Latin, Italian and English words:

Latin

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Italian

English

Kirsten Malmakjaer, The Linguistics Encyclopedia (1991, pp. 193-4).

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noctem

notte

night

octor

otto

eight

lactem

latte

milk

factum

fatto

fact

lectum

letto

bed

How can one claim philological correspondence between Latin and Sanskrit when the correspondence between Latin/Italian words and English is so far, though Italy is geographically much closer to England than to India? And culturally too. But Latin is philologically closer to its daughter French 3, than to English:

Latin

French

marem

mer

fabam

feve

patrem

pere

labram

levre

manum

main

panem

pain

planum

plain

famen

faim

partem

part

Malmakjaer (p.207) compares the word ‘bear’ in various IE languages:

English

bear

German

Bar

Latin

ursus

Greek

arktos

Sanskrit rksah 3

Ibid (p.197).

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If such is philological correspondence even between European languages – English, German, Latin and Greek – then how can one claim Sanskrit has philological philological correspondence with the European European languages which are thousands miles apart apart and culturally different? There may be significant philological philological correspondence of insignificant number number of words between Sanskrit and some European language. That would be because of borrowing or accidental. a ccidental. Fortunately, some scholars have been able to view holes in the theory of IE. P. H. Matthews, in Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction (2003, p.49), responding to the question, “What is the evidence?”, replies:

“The answer lies in the ‘comparative’ method. This involves a step-by-step step-by-step comparison of different languages, in which we look for detailed detailed correspondences that can not reasonably be explained explained unless unless a common ancestor existed. The great problem is: what sorts of details are convincing?”

Matthews (p.53), talking about Greek and Sanskrit, writes:

“Why should there be correspondences? These languages were spoken thousands of miles apart, in societies historically separate.” He also raises the question: “Could correspondences like these be due instead to pure chances?”

To be honest, I fail to understand a bit of o f linguistic maneuvers to prove philological resemblances between two genealogically different languages. I may have to have another Ph.D., perhaps in Linguistics, to be able to understand such sort of tricky philological correspondences. The linguistic and comparative maneuvers, thus developed, would one day prove that almost all human languages have a common parentage. Despite their hard research work for about two centuries, linguists have not been able to find the name of the mother of IE languages, nor have they reached their consensus on her original abode. They have given her hypothetical name as “the Proto-Indo-European” (PIE).. If they are not able to find her, at least they should find the grave, with her name on it. Seeing the historical confusion confusion – the colonial historians have created about the authorship of the Vedas, and the origins of Aryans, Sanskrit, and Swastika – it becomes apparent that these historians have defined history completely opposite opposite to what it should be. History is supposed to be a story of wellproven facts. They have been successful in crafting confusion by distorting the dates of significant events related to the ancient history of Bharat, the west envied the glory of. It seems, seems, European scholars have knowingly ignored what is written in the Vedic scriptures, saying that they are mythological and not historically worth believing. They claim they know better than India’s native scholars and the Vedic scriptures. The East India Company brought in missionaries, and introduced them as Sanskrit scholars to

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translate Vedic scriptures who, with the help of bribed poor Pundits, translated our scriptures to fit in their hidden ethno-political agenda. V. Gordon Childe, What Happened in History  (1942, p.13), expressed his concern against the western historians, in the section, ‘Archaeology and History ’: ’:

“WRITTEN history contains a very patchy and incomplete record of what mankind has accomplished in parts of the world during last five thousand years. The period surveyed is at best about one hundredth part of the time during which men have been active on our planet The picture presented presented is frankly chaotic; it is hard to recognize in it any unifying pattern, any directional trends. Archaeology surveys a period a hundred times as long .”

Prof. Graham Clark, in the the Foreword to this book, praises Childe:

“More perhaps than any other man, he showed how by using the data won by archaeologists and natural scientists it was possible to gain a new view of what constituted human history.”

Clark complains:

“The scope even of a work as comprehensive as What Happened in History is bound up with and limited by this concern: the New World, like Australasia, is omitted and only glancing references are made to the great focus of civilization in the Far East.”

He also showed (p.8) concern: “the urban civilizations c ivilizations of Egypt, Sumer, and the Indus Valley were no more immune from the effects of inborn contradictions than the Neolithic peasantries had been. ” It is shocking to know that even in present times of openness and transparency, historians don’t seem to be as honest as they are expected to be. NY Times (April 30, 2008, Arts Section, p.1) writes:

“Tony Horwitz’s new book, “ A Voyage Long and Strange,” is about the American history most American never learned, including the story of the short-lived, early-17 th-century colony established on this windswept island eight miles west of Martha’s Vineyard.”

History, some times, is written in vague and broad terms rather than specifics, to let the reader helplessly wonder what people and what language the author is referring to. The following quote from The Science Times Book of Archaeology  (1999, p. 45), ed. by Nicholas Wade, will explain what I am talking about:

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“Among the charioteers of the steppes, the pattern was much the same. Aryan-speaking charioteers, sweeping in from the north in about 1500 B.C., probably dealt the death blow to the ancient Indus Valley civilization. But a few centuries later, by the time the Aryans compiled the Rig Veda their collection of hymns and religious texts, the chariot had been transformed to a vehicle of ancient gods and heroes. Chariot technology, Dr. Muhly noted, seems to have left an imprint on Indo-European I ndo-European languages and could help solve the enduring puzzle of where they originated. All of the technical terms connected with wheels, spokes, chariots and horses are represented in the early Indo-European vocabulary, the common root of nearly all modern European languages as well as those of Iran and India.”

If the name of the specific language – (perhaps may be Sanskrit), instead of ‘Indo-European’ or ‘Aryan’ language was given, and if the names of ancient ancient gods who used the chariots were specifically specifically given – the puzzle of ‘where they originated’ would have ceased ceased to be as a puzzle. It is the responsibility of the scholars to use the language which can be understood by masses, even less educated. But, the way the above text has been worded, it is difficult to understand even by educated elite. I feel, I wish I am wrong, that scholars feel shy of giving credit, even legitimate, to the people of India, particularly Hindus. Aryans are Hindus, but the word ‘Aryan’ has been been too vague and confused. As I and every one else would expect that history should give exact facts – not vague guesses, qualified by ‘perhaps’, ‘probably’, ‘may be’, ‘seem ‘ seem to have been’ etc. – about some significant past events pertaining to a particular people, country, period, or person. Historian is supposed to find facts before he/she writes. Historian should not write any thing which suggests multiple inferences. The following piece of a narrative from ‘The Hindu World: An Encyclopedic Survey of Hindus’  (vol. I, p. 70) about Aryans, would tell what I am talking about:

“In fact, it is not certain whether any of the seven principal rivers referred to in the Rig-Veda were in India at all. The Rig-Veda is as much a product of Persia as of India.” I ndia.”

It would have not been difficult difficult for the Encyclopedia to find out the facts related to the seven rivers and the Rig Veda. Could not the historian find out where those seven rivers were? Does not the historian know that the Vedas including the Rig-Veda were composed by Hindu Brahmins of India? I believe most people know this. The same historian writes on the same page:

“Coming to their respective pantheons , we find that most of the major Hindu deities, where they have not been taken over from the aborigines, are ultimately Iranian or Middle Eastern. Professor Apte has pointed out that ‘among the Aryans, Varuna, Mitra and Aryaman are Indo-Aryan in origin’ (X, p.368).”

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How could Hindu deities, some or all, be Iranian or Middle Eastern? Historians are supposed to be particular and specific, saying ‘Indian’ (better Hindus) or ‘Iranian’, not to be vague by using the vague term ‘Indo-Iranian’, when talking particularly about Hindu deities, who can not be Iranian. History tells that Hindus had gone to Middle Eastern countries including Asia Minor, where they had established their kingdoms. If those Hindus, while in the Middle East, recited Vedic hymns, their deities should not be considered Iranian or Middle Eastern. They (Varuna, Mitra, and Aryaman) are of ‘Indian’ origin, not vaguely of ‘Indo-Iranian’ origin. Moreover, contradictions – as shown in this book, not only among various western scholars, but ironically, even within one-and-the-same author, some times on the same page – confuse the readers. Historians with their great scholarship can not do it unless they have some political East-West ethnocultural agenda. Contradictions are cleverly interwoven in the text with vague assertions, some times qualified by the terms: ‘probably’, ‘perhaps’, ‘mostly’, ‘about’, etc. For example, almost all scholars know  Arya’ is a Sanskrit word, and that Sanskrit is the language of the ancient Aryans or should know that ‘ Arya’  (Hindus) of Aryavarta (India), in which their Vedas were composed composed in remote ancient times. Until Until now, no scholar has been able to identify any people, other than Hindus, outside India who spoke Sanskrit and believed in the Vedas. Yet they, endorse the inter-twined theories of “ Aryan invasion of India’  and ‘Indo-European family of language’, according to which the Aryans and Sanskrit came into India from outside. From exactly where, no scholar scholar knows. Such maneuvers are professionally inexcusable. inexcusable. I am trying to emphasize that history should be clear, honest, true, and specific, not vague and tricky.

Several other races came and got absorbed

According to Jawaharlal Nehru,4 several other races – Iranians, Parthians, Greeks, Bactrians, Scythians, Huns, Turks – came to India before Islam and got absorbed. absorbed. Nehru cites Dodwell Dodwell who remarked that India was “infinitely absorbent like the ocean”. I think that they got ethno-culturally and lingually absorbed, because they were few in number. Nehru was surprised to see how these races ra ces were culturally absorbed in a caste-ridden society:

“It is odd to think of India, with her caste system and exclusiveness, having this astonishing inclusive capacity to absorb foreign races and cultures. Perhaps it was due to this that she retained her vitality and rejuvenated herself from time to time. The Moslems, when they came, were also powerfully affected by her.”

Nehru (p. 74) cites Vincent Smith: “The foreigners (Muslim Turks), like their forerunners the Sakas and the Yueh-chi, universally yielded to the wonderful assimilative power of Hinduism, and rapidly became Hinduised.” I think if Vincent meant that they became Hindus by religion, he was wrong. Culturally yes. Or one can say that they got assimilated or they culturally mainstreamed. Hinduism doesn’t believe in 4

Discovery of India (1946, pp. 73,74)

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conversion. Hence, Parsees, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians have been able to preserve their respective religions. Early Iranians, Parthians, Greeks, Bactrians, Sc ythians, Huns, Turks might have been religiously absorbed, as explained earlier, that they might have been immigrants in insignificant numbers. Even in present times Hinduism does not believe in conversion. Hindutva, in my opinion, is being politically misinterpreted as Hinduism. Hindutva is national ethos of Hindustan, equivalent to Bharatiyata of Bharat.

Christian Missionaries and History

In India too, in 19 th century Christian missionaries, particularly Max Muller, Sir William Jones and Lord Macaulay were brought in India by The East India Company  to distort history by misinterpreting misinterpreting Vedic scriptures. Lot of damage was already done to the history in different ways – by changing the names of  the cities (for example Karnavati was changed to Ahmedabad, etc), rivers, mountains, etc., restricting teaching of Sanskrit and its scriptures in schools schools and colleges, and empting library shelves of the the books related to Vedic religion and culture culture – by most Muslim rulers. Thus history, particularly of ancient Bharat, has been obscured and confused. This has been more adversely affected because of the attitude of indifference towards history on the part of sleeping Hindu historians. Lieut. Col. F. Wilford, in the  Asiatic Society of Bengal’s Research series, led by William Jones (1746-94), section: “On the Ancient Geography of India” (Vol. XIV, pp.374-376), says that some Puranas have information about the names of some mansions, geographical tracts, mountains, rivers, etc., but without any explanations about them. Wilford also describes his difficulties and frustrations in collecting relevant data, mainly because of lack of adequate cooperation from Pundits and Hindu historians. If Wilford had received full cooperation and if historians, over the years, referred to the ancient names of the rivers and towns in addition to their respective modern names, we would have been able to get clearer picture of ancient India’s geographical spread. The history of ancient Bharat, therefore, has been erroneous and infected with several gaps. Unfortunately, still there are many who believe that it is because of Britain India has a long network of  railways, universities, drainage system, etc. They think India would have not uplifted herself if Britain were not there. They, being great angrez-raj-bhagta, angrez-raj-bhagta, refuse to realize what India – who has technologically achieved so much during sixty years of her independence – would have achieved if she had independence of more than a millennium. Bharat would have soared through the roof to touch the sky. We should know that the Britain did not allow India have industries except textile. Raw material was exported to Britain for importing back the products manufactured thereof. In order to know what India would have been if she had independence long back, they should read books on the five thousand year old Indus Valley civilization to know that its two main cities, Mohenjodaro in Sindh and Harrapa in the Punjab, had parallel broad avenues, great drainage system, public swimming pool, brick houses with a well inside, etc. The people were literate and had know how about architecture, city planning, and drainage. dr ainage. They knew technology of ship building and navigation because of which they had maritime links with Egypt, Mesopotamia (present Iraq), Asia Minor, Bahrain,

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etc. Bharat had Nalanda Vishwa Vidalaya in her ancient times. Sanskrit S anskrit dictionary had “Vishwa Vidalaya” word for university. Much Much of this is included included in Five Thousand Years of Sindhis: Heritage, Religion, Entrepreneurship, Sindhyat, & Language (2006) by Dr. Jagat K. Motwani. Temple of History has been maligned

E. Pococke, in his “ India In Greece” or “Truth in Mythology” (preface, p. vii), seems helplessly rebuking the European scholarship for destroying the temple of history: “A gigantic mass of absurdities now lies exposed, for a sifting examination. It remains for the patient sagacity of European scholarship, working upon both Occidental and Oriental materials, to re-build, I trust, upon no unstable foundation, that Temple of History which national vanity has destroyed, and whose ruins national Bud’hism has obscured.” Pococke further writes (p. ix): “Our ignorance it is which has made a myth of history; and our ignorance is an Hellenic inheritance, much of it the result of Hellenic vanity.” Why Pococke, it seems, has titled this book also as, “ Truth in Mythology”. History and Identity

Wrong and misinterpreted history has confused Hindus about their identity, and about the antiquity of  their scriptures, and their heritage. They have questions about the origin of Aryans Ar yans and about Aryan invasion. If you want to weaken a nation, distort its history. If you want to destroy a community, confuse its ethno-cultural identity and heritage. Western colonials have done this to the ancient Hindu nation in general, and to the history of Sind, in particular. Sind is the region of the Indus (Sindhu) Valley civilization, which is the core civilization of Hind (Hindustan), the Hindu Samaj. The word “Hind” has been derived from the word “Sind” , “Hindi” from “Sindhi” , and “Hindu” from “Sindhu” . History of Sind reflects lot about history of India. Henry Cousens, in his “ The Antiquities of Sind”  (1929, p. 13), describes the history of Sind as full of contradictions and confusion: “Materials for the history of Sind, previous to the time of the Arab conquest in A.D. 711, are meager indeed, and what exist are contained almost solely in the accounts of a few Arab writers. The most lucid account, though very short, of the country immediately preceding the establishment of Arab rule in the province, is to be found in the Chach Namah which is a Persian translation of a work written by Ali, son of Muhammad Kufi, in A.D. 1216. Two later works on the history of S ind – the Tarrikh-i-Masumi or Tarikh-i-Sindh and Tuhfatu-l-Kiram – were to a great extent based upon the Chach Namah in their accounts of the earlier periods. 5 The history of Sind, as told by its own historians, with contradictions and various spellings of names, is very confusing; c onfusing; but this is as nothing to the hopeless tangle caused by the contradictory translations and commentaries of modern writers, each of whom is perfectly convinced in his own mind that he alone is right. … Nor do Hiuen Tsiang’s brief and perplexing references help us much more. A long dark period of a thousand years in which we catch glimmers of  the White Huns and other invaders, is as yet untraversed by any but the faintest rays of light.”

5

In this account, I have chiefly followed the translation by Mirza Kalichbeg Fredunbeg of Sind Civil Service. The Chach Namah, also as the Tarikh-i-Hind wa Sindh, was originally written in Arabic.

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Cousens writes that Chach Namah, also known as the Tarikh-i-Hind wa Sind, was originally written in Arabic. He further writes that the history of Sind, as written by its own historians, is full of contradictions and confusion. As a matter of fact, the history of Sind, as suggested by Cousens, was not written by Sind’s natives, Sindhi Hindus. Rather, it was written by Arabs in Arabic followed by faulty translations. This history – Tarikh-i-Hind wa Sind –  does not illustrate what had happened to, or in Sind before the Arab invasions. The pre-711 AD history of Sind would have helped Sindhis to know their 5000 year long heritage. Herbert J. Muller 6 tells that Herbert Butterfield, himself a historian, feels that the national history taught in schools has encouraged the most general and terrifying of existing evils, human presumptions and intellectual arrogance. He concludes: ”While we have great need of history, our first need is to unlearn most of what has been taught. A superficial, confused and distorted notion of history is far more dangerous than ignorance of it.” Indians (Indo-Aryans) seem to have blindly endorsed most of the ethno-socio-cultural theories, particularly – “Aryan Invasion of India” , “Aryans and Dravidians”, and “Indo-European Family of  Languages” – which have been expounded by western scholars with their missionary agenda to confuse our heritage. Indian politicians, I believe, have remained apathetic, silent, indifferent, and unconcerned about the wrong history being taught in schools and colleges. It seems, they have been resisting getting history of ancient India corrected, apparently because of political reasons, may be fear of losing minority votes. The historian Graham Hancock, in ‘ Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization’ (2002, p.116), remarks: “Almost every thing that was ever written about this (Indus) civilization before five years ago is wrong.” Mr. Hancock concludes that during most of the twentieth century, the archaeological record refused to reveal evidence of the Indus civilization’s long period of development. This created a vacuum, a dark hole in history, European scholars took advantage of. Hancock remarks: “European scholars felt free to conclude that the Indus Valley civilization might, in its origin, have been alien to India.” We know that the socio-cultural and religious landscape, before the advent of Muslims in the region, was very much similar, if not identical, to that in the rest of Bharat. Hancock (2002:169) explains how the culture of the ancient India has been misinterpreted:

“The Indus-Sarasvati civilization was a literate culture, but the archaeological interpretation of it has been strictly limited to excavated material remains and has never been able to draw upon the civilization’s own texts. This is because all attempts to decipher the enigmatic ‘Harappan’ script have failed, and because (at least until very recently) the Sanskrit Vedas were regarded as the work of  another, later culture and were assumed to have had nothing to do with the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. Well into the twentieth century, this approach simply meant that there was no Indus-Sarasvati civilization. It was not part of the archaeological picture of India’s past and was never even contemplated. It was, in other words, as ‘lost’ as Plato’s Atlantis until the material evidence that proved its existence began to surface when excavations were started at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in 1920s.” 6

Herbert J. Muller, op. cit. p.28.

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Even now, for some or even larger section of the world society – the Eastern (particularly Indian) as well as the Western – the Sindhu (Indus) Valley civilization has remained lost as Plato’s Atlantis, because of  the reasons:

•

The first-written-history has strong impact, because it gets implanted in the reader’s mind too deep and too hard to disbelieve disbelieve it. Old is considered considered wisdom and truth. Wrong history has gone down to so many generations. All do not read new developments.

•

•

•

There are few Donald Fosters who have scholarly grace and integrity to admit their wrongs. Most of the post-1920s scholars do not admit that whatever was written earlier was not right. Some even twist things around to reinterpret them as facts. Some Indian scholars have attempted to modify the history by reinterpreting the events in light of new historic developments. The general tendency is to discard them as sentimental and communal. Unfortunately, nationalism is being politically branded as communalism and fundamentalism. Such sort of contra-nationalistic thinking is being considered as a progressive fad, and nationalistic persons are criticized as conservative and backward. Previously, colonial ethnic politics was out to distort the ancient history of India, now our own domestic politics has been a strong obstacle against correction of the historic distortions.

The illiteracy among the massive rural segment of the society has prevented many from reading such a wrong and ethnically injurious history. Cousens (p.1) has cited Elliot’s 7 description of the squandering of public funds by Talpurs:

“It notoriously swarms with sanctified beggars and imposters, and contains, according to the current saying, no less than 100,000 100,00 0 tombs of saints and martyrs, besides ecclesiastical establishments, which, under the Talpurs, absorbed one-third of the entire revenue of the state.”

I recall that in my boyhood days in Sindh, a person, who squandered his money, was taunted as a Talpur . But, I think Talpurs knew that swarm of tombs would give Sind new r eIigio-cultural face (Muslim) to Sind.

Traditional name of a country reflects its identity

7

Elliot’s Appendix to the Arabs in Sind, p.63.

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The name, especially of a nation, speaks immeasurably of its history and culture. The name of a nation is a stepping-stone to define the identity of its original people and the antiquity of their society. I ndia – because of its politics and the traditional indifference of its people to its history and national identity 8 – has been sleeping over the issue. Its metropolis cities, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta, have regained r egained their respective traditional names – Mumbai, Chennai, and Kolkata.

Original name of a country reflects the history and heritage

Distortion or mutilation of history is done by burring the original name of a country too deep to see the sunshine. Victors, invaders, colonialists, or illegitimate occupiers did not want the world, particularly the people of India, know the history of the glories of India. Read the Chapter: Vishaal Bharat (Greater  India):Borderless World of Vedic Culture to know the achievements of ancient Bharat. The colonialists change the names of the countries they occupy, and also the names of its towns, rivers, mountains, streets, gardens, etc. to insure that its future generations would not know who were its original natives. This has happened to so many countries in the Middle East comprising of Asia Minor, Iran, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Bahrain, etc.; and also several countries in Central Asia including Balochistan, Afghanistan, Tadzhistan (Tajikistan), Turkmenistan, Turkistan or Turkestan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. Countries with their names suffixing with ‘istan’ or ‘stan’. could be part of Greater India in its ancient ancient times. ‘Sthan/stan’ is a Sanskrit word, meaning ‘place’. According to The Practical SanskritEnglish Dictionary , by Vaman Shivram Apte (1992:1007), ‘ sthanam’ means “A state, place, spot, site, locality, station, position, etc.” Some say that “istan” is a Persian/Iranian word. It is possible. Both Sanskrit and Avestan have the same or similar word for land. It is known that ancient Sanskrit and ancient Avestan languages were linguistically very close to each other. History of a country should be its true story right from its birth to the present time. Pococke (p.1) has has observed: observed: “An illustrious geographer has well observed that the names which geography, particularly physical geography, has consecrated, may be considered c onsidered the most important documents of primitive history, or of history anterior to chronology. … Had Had that geographical nomenclature been preserved preserved pure and entire, a map of the world might have been obtained, more valuable by far than the Universal Histories.” Pococke (pp.6,7) seems to lament that Greeks have inherited a mass of disfigured documents. This has been made more difficult by the superscriptions of new tales over the old parchment. He seems to believe that fortunately, since no erasures have been made, the text of the old history needs to be restored: “Our way seems effectually barred by the dictum of those theorist who virtually define ‘ancient history’ as ‘invention’. I deeply regret this spirit of theorisng; it has been gaining ground of late years in

8

Malte Brun, Geog. Univ.

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Germany; and, but recently, its most able exponent in this country has carried this principle into the regions of hypercriticism.” 9 Pococke (pp.6-7) talks about an “able writer” in the Edinburgh Review, stresses str esses upon the necessity of  historical naked truths about the actual actual events, not eclipsed by poetic poetic jewelry: : “The real question at issue is not so much whether there was a basis of his historical truth for the poetical legend; whether any such events as the siege of Thebes, or the expedition against Troy, actually occurred; as whether we are now able to extricate this kernel of tr uth from the mass of fable with which it is overgrown, and to exhibit the naked skeleton of historical fact, stripped of all its coverings of  poetical embellishment.” embellishment.” Pococke stresses that Indians (Vedic Aryans), Aryans), who colonized Greece, not only composed composed history, but also theorized mathematics in poetic form. To me, it looks that the ancient Vedic tradition of poetic mode of expression has been effectively inherited by present generation, as evidenced by its generous use, as musical poetic expression of love, sentiments and philosophy philosophy in Indian movies. Pococke (pp.7-8) remarks: “When we find the same nation (reference seems to be to India) who were the colonists of Greece, composing not only history but also mathematical treatises in a poetic form, this poetical form will produce, in our minds, no solid objection against the statements contained therein. … What we read as poetry, and legend, was once accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks could conceive or relish of their past time. Curtain conceals nothing behind, and cannot by any ingenuity be withdrawn.10

Pococke (p.8) explains that “the curtain is the picture”, the picture is Indian and the curtain is now withdrawn. It needs to be noted here that almost all Hindu (Vedic) scriptures are composed in poetry form.

British East India Company & Distortion of History

Dr. K. M. Munshi, the founder of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, in his foreword to Majumdar’s " History  and Culture of the Indian People" (1988:8-9), points out to the damage, several British scholars have intentionally inflicted on the history of the Indian culture:

"The attempts of British scholars, with the t he exception of Tod, wherever they have taken these ‘histories’  as reliable source-books, have hindered rather than helped the study of Indian history. Unfortunately for us, during the last two hundred years, we have not only to study such histories but unconsciously to mould our whole outlook on life upon them." 9

See “The History of Greece,” by G. Grote, Esq., London, 1849. History of Greece, vol. I, Preface, p. xiii.

10

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The British East India Company employed a well planned three-pronged three-pronged – missionary, history and education – assault on Hindu culture. Friedrich Friedrich Max Muller (Bharti, 1992:64-71), basically a missionary, missionary, was presented to India as a Sanskrit scholar. He was hired at the age of 25 years in 1847 to translate the Vedas into English. If they were really interested in translations, they would have hired an indigenous scholar with proficiency in Sanskrit and English, authentic historic perspectives on the Vedas, and with a genuine feel of the Vedic religion. Max Muller had none of the three. three. Neither English nor nor Sanskrit was his mother tongue. From the British point of view, his qualification was his firm commitment to his Sanskrit Pundits Christian mission. He very tactfully, as said by Bharti 11, hired a couple c ouple of impoverished Sanskrit Pundits (who could have been easily bribed), got Vedas misinterpreted to humiliate and discredit the Hindu religion and culture. For example, the mantras praising the Indo-Aryan (Hindu) heroes were attributed to the invading Aryans. I would have owed deep sense of gratitude to Max Muller and Sir William Jones for their hard researchoriented deep dig in the history and genuine tribute to the Vedic philosophy,

1.

if they had not robbed Hindus of their legitimate authorship of the Vedas and their age,

2.

if they had not confused the identity of the Aryans and their original home, and

3.

if they had not obscured the antiquity and the original abode of Sanskrit.

The ages of the four Vedas and the two epics (the Ramayana and the Mahabharta) have been shortened, so as to validate the ill-founded theory of ‘Aryan invasion of India’. The native Aryans were deprived of the credit for having such a great culture and composing the Vedas. Many exponents of the theory wrote that prior to the advent of the light-skinned  Aryans from Central Asia and the Asia Minor region, the natives of India were dark-skinned uncivilized uncivilized Dravidians who were allegedly pushed down to the South by the invading Aryans. This sowed the seeds of difference and division between the North and the South. The world is aware of the age-old British doctrine, ‘Divide and rule ’. Adam Hochschild, reviewing (NY Times, July 24, 2005) the book “Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact”  by historian Inga Clendinnen, writes that the author Inga Clendinnen feels that because of their ‘Divide and rule’ tactics, the British colonizers did not meet heroic resistance in much of Africa, India and Latin America. They succeeded su cceeded because they could make indigenous groups fight with each other, other, not against the strangers. She also also addresses the issue of the history. She remarks:

11

Bharti, Brahm Dat. Max Muller:A Lifelong Masquerade. New Delhi: Era Books, 1992.

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“History is always written by the victors – at least at first. … Since then, of course, the end of colonialism in Africa and Asia and the civil rights movement in the United States have forced us to start writing history differently. … Yet history remains a messy and complicated business.”

History: Legends & Mythology

: Herbert J. Muller, in The Loom Of History (1958, p.3) has said about the legends and myths:

“More important, the myths and legends legends are true history as the records of the mind of ancient ancient peoples. They yield insights into prehistoric custom and belief, the growth of more civilized aspirations, and finally the realization of conscious ideals.”

Muller has correctly described legends and myths. How could Jones objectively and accurately write about Hindus by discarding their ancient scriptures? They tell lot about the history of the ancient India. Hindu legends, like those of the Greeks and of the Romans, are not completely mythological. They contain lot of historical facts. In ancient times, peoples didn’t have the concept of history as distinguished from myths. In fact, most of the content of most religious scriptures contained historical facts. It is possible, there may be more sugar in praise of the main act ors, by way of some exaggeration in describing their acts, achievements, and philosophy. One should not blame the feelings and the sentiments, writers and poets had for their heroes. They should be thanked for the facts they have given for historians to reconstruct an objective and reliable history for generations to come.

Childes: Vedas, source of historical data

V. Gordon Childes, in The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins (1987, p.30), considers the Rig Veda, as a great history book. He remarks that the Vedas, particularly the Rig Veda, contain lot of historical data:

“The Indians’ language approximates most closely to that of the Mitanni documents and has been preserved from a remote date in the hymns of the Rig Veda. This priceless document also furnishes precious historical data.”

This evidences the age of the Rig Veda longer than the Mitanni documents can be placed before 1800 B.C. Though the Vedas are thousands of years older than that. t hat. Mitannis (Mitranis) were Khshtaries (Warriors) from the Punjab who had established their kingdoms in Asia Minor and in its neighboring

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region in about 1800 B.C. The age of the Vedas suggests the age of Sanskrit in which the Vedas were composed. The religion of the Indo-European Aryans is described in the Reader’s Digest’s The World’s Religions, edited by Dr. Peter B. Clarke (1993:130,131):

“Knowledge of the Aryans is mostly derived from the heritage of their sacred literature, known as the Vedas, especially the Rig Veda, a collection of hymns. … They spoke an early form of Sanskrit.”

On p.130, Clarke talks about the the connection of the big bath in Mohenjodaro with Hindu rituals:

“Since there are no written records, the bath’s (in Mohenjo-daro) purpose is unknown. However, scholars believe that it was connected with w ith ritual cleanliness and that it may even have prefigured the purificatory tanks found beside Hindu temples. If that is the case, ritual ablutions in India I ndia may have a history of 4,000 years.”

On the same page (p.130), it is written that the invading Aryans entered India about 1,500 B.C., contradicting the above statement that Hindu ritual ablutions ablutions may have a history of 4000 years, meaning 500 years prior to the alleged invasion of India by Aryans. On the basis of what is said above, it can be said that the Vedas, especially the Rig Veda, were composed much earlier than 1,500 B.C. As a matter of fact, the Vedas were composed long before 4,000 years (refer to the chapter: Sanskrit and Vedas)..

Should one write the history of others?

At least the one, who considers own legends as history and of others as myth, should not write history of others. It would be unprofessional and unethical for an ethnically biased historian to write about ethnically different people. If he wants to write, he should respectfully consult their scriptures, because, otherwise unconsciously inter-ethnic comparative bias would creep in. Historians are human beings, not saints. Historian should have identification with and adequate knowledge of the culture of the people, he/she is writing the history of. History has been prostituted only by those who have power to. Sorry to say that most European scholars, particularly those of the c olonial days, have superiority complex in regard to most Eastern cultures. Histories penned by such historians are bound to be ethnically biased. May be the colonial lords did not give them correct facts, or they told them what to write and how, evidenced by histories of several European colonies. 28

The first version of a history, undoubtedly, has more lasting impact than its later corrected versions. The “first history” has typically been written by government-decorated scholars. In such history books, truths are set aside to bring forth the accounts as dictated dictated by the colonial agenda. Such governmentgovernmentsponsored books receive extensive readership due to their recognition by schools and colleges as text books. They are given much more shelf space in libraries, particularly in public libraries. It is evidenced by what several copycat present post-independence post-independence scholars write. Max Muller worked enthusiastically to project Hinduism in unfavorable colors. His design is well reflected in his letter to Chevalier Chevalier Bunsen (The Life and Letters of Max Muller,Vol.1:17): Muller,Vol.1:17):

“Your Excellency, … I have no doubt whatever, that something can be written about the Veda which

would reach even the dullest ears. Nevertheless I, of course, shall be glad if the Rig Veda is dealt with in the Edinburgh Review , and if Wilson would write from the standpoint of a missionary , and would show how the knowledge and bringing into light of the Veda would upset the whole existing system of Indian theology. It might become of real interest. … The Christianity of 19th century will hardly be the Christianity of India. But the ancient religion of India is doomed … and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault it would be? ” 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, another missionary poised behind the mask of an educationist, told his father in 1836 (Bharti 1992:66) that if his plans of education were followed up, there will be no high caste Hindu left in Bengal after 30 years. years. Both Max Muller and Macaulay worked worked hard to disfigure and distort Vedic culture with an objective to infuse, in Hindus, a cultural inferiority complex. Muller and Macaulay did not succeed that much as they had desired because in those days very few Indians had knowledge of English; and very few among those few did read the books, Muller and Macaulay wrote. Moreover, Indians, in general, were getting correct perspectives on their religion and culture from oral traditions by way of  satsangs in temples and traditional plays from town to town, such as Ram Leelas, Krishna Leelas, satsangs, etc. It seems, seems, Max Muller had changed in his later later period of his stay in India. He started talking positive about Hindu culture. But the damage has been done by the two intertwined theories – ‘ Aryan  – according to which  Aryan invasion of India’  and ‘Indo-European family of languages’  – original natives of Bharat were not Aryans, who along with Sanskrit came from outside, and the original natives were dark-skin uncivilized Dravidians who were pushed southward by the invading Aryans who spoke Sanskrit which was linguistically quite alien to the Dravidian languages. They succeeded in creating wide ethnic ethnic rift between the North and the South. Dr. K. M. Munshi (in Majumdar, 1951:9) has drawn our attention to the harm several European scholars have intentionally done to Hindu culture: He laments how the failures of Hindus have been highlighted and how their successes have been consistently ignored:

“It (history) does not give us the real India. … During our school or college career, generation after generation were told about the successive foreign invasions of the country, but little about how we resisted them and less about about our victories. We were taught to decry the Hindu social systems; systems; but we

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have never been told how this system came into existence as a synthesis of political, of political, social, economic and cultural forces; and how it developed in the people the tenacity to survive catastrophic changes.”

We can find consolation in Munshi’s (in Majumdar, 1951:9) assuring note:

“History, as I see it, is being consciously lived by Indians. History is a witness to the fact that politically

motivated recorded history of India has been disappointed by the history given down to us orally by our Vedas and Upanishads.”

Illiteracy: A Blessing In Disguise

Paradoxically, mass illiteracy in the villages in earlier times has been a blessing in disguise. It has saved the “ Jahil ” villagers of India from reading the undesirable material written in history books against Hindus and their culture. The illiteracy has kept them culturally immune to the colonial historical virus. They, unlike the educated elite, have remained ignorant of misrepresentations and distortions of the history, and thus have been correctly informed about their culture and heritage through the traditional oral mode of transmission of Vedic knowledge from generation to generation. It has been better explained by Dr. Alan Roland, an eminent American psycho-analyst, in his “ In Search of Self in India and   Japan” (1988, p.18):

“British administrative, educational, and missionary attitudes all conveyed intense attitudes of British superiority and Indian inferiority in numerous shades and ways over the two centuries c enturies of their colonial presence. This had enormous psychological impact, particularly on the Western-educated elite who were more closely associated with the Raj. Since the men were more exposed to British attitudes than women, they were much more affected by colonial denigration.”

In fact, the “educated” elite of India, in order to become learned in a real sense, need to unlearn lot. We Indians have been suffering from an ethno-cultural inferiority complex. It would be beneficial for India and Indians if politicians politicians and academics take active interest interest in uncovering the historic truths. Dr. K. M. Munshi (Majumdar, 1951:8) has remarked:

“To be a history in the true sense of the word, the work must be the story of the people inhabiting a country. … The central purpose of a history must, therefore, be to investigate and unfold the values which age after age have inspired the inhabitants of a country to develop their collective will and to express it through the manifold manifold activities of their life. Such a history of India is still to be written”. written”.

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In conclusion, I would like to say that Hindus indifference to our own history has been invitation to foreigners to write our history. Western historians discarded Indian mythology as history. This was the reason why western scholars did not know true history of ancient India. Matlock, in his India Once Ruled  the Americas (p.170), explains this: “The one and only reason why we don’t know about India’s true role in human history is our selfimposed ignorance of Indian mythology, history, and traditions!”

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Illinois, University Press, 1983. Banerjee, Satya Ranjan. A Handbook of Sanskrit Philology. Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 2000. Barnett, L.D. Antiquities of India. New York, 1914. Benveniste, Emile. Indo-European Language and Society. Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press, 1969. Bhatia, Tej K. Negation of South Asian Languages. Patiala, India: Indian Institute of Language Studies, 1995. Bhattacharjee, Arun. A History of Ancient India (2nd ed.). Liverpool: Lucas, 1988. Bhattacharya, D.K. Prehistoric Archaeology. Delhi: Hindustan Publishing Corporation,1972. Bodmer, Frederick. The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. New York, London: W.W Norton & Company, 1972.

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Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: Anchor Books,1988. Cannon, Garland & Kevin R. Brine (ed.). Objects of Enquiry: The Life, Contributions, and  Influences of Sir William Jones. New York: New York University Press, 1995. (DHL 954,0072, OBJ.)

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Childe, V. Gordon. The Aryans: A Study of Indo-European Origins. New York: Knopf, 1926.  ________ . New Light on the Most Ancient East. New York : Frederick A. Praeger, 1953.  _________ . The Dawn of European Civilization. London,1950  _________ . Piecing Together the Past 

 _________ . What Happened in History , Pelican Books,1943 Clark, Grahame. World Prehistory in New Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993. Clark, Grahame & Stuart Piggot. Prehistoric Societies. New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1968. Clarke, Peter B. The World=s Religions, Understanding the Living Faiths. Pleasantville:Marshall Limited,1993. . Coedes, G. The Indianized States of Southern Asia. Honolulu: An East-West Center Book, The University Press of Hawaii, of  Hawaii, 1964. I ntroduction. Chicago & London: The Dimock, Jr., Edward & et al. The Literature of India: An Introduction.

University of Chicago Press, 1974. Durant,Will. Our Oriental Heritage. New York: MJF Books,1935. Elst, Koenraad. Indigenous Indians: Agastya to Ambedkar. New Delhi: Voice of India, 1993.  __________ . Dr. Ambedkar: A True Aryan. New Delhi: Voice of India,1993a.

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 ____________  ____________ .Gods, Sages and Kings. Salt Lake City: Passage Press, 1991.

Griffith, Ralph T.H. The Hymns Of The Rgveda. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas Publishers Private Limited, 1995. Langer,William L (ed.). The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of World History (Vol. 1 & 2). Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,1968.

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McCrindle, John W.  Ancient India. As Described in Classical Literature. New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1979.  ___________ . Ancient India: As Described by Ptolemy. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt.,Ltd.,2000. Malmkjaer, Kristen (ed.). The Linguistics Encyclopedia. London and New York: 1991.

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Majmudar, R.C.(ed). History and Culture of the Indian People. Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1951.  _____________ . Ancient India. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1952. Mallory, J.P. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology and Myth. New

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Thames and Hudson,1989. Malmkjaer, Kristen (ed.). The Linguistics Encyclopedia. London and New York: 1991.

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Mathews, P.H. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1997.  ____________ . Linguistics: A Very Short Introduction, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Motwani, Jagat K. Ancient History of Bharat and Hindu Identity. i n Sharma, Bhu Dev & N. Ghosh (ed.). Revisiting Indus-Sarasvati Age and Ancient India. Atlanta (USA): World Association for Vedic Studies, USA.1998.

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 _________ . Indo-European Languages: Too Diverse for One Family. In Sharma, Bhu Dev (ed.). New Perspectives on Vedic and Ancient Indian Civilization. Meerut (India): World Association of Vedic Studies, 2000.  _________ . Indo-European Languages: A Myth. In Sharma, Bhudev (ed). Contemporary  Views on Indian Civilization. Meerut (India): WorldAssociation WorldAssociation of 

Vedic Studies, 2003. Muller, F. Max. Science of Language (Vol .I). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons , 1891.  __________ . The Six Systems of I ndian Philosophy. Calcutta: Susil Gupte (India) Ltd., 1952.  _________ . India: What Can It Teach Us? London: New York, Longmans, Funk & Wagnalls Company,1999. Muller, Herbert J. The Loom of History. New York: Harper & Brothers,1958. Nadiem, Ihsan H. Moenjodaro: Heritage Of Mankind.(2nd. revised edition) Lahore: Sang-eMeel-Publications, 1995. Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Calcutta: The Signet Press, 1946. Pococke, E. India in Greece; or Truth in Mythology. London: Richard Griffin and Company, 1856. Poonai, Premsukh. Origin of Civilization and Language. Dayton Beach (Florida): Pearce Publishers, Inc. 1994.  Archaeology & Language: The Puzzle Of Indo-European Origins. New Renfrew, Colin.  Archaeology &

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Cambridge University Press, 1987. Roberts, J.M. History of the World . London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1987. Robinson, Andrew. Lost Languages: The Enigma of The World’s Undeciphered Scripts. New York: McGraw Hill, 2002 Robinson, Francis (Ed.). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri  Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldivas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Sharma, Bhu Dev & N. Ghosh (ed.). Revisiting Indus-Sarasvati Age and Ancient India. Atlanta (USA): World Association for Vedic Studies, USA.1998. Sharma, Bhu Dev (ed.). New Perspectives on Vedic and Ancient Indian Civilization. Meerut

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(India): World Association of Vedic Studies, 2000.  ________ . Contemporary Views on Indian Civilization. Meerut (India): WorldAssociation WorldAssociation of  Vedic Studies, 2003. Sidharth, B.G. The Unmythical Puranas: A Study in Reverse Symbolism .@ In Grifith 1989.

Observer , April

 ___________.The  ___________.The Antiquity of The Rig Veda. Hyderabad: B.M.Birla Science Centre, 1991.  ___________.Mahayuga:  ___________.Mahayuga: The Great Cosmic Cosmic Cycle And The Date of the Rig Veda.

Hyderabad: B.M.Birla Science Centre,1991a.  __________  __________ .The Astronomical Symbolism of Vishnu from t he Vedas to the Puranas.Hyderabad:B.M.Birla Puranas.Hyderabad:B.M.Birla Science Centre , 1991b...  ___________.  ___________. A Lost Anatolian Civilization: Is It Vedic?  Hyderabad:B.M.Birla Centre,

1992.

 A Date and Place for the Mahabharta. Hyderabad: B.M.Birla Science Centre,  ___________ . . A

1993.

 ___________.  ___________. Calendaric Astronomy, Astronomical Dating & Archaeology: A New View of   Antiquity and its Science . Hydrabad: B.M.Birla Science, 1993a.

Walker, Benjamin. Hindu World: An Encyclopedic Survey of Hinduism (2 vols). New York: Wheeler, R. E. M. F ive Thousand Years of Pakistan. London: Royal India & Pakistan Society, 1950. Wheeler, Mortimer. The Indus Civilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Wilford, Francis. Chronology of the Hindus.@ In Sir william Jones.   Asiatic Researches pp.241-295). New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1979.

Vol.5, Ch.XVIII, ( 

 ____________  ____________ . An Essay on the Sacred Isles in the West@ (written in 1780's). In Sir William Jones (ed.).  Asiatic Researches (Vol.8,Ch.VII,pp.245-375). New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1979a.  ____________  ____________ . A Dissertation on Semiramis, the Origin of Mecca@ (written in 1780's). In Sir Sir Jones (ed.).  Asiatic Researches( Vol. 4, Ch.XXVI, pp.361-383). New

William

Delhi: Cosmo Publications,1979b.

  ____________ ____________ . On Egypt and Other countries adjacent to Cali River or Nile of Sir William Jones (ed). Asiatic Researches ( Vol.3,Ch.XIII, Vol.3,Ch.XIII, pp.295-468). Publications, 1979c.

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New Delhi: Cosmo

Ethiopia.@ in

 ____________  ____________ . On the Ancient Ancient Geography of of India@ (written (written in 1780's). In Sir William Jones.  Asiatic Researches (Vol.14, Ch.VII,pp.373-470). New Delhi: Cosmo Publicationss, 1980.

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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 puranic accounts handed down to us over several millennia. millennia. It is to state it without any embellishments, embellishments, a revised history history that is completely at odds with 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 of Indian historians at the time of Independence Independence accepts the basic framework of the History of India as revised by the British colonialists. Fifty years after independence independence the narrative has not changed and the banner of the colonial colonial version of history is now now borne by the Indian left including the Communists and the rump of the Congress party left behind after successive successive defections from its fold and whose only common ideology is the adulation of the family of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Jawaharlal Nehru, despite the fact that the current generation of that 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 now feel they have a stake in in the preservation of this false history and when confronted with the reality of their acquiescence acquiescence to a false and revised history history of their their own land by by a very recent arrival on the scene, react with irrelevant responses such as “why blame 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 explanation is that long centuries of servitude as a Dhimmi 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

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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 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 process undertook a dangerous and long journey in order to satisfy their curiosity. The other category belongs to those who were influenced influenced considerably 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 unequivocal terms. But the the pattern of spending spending a lifetime studying the Indics Indics for a lifetime and imbibing their knowledge knowledge and then subsequently subsequently belittling their achievements achievements was first exhibited 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 12

“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” 

12

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

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We remind our readers that such an unabashedly racist sentiment was expressed as late as th

the beginning of the 20 century, after the renaissance and the enlightenment. 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 in dispute. 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? Pali? We feel the answers were unique 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 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

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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 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 interested in Indic scholarship. The Byzantines or the Eastern Empire 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. 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 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. Arab and Non Arab Islamic studies of India (most of the Islamic savants who who studied India did not speak Arabic as their native native tongue, but were were descended from converted central Asian and Indic civilizations civilizations (700 CE to 1200 CE). In fact it can safely be be said that the Arab savants savants had enormous respect 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 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 does not seem to bother AlBiruni. Furthermore Furthermore , Al Biruni even though a native of Khorasan (Khwaresm), (Khwaresm), was raised in Ghazni and and spoke a dialect of Farsi known as Dari, which is spoken even today in Afghanistan. These areas of Afghanistan were in fact fact freshly Islamized after 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 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 the Mongol Great Khan Chinghiz, the most victorious victorious conqueror of all time. time. It was also severely impacted when vast numbers of Indics were taken in slavery, especially able bodied bodied men and women, and those with skills in the arts and sciences sciences and equally large numbers 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 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

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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. 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 the 12th Century Pope, Honorius 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. 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 S ir William Jones in the 1770’s. 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, 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 obsession of nationalistic Hindus. Such Such is the fate and the perversion of of history that conquered conquered nations can aspire aspire to Different aspects of this fascinating chapter, on the postulation postulation of an Aryan race and its corollaries the Indo European, Indo German are described for instance by various authors Trautmann 13, Rajaram14 and Arvidsson 15 and very recently by Prodosh Aich16 . The interesting but the curious aspect of this phenomena is that while the concept of  13

Trautmann, Thomas, Thomas , “Aryans and British India”, 1997, University of California press Rajaram, Navaratna “The Politics of History, Voice of India, 1995 15 Stefan Arvidsson 2006:38 Aryan 2006:38 Aryan Idols 16 Prodosh Aich Lies wirth Long Legs, 2006, Samskrti, New Delhi 14

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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 Ar yan people. In contrast to the Germans and the French , whose interest in matters Indic was catalyzed by their observance of the ubiquitous presence presence of the Indic civilization 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 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 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 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. 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 s igh 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 th (remember ideas of racial superiority were dominant in 18 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

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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. own. This is a train of thought that needs to be explored further, but we do 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 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 have been no benefits accrued from the change in the medium medium of  instruction to English. English. Due to the fortuitous circumstance that a substantial substantial part of the new new world now 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

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Indian population population is not a participant in this new bounty, because they do not have the access access to the expensive schools that purvey access to such an education. The most telling impact impact of the newly coined endeavor endeavor called philology , that was the result of this unwanted gush of attention engendered ever since the discovery 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 and his geographical origin was synonymous with 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 opinion of India and Indic Indic traditions that the Colonial overlords had, of India in the eighteenth 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 .

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Table 1 the general British view of the Indic during the Colonial Era The Caricaturization of the Indic There is a strong undercurrent in the Occident that it Is the religious beliefs of the Indic that are the root cause of his misfortunes. The Indic is inherently incapable of adventurous behavior and will not venture beyond the confines of  the Indian subcontinent (Kaalapaani syndrome) The Indic is incapable of original, rational and creative ideas. The Indic is incapable of independent thinking and is unquestioning in his adherence to authoritarian diktats such as those in the Vedic texts and is only capable of rote learning (presuming it is conceded that the Indic is capable of learning at all.) The caste system is an artifact of the Indic religious belief system, and that the Indic is inherently opposed to egalitarian ideas and is wedded to the racial and ethnic stratification of his own society. The Indic is especially unique and egregious in the manner in which he exploits his fellow Indics The Indic is is fundamentally not tuned tuned to making progress progress and advancing advancing in the modern world, world, and is lost in an ancient mind set Everything good and worthwhile in the Indian subcontinent has been imported by the invaders, and the only indigenous characteristics are those like caste that are i nherent to the Indic civilization. The Indic is fatalistic and will not make an effort to change his destiny which is written in stone the moment he is born The Indic is lazy and indolent The Indic has no sense of history and is even poorer at keeping records of his historical past As a consequence of the above the Indic is socially backward, possibly morally corrupt and perennially hence dependent upon Westernization to reform the current problems in Indian society.

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. subcontinent. In the same vein, vein, HH Wilson, the first occupant of the Boden Chair in Sanskrit, wrote as follows,

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“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 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.

1. Indic studies by native Indics when the Indic tradition miraculously 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 techniques - first with the sword and then 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 include Perception and Observation Observation (Pratyaksha), Anumaana (inference), Comparison and Analogy (Upamaana), shabda ( acceptance, though not necessarily uncritical acceptance, of the

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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). 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 c onspiracy 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.

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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. b. c. d.

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 literature (of the Veda, the Brahmanas, the Upanishads, Upanishads, the Purana,) Purana,) as well as fundamental fundamental theories 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 point to be made about about the direction in in which knowledge was transmitted. transmitted. Many have been the 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 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 from the people who practiced such skills, like Jyotish Pandits and engage engage in intellectual property property theft. What defines such such activity as theft? If the recipient recipient does not acknowledge the source of his teaching then it is fair to call it theft.

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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

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“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 standards of evidence required required for a similar claim of transmission transmission of knowledge from West 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’ PhD thesis titled “Materials for the Transmission of Greek astrology to India”. Notice he does not ask whether such a transmittal ever happened. 17

C K Raju “Cultural Foundations of Mathematics”, Centre for Studies in Civilizations(PHISPC), Pearson Education, 2007,page 313,

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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 The inherent contradictions contradictions of the Aryan Invasion Invasion Theory by the mythic and yet to be identified identified Aryan race. The insistence on clinging to a racial terminology even when it is widely discredited and abandoned elsewhere The insistence that Indic astronomy , geometry geometry and mathematics was not autochthonous to India India but was borrowed from the Greek or the Babylonians The origin of the Brahmi script becomes a victim of the ‘anywhere but India’ syndrome Devaluation and denigration of the extent of the ancient Indic contribution to Mathematics and Astronomy Dating of the Mahabharata Dating of of the Satapatha Brahmana Dating of of the Veda Dating of the Vedanga Jyotisha Dating of the Sulva sutras The beginning of the Vikrama era The dating of the Buddha The dating of the Arthashastra The dating of Chandragupta Maurya The dating of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi and consequentially the dating of Panini Panini himself  The dating of Aryabhata There are resulting inconsistencies in the chronology of the Indic historical narrative,, which is now horribly mangled to fit the straightjacket of British assumptions

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 high percentage were loathe to discard the prevalent

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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 well known people as Sir William, William, Max Mueller, Franz Bopp, and many others have to be reevaluated and that the vast majority of the so so called Sanskrit scholars were indifferent 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 individuals to the category of mediocre imposters 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 18 th 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 cir cumspection 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 Mission for Manuscripts was established 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 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

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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 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 so many manuscripts that he called the resulting resulting effort at cataloguing a Census, s Census which took several volumes to compile And yet we are told repeatedly that the ancient ancient Indics were deficient in historical record keeping. 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 Sanskrit,, an example of a manuscript on palm-leaf, Bihar or Nepal 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.

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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)

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MAHABHARATA-HISTORY OR MYTH? BY Narayan Joshi Ph.D.

Abstract

Ramayana and Mahabharata have special place in hearts of Indian people. The fabric of Hindu culture is woven with characters and values of heroes from these two epics. Among all heroes Rama and Krishna are highly respected and worshipped by Indian people with loving hearts. Almost all of them believe these two personalities were incarnation of Bhagawan Vishnu. Both epics were repeated by people with devotion years after years. Stories of heroes from these two epics were retold thousands of time for character building of children in home and schools. Almost all Indian people believe the incidents described in epics were actually happened in prehistoric time. Hence they are part of the ancient Indian history. However there are Indian and alien scholars believe otherwise. In this work Dr. Joshi presents evidence about migration of Asians into the prehistoric Europe that could be due to the epic war.

Keywords: Mahabharat, Kuru, Kamboja,

Introduction

Without going into details, one can summarize broad belief of some (not all) alien scholars about the ancient Indian history. For past two hundred years alien scholars promoted the theory of white Aryan invasion from the northwest corner of the subcontinent and subsequent subjugation of indigenous black Dravidians. Indian epics thus describe struggle between invaders and aborigines of the subcontinent. Dr, Stanley Stanley Wolpert Wolpert (1) wrote this was the most important invasion in all of India’s history, since the Aryans brought with their Caucasian genes a new language-Sanskrit-and a new pantheons of gods, as well as the patriarchal, patrilineal family and the three-class social structure (priests, warriors and commoners) into which their tribes were organized. Late Dr. Murray Emeneau (2) wrote that Indians lost memory of Aryan invasion. Aryan invasion theory has undergone modifications in

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the past thirty years. The reward for forcing this modification on die-hard invasionists goes to Indian immigrants to countries like US in the past fifty years. Opinions of Indian Scholars

Now let us see the opinions of Indian scholars living in and outside of India. In January 2001, Dr. Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate economist in annual conference of Indian History Congress at Alipur Campus of the University of Calcutta, while addressing delegates, said that Ramayana and Mahabharata do not have any historical value. These two epics are simply mythology and nothing but poets’ fancy. He also said that neither Rama nor Krishna was a historical personality and both of them were simply mythological.

Dr. S.S.N. Murthy in his article (3) declared that the composer of Mahabharata was more

concerned about the spiritual aspect and hence, we have to seriously doubt the historicity of  the matter presented in the epic.

Dr. R.D. Banerji in his book (4) reported that Pandus were immigrants into India who were

entirely unconnected with Kurus. It is quite possible that Kunti, a daughter of Yadava clan was carried away by a barbarian named Pandu and five Pandava brothers were born of this illicit connection.

Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji in his book (5) wrote that Hindus were mild diluted brothers of the

aggressive pure white European Aryans.

Dr Rajesh Kochhar in his book (6) wrote that the clearing of Ganga plain forests had to await

the development of iron technology. The technique would have been to first burn down the  jungles and then remove the rumps with axes. The Mahabharata itself provides an example of  such a clearing, when Khandava forest was burnt down to found Indraprastha. He added further that Rigveda was a pre-iron age document. The compilation of Rigveda was taken up after 1700 BC by Indo-Iranian people or Indo-Aryans. After 1400 BC the Rigvedic people entered the Punjab plain and eventually spread further eastwards. In about 900 BC, the compilation of  the Rigveda was finally closed and the Bharata battle was fought.

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We see here clearly that these scholars are engaged in simply guesswork without giving us concrete evidence. Some of them present us few river names from Afghanistan and other talk superficially about Hindu Vedas and Iranian Avesta. Most of the information of these scholars is based on the theory of Aryan invasion promoted by alien scholars in order to demote the ancient Indian antiquities. Discovery of Indo-European family of languages by Europeans and British occupation of India coincided. It was in great interest of alien rulers of  India to rewrite the ancient history of India. They realized that they cannot make Krishna a post-Jesus (1AD) historical figure. So they tried to make him post-Moses (1500 BC) figure by promoting Aryan invasion of India after 1500 BC. However one cannot deny that there might be other reasons related to archaeological discoveries from the middle-east countries.

Time of the Epic War

Archaeological discoveries from India and Pakistan in the past 100 years are not of any great help in proving historicity of Mahabharata. There are diverse opinions about the decipherment of Indus script. Moreover thousands of samples of script found in excavations were taken outside of the subcontinent by alien researchers. Among people of India there is general belief that Mahabharata war took place in north India by the end of Dwapar Yuga. After departure of Bhagawan Krishna effect of Kaliyuga took its force. In Astronomical books of the ancient India we find references of the year of starting of Kaliyuga based on astronomical and astrological references from the epic Mahabharata.

Many Indian scholars of diverse background like medical, engineering, sciences, and humanities have some knowledge of astronomy and astrology. Due to their interest in Mahabharata they also tried to fix the year of Mahabharata war. Many of them arrived the date somewhere between 3200 BC and 3000 BC. One noteworthy effort in recent years to be mentioned here in this direction was that of Dr. Narahari Achar (7). Using modern planetarium software and his decipherment of Sanskrit astronomical passages from the epic, he arrived at the year 3017 BC for Mahabharata war. To the best of my knowledge nothing that ancient has discovered in the soil of the subcontinent during archaeological excavations except Indus civilization. But it has its own problem about decipherment of Indus script to the satisfaction of  both indigenous and foreign scholars. Certainly pottery pieces that old are always found but would that be enough to prove that Hastinapur and Indraprastha were somewhere in north India?

Five Cities Claimed by Pandava Brothers

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People of India are proud of Hastinapur and Indraprastha which were world capitals according to some of them. Although no concrete archaeological evidence so far came forward for their existence in north India, north Indians are eager to show their locations somewhere in Uttar Pradesha or Harayana. They even claim that five villages claimed by five Pandava brothers were Sonapat, Marpata, Panipat and other two in the same area. However the names of five cities (not villages) claimed by five Pandava brothers were Indraprastha, Avisthala, Vrikasthala, Varanavata and Makandi (capital of the south Pancala of the king Drupada) as described in Mahabharata. In short general belief of people may be different from actual references in the epic. This happens because the original Mahabharata is in Sanskrit verses and very few people nowadays have knowledge of Sanskrit, time and patience to read the epic in detail. Many read short stories from Mahabharata. Scholars differ again on different editions of the epic. Some of  them claim that there are many interpolations in the epic over the known Indian history of  2500 years,

Yaksha worship in Kurukshetra

Fortunately the whole Mahabharata is translated in many regional languages of India in recent years. The translation into Marathi is published and therefore I was able to read it. There are hundreds of interesting things in the epic like flying city of king Shalva. The research paper of Bharadwaj (8) describes Yaksha-worship in Kurukshetra. Yakshas were described as Dvarapalas of Kurukshetra. On one hand they are described as models of beauty and on the other hand they are grouped with Rakshasas, Gandharvas, Kinnars, and Pishacas. The word Yaksha occurs several times in the Rigveda, the oldest literary testament of mankind. Description of Yakshass from the ancient books of India is not always free from doubt. The four Yaksha guardian deities of Kurukshetra were Tarantuka, Arantuka, Kapil and Machakruka of  Ramhrada. However in another reference these were identified as names of the places and not as the names of Yakshas. So confusion always persists in connection with identification of  Yakshas. Many stories from Indian Puranas often describe Asuras, Suras, Rakshasas, Yakshas, Gandharvas, Pishacas and Vidyadharas along with place names from the area of Kurukshetra. So if we assume Kurukshetra was located around the modern state Harayana of the north India, then all these people were in ancient times within the borders of undivided subcontinent. In that case who were in the rest of the world when Mahabharat war was fought in the north India? To the best of my knowledge no satisfactory answer was offered to this question. Some Indian scholars reply saying in the ancient prehistoric times Indians pushed their brothers beyond Khyber Pass. This answer is based on on the story of children of Yayati, namely Anu, Druhyu, Yadu and Puru . In short, Indians are happy to believe that the world capitals Hastinapura and Indraprastha were located somewhere in the north India and there is no need

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to extend inquiry beyond the Sindhu river now in Pakistan. Many are even happy with the newly promoted Indian river Sarasvati within the borders of the truncated subcontinent called India. Is it really necessary to go beyond Sindhu river in order to understand the ancient history of Mahabharat? Mahabharat? Let us see!

Main Parties in Mahabharat War

In the present west Pakistan, we come across Sindha province. This is Sindhu desha of  the king Jayadratha of Mahabharat. Coupled with Sindhu, we always find Sauvira desha in the epic. This province is east of Sindha now called Huri.. In the north of Sindha there is Shibi desh. In the north of Shibi is Gandhar desh. The princess Gandhari was mother of one hundred wicked Kauravas. They were cousin brothers of noble Pandavas from the epic. In the west of  Sindha is Baluchistan province of Pakistan. This is the country of Bhadragana kshatriyas from the epic. In the north-west of Gandhar was the ancient Valhika desh (modern Bactria) from the epic. In the south of Bactria were Kambojas. Thus the main parties in the war, namely Kurus and Kambojas and their relative provinces were concentrated on the border of the present day Pakistan and Afghanistan. So is it justified to assume that the epic war took place all over the north India only?

Indo-European Language Family

Many believe the epic war was office time war after two armies gathered on the battle field of Kurukshetra. There is contradiction here too. The warrior Karna was king of Vanga east of Magadha. Magadha was under control of Jarasandha. After he was killed, his sons agreed to help Pandavas. Karna was on the side of Kauravas. In that case how Magadha would have allowed army of Karna to pass through their kingdom towards the west to Kurukshetra to fight war? Kings engaged in the struggle of the epic appear to be located on both sides of the Vedic Sarasvati river. During the war Balaram went on holy journey on the river Sarasvati when the war was raging on both sides of the river. I think something is missing from this picture of the war of the epic. This picture did not address the countries and their kings from the land of the ancient Persia. Persia is important because alien scholars of the Indo-European language family are firm believers that Sanskrit was developed in Indian subcontinent from the mixture of  language of invading Aryans and indigenous linguistic elements. Due to similarities between Vedas and Avesta some of them believe that Sanskrit was brought to India from ancient Persia. Although the “Aryan invasion theory” (AIT) was diluted to the Aryan migration theory in recent years, it did not disappear totally yet. To the best of my knowledge, Indian linguistic scholars

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and Indian archaeologists to this day had not provided us with satisfactory answers to the spread of Indo-European language family over the vast mass of Eurasia. Only explanation came forward so far from Indian side is that Indians pushed their brothers beyond Khybar pass in the ancient times. This is called the” Out of India” theory.

Indian River Names to Lithuanian Rivers

I met professor Mislav Jezic from the country Croatia from Europe. I met him in May 2007 in Vedic workshop of Asian Studies Center of University of Texas at Austin. I asked him respectfully that is it true that Croatia’s name derived from the name SarasvatŸ (H‘Rat). He said yes. So we have country SaravatŸ in Europe. Let us move further to the west. The author Krishna Chaitanya (9) in his book reported that Lithuanian rivers have names like Tapti, Nemuna, Srobati, Narbudey and Gauja which are surprisingly like Indian river names Tapti, Yamuna, Saraswati, Narmada, and Ganga. The tribal or clan names of the ancient Lithuanians such as Kuru, Puru, Yadava and Sudava seem distinctly Aryans; so also are the names of their gods such as Indra, Varuna and Purakanya. Late Arvinda Ghosh from Houston visited Lithuania and reported in Voice of Asia (April 7, 1997) that Lithuanian language is Sanskritic and not Slavic. It has seven declensions.The city Kaunas has a museum called the Museum of Devils. Idols of Mahakali, Shree Hanuman are featured here. I myself checked the truth of river names with Lithuanian computer professional lady working in Houston. She confirmed the above information as true. How do we explain the river names?

Indo-Asian Invasion of Prehistoric Europe

This information can be used in both ways. Proponents of “Aryan invasion theory” (AIT) have used Lithuanian connection to prove that Aryans invaded (recent modification--migrated) India from Europe. The proponents of “Out of India theory” (OIT) say Indians went to Lithuania in prehistoric times. In the second version of the theory, Indians pushed their unwanted brothers beyond Khyber Pass and decided to forget the west afterwards until this day. Where is the truth? Why Ganga, Yamuna and Sarasvati are also in Lithuania? Let us check in the book of  the Lithuanian archaeologist late Marija Gimbutas (10). She wrote that Sanskrit and Baltic are the two linguistic poles between which the languages of the Indo-European homelands are found. Some linguists, because of very archaic character of the Lithuanian and Old Prussian languages, believed and still believe, that the homelands must be in Lithuania, or near it, somewhere between the Baltic Sea and western Russia, even in a small area between the Vistula and Nemunas. However archaeological data indicate movements of people from

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Eurasiatic steppes into Europe and Asia Minor and assimilation or disappearance of local Neolithic and Chalcolithic cultures in Europe at the end of the third and beginning of the second millennium BC. She continued that in 2300-2200 BC the first sign of expansion of an entirely new culture from steppe zone north of Black sea into western Anatolia and then in Europe. The Kurgan Pit-grave people from Volga and the south Siberian steppes and Kazakhstan were ceaselessly advancing westwards. They possessed vehicles- - - - - -. So in ancient times people from Asia were moving towards Europe. However some alien clever scholars turned the whole history around and fooled us for more than two hundred years with faked theory of Aryan invasion of Dravidian India. These clever alien scholars conveniently transferred ancient Dasas from the northeast of the ancient Persia into subcontinent and constructed fake history in which Aryan hero Indra destroying Dasas inside subcontinent. After destroying the ancient history of Indian people for two hundred years, they finally got revelation of their mistake and shifted Dasas back to the middle-east in the later part of twentieth century.

Conclusions

Was Asian migration into Europe in the ancient times was the result of the epic war? There is more information hidden in the epic that needs to be reinvestigated going beyond borders of the subcontinent. Dr. Koenrad Elst has written that a theory does not die because it has faults. It is replaced by more comprehensive theory that can explain all existing facts. The proponents of AIT know that their theory is not perfect. But the proponents of OUT have not come with comprehensive theory either. There is room for deeper research in the epic Mahabharat in order to prove that it is not a myth but it is history of the ancient world . References

(1) Stanley Wolpert, “A New History of India”, Fourth Edition, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1993, p.27 and p.37. (2) Murray Emeneau,” Linguistic Prehistory of India”, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 98, 1954, pp.282-292.

(3) S.S.N. ”The Questionable Historicity of Mahabharata”, in Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies, 10, 2003.

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(4) R.D. Banerji, ”Prehistoric Ancient and Hindu India”, The World Publishing Company, Cleveland and New York, 1963, p.152.

(5) Suniti Kumar Chatterji,” Indo-Aryan and Hindi”, Pub: Firma, K.L. Mukhopadhyay, Calcutta-12, revised and enlarged Second Edition, 1969, p.32. (6) Rajesh Kocchar, “The Vedic People, Their History and Geography”, Pub: Oriental Longman Ltd, New Delhi, 1997, p.90.

(7) Narahari Achar, ”Date of the Mahabharat War-Simulations using the Planetarium Software”, Vedic Science, Vol.8, No.4, Oct-Dec 2006, pp. 12-22.

(8) O.P.Bharadwaj, “Yaksha-worship in Kurukshetra” in Prach-Prabha edited by D.C.Bhattacharya, Herman publishing House, New Delhi, 1989, pp. 203-223.

(9) Krishna Chaitanya, “A New History of Sanskrit Literature”, Pub: R.C. Jam for Manohar Book Service, 2 Ansari Road, Darya Ganj, New Delhi, 1977, p.3.

(10) Marija Gimbutas, “The Balts”, Pub: Frederick A. Praeger, Praeger, New York, 1963, pp. 37-38. . --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------About Author: N. R. Joshi, 1735 Bryant Way, Beaumont, Texas 77706 USA. E-mail address: [email protected]

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(Paper presentation in the 7th Intl. Conf. of WAVES on June 27 - 29, 2008)

THE "DOTTED RECORD" AND ITS IMPACT ON ANCIENT IN DIAN CHRONOLOGY, INCLUDING THE ANTIQUITY OF THE VEDAS AND OF THE BHAGAVAD GITA

By

Sunil Kumar Bhattacharjya, Pune, India

ABSTRACT

In the Indian tradition, history is very important and this is one of the five criteria that a Purana must meet. The Puranas have maintained details of the royal dynasties from the times of Ramayana and Mahabharata and have even ventured to determine the age of the earth and the universe. With records carefully maintained the Hindus always thought that they are the indigenous people of India from the ancient times and that their philosophical, religious and other literature are several millennia old.

In the 4th century BCE Megasthenes wrote the "Indica", which has also been used as a sort of historical document but this has not been interpreted properly. Similarly the account of Alberuni, who came much later, has also not been interpreted properly. Megasthenes, Megasthenes, who was in the court of Sandrocottus, said that the capital of the kingdom of the latter was Palibothra. In late 18th century CE Sir William Jones wrongly arrived at the conclusion that Pataliputra was the Palibothra and also suggested that Chandragupta Maurya was the Sandrocottus. Then in early 19th century CE, Dubois suggested that people from Caucasus region migrated to India. Yet till the middle of the 19th century CE nobody raised the question as to whether the Hindus are the indigenous people of India or not. In the later part of the 19th century Prof. Max Muller proposed that there was Aryan Invasion in the 15th century BCE. He had also worked out an Ancient Indian Chronology and also gave the dates of the Vedas, the Brahmanas, the Puranas and the Sutras after the Aryan invasion. He arrived at the date of Lord Buddha from the work of  Sir Jones as well as from the Dotted record. But the Dotted record was the record, which was kept together with the Samantap āsādikā and Sanghabhadra translated the latter from Sanskrit to the

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Chinese. Buddhaghosa also translated the Samantap āsādikā into the Pali language. The Sri Lankan Buddhist scholars considered Sandrocottus to be Chandragupta, as suggested by Sir Jones and calculated the date of Lord Buddha in the 5th century century BCE. They gave a date of the translation of  of  Samantapāsādikā by Sanghabhadra to tally with their date of Lord Buddha. Prof. Max Muller Muller heard about the Dotted record and he received the details of that from his friend and past pupil, B. Nanjio and Prof. Max Muller seemed to have found confirmation for his speculations from it. Thus a combination of  the speculation of Sir Jones with the speculation of the Sri Lankan Buddhist scholars on the date of Lord Buddha and of the translation of the Samantap āsādikā (and hence of the Dotted record) helped Prof. Max Muller to further speculate the Aryan Ar yan Invasion Theory and to prepare an Ancient Indian Chronology including the date of the Vedas and other scriptures and literature.

The date of the Dotted record as well as of Sanghabhadra has been re-examined and it is shown that Prof. Max Muller's ideas were flawed. The real Palibothra has been identified for the first time and this will dismiss Sir Jones speculations for ever. There was no Aryan Invasion and Lord Buddha died many centuries before the the 5th century BCE. It has also been been shown how Alberuni Alberuni was misquoted misquoted by the historians to keep the Jonesian and Max-Mullerian speculations alive.

INTRODUCTION

India has a very ancient history and every Indian can be proud of the very high material and intellectual achievements of the past. Yet there was an eclipse, which climaxed towards the end of the nineteenth century CE, with Prof. Max Muller's speculation of the Aryan Invasion Theory as well as of an Ancient Indian chronology, which defied all logic. Prior to Prof. Max Muller's speculation of the Aryan Invasion Theory, the historians referred to the Hindus as the indigenous people of India. In his "History of India", M.S. Elphinstone wrote in 1841 CE that nowhere in any ancient book of the Hindus there is any mention of the Hindus ever inhabiting any other country. Moreover the Hindus do not have any Vedic rituals performed outside India in the ancient times. This is despite Jean Antoine Dubois's speculation in 1816 CE that there was migration of people to India from the Caucasus region but without making any mention of the Aryans. As a result of these speculations of Prof. Max Muller, the antiquity of the Vedas and also of the Bhagavad Gita were lowered. Prof R.C Zaehner, who wrote an excellent book on Bhagavad Gita, even ventured to make the absurd claim that Bhagavad Gita got the ideas from Lord Buddha's teachings, while the contrary is only true. Further his speculations of the Ancient Indian Chronology had lowered the antiquities of all the Religious, Philosophical and Literary stalwarts of India of the ancient past.

There were several factors which led Prof. Max Muller to make these fantastic speculations and the "Dotted Record" contributed to it in no less measure.

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HISTORY OF THE DOTTED RECORD

After Lord Buddha passed away Upali collected the Vinaya pitaka with due respect and marked a dot on a record and kept it next to the Vinaya. This became a regular practice to mark a dot in that record every year. Before his death Upali gave it to his disciple D āsaka. Dāsaka gave it to Sonaka and Sonaka S onaka gave it to Siggiva. Siggiva gave it to Moggaliputta Tissa and the latter gave it to Candavajji. This practice continued till it reached a Tripitaka Master, who took the Dotted Record and the Samantap āsādikā (a commentary on the Vinaya pitaka) with them, when he and his disciple Sanghabhadra visited Canton in China. Before his death the Master wanted to return to his native land (India) and he handed over the Dotted Record and the Samantapāsādikā to his disciple Sanghabhadra. Sanghabhadra translated the Samantap āsādikā into the Chinese language with the help of a S āmanera (bhikshuni) named Seng-Wei, at the Bamboo Grove monastery at Canton. These details have been given by Fei Chang-fang. ( Ref.1). At that point of  time there were 975 dots in the "Dotted Record", which indicated that 975 years have passed since Lord Buddha died.

Sangabhadra belonged to the Dharmagupta school of the Sarv āstivādins. All Sarv āstivāda literature was in Sanskrit and the history of their compilation goes back to the time of Kaniska, who came to power in 1298 BCE. The Rajatarangini and the recent studies of Prof. Narahari Achar on the available astronomical data of that time confirm that Kaniska became king in 1298 BCE. The great Buddhist scholar Asvaghosa came from Magadha to the court of Kaniska and a Buddhist Council of the Sarv āstavādins was held under the patronage of Kaniska. In that council the Buddhist literature of the Sarv āstavādins including the Tripitaka were compiled and written down in Sanskrit. Sri Lankan Buddhists do not recognize this council but the northern Buddhist schools confirm that it did take place five hundred years after the death of Lord Buddha. Thus from the Date of Kaniska the date of death of Lord Buddha comes out to be around 1800 BCE.

DATE OF SANGHABHADRA

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Sanghabhadra was a Sarvāstavādin and a contemporary of V āsubandhu. According to Hiuen Tsang Vāsubandhu was born 900 years after the death of Lord Buddha. In his early life V āsubandhu was a sarvāstivādin and he wrote the Abhidharmakosha but later on he became a critic of his own work and wrote the Abhidharmakosha-bhashya, where he refuted many aspects in Abhidharmakosha. He finally became a co-founder of the Yog āchāra school in association with his half-brother Asanga. The Buddhist scholar, Dignaga was a disciple of V āsubandhu. Dignaga had been criticized by Kumarila Bhatta. The Jaina records confirm that Lord Mahavira lived from 599 BCE to 527 BCE and also that Lord Mahavira defeated Kumarila Bhatta in debate. According to Jina Vijaya, Kumarila Bhatta was born in 557 BCE. Kumarila Bhatta was a contemporary of another Buddhist scholar Dharmakirti, who was born long after Dignaga. It is thus reasonable to state that Sanghabhadra was born long before the 6th century BCE and it could well be around the 8th or the 9th century BCE. BC E.

The question naturally arises that if Sanghabhadra was born around the 8th or the 9th century BCE and the Sarvāstivāda literature were in Sanskrit why then the Sri Lankan Buddhist scholars believed that Sanghabhadra translated the Samantap āsādikā in 489 CE and that the the text was originally in the Pali language. To delve into this mystery we must look at the misinterpretation of Indian Chronology during the 18th and the 19th century CE.

HANDLING OF INDIAN CHRONOLOGY IN THE 18th AND the 19th CENTURIES CE

In the Indian tradition the puranas provide the geneology of the royal dynasties as this is one of the five criteria requirements, which must be fulfilled by a work, to be eligible to be called a purana. Because of  this requirement even though the puranas are very ancient yet they have to be updated from time to time, so far as the historical information is concerned. Thus the puranas are valuable historical documents and the historical details of the puranas are authentic and free from the exaggerations and allegorical details found in the other pauranic stories, which were meant to convey the spiritual messages through different stories. Another historical source book was Kalhana's Rajatarangini. On top of these there were many astronomical details given in the ancient literature, which help one to arrive at the chronological information precisely.

In the 4th century BCE Megasthenes was in the court of Sandrocottus as a Greek emissary, though he himself was not of Greek origin. He wrote "Indica" and only the fragments of it are available today. But it does help one to know about the royalty and the social structures of those days. He says that Sandrocottus had his capital at Palibothra. Sir William Jones had mistakenly identified Pataliputra to be the Palibothra. Megasthenes wrote clearly that Palibothra was at the confluence of Ganga and Errannobas (or Yamuna), the third largest river in India (after Ganga and Sindhu or Indus). Megasthenes also mentioned several other rivers of India including Sone. But Sir Jones said that there was no ancient city near the confluence of Ganga and Yamuna. (Ref. 2) Even though Megasthenes had specifically mentioned Sone separately yet Sir Jones conveniently stated that Megasthenes mentioned about Sone negligently. But there was none in those days to protest against such horrendous accusation hurled at

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Megasthenes. Present day well -informed historians know that there was indeed the city of  Pratisthanpur at the confluence of Ganga and Yamuna, which was also mentioned by the great poet Kalidasa of the 8th century BCE in his drama "Vikramorvashia". The city of Pratisthanpur was destroyed completely about one thousand years ago by a devastating fire and from that time onward that city has been known as Jhusi (or Jhunsi), a name derived from the Hindi word Jhulasna or to burn. Megasthenes stated that in those days all the buildings / houses near the rivers and the sea were made of wood and Palibuthra, being at the confluence of Ganga and Yamuna, was no exception and that the structures with brick and clay were built only in places far away from the rivers and the sea. Thus it appears possible that the fire destroyed all the traces of the ancient wooden structures, if any of these at all survived till the time of the devastating fire. Jhusi is located towards the east of Allahabad, Allahabad, just across the river Ganga. Archaeologists have found grains and other artifacts in the mounds of Jhusi, which dates back to before the 4th century BCE. The Ashokan pillar found in Jhusi had inscriptions of  Samudragupta and it was shifted to the Allahabad Fort and the emperor Jahangir also made his inscriptions on that. There is also inscription of Ashoka in that and it was of Samudragupta after he was converted to Buddhism and he assumed the name of Ashokaditya. All the Gupta kings had their second names ending in "-aditya"

Sir Jones found abundant information from the Buddhist literature regarding the Pataliputra being the capital of Chandragupta Maurya, the grandfather of Ashoka Maurya. It was earlier during the reign of  the king Ajātsatru that the capital of Magadha was shifted from Rajagriha to Pataliputra. Sir Jones had conveniently suggested that Pataliputra was the Palibothra and Chandragupta Maurya was the Sandrocottus.

In reality Chandragupta of the Gupta dynasty was the Sandrocottus. Jaina record says that the Gupta era started 215 years after the death of Lord Mahavira. Gupta era is reckoned from the coronation of  Chandragupta. The coronation of Chandragupta of the Gupta dynasty thus took place in 527 - 215 = 312 BCE. Chandragupta had a truce with Seleucus in 305 BCE, according to which Seleucus ceded some of his territory to the west of Indus to Chandragupta and Chandragupta made a return gift of five hundred elephants to Seleucus. Seleucus, as a result, could concentrate on consolidating his empire in the west. According to the Jaina records Chandragupta abdicated his throne in 297 BCE and became a Jaina monk. Chandragupta was born before the advent of the Sh ālivahana Saka era and the Vikrama Samvat era. His date is therefore should be expressed in terms of the Saka-raja k āla (or the Saka-nripati k āla), which started in 553 BCE. According to Alberuni, the Gupta rule ended in the year 241 of the Saka k āla ie. in 241 + 78 = 319 3 19 CE. He identified the last king of the Guptas as Valabha. If we consider the date of start of  the Gupta era as 312 BCE as given by the Jaina records then we find find that 241 years before that ie in 312 + 241 = 553 BCE there was the Sakar ā  ja kāla. Sakarā jā kāla started from the year 553 BCE, in which Cyrus-II, the Great, led a revolt against the median king, as a consequence of which he became the ruler of all Iran, thus starting the Achaemenian period, which lasted till the arrival of Alexander, the Great, in 330 BCE. This means that the Indian historians historians should have considered considered the Sakar ā  ja kāla and calculated to find the start of the Gupta era in 553 - 241 = 312 BCE. This matches with the figure obtained by using the data from the Jaina record. Because of the wrong identification of Sandrocottus with Chandragupta

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Maurya by Sir Jones and also because because of the tremendous power and influence influence enjoyed by him, him, the contemporary historians ignored all historical facts and obligingly reduced the antiquity of the Gupta dynasty by 553 + 78 = 631 years and started saying that Chandragupta of the Gupta dynasty became king in the year 241 of the Shalivahana Saka and consequently the Ancient Indian Chronology was greatly damaged. In fact Alberuni also was of the opinion that Buddhism prevailed in Persia (Iran) and Irak (Iraq and upto Syria )before the advent of Zarathustra in the 7th century BCE. (Ref.3) This shows that Ashoka Maurya lived much before the 7th century BCE and Lord Buddha died about 300 years before the coronation of Ashoka Maurya. So would Alberuni have ever said that Sandrocottus was Chandragupta Maurya and would he have ever said that Chandraupta of the Gupta dynasty was born around 600 years after Sandrocottus? Sandrocottus? Alberuni must be turning in his grave as as the Indian historians, since the second half of the 19th century, conveniently overlooked this observation of Alberuni to suit their own pre-conceived notions, even though Max Muller himself retracted his own speculations when he said subsequently that no one on earth can tell the date of the Vedas correctly. It is the historians, who are keeping the Aryan Invasion Theory and his chronology alive even today even after getting so many newer information such as about the lost Saraswati river to which Sir William Jones and Prof. Max Muller did not have access to..

From Buddhist record Ashoka Maurya became king 300 years after the death of Lord Buddha and that the Jaina teacher Nighanta Nataputta was a contemporary of Lord Buddha. The Sri Lankan Buddhist scholars fixed the date of Lord Buddha assuming two limits (ie. upper and lower limits) that Lord Buddha died after Lord Mahavira and that he died before Ashoka Maurya became the king. But they were wrong in assuming that Nighanta Nataputta and Lord Mahavira was the same person. They were in fact different persons as they died in different places and they did not profess the same code of practice or vows. While Lord Mahavira recommended recommended the five-fold vows (or yamas yamas or restraints), restraints), Nighanta Nataputta , like Bhagawan P ārsvanath recommended four-fold vows. In fact after the death of Lord Mahavira there was a meeting of Kesi, the senior follower of Bhagawan Parsvanath and Gautama Indrabhuti

The linguistic experts also ignored the fact that Lord Buddha taught in the Pali language, also called the Shuddha-Magadhi or or the Ancient Prakrit, whereas whereas Lord Mahavira taught in Ardha-Magadhi or Jainaprakrit, which is the language that evolved evolved from Pali, over several centuries. centuries. All these show that Lord Buddha preceded Lord Mahavira by long time and they could not have been comtemporaries. Not only the linguists did not do justice to Indian History even the Political and Social scientists till late 20th century ignored the fact that the Polity as found in the accounts of Megasthenes and Kautilya (or Vishnugupta or Chanakya) were vastly different, as pointed out by Goyal. ( Ref.4) From his studies Goyal had rightly concluded that Megasthenes and Kautilya could not have belonged to the same time period. This also means that if Kautilya, the king-maker, who was instrumental in installing Chandragupta Maurya in the throne of Magadha, was not a contemporary of Sandrocottus then obviously Sandrocottus cannot be Chandragupta Maurya. But it appears that Goyal did not dare to challenge the views of those academic historians, who still holds on to the speculations of Sir William Jones and Prof.

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Max Muller. Goyal simply said that Kautilya could have been from a period later than that of  Megasthenes.

With two wrong premises that Chandragupta Maurya was Sandrocottus and that Lord Mahavira was Nigantha Nataputta, the Sri Lankan Buddhist scholars fixed the date of Lord Buddha between the date of  sandrocottus and that of Lord Mahavira. Taking the date of Chandragupta's abdication of throne in 297 BCE and the reign of his son Bindusara to be 25 years they calculated Ashoka's accession to throne in 297 - 25 = 272 BCE and his coronation four years later in 272 - 4 = 268 BCE. They assumed that Ashoka's coronation took place 218 years after the death of Lord Buddha. However according to the Indian Buddhists it was 300 years and not 218 years. They had reduced the reign of the Nandas to 22 years whereas it was 100 years. They also did not mention the period of reign of Aniruddha and his brother Munda properly. Both of them ruled ruled for 8 years each but the the Pali version version of Samant āsādikā has given only 8 years for both of them together. They had necessarily reduced that period by about 100 years to make it 218 years as otherwise it would have meant that the death of Lord Buddha occurred before that of Lord Mahavira. Adding 218 years to 268 BCE, the year of Ashoka's coronation they calculated that Lord Buddha died in 268 + 218 = 486 BCE. Taking 486 BCE as the date of death of Lord Buddha they calculated the date of Sanghabhadra's translation of Samantap āsādikā to be be 975 - 486 = 489 CE, since 975 years passed from the death of Lord Buddha as indicated by the 975 dots on the Dotted Record.

In the introduction to his translation of "The Amitayur-dhyana sutra" Prof. Max Max Muller states as follows:

"-----------The date of Kandragupta (Sandrocryptos) as fixed by Greek historians and serving to determine the dates of Ashoka and his inscriptions in the third and indirectly Buddha in the fifth century (BCE) -----------." (Ref. 5)

Here Prof. Max Max Muller writes the name of Chandragupta as Kandragupta. Prof Max Max Muller received the details of the Cantonese Dotted Record from his friend and past pupil B. Nanjio in 1884 CE. Other western scholars came to know of the Dotted record later when Takakusu wrote about it while trying to show that not only Sanskrit but Pali literature was also translated to the Chinese language language and he took Samantapāsādikā as an example. (Ref. 6) Prof. Max Muller accepted the Dotted Record as giving support to his speculations on ancient Indian Chronology, even if he might have known about the manipulations of the date of Lord Buddha as well of the Dotted record. Prof. Max Muller rejected the protests from other Indian and western scholars including M.Troyer, who on the basis of his mastery in Kalhana's Rajatarangini, did not accept Prof. Max Muller's speculations on the ancient I ndian Chronology.

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Assumed support from the Dotted Record coupled with Max Muller's own Germanic background induced him to suggest a historical historical time-line, which included the mythical Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) (AIT) according to which the Aryans invaded India in the 15th century BCE. In 1868 CE the German linguist Theodor Benfey stated that Aryan mother-tongue originated in Europe between the source of the Danube river and the Caspian Sea. Then Ludwig Geiger suggested that Germany was the Aryan homeland. At that time Prof. Martin Haug suggested that the Rig Veda was composed subsequent to the Pentateuch (ie. the first five chapters of the Old Testament of the Bible). The latter was composed in the middle of the 15th century BCE, as evidenced from data given in the Old Testament itself. Prof. Max Muller also believed that the origin of all languages was when and where the Biblical Tower of Babylon was constructed. Equipped with all this information Prof. Max Muller thought that the Aryans came to India from Germany in the middle of the 15th century BCE but without making it explicit he simply suggested that Aryan invasion occurred in the middle of the 15th century BCE and that this was based on linguistic studies, thus camouflaging camouflaging his real inspirations inspirations which came from his fancy that his own ancestors came to India in the middle of the 15th century BCE and composed the Rig Veda as well as the other Vedas and that was was the real root of the Vedas. Ascribing 15th century BCE to the time time for Aryan Invasion and the 5th century BCE to the date of death of Lord Buddha, Max Muller worked out the dates of the ancient Indian literature including the scriptures, ie. the Vedas, Brahmanas, Puranas and Sutras allocating arbitrary time periods for their development. Thus he had completely disoriented the historians, both western and Indian. But Max Muller saw his reasoning crumble before his eyes towards the end of his life and he realized his mistakes and the AIT has generally weakened. Towards the end of  his life Max Muller himself said that nobody can definitely say about the date of the Vedas whether it is 1500 BCE or much earlier and that was a clear negation of the AIT and it does not require a genius to understand that. But the subsequent historians including the Indian historians wanted to keep the AIT alive and some of the books are perpetuating that to this day without any sign of their withdrawal. In the course of analyzing analyzing the ways of working of Prof. Max Muller, Gregory Schrempp Schrempp wrote that in the light of criticisms Max Muller started revising his own formulations ultimately leaving behind him a legacy of retrodictions (contradictions) that covered his entire career. (Ref. 8)

MORE ON THE DOTTED RECORD

Pachow (Ven. Fa-Chow), who was a professor in the Ceylon University in Sri Lanka, gave the translation of a passage from Seng-Yu's Ch'usan-Tsang Chi Chi, a portion of which is as follows:

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"On the 10th of the third Moon, in the 10th 10t h year of Yung-Ming of the Chi dyanasty, Bhikshuni Ching-hsiu of Cheng-Lin learnt that the Venerable Sanghabhadra. assisted by the Venerable Seng-Wei translated the Sanskrit text "Samantapāsādikā, into Chinese, consisting of 18 fascicles---------------." fascicles---------------." ( Ref.7)

It is clear from the above that Sangabhadra translated the Sanskrit text and not the Pali text of  Samantapāsādikā. But Pachow, probably from pressure from the Sri Lankan Budddhist scholars, contradicted what is given in the original excerpt shown above and stated in a foot-note that actually this was in Pali. His assertion was unfounded as Sanghabhadra was a Sarv āstavādin and all Sarv ātavādi literature were in Sanskrit, right from the time of Kaniska.

Buddhaghosa did write the Pali version of the Samantap āsādikā before his arrival in Sri Lanka towards the end of the rule of his host king, Sriniwasa or Sirikuda, who died within one year of his arrival in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Buddhist scholars identified Mahanama as the Sirikuda, but this is questionable. Buddhaghosa wrote several books during this time and the writing of Samantap āsādikā during that time does not seem probable. In the book " The Inception of Discipline and the Vinaya Nidana", the author mentions that the commentaries of the four Agamas refer to Samantap āsādikā but the latter scarcely refers to the other Agamas. This suggests that the Samantap āsādikā is the earlier work.(Ref. 9) Before his arrival in Sri Lanka he had translated the the Samantapāsādikā into pali from its Sanskrit version, which was the same as the version used by Sanghabhadra and that version remained with him in Canton unless he came back with it later to India, but there is no mention of his return to India anywhere. According to Bigandet Buddhaghosa went to Sri Lanka 943 years after the year of the religion, ie. after the death of Lord Buddha. (Ref. 10) The time gap between Buddhaghosa's visit to Si Lanka and the time of Sanghbhadra's translation of the Samantap āsādikā was only 975 - 943 = 32 years. This makes Buddhaghosa a contemporary of Sanghabhadra and Vasubandhu.

A comparison of the pali version of the Samantap āsādikā has been done with the Chinese version of that by Bapat and Hirakawa. (Ref.11) In the Chinese version the influence of the Dharmagupta school of  Sarvāstivādins is very clear. Pali version uses the word "Nikaya" and the Chinese version uses the word "Nigama" in line with the Northern schools of Buddhism. There were several other leanings towards the Dharmagupta school. The names of the places are different in many cases. Bapat and Hirakawa mention that in several places the transliterations point to Sanskrit origin.

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Pachow says that the contention of Takakusu that Sanghabhadra was a Sinhalese or Burmese is not convincing.(Ref. 7) Pachow suggests that Sanghabhadra's return to "Nan" in the South, South, as mentioned in Li - tai San - Pao - Chi of Fei Chang - fang and Ch'u - San - tsang Chi Chi Chi of Sang - Yu, was actually to FuNan or Cambodia and the Dotted record was taken from India to Cambodia and from there to Canton by sea and not from Ceylon. (Ref. 7) When Moggaliputta Tissa handed over the Vinaya to Candavajji, the Dotted Record was also also given with the Sanskrit version version of Samantapāsādikā and that is how it reached Canton. Mogaliputta gave one set of the Vinaya to Mahinda (Mahendra) also but without the Dotted Record, otherwise it would have been known to the Sri Lankan Buddhist about it from that source.

CONCLUSIONS

During the times of Sanghabhadra the Chow dynasty (1122 - 249 BCE) was in power in China. Thus it was the Chow dynasty and not the Chi dynasty at time of Sangabhadra contrary to what has been claimed by Takakusu. As Sanghabhadra was around the 8th or 9th century BCE and the Dotted record indicated 975 years from the death of Lord Buddha at the time of the translation by Sanghabhadra it is reasonable to say that Lord Buddha died in the 18th or the 19th century BCE and not in 486 BCE as worked out by the Sri Lankan Buddhist scholars. Their assertion that the Dotted Record was translated in 489 BCE has no basis except for this being an attempt to prove that Lord Buddha was born in 486 BCE. They have not tried to determine the date of Sanghabhadra independently. That Lord Buddha was born many centuries before 486 BCE has been ascertained by the modern scholars also by studies on astronomical data available in the literature of those days, according to which Lord Buddha was born 1887 BCE and he died in 1807 BCE. The more reliable period as to when the Dotted Record was translated, as shown above, removes one of the great hurdles in working out the ancient Indian Chronology correctly. This also helps in establishing the antiquity of the Vedas and of the Bhagavad Gita, which are considered the foundations of the Sanatana dharma or the Hinduism.

REFERENCES

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1) Li - tai San - Pao Chi (or "The Chronicle of the three jewels"), Fei Chang fang (597 CE), as quoted in Ref. 5

2) The Tenth Anniversary Discourse at the Asiatic Society of Bengal, S ir, William Jones, February 28, 1793.

3) Edward C. Sachau, Alberuni'a India, Vol. 1, Page 21

4) India as known to Kautilya and Megasthenes, Megasthenes, S.R. Goyal, Kusumanjali Kusumanjali Book World, Jodhpur Jodhpur (2001 CE)

5) Buddhists Mahayana Texts, Translation by E.B.Cowell, F. Max Muller and J. Takakusu, Oxford Clarendon Press (1984) ( Vol. XLIX of the Sacred Books of the East)

6) On the "Dotted Record", J. Takakusu, Journal of Royal Royal Asiatic Society, 435,437 (1896), as quoted in Ref. 5

7) A Study of the Dotted Record, W. Pachow, Journal of the American Oriental Society, 85,342 348 (1965)

8) "The Re-education of Friedrich Max Muller : Intellectual Appropriation and Epistemological Antinomy in Mid-Victorian Evolutionary Evolutionary Thought" Thought" by Gregory Schrempp, MAN (erstwhile "Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland"), New Series, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 90 - 110, March 1983

9) The inception of Discipline and the Vinaya Nidana (Being a translation and edition of the Buddhaghosa's Samantapāsādikā, the Vinaya commentary by N.A.Jayavickrama (Sacred books of  the Buddhists, Vol. XXI (1962)

10) The Life and Legend of Gaudama, Bishop Bigandet, Rangoon (1866)

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11) Shan - Chien - P'i - P'o - Sha, A Chinese version by Sangabhadra of Samantap āsikā (English translation), P.V. Bapat and A. Hirakawa, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, India (1970)

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SOME SLIDES FROM HISTORY TUTORIAL

Slide 1

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भातीय  सयता  का  कालतव  औ  इतहास  कसल  वेप  प 

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The Indic Civilization

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Why study history ? What is History ?

The study of history

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The Father of Historiography Our Framework for writing history

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Slide 3

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The Traditional Definition What do historians look for

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What was said What was written What was physically preserved The earliest oral record of a history is that of the Veda (4000 BCE) and the earliest written record is the Cuneiform 3400 BCE

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What is history •

पुाणमतवृ ाणमतवृमाखयायकदाहण माखयायकदाहण धमरथर थरशा शा चेतीतहासः तीतहासः

•

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

•

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Kautilya’s Arthashastra, Book 1, Chapter 5

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Mahabharata Adi Parva 1.267,268

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ाणाय़ा वॆद  द  समुपबृ पबृ  ये येत  त  “इतहासपु ाणाय़ा बभॆय  य  अपौुताद ताद वॆद  द  मामय ूिहंयत 

“

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the Mahabharat Mahabharata a (Adi-Parva1.2 (Adi-Parva1.267 67 268) 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."

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Slide 6

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Kalhana’s Rajatarangini

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धमारथर थकाममाणामु क र ाममाणामुपदे पदेशसमवत । पुावृ ावृ कथायुमतहास मतहास ूचते ।।

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“Dharmaartha-kaama-mokshanaamupadesa-samanvitam|

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Puraa-vrttam, kathaa-yuktamIthihaasamprachakshate ||”

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.

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Why should we take a fresh look at History The state of knowledge in various fields such as Physics, Genetics, biology, chemistry, and forensics, is such that they can now be brought to bear on the questions that arise in the decipherment of history. No longer is one forced to guess, at least in an increasing number of cases, the dates when an event took place, as did the colonial overlord

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 ___________________________________ 2 Key assumptions in Colonial Paradigm Paradigm of history

1. Every noteworthy development opment was made by invaders (Hegelian Hypothesis). The history of India is almost entirely a History of Invasions

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2. No discovery ought to be credtedto the Indics prior to the advent of the Golden age of Greece, circa 600 BCE

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Slide 9

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 ___________________________________ Caricaturization zation of the Indic I

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Religious beliefs of the Indic that are the root cause of his misfortunes.

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The Indic is inherently incapable of adventurous behavior and will not venture beyond the confines of the Indian subcontinent (Kaalapaani syndrome)

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The Indic is incapable of original, rational and creative ideas. The Indic is incapable of independent thinking

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The caste system is an artifact of the Indic religious belief system, and that the Indic is inherently opposed to egalitarian ideas

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The Indic is especially unique and egregious in the manner in which he exploits his fellow Indics

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Caricaturization of the Indic II

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The Indic is fundamentally not tuned to making progress and advancing in the modern world, and is lost in an ancient mind set

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Everything good and worthwhile in the Indian subcontinent has been imported by the invaders, and the o nly indigenous characteristics are those like caste that are inherent to the Indic civilization.

•

The Indic is fatalistic and will n ot make an effort to change his destiny which is written in stone the moment he is born The Indic is lazy and indolent The Indic has no sense of history and is even poorer at keeping records of his historical past As a consequence of the above the Indic is socially backward, possibly morally corrupt and perennially hence dependent upon Westernization to reform the current problems in Indian society.

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Inconsistencies I •

The inherent contradictions of the Aryan Invasion Theory by the mythic and yet to be identified Aryan race.

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The insistence on clinging to a racial terminology even when it is widely discredited and abandoned elsewhere The insistence that Indic astronomy , geometry and mathematics was not autochthonous to India but was borrowed from the Greek or the Babylonians The origin of the Brahmi script becomes a victim of the ‘anywhere but India’ syndrome Devaluation and denigration of the extent of the ancient Indic contribution to Mathematics and Astronomy Dating of the Mahabharata Dating of the Satapatha Brahmana Dating of the Veda Dating of the Vedanga Jyotisha

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Slide 12

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Inconsistencies Inconsistencies II •

Dating of the Sulva sutras

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The beginning of the Vikrama era

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The dating of the Buddha

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The dating of the Arthashastra

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The dating of Panini’s Ashtadhyayi

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The dating of Aryabhata

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Inconsistencies in the chronology of the Indic historical narrative

The dating of Chandragupta Maurya

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The study of History Why study history? The answer is because we virtually must, to gain access to the laboratory of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness.

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Who were the founders of History and Historiography •

14th

Writing in the Muqaddimah in the century, IbnKhaldun said that “All records, by their very nature, are liable to error” because of the following reasons:

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 – They favor a creed or opinion (biased)  – It is difficult to determine the original intent or context  – History may have been written to favor a certain power •

The trouble with interpreting the past is that we look at it through the present. We must learn to put ourselves in their shoes.

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The Indics regard Veda Vyaasa as the father of historiography

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Slide 15

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ICIH2009, January 9-11,2009

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Geopolitics

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ICIH2009, January 9-11,2009, IIC,Delhi पुाणमतोु ाणमतोुमाखयायकदाहण माखयायकदाहण धमरथर थरशा शा चेतीतहासः तीतहासः

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History

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ICIH2009 Civilization

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Geopolitics

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The Indic Civilization •

JayashreeAnandampillai what would betheIndian perspectiveand approach to history? Traditionally acclaimed historianofIndia Kalhana who wrotethe Rajataranginisays,

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“Dharmaartha-kaama-moskshanaamupadesa-samanvitam| Puraa-vrttam,kathaa-rupam Ithihaasampracakshate||”

•

History willbethe narration ofevents asthey happened,in theformof a story, whichwillbe an adviceto thereader tobefollowed in life, togain thepurusaarthasna mely Kama thesatiation of desiresthrough Arthathe tool, by following thepathof Dharma the humancode of conducttogain Moksha or liberation.

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.Thekalhanian formula seemsto betheid ealperspectiveto befollowedin writing history.For wefeelthat it willavoid to a large extantthesubj ectivedistortion that hasinvariably beencreeping in tothehistories written so far.

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By accepting such a norm, History becomes relevantand contemporary and accepting thelogic of thesix systems of philosophy by whichone can finetunethe authenticity of a statement basedonjust oral tradition along with theobjectiveevidence heobjectiveevidence of theartifacts available.That apartwea lso havetheclear enunciationofthe wayof life(Dharma) enunciatedin thesmrtis.This hesmrtis.This can beapplied at threestages Namely Dharmaof nature, humandharma, and locationaldharma.This helpsone to cometo conclusionswhichcan be fairly logicaland acceptableto themajority.Itis after all, theconclusions thatlandshistorians intocontroversy.The moreobjective itis, morecomprehensiveit is, morepurposefulitis, willnatura llyleadto thereduction of controversies.

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Slide 18

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इतहास  itihaasTradition has it that it stands for the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. In other words these are our historical narratives.Historicalevidence or t radition which is recognized as proof  by the pauranikas

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History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

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History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be

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 ___________________________________ The Indic Civilization If we do not write our own history somebody else will (they will have no compulsion sion to be true to our history). They will write it from their perspective an account favorable to their civilization

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A History of a civilization is the record of all its experiences, mistakes and successes (the DNA of the civilization)

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Nations have gone to war in order to learn from an adversaries history

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Why is chronology important

• Chronology must be internally and externally consistent, • Current History is both internally and externally inconsistent

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• A false chronology chronology leads to false conclusions conclusions about our history

• It denies us precedence in mathematical discoveries • If chronology is not important why is the occidental so

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tenacious in denying our antiquity

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Slide 21

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Why is chronology important

• We who are of Indic heritage realize only too well that a mere claim of antiquity will not gain us the respect of the world, but it is indeed remarkable remarkable to see the great lengths that some amongst the occidentals today will go to deny us the antiquity which we feel is the r ight one. The ferocity with which he argues against our historical heritage is only matched by the tenacity with which he would deny us a place at the table with other major powers, and that is another story unto itself.

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The Indic Civilization Famous indologists who studied Indic literature

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The Problem of Ancient Indic Chronology 

Created by Sir William Jones (1746-1794)

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He single handedly retrofitted Indic History to fit his own misconceptions

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Lopped off 1200 years from Puranic Itihaasa texts

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Mistakenly identified the identity of Sandrocottus, referred by Megasthenes with Chandragupta Maurya

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Thus was born the subject of Indology analogous to Entomology, the study of insects

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Slide 24

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The Indic Mathematical tradition It must have been the Aryans !

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Eurocentricity

(a euphemism for a clearly racist attitude) gave greater credit to Greece and later to Babylonian mathematics rather than recognize Indic and Vedic mathematics on its own merits

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Indics

incapable of discovering and utilizing a gamut o f  mathematical techniques

Ergo,

since the Indics were incapable, the discoveries were made by a mythical race from elsewhere – the Aryans The

Circular argument persists to this day – assumptions are treated as facts and any conclusion contradicting the assumption is therefore dismissed summarily as absurd

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The Indic Mathematical tradition Colonialism and its forms of knowledge The command of Language and the Language of Comm and

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What the rest of the world said about Indic contributions The historian Florian Cajori, one of the most celebrated  historians of mathematics in the early 20th century,  suggested that "Diophantus, the father of Greek algebra, got  the first algebraic knowledge from India." This theory is  supported by evidence of continuous contact between India and the Hellenistic world from the late 4th century BC, and  earlier evidence that the eminent Greek mathematician Pythagoras visited India, which further 'throws open' the Eurocentric ideal.

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Slide 27

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Saad al-Andalusi al-Andalusi,, the first historian of Science who in 1068 wrote Kitab Tabaqut alUmam in Arabic (Book of Categories of Nations) Translated into English by Alok Kumar in 1992

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To their credit, the Indians have made great strides in the  study of numbers (3) and of geometry. They have acquired  immense information and reached the zenith in their  knowledge of the movements of the stars (astronomy) and  the secrets of the skies (astrology) as well as other  mathematical studies. After all that, they have surpassed all  the other peoples in their knowledge of medical science and  the strengths of various drugs, the characteristics of  compounds and the peculiarities of substances.

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The Indic Mathematical tradition TimeLine according to MaxMueller[4] Chandas Rg Veda Mantras later Vedas Brahmanas Sutras

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1200 to 1000 BCE 1000 to 800 BCE 800 to 600 BCE 600 to 200 BCE

Timeline according to Keith[5] Ta it it ti ti ri ri ya Sa mh mh it it a 5 00 BC E Baudhayana 400 BCE Ashvalayana 350 BCE Sankha ya na 350 BCE Yaska 300 BCE Apastambha 300 BCE Pratisakhya 300 BCE Panini 250 BCE Katyayana 800to 600 BCE

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Slide 29

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The Indic Mathematical tradition 

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Yajnavalkya who wrote the Shatapatha Brahmana ( as well as the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad)in which he describes the motion of the sun and the moon and advances a 95 year cycleto synchronize the motions of the sun and the moon Lagadha who authored the Jyotisha Vedanga Baudhayana the author of the Sulvasutra named after him Apastambha “ Katyayana “ Panini the Grammarian for the Indo Europeans Pingala Binary System of number representation Aryabhatta the astronomer laureate of ancient India Varahamihira who synthesized the knowledge The author of the Jaina treatises the Suryaprajnapati, Chandraprajnapatiand the seventh section of Jambudvipaprajnapati

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The Indic Mathematical tradition Savants in the Mathematical Scienc es

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Indian Subcontinent, through the Millennia Apastambha Aryabhatta I Aryabhatta II Ashvalayana Baudhayana Bhadrabahu Bhartrihari Bhaskara I Bhaskara II Bose Brahmadeva Brahmagupta Govindasvami Harish-Chandra Hemchandra Jagannatha Jyesthadeva Kamalakara Katyayana Lagadha Lalla Madhava Mahadeva Bhatta Mahavira Mahendra Suri Manava Manjulacharya

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Narayana Pandita Nilakantha Somayaji Panini Paramesvara Patodi Pingala Pillai Prthudakasvami Puthumana Somayajee Rajagopal Ramanujan Sankara Satananda Sridharacharya Suryaprajnaapati(author unknown) Sripati Varahamihira Vateswaracharya Vijayanandi VirasenaAcharya Henry Whitehead Yajnavalkya Yaska Yativrsabha Yatavrisham Acharya Yavanesvara

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The Indic Mathematical tradition Proposed chronology of the Vedics

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A work in progress

What is the proper sheet anchor to use The sheet anchor the Western Indologists use is the ascension to the throne of Chandragupta Maya The Indics especially the Mathematicians preferred to use the end of Mahabharata or the death of Sri Krishna as the reference year

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The Indic Mathematical tradition Proposed chronology of the Vedics

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A work in progress Ev ent

Individual

Dat e

Birth

Veda Vyaasa

~3300 BCE

Apastambha

3200 BCE

Birth Birth Baudhayana Aryabhata

2765 BCE

Lifespan

Gautama Buddha

1888-1807 BCE

C or on on at at io io n

C ha nd nd ra ra gu pt pt a M au ry ry a

1 55 55 4 B CE

Coronation

Birth

Asoka Maury a

1472 BCE

Coronation

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Kanishka

1294-1234 BCE

Era

Andhra Satavahana

833 BCE -327 BCE

C or on on at at io io n

C ha ha nd ra ra gu pt pt a o f G up ta ta dy dy na na st st y

Pancha Siddhanta

VarahaMihira

123 BCE

Reign

Vikramaditya

102 BCE to 78 BCE

Birth

Brahmagupta

30 BCE

W ri ti ti ng s

B has ka ka ra I IS IS id dh dh an ta ta S ir ir om om an i

4 86 B CE

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3 27 27 B CE CE

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The Indic Mathematical tradition

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The Structure of Indic Literature We can only discuss what survived the millennia of  wars and destruction. Literally thousands of  manuscripts were destroyed when Ikhtiar Khalji rode into Bihar with a small band of looters around 1200 CE

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Indic

Literature is derived from a Srautic parampara – an oral tradition, which is one reason that the original language has still survived

Hence

there is great importance paid to brevity

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The

content needs to be maximized for a given number of syllables hence the need for Sutras

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The Indic Mathematical tradition

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The structure of Vedic Literature (continued) EachVedaconsists of Samhitas, Brahmanas, Aranyakas -speculation in the solitude of wilderness eventually taking shape as the Upanishads, To these were appended what were later called the Vedangas comprising of  Shiksha (phonetics) Sandhi rules

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Chandas (meter) Nirukta (etymology) Vyakarana(grammar) Jyotisha (astronomy and calendric functions) KalpaSutras(Ritual procedures and the associated mathematics)

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Note the emphasis on brevity throughout, sandhi to make the content more compact, phonetics for mnemonicpurposes. mnemonicpurposes. Panini’s Ashtadhyayi is a tour de force as t he worlds oldest Grammar text and Nirukta for associativity in remembering the meaning of words

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The Vedanga Period • • • • • • • • • • • • •

The Vedanga (IAST vedāṅga, "member of the Veda") are six auxiliary disciplines for the understanding and tradition of the Vedas. Shiksha (śikṣā): phonetics and phonology (sandhi) Chandas (chandas): meter Pingala Vyakarana(vyākaraṇa): grammar Panini Nirukta (nirukta): etymology Yaska Jyotisha (jyotiṣa): astrology Lagadha Kalpa (kalpa): ritual Apastambha, Baudhayana, Katyayana , Manava The Vedangas are first mentioned in the MundakaUpanishad as topics to be observed by students of the Vedas. Later, they developed into independent disciplines, each with its own corpus of Sutras.

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The Indic Mathematical tradition What were the SulvaSutras (literally ly Sutras of the cord)

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As we emphasized absence of a likhita parampara5000 years ago(scriptural resources)demanded brevity and the sutra represents a technological marvel of  high order. A set of Kalpasutrasattached to each Veda consisted of  GrihyaSutras (associated with household duties) Srauta Sutras

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Dharma Sutras Sulvasutras In what follows we wll be concerned with Jyotisha and the SulvaSutras

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The Indic Mathematical tradition What kind of Math problems did the Sutrakaras tackle

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geometry for practical use in the construction of alters and places of sacrifice. construction of squares and rectangles of equivalent squares and rectangles, construction of equivalent circles, construction of squares equal to the sum of two given squares or the difference of the two given squares. they knew the theorem which is today attributed to Pythagoras. Familiar with surds like sqrt 2 and transcendental numbers like PI complex numbers using the imaginary number ‘i’ or π1− For obtaining the diagonal , the rule given in the Sulva Sutras is to multiply the side of the square by

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The Indian Mathematicians of the ancient era primari ly number theorists. Excelled in Diophantine Equations ax + ax + by = by = 1: this is a linear Diophantine.  X**n + y**n = z**n:  z**n: For n = 2 there are infinitely many solutions ( x ,y , z   z ), ), the Pythagorean triples. For larger values of n of n, Fermat's last theorem states that no positive integer solutions x  solutions x , y , z satisfying  z satisfying the above equation exist.  X**2  X**2 - n y ** **2 = 1: (Pell's equation) which is named, mistakenly, after the English mathematician John Pell. It was studied by Brahmagupta and much later by Fermat

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The Indic Mathematical tradition

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Example of Brahmi script

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The Indic Mathematical tradition Panini

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पाणन 

Based

on new research 3100 BCE conventional date (520 BCE - 46 0BCE)

Probably the single most influential individual in the linguistic and symbolic mathematical development development of India.

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The

worlds first Grammarian the worlds first developer of Linguistics as a science codified rules of Sanskrit grammar first suggested alphamericsymbols for numbers Postulated

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use of zero and place value system ???

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Apastambha Author of SulvaSutras References Books: G G Joseph, The crest of the peacock (London, peacock (London, 1991). Articles:

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R P Kulkarni, The value of p known to Sulbasutrakaras, Indian Sulbasutrakaras, Indian J. Hist. Sci. 13 (1) (1978), 32-41. G Kumari, Some significant results of algebra of pre-Aryabhata era, Math. Ed. (Siwan) 14 (1) (1980), B5-B13. A E Raik and V N Ilin, A reconstruction o f the solution of certain problems from the Apastamba Sulba Sutra Apastamba (Russian), in A P Juskevic, S S Demidov, F A Medvedev and E I Slavutin, Studies in the history of mathematics 19 'Nauka' (Moscow, 1974), 220-222; 302. 10/12/2007

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The Indic Mathematical tradition Aryabhata I (the elder)

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Born 2765 BCE (based on modern research) conventional dating (476 - 550 CE)

astronomer mathematician of the ancient world

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The Indic Mathematical tradition

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Misdating of Aryabhata Aryabhata is the first famous mathematician andastronomer of Ancient India. In his book  book Aryabhatteeyam, A ryabhata clearly provides his birth data. In the 10th stanza of the Kalakriya, or the reckoning of time he says 60 x 6 = 360 years elapsed in this Kali Yuga, he was 23 years old. The stanza of t he sloka starts with “Shastyabdanam Shadbhiryada vyateetastra yascha yuga padah.”“Shastyabdanam Shadbhi” means 60 x 6 = 360. While printing the manuscript, the word “Shadbhi” was altered to “Shasti”, which implies 60 x 60 = 3600 years after Kali Era.

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 ___________________________________ Misdating of Aryabhata As a result of this intentional arbitrary change, Aryabhata’s birth time was fixed as 476 A.D Since in every genuine manuscript, we find the word “Shadbhi” and not the altered “Shasti”, it is clear that Aryabhata was 23 years o ld in 360 Kali Era or 2742 B.C. This implies that Aryabhata was born in 337 Kali Era or 2765 B.C. and therefore could not have lived around 500 A.D., as manufactured by the Indologists to fit their i nvented framework. Bhaskara I is the earliest known commentator of Aryabhata’s works. His exact time is not known except that he was in between Aryabhata (2765 B.C.) (2765 B.C.) and Varahamihira (123 B.C.)." .

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Aryabhata आयरबठा  बठा  Explains

the causes of eclipses of the Sun and the Moon.

Estimated the length of the year at 365 days 6 hours 12 minutes 30 seconds is remarkably close to the true value which is about 365 days 6 hours.

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 book

has four chapters: (i) the astronomical constants and the sine table (ii) mathematics required for computations (iii) division of time and rules for computing the longitudes of  planets using eccentrics and epicycles (iv) the armillary sphere, computation of eclipses.

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The Indic Mathematical tradition

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So, who invented the Zero and the decimal place value system Was it Yajnavalkya ? Pingala perhaps ?

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Was it Panini ? Or Apastambha ? Or was it Aryabhata ? Or perhaps none of the above

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INDEX Abhayankar, K.D ............................. ............................................ .............................. .............................. ............................... .................... .... 31 ............................................. .............................. .............................. ............................... ...................... ...... 38, 40 Al Biruni .............................. .............................................. .............................. ............................... ............................... ...................... ....... 48 Anaxagoras, ............................... ............................................. ............................... .............................. .............................. ................... .... 49, 50 Astronomy ............................. .............................................. .............................. ............................... ............................... ...................... ....... 31 B.G.Sidharth...............................

Banerjee, Satya Ranjan .............................. ............................................. .............................. .............................. ........................... ............ 31 ............................................... ............................ ............ 9, 10, 11, 12, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 29, 33 Bharat ...............................

Bharti .............................. ............................................. .............................. ............................... ............................... .............................. ............... 26 British East India Company ................................ ............................................... ............................... ............................... ............... 25, 26 .............................................. ............................... .............................. .............................. ................. .. 32 Campbell, Joseph .............................. Chach Namah .............................. ............................................. ............................... ............................... ............................... ................ 21, 22

Coedes, G .............................. .............................................. ............................... .............................. .............................. ......................... .......... 32 Dar ul Islam ............................... .............................................. .............................. ............................... ............................... ...................... ....... 37 David Pingree ............................. ............................................ ............................... ............................... .............................. ...................... ....... 52 .............................................. .............................. .............................. ............................... ............................ ............ 37 Dhimmi ...............................

Dr. Alma Kunanbay ............................... .............................................. .............................. ............................... .............................. .............. 11 .............................................. ............................... .............................. .............................. ................. .. 33 Embree, Ainslie T .............................. .............................................. .............................. ............................... ............................... ...................... ....... 48 Empedocles ............................... ............................................ ............................... ............................... .............................. ...................... ....... 17 Graham Clark ............................. ............................................. .............................. .............................. ............................... ...................... ...... 39, 41 Indology .............................. .............................................. ............................... ............................... ............................... ..................... ..... 25 K. M. Munshi ............................... ............................................. .............................. .............................. ............................... ............................ ............ 10 Kenoyer .............................. Lake Mansarover  .............................. .............................................. ............................... .............................. .............................. .................. ... 9

............................................ ............................... ............................... .............................. ...................... ....... 49 Mathematics, ............................. ................................................ ....................... ...... 4, 11, 20, 26, 29, 62, 63, 67, 68, 69, 72 Max Muller ...............................

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............................................. ............................... ............................... .......................... ........... 11, 20, 28 Mohenjodaro .............................. ............................................ .............................. ............................... ............................... ................... .... 33 Motwani, Jagat K............................. ............................................. .............................. .............................. ............................... ............................ ............ 39 Nalanda .............................. ............................................ .............................. .............................. ............................... ............................ ............ 11 P. Poonai .............................

Parthians ............................. ............................................. ............................... ............................... ................................ ..................... ..... 19, 20 .............................................. ............................... ............................... ............................ ............ 21, 24, 25, 34 Pococke ..............................

Pythagoras .............................. .............................................. ............................... ............................... ............................... .................. ... 40, 48 RC Majumdar ............................. ............................................ ............................... ............................... ............................ ............. 7, 37, 44 .............................................. .............................. .............................. ............................... .................... .... 34 Renfrew, Colin ...............................

Sharma, Bhu ............................... .............................................. ............................... ............................... ............................... ................ 33, 34 Sir William Jones ............................. ............................................ ...............4, 11, 20, 26, 32, 35, 41, 42, 43, 62, 65, 67 Thales ............................. ............................................ ............................... ............................... .............................. .............................. ............... 48 Vaman Shivram Apte ............................. ............................................ ............................... ............................... ............................. .............. 24 Vincent Smith ............................. ............................................ ............................... ............................... .............................. ...................... ....... 19

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