Read Online Hinduism: A Short History by Klaus K. Klostermaier - Free Book Online

affinity between many European languages and Sanskrit became a commonly accepted notion, scholars almost automatically concluded that the Sanskrit-speaking ancestors of the present-day Indians had to be found somewhere halfway between India and the western borders of Europe – Northern Germany, Scandinavia, Southern Russia, the Pamir – from which they invaded the Punjab. 5 (It is also worth noting that the early arm-chair scholars who conceived these grandiose migration theories had no actual knowledge of the terrain their “Āryan invaders” were supposed to have traversed, the passes they were supposed to have crossed, or the various climates they were believed to have been living in.) Assuming that the Vedic Indians were semi-nomadic warriors and cattle-breeders, it fitted the picture, when Mohenjo Daro and Harappa were discovered, to assume also that these were the cities the Āryan invaders destroyed under the leadership of their god Indra, the “city-destroyer,” and that the dark-skinned indigenous people were the ones on whom they imposed their religion and their caste system.
    Western scholars decided to apply their own methodologies and, in the absence of reliable evidence, postulated a time frame for Indian history on the basis of conjecture. Considering the traditional dates for the life of Gautama, the Buddha, as fairly well established in the sixth century B.C.E, supposedly pre-Buddhist Indian records were placed in a sequence that seemed plausible to philologists. Accepting on linguistic grounds the traditional claims that the
Ṛgveda
was the oldest Indian literary document, Max Müller, allowing a timespan of 200 years each for the formation of every class of Vedic literature, and assuming that the Vedic period had come to an end by the time of the Buddha, established the following sequence that was widely accepted:
    Ṛgveda c
. 1200 B.C.E.
    Yajurveda, Sāmaveda, Atharvaveda
, c.1000 B.C.E.
    Brāhmaṇas
, c.800 B.C.E.
    Āraṇyakas, Upaniṣads, c.600
B.C.E.
    Max Müller himself conceded the purely conjectural nature of the Vedic chronology, and in his last work,
The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy
, published shortly before his death, he admitted: “Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 1500 or 15,000 B.C., they have their own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world.” 6 There were, already in Max Müller’s time, Western scholars, such as Moriz Winternitz and Indians like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who disagreed with his chronology and postulated a much earlier date for the
Ṛgveda
.
    Indian scholars had pointed out that there was no reference in the Veda to a migration from outside India, that all the geographical features mentioned in the
Ṛgveda
were those of northwestern India, and that there was no archeological evidence whatsoever for the Āryan invasion theory. On the other hand, there were references to constellations in Vedic works whose time frame could be reestablished by commonly accepted astronomical calculations. The dates arrived at, however, 4500 B.C.E. for one observation in the
Ṛgveda
, 3200 B.C.E. for a date in the
Śatapatha Brāhmana
, seemed far too remote to be acceptable, especially if one assumed – as many nineteenth-century scholars did, that the world was only about 6000 years old and that the flood had taken place only 4500 years ago.
    DEBUNKING THE ĀRYAN INVASION THEORY
    Many contemporary Indian scholars, admittedly motivated not only by academic interests, vehemently reject what they call the “colonial-missionary Āryan invasion theory.” They accuse its originators of superimposing – for a reason – the purpose and process of the colonial conquest of India by the Western powers in modern times onto the beginnings of Indian civilization: as the Europeans came to India as bearers of a supposedly superior civilization and a higher religion, so the original Āryans were assumed to have invaded a country that they