Sita Ram Goel: The man who exposed Nehruvian fallacies and won our hearts with his mind

. A 100 years ago, Sita Ram Goel was born in a poor family, and through his sheer hard work and intellect, exposed the hollowness of the Left at a time when it seemed invincible Koenraad Elst October 16, 2021 10:58:16 IST Sita Ram Goel: The man who exposed Nehruvian fallacies and won our hearts with his mind Sita Ram Goel was born on 16 October in the Haryana village of Chhara. Image Courtesy: http://indiafacts.org/ On 16 October 1921, at 8:34 pm, in the Haryana village of Chhara, Sita Ram Goel was born. Though belonging to the merchant Agarwal caste, his family was quite poor but found sustenance in Vaishnavism and especially the devotional poetry of the local 18th-century Sant Garib Das. Possibly this is what made him such a friendly and generous man, always attentive to the needs of others. When growing up, he came under the influence of Arya Samaj reformism and of Mahatma Gandhi. During his student days he was a Gandhian activist. He obtained an MA in History from Hindu College, Delhi University. In the last years of the freedom struggle, he became friends with a group of young intellectuals with a great future, from Times of India editor Girilal Jain and philosophy author Daya Krishna to Planning Commission member Raj Krishna and arts tsarina Kapila Vatsyayana. But the most important and lasting influence was economics graduate Ram Swarup (whose centenary we celebrated last year), who in 1944-47 led the debating forum Changers’ Club. Though they were “progressives” at the time, we find in their pamphlets already some themes that would become prominent in Goelji’s writing career. In 1948, Goel had almost become a Communist Party member, but under the influence of Ram Swarup and of reading the communist classics, he swiftly evolved into an articulate anti-communist. In Kolkata he set up the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia, which during the 1950s was the leading anti-communist think tank in the Third World. It published a series of factual studies about the atrocities and the dismal socio-economic performance of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic, much appreciated (but, to lay a nasty rumour to rest, never financed) by prominent foreign anti-communists and by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Chiang Kai-shek. Meanwhile, he rediscovered Hindu-Buddhist spirituality and also found the time to write several historical novels in Hindi, as well as preparing Hindi translations of classic works of philosophy and history. In 1957, he stood as an independent candidate on the Jana Sangh (later BJP) ticket for the Lok Sabha elections in the Khajuraho constituency. This was an arrangement with Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s budding anti-Communist Swatantra Party, India's main opposition party in the 1960s. It had wanted Goel in Parliament because he had the mettle to stand up to then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but the election gods were not favourable. In 1961, Goel published a series of articles critical of Nehru in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh weekly Organiser. It was discontinued on orders of the RSS high command, which feared a backlash against the RSS if anything were to happen to Nehru, as had been the case after Mahatma Gandhi’s murder. It was not the last time he got disappointed in the Sangh Parivar. In the 1960s and ’70s he left the political struggle behind to build up his own publishing business. But after retiring, in 1981 he started writing several series of articles in Organiser and its Hindi counterpart Panchjanya. These were then published as booklets by a new publishing outfit he created, first of all as a conduit for Ram Swarup’s books, but also for his own ideological writings: Voice of India. He opened the very first one, Hindu Society under Siege, with an analysis that said it all: “Hindu society is the only significant society in the world today which presents a continuity of cultural existence since time immemorial. Most other societies have undergone a traumatic transformation due to the invasion and victory of latter-day ideologies — Christianity, Islam, Communism. Hindu culture can meet the same frightful fate if there were no Hindu society to sustain it. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces. And its beneficiaries no more seem interested in its survival because they have fallen victims to hostile propaganda. They have developed towards it an attitude of utter indifference, if not downright contempt. Hindu society is in mortal danger as never before.” Or in his Defence of Hindu Society (1983): “Hindus have become devoid of self-confidence because they have ceased to take legitimate, well-informed and conscious pride in their spiritual, cultural and social heritage. The sworn enemies of Hindu society have taken advantage of this enervation of the Hindus.” This outlines a task that would determine the remainder of Ram Swarup’s and Sita Ram Goel’s writings: Detailing the history and ideological motivation of Hinduism’s enemies, and showing the contrast with what Hinduism has to offer. This work is fascinating through its combination of fearless analysis of unpleasant questions with a passion for the benefits of ancient dharma and of the contemporary real-life Hindus. It takes up the ideological struggle so as to avoid the physical struggle, and is thus humane par excellence. As Goel’s son Pradeep said after Goel’s passing in 2003: “They won our hearts with their minds.” Goel himself would soon become a victim of this Hindu loss of nerve. In 1985, the RSS leadership again intervened to have his article series in their papers banned. This time it was Islam that they wanted to spare. Not because they feared a terrorist attack in revenge (they already had an anti-Muslim reputation), but because any Islam-critical writing might “keep Muslims from coming to us”. At the time, the Sangh Parivar still clamoured against “minority appeasement” in public, but in private the rot had already set in. Goel’s best-known work will remain his two-volume Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them? (1990-91). In it, he gives a very incomplete but already impressive list of nearly 2,000 forcible displacements of temples by mosques, of which not one has been challenged since. But its most important part is the summary and analysis of the theological justification of this centuries-spanning (and continents-spanning, think of Istanbul’s Aya Sophia or even Mecca’s Kaaba) record of iconoclasm. This was the key to understanding the Ayodhya controversy, but remark that in the Ayodhya campaign and its judicial proceedings before the UP High Court, it was kept out of view: The RSS-BJP campaigners preferred superficial emotions about the temple to a serious understanding of the theological background. Today, Sita Ram Goel’s work is without influence on government policy. Thus, his critique of the many falsehoods in the Nehruvian history textbooks have not made Narendra Modi’s Cabinet take up the need of correcting them. But his influence on the new crop of online Hindu media is profound. This outreach to the Hindu mind and to a new generation is an important step, but a civilisation under siege can ill afford to leave it at that.
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“I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history”

Koenraad Elst: “I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history” (interview by Surajit Dasgupta- 5 June, 2016, Swarajya) 5 In this exclusive e-mail interview with Swarajya’s National Affairs Editor Surajit Dasgupta, the Belgian Indologist and writer calls the bluff of leftist historians while urging Indian students of history to pursue the subject with more rigour and scientific temper. Excerpts: While Swarajya has published articles exposing how Marxist historians hound peers who disagree with them out of academic institutions, we have got news from different sources that you are finding it difficult to get employed even in Belgium. What precisely is the objection of your detractors? I do not wish to offer much detail here. Firstly, I am not privileged to know the details of decision-making instances that lead to my own exclusion. Even when sending an official “regret letter”, they would not give in writing the real reason behind their decision (as anyone experienced with job applications knows). Secondly, even though no law was broken, going into this still has the character of an allegation, and that requires proof. Some cases of deliberate exclusion or disinvitation were simply obvious, but my standards of proof are higher than that. So, I just want to close this chapter. Let’s not bother, everybody has his problems, and these career hurdles are mine. In fact, I have had quite a bit of luck in my life, including help from individual Hindus whenever the need arose (air tickets paid, hospitality etc), so any fussing about this boycott against me would be disproportionate. Let’s just assume I missed those opportunities because I was not good enough. Or karma, whatever. The topic in general is important, though. The Leftist dominance of the Humanities departments in India, often amounting to total control, results from the wilful and systematic “ethnic cleansing” (to borrow Madhu Kishwar’s term) of any young scholar suspected of pro-Hindu sympathies. Exceptions are the people who entered on the strength of ideologically neutral work, or of initially toeing the line, but coming out with pro-Hindu convictions only after getting tenure. This cleansing of enemies stems from the old Marxist mentality: a war psychology, treating everyone with a different opinion as an enemy inviting merciless destruction; and a boundless self-righteousness rooted in the belief of being on the forward side of history. Marxism is waning even in India, but that attitude is still rife among the anti-Hindu forces, both in India and among Western India-watchers. You refer to Indian Marxist historians sarcastically as “eminent historians”. Why that particular term? “Eminent historians” is what they call one another, and what their fans call them. When they don’t have an answer to an opponent’s arguments, they pompously dismiss him as not having enough “eminence”. So when Arun Shourie wrote about some abuses in this sector, he called his book Eminent Historians. It is also a pun on an old book about prominent colonial age personalities, Eminent Victorians. “Eminence” in this case refers to their position and relative glory. The Communists always made sure to confer position and prestige, as opposed to the Sangh Parivar, which fawns over people with position but doesn’t realize that those people have only acquired their position by toeing the anti-Hindu line. In a way, you have to concede that the Left has honestly fought for its power position. But half their battle was already won by the Hindu side’s complete absence from the battlefield. One example of the Sangh’s ineptness at playing this game. In 2002, the supposedly Hindu government of A.B. Vajpayee founded the Chair for Indic Studies in Oxford. The media cried ‘saffronization’. However, the clueless time servers at the head of the BJP nominated a known and proven opponent of Hindu nationalism, Sanjay Subrahmaniam, who thus became the poster boy for ‘saffronization’. This way, they hoped to achieve their highest ambition in life: a pat on the shoulder from the secularists. That pat on the shoulder, already begged for so many times, remained elusive, but the tangible result was that they had conferred even more prestige on an “eminent historian”, all while denying it to their own scholars. What would you tell your peers who say that the “Out of India” Theory (OIT) is a fringe theory? Of course it is a fringe theory, at least internationally, where the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is still the official paradigm. In India, though, it has the support of most archaeologists, who fail to find a trace of this Aryan influx and instead find cultural continuity. As for the situation abroad: most scholars assume the invasionist paradigm, but only very few also argue in an informed manner for the invasionist theory, not many more than those who argue against it. But anyway, this ‘fringe’ aspect doesn’t impress me at all. When Copernicus put the sun rather than the earth at the centre of the solar system, he was in a minority of one, very ‘fringe’ indeed; but he won the day. What is the evidence against the Aryan Invasion Theory? First of all: there is no evidence in its favour. Archaeologists have spent a century of well-funded excavations looking for a trace, any trace, of the Aryans moving into India. Even the invasionists concede that “as yet” no such thing has been found. The new genetic evidence, while still immature, generally goes in favour of emigrations from India and, while leaving room for immigrations too, is emphatically failing to pinpoint an invasion coinciding in time with the hypothetical Aryan invasion. Meanwhile, the written record clearly points to an emigration scenario. That the Iranians lived in India and had to leave westwards is reported in the Rig Veda, a text thoroughly analysed and shown to support an “Aryan emigration” by Shrikant Talageri. It can equally be deduced from the Avesta. Even earlier migrations are mentioned in the Puranas. These are of course very mixed and unreliable as a source of history, but it is a bad historian who discards them altogether. Their core, later fancifully embellished, consists in dynastic lists. Keeping that ancestral information was the proper job of court poets, and they devised mnemotechnical tricks to transmit it for many generations. In this case, it too does convey a basic scenario of indigenousness and emigration. Finally, there is the linguistic evidence. Many Indians believe the hearsay that it has somehow proven the invasion. It hasn’t. But permit me to forego discussing those data: too technical for an interview. Of late, the Marxist historians have revised ‘invasion’ to ‘migration’. They say that there might not have been a war when the so-called Aryans arrived here, but they have no doubt that the ancestors of today’s North Indians, especially the upper castes, by and large migrated from Central Asia into India. In other words, the Marxists say that we Indians were originally not Indians—invasion or no invasion. Does this ‘revision’ satisfy you? Exasperated at not finding a visible trace of this invasion, conformist scholars have theorized an alternative that doesn’t require such visible remains: a migration under the radar. Often, when they try to give details, they still mean a military invasion rather than a gradual migration, since they bring in the military advantage of horses and chariots to explain how such a large and civilized Harappan population could be overrun by a handful of outsiders. But even if they genuinely mean a migration, it still amounts to the same scenario as an invasion, that the Vedic Aryans came from abroad and the natives took over the language and religion of the intruders. So, anyone who thinks that the migration theory is a breakthrough away from the invasion theory really shows he doesn’t understand the issue. ‘Migration’ effectively means ‘invasion’ but avoids the burden of proof that the more dramatic term ‘invasion’ implies. To be sure, it doesn’t much matter who came from where. The so-called Adivasis (a British term coined circa 1930) or ‘natives’ of Nagalim in the North East have settled in their present habitat only a thousand years ago; which is fairly recent by Indian standards. So, ironically, they are genuine ‘immigrants’ or ‘invaders’, yet no Indian begrudges them their place inside India. Many countries have an immigration or conquest of their present territory as a proud part of their national myth: Madagascar, Romania, the Siberian part of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc. If the Indo-Aryans, or indeed the Dravidians (theorized to have come from Iran or even Central Asia), had really immigrated, that would then have been a pre-Vedic event, at least 3,500 years ago, and that time span ought to have been enough for integration into the national mainstream. So this ‘homeland’ debate ought to have been a non-issue, only of interest to ivory tower scholars. But different non- or anti-Hindu forces decided to politicize it. Abroad, these were the British colonialists, white supremacists in the US and Europe, and among them the Nazis, who considered the AIT as a cornerstone and eloquent illustration of their worldview. Inside India, first of all the Christian missionaries, followed by the non-Brahmin movement, the Dravidianists, Nehruvians and Ambedkarites, followed in turn by their western supporters. The AIT was used to break up Indian unity and pit upper castes against lower castes, non-tribals against tribals, and North Indians against South Indians. After this massive politicization, the partisans of Indian unity finally decided to give some feeble support to the fledgling Out of India (OIT) theory. Yet, scholars rejecting the OIT because of its alleged political use have no qualms about espousing the AIT, politicized since far longer, in many more countries, and not as a pastime of a few historians but as the basis for government policies. On the one hand, the unaffiliated or apolitical Indian student loves your theories; your passages are quoted widely in debates on ancient Indian history. On the other, you do not seem to get along well with the so-called right wing historians of this country either. You have written a blog against them. Well, I have nothing but good to say about some Indian researchers, both naturalized ones like Michel Danino and natives like Meenakshi Jain or Shrikant Talageri. But then, there are others too. Certainly the name P.N. Oak rings a bell? In the second half of last century, he spread all these theories that the Taj Mahal was a Shiva temple; that the Kaaba was built by Vikramaditya as a Shiva temple; that the Vatican (originally the Roman “Poets’ Hill”) is really “Veda-Vatika”; that my mother tongue, Dutch, is the language of the Daityas (demons), etc. The bad thing is that numerous Hindus have run away with these stories, and even some NRI surgeons and engineers of my acquaintance believe in diluted versions of the same. In a less extreme manner, this disdain for historical method is widespread among traditionalist Hindu “history rewriters”. They frequently put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Many of these rewriters thought that with Narendra Modi’s accession to power, their time had come. I know, for instance, that many of them sent in proposals to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). None of these was accepted because they ignored the elementary rules of scholarship. Any student writing a thesis knows that before you can develop your own hypothesis, you first have to survey the field and assess what previous scholars have found or theorized. But these traditionalist history rewriters just don’t bother about the rest of the world, they are satisfied to have convinced themselves. Their horizon is not larger than an internet list of like-minded people. In itself, it is not a problem. People can learn. Unfortunately, they are too smug to do that. They actively misinform Hindus by claiming that the Aryan Invasion Theory has long been discarded. They also do a lot of harm to the bona fide historians with whom they get juxtaposed. So it is true that I have lost patience with them. Since the Modi government came to power in 2014, has there been an effort to revise the depiction of Indian history in academic curricula, which, many in India believe, is politically motivated? Has the Indian government approached you with the request of being a part of any such initiative? No, there has been no request at all. However, I myself have sent in an application to the ICHR, but that has run into technical difficulties, mainly to do with my foreign passport. So, the situation is and remains that institutionally, I have nothing to do with the Indian history scene. The version of history taught by the Nehruvians was politically motivated. The feeble Hindu attempt to counterbalance this (‘saffronization’) circa 2002 was confused and largely incompetent. Humbled by that experience, the BJP today is not even trying to impose its own version. Contrary to the Nehruvians’ hue and cry, allegations about the BJP’s interference in history teaching or more generally in academe are simply not true. We are only talking of changing some lines in the textbooks, and even that seems a Himalayan effort to the BJP. Yet, what is really needed is a far more thorough overhaul. Except for some scholars without any power, nobody is even thinking about this very-needed long-term job. “Many Hindu ‘history rewriters’ put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Like the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple.” “Many Hindu ‘history rewriters’ put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Like the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple.” Could the reason be that RSS-affiliated historians and you are not particularly fond of each other and this government is influenced by the Sangh? Sangh-affiliated historians would not need me to arrive at their positions or to devise a policy if called upon to do so by the present government. But again, I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting the distorted history propagated by the Nehruvians. I would welcome it if it happened, but so far the BJP, still begging to be recognized as ‘secular’, only has its eye on ‘development’. I am happy to report that there are some as-yet-insignificant private initiatives, though. Once they achieve results, there will be more to say on them. Would you say or agree that the Indian government, regardless of the political party that runs it, would be uncomfortable appointing or commissioning an academic who is perceived as being anti-Muslim? Certainly. Though it never had any problem with anti-Hindu candidates to even the highest post. Does the genesis of your problem with anti-left historians in India lie in the fact that on the issue of Babri Masjid, if you do not agree with the left, you do not agree with the right wing either? On Ayodhya, there has never been a conflict with any non-Left historian. To be sure, I have my disagreements on some minor points, but they have never been the object of a controversy. So, no, on Ayodhya, I may have minor and friendly differences of opinion with ‘right-wing’ historians, but no serious quarrel. In that debate, the longstanding quarrel has been with the “eminent historians”, their supporters in media and politics, and their foreign dupes. They were on the wrong side of the history debate all along, and it is time they concede it. In the case of the “eminent historians”, it is also time for the surviving ones to own up to their responsibility for the whole conflict. The then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was on course towards a peaceful settlement, allotting the site to the Hindus and buying the militant Muslim leadership off with some typically Congressite horse trading. Not too principled, but at least with the virtue of avoiding bloodshed. It is the shrill and mendacious declaration of the “eminent historians” in 1989, amplified by all the vocal secularists, that made the politicians back off. Not only have they falsely alleged that no Rama temple ever stood on the contentious site, their more fundamental lie was to bring in history at all. Ayodhya belongs to the Hindus not because it was their pilgrimage site a thousand years ago, nor because of ‘revenge’ for a temple destruction effected 800 or 500 years ago, but because it is a Hindu sacred site today. No Muslim ever cares to go to Ayodhya, and in spite of being egged on by the “eminent historians”, enough Muslim leaders have expressed their willingness to leave the site to the Hindus. This whole controversy was unnecessary, but for the Nehruvians’ pathetic nomination of the Babri Masjid as the last bulwark of secularism. If all the archaeological findings from Ayodhya are arranged chronologically, what story of the disputed plot of land does one find? Did a temple of Lord Rama stand there, which Babar’s general Mir Baqi demolished to build the mosque? Or, did Mir Baqi find ruins on the spot? That a Hindu temple was demolished by Muslim invaders is certain, on that we all agree. But there is less consensus around, or even awareness of, the fact that this happened several times: by Salar Masud Ghaznavi in 1030 (the rebuilt Rajput temple after this must be one of the excavated pillar bases), by Qutbuddin Aibak’s troops in 1193, and by Mir Baqi on Babar’s behalf in 1526. “The Ayodhya site should belong to the community that holds it sacred. Muslims do not, and the Rama worshippers do. Case closed.” “The Ayodhya site should belong to the community that holds it sacred. Muslims do not, and the Rama worshippers do. Case closed.” What it was that was replaced by Babar’s mosque is not fully clear. I speculate that in the rough and tumble of the collapsing Delhi Sultanate, Hindus had managed to take over the site and started worship there, even though the building they used was a mosque imposed on the site. That was exactly the situation in 1949-92, and I think it also applied towards 1526. Babar destroyed a Hindu pilgrimage centre, a Hindu presence at the site, but not the Rajput temple from the 11th century of which the foundations were excavated in 2003. Was the temple’s demolition just an odd event, or was it the necessary materialization of an ideology, repeated many times and in many places? When Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghori and his lieutenants conquered the entire Ganga basin in 1192-94, they destroyed every Hindu temple they could find. Only a few survived, and that is because they lay out of the way of the Muslim armies, in the (then) forest, notably in Khajuraho and in Bodh Gaya. But all the Buddhist universities, all the temples in Varanasi etc were destroyed. Ayodhya became a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, and it is inconceivable that the Sultanate regime would have allowed a major temple to remain standing there. So, the narrative propagated by the Sangh Parivar, that Babar destroyed the 11th century temple, cannot be true, for that temple was no longer there. When Babar arrived on the scene, Hindus may have worshipped Rama in a makeshift temple, or in a mosque building provisionally used as a temple, but the main temple that used to be there had already been destroyed in 1193. See, Ayodhya’s history becomes more interesting once you discard the lies of the “eminent historians” as well as the naïve version of the Sangh Parivar. The controversial part lies herein, that the persistence of the temple all through the Sultanate period would have implied a certain tolerance even during the fiercest part of Muslim rule. In reality, the demolition of Rama’s birthplace temple was not an odd and single event, but a repeated event in application of a general theology of iconoclasm imposed by the Prophet. Was it a temple of Lord Vishnu rather? Or, were they quite a few temples of one or more deities built in different periods by different kings? In her 2013 book Rama and Ayodhya Prof Meenakshi Jain has detailed all the scholarly evidence and the debate around it, including the embarrassing collapse of the “eminent historian” case once they took the witness stand in Court. She shows that the Rama cult had already left traces more than 2,000 years ago. Attempts to make Rama worship a recent phenomenon were just part of the sabotage attempts by these historians. Also, the site of Ayodhya, though probably older, is at least beyond doubt since Vikramaditya in the first century BC. All indications are that the disputed site was already visited by pilgrims as Rama’s birthplace well before the Muslim conquest. So, this was a longstanding pilgrimage site for Rama. Against the utter simplicity of this scenario, anti-Hindu polemicists of various stripes have tried all kinds of diversionary tactics: saying that Rama was born elsewhere, or that the temple belonged to other cults. This Vishnu-but-not-his-incarnation-Rama theory, or the claim of a Shaiva or Buddhist origin, were some of those diversionary tactics; they are totally inauthentic and artificial. Alright, among historians we can discuss every possible hypothesis. But from the very relevant viewpoint of Islamic iconoclasm, all these distinctions don’t matter: all those sects were false, leading men astray, away from the one true religion, Islam, and therefore they all, and certainly their idols and idol houses, were to be destroyed. Whatever be the true story, which community do you believe has a greater right of ownership over that disputed site? The community that holds the site sacred. Muslims go through all this trouble to travel to faraway Mecca, why don’t they go on a cheap and easy pilgrimage to Ayodhya instead? It seems they have made their choice. So let us respect their choice, and also the choice of the Rama worshippers who do care for Ayodhya, by leaving the site to the latter. Case closed. Do you hate Muslims or Islam? No, I do not hate Muslims. They are people like ourselves. Having travelled in Pakistan and the Gulf states, I even dare say I feel good in Muslim environments. And if I desire the liberation of Muslims from Islam, that is precisely because I like them. Suppose you discover that a friend of yours still believes in fairy tales: wouldn’t you consider it your duty to set him straight and confront him with the true story, precisely because he is your friend? And I do not ‘hate’ Islam either. If a teacher uses his red pencil to cross out a grammatical mistake in a pupil’s homework, we do not say that he ‘hates’ the mistake. He simply notices very dispassionately that it is wrong. The use of the word ‘hate’ in this case stems from an attempt to distort the debate and misrepresent the argument by means of emotive language. The belief that someone heard the word of God, dictating the Quranic verses, is just one of the many irrational and mistaken beliefs that have plagued mankind since the beginning. I have been part of a massive walk-out from the Church. For intellectuals, the decisive reason was the dawning insight that Christian belief was irrational. But for the masses, it was mainly that it was no longer cool to be a believer. People started feeling embarrassed for still being associated with this untenable doctrine, and are none the worse for having left the beliefs they were brought up in. I wish Muslims a similar evolution, a similar liberation. I do not wish on them anything that I have not been through myself. How do you view the recent terrorist attack on Belgium? To what extent do you think is migration from Islamic countries responsible for terrorism on European soil? As Ché Guevara said, a guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In this case, the jihad fighters had found safety and comfort in the Muslim community. So the demographic Islamization of some neighbourhoods i000n Brussels (due to our own silly policies) has indeed played a role. But I expect you to retort that there were also other factors, and that is true. How do you react to the Muslim refrain that the terrorists in their community are a creation of America and NATO’s flawed foreign policy and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc? It is simply not true that Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb took to jihad and iconoclasm in reaction to British colonialism or American bombings. They were inspired by an older source—the Prophet’s precedent, Islam. However, it is true that many contemporary jihad fighters have indeed been fired up by a specific circumstance—western aggression against Muslim countries. Assenting to Quranic lessons about jihad is one thing, but actually volunteering for jihad it quite another. In most people, it needs a trigger. The illegal invasions of Iraq or Libya, or footage of an Afghan wedding bombed by American jets, provided such a trigger. I am very aware that being bombed is just as unpleasant for wedding guests in Kandahar as for commuters in Brussels or Mumbai. Right now, even little Belgium has five bomber planes in Iraq as part of the US-led war effort against IS. These bombers must already have killed, along with some jihad fighters, more civilians than were killed in the terrorist attacks in Brussels. In Belgium, I have drawn some attention with my defence of the Syria volunteers: young Muslims grown up in Brussels or Antwerp and going to fight for the Islamic State. Our politicians call them ‘monsters’, ‘crazy’ and other derogatory names, but in fact they are pious idealists. They may be misguided in their beliefs, and I daresay they are, but they do have the courage of their conviction. Without any pressure on them, they volunteer for putting their lives on the line in the Syrian desert. You cannot deny them bravery and self-sacrifice. The western invasions and bombings in Muslim countries have brought nothing but misery, and I have opposed them all along. What the Muslim world needs is not more civil wars, sectarian wars, foreign military interventions, which all serve to polarize the minds, to freeze them in existing antagonisms. What it needs is a thaw. Here again, I speak from my own experience: the post-war climate of peace and prosperity in Europe has allowed a genuine cultural revolution, an emancipation from the stranglehold of Christianity. The Muslim world will only evolve if it attains a modicum of peace and stability. Note that the military interventions have nothing to do with Islam criticism, nowadays slandered as ‘Islamophobia’. On the contrary. Without exception, all the politicians ordering interventions in Muslim countries have praised Islam, calling it “the religion of peace” that is being ‘misused’ by the terrorists. Not a single word of Islam criticism has ever crossed their lips. A legitimate Islam critic like the late historian Sita Ram Goel has never harmed a hair on the head of a Muslim. Islamophiles such as these politicians, by contrast, have killed many thousands of innocent Muslims. How would you advise Indians to fight terrorism? Security measures and repression are neither my field nor my favourite solution, but I understand that sometimes they are necessary. So I want to spare a moment to praise the men in uniform who risk their lives to provide safety. However, this approach won’t provide a lasting solution if it is not accompanied by a more fundamental ideological struggle. That is what I am working on.
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Why ISIS targeted Brussels

(DailyO, .26 March 2016; Courtesy of Mail Today.)

 March 22 is henceforth an iconic date in Belgian history. Bomb attacks in the departure hall of the Brussels Airport and at the Maalbeek underground station near the European Parliament building killed dozens of people. I have been hundreds of times at these locations, and must count myself fortunate that I was’t there at the wrong time.

History

Is there a reason why Brussels was singled out for bomb attacks claimed by the Islamic State? Yes, there was, and we in Belgium felt it was only a matter of time before such a thing would happen — though the actual event still came as a shock. In fact, several reasons.

Militants of the Islamic State, the self-styled caliphate, are acutely aware of Islamic history, and that contains one reason, dim to us but very vivid to them. ISIS statements about the attacks identify the victims as "crusaders", 0and Belgium is indeed strongly identified with the crusades. The First Crusade was led by the proto-Belgian earl Godfrey of Bouillon, who became the first king of Jerusalem in 1099; his equestrian statue adorns the highest place of Brussels, next to the Royal Palace.

The Crusader elite corps of the Knights Templar had a tactical alliance with the Assassins, a Shia militia dedicated to fighting the (Sunni) Caliphate. Today, the neo-caliphate (ISIS) is continuing that thousand-year-old struggle against both Shia and Crusaders.

The second reason is the symbolic value of Brussels as containing the headquarters of both the EU and NATO, incarnations of armed infidelism. The caliphate is at war with these entities, and Belgium is among the Western nations bombing the Iraqi part of the caliphate.

 

Many Leftists have transferred their old sympathy for Cuba and Vietnam to the Islamic challengers of Western imperialism. Therefore, they tend to minimise the seriousness of terrorism by alleging, not incorrectly, that even a small country like Belgium has already killed more Arab civilians (apart from caliphate fighters) than have died in any of the terrorist attacks on Madrid, London, Paris or now Brussels. Being killed on the way to work by a sudden bomb explosion is exactly as bad in Mosul as it is in Brussels, so "Belgians shouldn’t complain."

The third reason is the relative laxity of the Belgian authorities. Within Belgium itself, when compared to the second city, Antwerp, the administration of Brussels counts as undisciplined, chaotic and corrupt. The over-all Belgian standard is not so good either, as the security forces are badly underfunded. For decades, whenever budget cuts have been considered, the Army has served as a milch-cow. Soldiers are not expected to complain, but the result is that today they are ill-equipped to deal with the terror threat.

Adapt

Within the calculations of the ISIS strategists, the fourth reason, at least explaining why it happened now, is that it had to happen fast. Last week, Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the cell that carried out the Paris attacks in November, was arrested in Brussels. The Belgian government was triumphant and expected to extract important information from the terrorist.

For the very same reason, ISIS feared that its plans for further actions would become known, so it preponed the bomb attacks that have now taken place. That explains why they targeted easily accessible places: ISIS showed that it could fast adapt to the constraints of the new situation and still achieve a very tangible and sensational result.

But the most controversial and politically charged, is the fifth reason. Using Brussels as a staging-ground for preparing attacks in Madrid, Paris or Brussels itself is fairly easy, because the militants can always count on a large population of sympathisers.

Anti-system

As Ernesto Ché Guevara wrote, a guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In the Muslim neighbourhoods of Brussels, there is a strong anti-system feeling, and even moderates will never betray a member of their own community.

Take the case of Salah Abdeslam, whom it took four months to catch. He had not been roaming as a fugitive, but lived in hiding with an extremist family in the Brussels suburb of Molenbeek. His brother, who lived nearby, had told the police he hadn’t heard of Salah and feared he was dead. Yet, he and many in the neighbourhood knew Salah’s whereabouts, but nobody spilled the beans.

The Belgian population frowned when it learned of this display of disloyalty. This formed part of a long-running and far-reaching debate on immigration, ethnic relations, religious pluralism and the secular state. At any rate, in a realistic assessment, Brussels had it coming. Belgium’s home minister, Jan Jambon, had warned last week that the latest catch of a terrorist did not mean that the terror threat had died down. He was proven right sooner than he expected.

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A "union of states"

A "union of states"

 (First Post, 12 Feb 2022)

According to Congress MP Rahul Gandhi, “India is described in the Indian Constitution as a union of states and not a nation. One cannot rule over the people of a state in India. Different languages and cultures cannot be suppressed. It is a partnership, not a kingdom.” Let’s see about that.

The terms “union” and “state” (in the Hindi text: rājyon kā saṅgh) are quite vague, especially for a juridical document: both can have several interpretations. A "union" can mean a federation, which is a sovereign state dividing itself in autonomous provinces; or a confederacy, a permanent alliance of sovereign states; and everything in between, with history often showing an evolution from the one to the other. Thus, Switzerland is effectively a federation but called itself at its founding Confederatio Helvetica. An effective confederacy at present is the political structure of the Eurasian landmass's western subcontinent, the European Union. As the Brexit has demonstrated, though to much surprise, a member state of the EU retains its sovereignty, including the defining right to secede. By contrast, the Indian Republic does not confer on its lower political units this right of secession.

A "state" usually means a sovereign country, but it can also mean a province within a country. It is very common for this class of words not to have a fixed meaning in regard of its dimension of sovereignty, e.g. "land" in German means a province, in Dutch a sovereign country, and in English it has no political meaning, merely signifying any non-maritime region. When appearing in a legal text, such words first require a definition. From the wording in India's Constitution, one can deduce that here the word “state” (rājya) means the political level below full sovereignty.

 

 

Trivially, today's Indian Republic is geographically the sum total of its states. Yet historically it is not correct to imply that India has come about by uniting pre-existing states, as "union of states" might suggest. It came into being as a successor-state to British India. Yes, much of its present territory consisted of theoretically independent states before the Transfer of Power in 1947,  the Princely States. But these did not negotiate with British India as equal partners who then decided to merge. Instead, by signing the Instrument of Accession, they gave up their (already theoretical) sovereignty to be absorbed into the Republic.

 

For better understanding, consider the contrast with the European Union. The EU consists of sovereign member states with their own political history, mostly with active nationalist movements that went as far as to foment war against each other. It took the horrors of two World Wars and the common fear of the Soviet Bloc to make them water down their sovereignty step by negotiated step in a common ever-closer union. Each state retained the right to veto common decisions, so that these required a consensus. In India, by contrast, in vital matters the centre can overrule the states.

 

A great advantage of having a united federation of semi-autonomous states rather than a conglomerate of sovereign states is that it dedramatizes what would otherwise become a cause for war: the redrawing of boundaries between the states. The reorganization of the Northeast into the "Seven Sisters", the creation of Andhra Pradesh in the 1950s or the Panjabi Suba in the 1960s, or the more recent bifurcation of Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh, are the stuff that elsewhere wars are fought over. Yet under the umbrella of India, they became mere administrative procedures. Though pooh-poohed by Rahul Gandhi, the existence of a national level above the affected states is highly beneficial.

 

One thing Eurasia's southern and western subcontinents have in common is that in their founding statements they avoid the term "nation" to refer to themselves. In Europe this would be a denial of history, where nationalist passions and considerable blood-letting were needed for the unification of Italy and Germany, the independence and unification of the Yugoslav states followed later by this federation's disintegration, etc. The project of countering these old nationalisms with a new EU nationalism has only lived in a small Rightist fringe; the “nation” counts as but a relic from history. In India, by contrast, the idea of defining the Subcontinent's population as a nation has been alive in the Freedom movement, which was influenced by the contemporaneous European nationalisms, most explicitly through VD Savarkar's translation of Italian nationalist thinker Giuseppe Mazzini.

 

Indians have debated whether they form a nation, and if so, what kind of nation. The Nehruvians claimed India was a new nation, with Mahatma Gandhi as "father of the nation", and in need of "nation-building". This is in complete denial of history, when a sense of Indianness existed for millennia. So Gandhi himself had considered India an ancient nation with himself as its grateful son. The Muslim League applied the Ottoman division into millets, "nations", meaning religious communities treated as political units. The Left mostly preferred a fragmented India and invoked the European equation of nation with national language, e.g. the Bengali nation. Prakash Ambedkar thought that the attributes of nationhood apply to the castes: "Every caste a nation."

The present Sangh Parivar effectively espouses Gandhi's view (the asli Gandhi, not the naqli Gandhi who triggered this debate) that India is an ancient nation which includes every Indian. Nowadays it downplays its original Hindu identity and emphatically calls itself nationalist, forever intoning the mantra “unity”. But in an earlier stage, under MS Golwalkar, it taught that only Hindus (in the broad sense) form the nation, while the Muslims and Christians are mere guests. The reason was that only Hindus could boast of a civilizational continuity, whereas Christians and Muslims had historically rejected the culture they found here, or from which they converted, explicitly wanting to replace it with their own.

 

The main problem with asserting an Indian nationhood, as per Rahul Gandhi, is its diversity. This is a false problem, merely a higher magnitude of what every country has to deal with. Moreover, it is part of the genius of Hindu civilization that it can deal exceptionnally well with diversity. While there is always room for improvement, the present federal structure takes care rather well of the needs of its diverse demographics. All the way from Brussels, I dare say that in terms of a political structure doing justice to its own motto of "Unity in diversity", the European Union had better learn some lessons from the Indian Republic.

 

 

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Questioning the Equality Statue

 

 

Questioning the Equality Statue

 

(First Post, mid-January 2022)

 

 

On 5 February 2022, the revered Prime Minister, Sri Narendra Modi, unveils a giant five-metal statue of the 11^th-century founder of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta (“qualified-non-dualist conclusion-of-the-Veda”) philosophy and Ācārya of its concomitant Bhakti (“devotion”) practice, Śrī Ramānuja. Though the preceding philosopher Śaṅkara with his Advaita Vedānta (“non-dualist conclusion-of-the-Veda”) is better known internationally among intellectuals, in India he is more revered for his path-breaking organizational work in monasticism and temple worship, while it is Ramanuja whose devotional theism is far more entrenched in Hinduism’s religious orders and popular culture, including its variations in sects like the Nanak Panth (Sikhi) or the Swaminarayan community. In living Hinduism, which has many leading figures, he may not be such a household name as Shankara or Swami Vivekananda, but arguably his influence reaches the deepest.

 

This is a joyous occasion, we have no reason to minimize it. But, as is my wont, I leave it to others to applaud this event; I would rather offer a few critical observations.

 

 

1.    Gigantism

The Ramanuja statue is one of the largest in India, reportedly 216 feet high, standing on top of a 54-feet pedestal. It follows the trend set by Sardar Patel's statue in Gujarat, to which even overflying airplane pilots draw the attention of their passengers. But what purpose is served by this?

In the case of a political figure, one can understand that the public square is where he belongs. So, a century and more ago, national authorities strengthened their self-justification in the public's mind by visually commemorating those who had been pillars of their establishment. For a philosopher and religious leader, this overwhelming physical presence is less appropriate.

 

Secondly, making a statement about your ideological sympathies by means of a statue towering over the street view is rather obsolete, since our visual life has mostly gone into cyberspace. Statues belong to a past century, nowadays you can produce far more impressive images online.

Thirdly, why the gigantism? The best Hindu temples have an intimacy about them (as struck me especially in Ujjain’s HarSiddhi temple or in the present Kashi Vishvanath), and even the biggest ones are divided in compartments that reproduce this intimacy. They are meant for visits by families at times convenient to them, not for congregational worship fixed on Friday or Sunday. And they are meant for pilgrims, not the mass tourism that giant statues aim for.

 

A few years back, I was in Haridwar and Rishikesh, where a flood of the Ganga river had wrought some destruction, washing human constructions away. This included a recent giant statue of Shiva. The locals told me that this was Ma Ganga's way of showing her disapproval for this gigantism. A god doesn't need this kind of emphasis on his intrinsic greatness. In a way, it is disrespectful to his divine character. If you must, then make a giant statue of Patel, who after all cemented the Indian state, the ultimate authority sanctioning all these monuments. But Shiva can do without this, and so can Ramanujacharya.

 

 

2.   Trinkets

Whenever anything is done for religion, Leftists sourly object that the money had better been spent on prosperity-enhancing initiatives for the masses. Dharma-oriented people can take a leaf from the Leftists’ book and wonder whether the money spent on the statue (and to be spent on its upkeep in the future) could not have served a better purpose. Thus, local temples or Dharmic associations connected with those temples could have deployed more activity in the field of education, a field where Hindus are painfully absent compared to the Christian missionaries.

Since Modi came to power, many people have noticed with increasing consternation that several consequential legal anti-Hindu discriminations which could finally have been abolished by the BJP’s comfortable majority in Parliament, are on the contrary being perpetuated. The BJP not only left the existing inequality between Hindus and the minorities (who are given privileged autonomy by the Constitution, esp. Art.26-30) in school and temple management intact, it has actively thwarted attempts to correct this glaring inequality. When in 2018 BJP MP Satyapal Singh tabled a Private Bill to abolish these discriminations, it was not just cold-shouldered by his party; he was given a minor Minister’s post (bought off?) and nothing was heard of his proposal again.

Hindu places of worship are not autonomous, they are subject to or constantly threatened by nationalization and the siphoning off of their funds towards secular or even anti-Hindu purposes. This is highlighted by the race to the exit of the Hindu community by sects that want to invest in education and fear such government take-overs, such as the Arya Samaj, the Ramakrishna Mission or the Lingayats. Similarly, Scheduled Tribe communities who have a status in a grey zone part Hindu part separate, are embracing the non-Hindu side, affirming their local identities as Donyi-Polo (Arunachal Pradesh) or Sarna (Jharkhand), because they gain from a cool “aboriginal” identity and have everything to lose with a demonized and discriminated-against Hindu identity. The alternative to leaving the sinking ship of Hinduism is to remain loyal, but of such loyal Hindu temple associations I hear from local primary sources that they sometimes contemplate initiatives in education but call these off because of this same fear of a hostile take-over. Instead of glittering statues, they could use extra funds to finance their juridical defence under the present power equation; or better still, a BJP-piloted abolition of these discriminations so as to lift this fear.

Instead, apart from giving privileges to the minorities in the vain hope of catching their votes (or in the equally vain hope of a pat on the back from his revered  secularists), Modi has merely made a number of empty Hindu gestures. These include highly televised temple visits, conspicuous public works in Ayodhya and Kashi, or the recent unveiling of a Shankara statue in Kedarnath. But the legislative jobs for remedying the second-class status of the Hindus in India, which only his government is in a position to do, he has left undone. As a former confidante of Modi’s told me, the BJP merely wants to “keep the pot boiling”, throw Hindu-looking crumbs to the Hindus to earn their votes, yet give them nothing substantial.

The highly mediagenic unveiling of the Ramanuja statue follows the same pattern. Hindus love all the pomp and circumstance, regardless of whom it is dedicated to (hence no eyebrows were raised when Modi recently gave glittering presents to the dargah of the anti-Hindu ideologue and invasion-facilitating spy Muinuddin Chishti in Ajmer). Short of a high-powered campaign to raise their awareness of the discrimination they suffer, they won’t be up in arms about the disappointingly superficial performance of their Hindu government. Even if the BJP itself can’t convince the Hindu voters of any pro-Hindu commitment, it can count on the media: they will seize on any appearance by Modi in a religious setting to clamour indignantly that he is pursuing a Hindu Rashtra, an unearned reputation that only makes him more popular. It merely confirms him as the Hindu Hrdaya Samrat (“emperor of the Hindu heart”). Hindu jubilation after receiving yet another trinket only proves that a child’s hand is easy to fill.

 

 

 

3.   Egalitarianism

 

When honouring Ramanuja, the Government has taken care to give an ideologically useful name to the new monument: it will go by the name “equality statue”. In the 1960s the Jan Sangh, earlier incarnation of the BJP, veered into Socialist territory, rather explicitly in the case of leaders like Nana Deshmukh (whose slogan vikās/“development” is still central in Modi’s speeches), AB Vajpayee and trade-union leader Dattopant Thengadi, and even after the liberalization of the economy since the 1990s it hasn’t really vanished. In all three, this Nehruvian economic view went hand in hand with a choice for secularism: in both realms they simply followed the dominant ideology.

This is still the case today: the BJP, portrayed worldwide as fanatically Hindu, is in fact ideologically weak and ever-weaker. It has no ideological backbone and therefore turns with the reigning wind, or even dances to the tune played by its declared enemies. It has no self-respect but is a dedicated follower of fashion. Now, an international ideological fashion that even India can’t escape, is absolute egalitarianism.

So the great Sri Ramanuja is instrumentalized in the BJP’s egalitarian re-profiling. It emphasizes that Ramanuja assured everyone regardless of caste that he could achieve Liberation. Anyone can develop and cultivate devotion (Bhakti) to a God and intone His name as a Mantra.

This insight wasn’t all that revolutionary: none of the classics on Yoga (Katha Upanishad, Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Sutra, Yoga Vasishtha, Shiva Sutra etc.), demanding though they may be in terms of Sadhana discipline, excludes anyone from the spiritual path. Thus, one of the most constant inequalities in society is that between men and woman, yet already in the Mahabharata the nun Sulabha defeats king Janaka in debate with her argument that “the Self (Ātman) is not gendered”, so that women are equally fit for yogic achievement.  

It is claimed that some Brahmin circles did transpose the inequalities in society to the spiritual realm. If so, it was but an intermezzo in Hindu Dharma’s long history, always counterbalanced by the view that the Self is nirguna (“without qualities”) and neti-neti (“neither this nor that”). Indeed, that the worldly inequalities do not apply to the yogic sphere is the more orthodox, more Vedic position. Whatever else may be up for criticism in the Arya Samaj, its endeavour to root its egalitarian reformism in the Vedas has a basis in fact.

And yet, though this same age-old position was expressed by Sri Ramanuja, the modern-sounding name “equality statue” is infelicitous. It is unlikely that he had ever heard of egalitarianism, and it certainly wasn’t what occupied his mind. He concentrated on the Supreme, as did the many Bhakti sects centred around variations on his worldview. I suspect that his assuring all men of Liberation provided they do the right Sadhana made no difference to their societal status.

The Leftists, whom Modi has been imitating in his zeal for secular social justice, won’t be impressed. When Karl Marx and the first trade-unionists took their stand in then-Christian Europe, they faced a similar ideological obstacle: the Church instilled in its flock the sense that vis-à-vis God they were all equal. They all had an eternal soul, tainted by eternal sin, but capable of faith and of receiving God’s grace, regardless of their status in society. That was what Marx called the “opium of the people”: the belief in some higher realm endowed with equality which made socio-economic inequality bearable. As St Paul wrote: there is neither freeman nor slave, for all have been freed in Christ – but this was a poor consolation for the slaves, for it made no end to worldly slavery.

For the present purpose, the situation in Vedanta is not substantially different from that in Christianity. Yes, in a yogic perspective, all are equally endowed: man and woman, rich and poor, master and servant. But their spiritual progress doesn’t make them leave the class they belong to. It may Liberate them from their limitations, but not from their societal category. It doesn’t make them equal in any worldly sense.  

 

Conclusion

The statue of Sardar Patel, who like Otto von Bismarck in Germany was the “iron man” and the unifier of his country, is sensibly called the “Unity Statue”: his main legacy is indeed India’s unity. In Ramanujacharya’s life, equality is only an incidental aspect of his prescriptions for spiritual progress. Commentaries and papers have been written about him in the intervening nine centuries without dilating on equality. The pursuit of equality is a typically modern phenomenon, alien to Jesus and Paul, and just as alien to Ramanuja.

We've often seen Hindus make flattered claims to modern equality, only to collapse when critically questioned by outsiders. They may find themselves very clever in projecting this contemporary value onto their ancient tradition, but others see through this ploy. That's why we warn them to think twice before making such claims. Neither the Buddha, another much-acclaimed purported egalitarian, nor Ramanujacharya had the power to change lay society. They could influence their followers’ minds and organize their monastic orders, but that was the extent of their reach. From a modern perspective, a certain amount of equality was incidental to their real purpose, but this purpose was not equality. Contrary to what Ramanuja’s statue’s name might suggest, his goal was not equality but Liberation.

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Divinizing the Veda: the Problem of Traditionalism

 

 

Divinizing the Veda : the Problem of Traditionalism

Dr. Koenraad ELST

in Prof. Bhaskarnath Bhattacharya, ed.: Vedavidyāśrīḥ / Gems of Vedic Wisdom. Prof. Shashi Tiwari Felicitation Volume (Pratibha Prakashan, Delhi 2021), p.170-186:

  

Abstract

The present discussion is not new but still necessary. Till today, traditionalism insists that the Vedas are a revealed scripture. This is what Muslims also say about the Qur’ān, but in Hinduism it precedes Islamic or any other influence. Rather, it stems from a pan-human tendency to idealize and absolutize anything deemed spiritual, and is well-attested in foreign cultures throughout history. But it is demonstrably in conflict with various types of testimony in the Vedas themselves.

 

1.     Traditionalism

Definition: traditionalism claims that what was valid in the past, is still valid today and must be continued tomorrow. This is because what has been handed down is intrinsically superior, just as a child trusts its father’s grasp of reality to be superior to its own. In ethics and law, for instance, rules are handed down from earlier generations to us (the mos maiorum, “customs of the ancestors”) because we deem them to have proven their worth by long practice. To an extent, this may be justified; it is pragmatic. But this evaluation often gets absolutized and is vulnerable to a few distortions.

Firstly, what was once experienced in practice to be valid, may be done by future generations purely out of deference to the mos maiorum without any remaining reference to its empirical reason. This attitude may then wilfully ignore new circumstances or increasing knowledge: a blind attachment to a past generation’s experience blind to new but equally real experience. A very simple example, over an even shorter time-span than generations: we once knew a girl regularly hanging up the laundry outside so sun and wind could speed up its drying. She used clothespins because she found (and in fact, at first her mother had told her) that otherwise the wind would blow the clothes away. But one day it rained and she hung the wet clothes to dry (p.171) inside the garage, where there was no wind; yet out of attachment to a long established habit, without thinking further, she still used clothespins.

If this example is innocent, we can also give more controversial instances. Thus, for ages, women were expected to confine sexual activity to inside marriage, and not before, as they could get pregnant; but that has changed with the discovery of reliable birth control. Men were advised to jealously guard their wives’ fidelity, since otherwise the children they bore could be another man’s, even without his knowing; but that has changed somewhat with the development of genetic testing. Does this mean that the chastity rules from the past can now go out the window? Not necessarily, there may be other reasons for maintaining them, but these elementary biological considerations have lost their compelling force. So now, debate and reconsideration are needed.

We need a subtler understanding of the human condition to make the right choice. Old truths are not so obvious anymore, the course to take not so automatic anymore, so that we have “choice stress”. This is at once the main reason why traditionalism is so popular: it saves us the trouble of making choices, a possibly demanding process of gathering information, analysing it and estimating potential consequences. It is easy. In a world where we have so many things to do, we cannot always go back to square one, we often have to rely on conclusions or decisions that some older and wiser generation has made for us. Indeed, as children we do it all the time, so it is an ingrained habit. As adults we sometimes get to make the laborious choice whether to follow in our ancestors’ footstep or chart a new and different course, and we tend to limit these occasions.

Thus far, no real problem, at least not for the topic of the status of the Vedas that concerns us here. But a second problem with traditionalism arises when traditionalists also do the reverse: they do not just make the past condition the present, but also project the present norms onto the past, or norms valid in a recent past onto a more ancient past. They homogenize the past into a single screen, denying any specific time-depth to different phases. They do in time what we all do in space when looking at the stars: we see no space-depth, they all look homogeneously far, whether 4 or 4,000 light years away. In doing so, they tend to deny changes that have taken place at some historical point in the past. This usually takes the form of grafting onto the ancient past an invented tradition that came about later. Grafting, or imagining a false ancestry for current views and customs, is widespread in traditionalism, though not synonymous with it. It need not be intrinsic to traditionalism, but is a disease to which it is very vulnerable.

Thirdly, the ancients in many cultures had a tendency to absolutize the value of what the earlier generations had transmitted, and extol it to superhuman status, even (p.172) God-given. What is eternal was there before you, what your grandparents have been into was also there before you, so the two are easy to confuse.

 

2.     Foreign Examples

 

Our first examples are from outside India. The Book of Changes or Yijing was

written in the 11th century BCE, and incorporated in the Confucian corpus

collected in the 5th-3rd century BCE. It was originally an oracle book:

predictions of the future in a straightforward language that, with the loss

of the contemporaneous reference framework and the changes in script and

language, has become cloudy. The Confucians read all manner of new,

moralizing meanings into the key phrases of the Yijing, thus making it into

a proto-Confucian classic. For instance, the standard phrase li zhen, “fortunate

oracle”, came to mean: “constancy is beneficial”. The Confucian reading of

the Yijing has been enormously influential in Chinese civilization, yet

constituted an invented tradition seriously different from the original.

 

Neo-Platonism was a dominant philosophy in the later Roman Empire.

It was emanationist, i.e. it taught that from the original One, successive

emanations formed layers of solidifying essence, culminating in the material

world, somewhat like the five successive sheaths in the Taittirīya Upaniṣad.

This means that even the most material objects partook of the essence of

the One. Many scholars agree that it was a Hellenistic evolute of a basic

insight from Vedānta.

 

This emanationism was the opposite of creationism: unlike in Biblical

(and later most explicitly the Quranic) theology, it did not posit a creation

ex nihilo, where the created world contrasts as temporary with the eternal

Creator. In the Vedantic-cum-Neo-Platonist view, every being carries the

essence of the One inside itself, whereas in the creationist view, the Supreme

Being and his creation are radically different, and it is blasphemous to liken

the one to the other. There, God is the totally Other.

 

Yet, Neo-Platonism was absorbed by some Jews, who started

reinterpreting the Bible in its light. This became mystical Judaism or the

Qabbala, “what has been received”, “tradition”. Its concept of the Tree of

Life is intellectually quite elegant and original, bridging these ultimately

opposing ideas of creation and emanation. But the point at present is: it

projects meanings onto Biblical terminology that weren’t there and had not

been meant by the authors. Like seeing the Tree of Life wherever the

Biblical narrative mentions wood.

This back-projection of meanings onto scriptural terminology is also in evidence in Sufism, the mystical current within Islam. Thus, ḏikr, “remembering”, is a translation of the Sanskrit Vedāntic concept smaraṇa 173 (Panjabi simraṇ) or smṛti, Pali Buddhist sati, and means in effect dhāraṇā, “concentration”, “continuous focus”. This yogic concept was not present in the Qur’ān, yet the Sufis had to justify as Quranic their borrowed spiritual practices (to avoid being denounced as Infidels), so they read this technical meaning into the perfectly ordinary word ḏikr. This way, they grafted a new, borrowed spiritual tradition onto the Quranic stem. (Through French convert René Guénon, Sufism actually spawned a self-styled “Traditionalist” current in 20 th -century Europe.)

Within Christianity, Roman Catholicism is, according to the Protestants, full of “invented traditions”, often borrowed from Pagan sources but at any rate not Evangelical. Thus, modern Catholics may assume that their celibate priesthood is an ancient and quintessentially Christian institution, but Jesus never created a priesthood. This institution was at some point imitated from the surrounding religions; and it was only at yet another remove that this priesthood was ordered to remain celibate.

The Catholic Church bases itself only very partially on the Bible and more on what it calls “Church tradition”, justified as the continuous working of the Holy Ghost, e.g. the institution of priestly celibacy is attributed to a whisper from the Holy Ghost. Or for another example, when the Cardinals vote to elect a new Pope, it is the presence and unseen working of the Holy Ghost that someone engineers the “right” majority vote. Through the Holy Ghost stratagem, the Church manages to do de jure what other traditions only do de facto, viz. to integrate change or deviation from the original message.

Traditionalism is a worldwide phenomenon, simplifying and homogenizing the working of time as far as a sect’s own doctrine and practices are concerned. Scholars of other cultures will immediately recognize it in the Hindu tendencies sketched below. But this attribution of a tendency well-attested elsewhere to Hindu civilization is, so experience teaches, strongly resented in Hindu circles. To them it is like trying to pull the large psychological categories of Yoga thought into the small categories of modern materialistic Western psychology.

 

3.     Indian Non-Vedic Examples

Now coming to India, let us see how Hindu traditionalists celebrate invented traditions, historically determined, as if they were hoary or even eternal, and as if they are quintessentially and constitutively Hindu. The “traditional” chronology offers a fine example, viz. the claim that Kṛṣṇa’s death completing the Mahābhārata narrative took place in 3102 BCE, and the war 37 years before, in 3139 BCE. We see this “invented tradition” take shape only in the mid-1st millennium CE. The specification of the year (p.174) 3102 BCE as the start of Kali Yuga only appears in the work of Āryabhata in 499 CE, and there, Kṛṣṇa’s passing is not brought into the equation. The full equation: Kṛṣṇa’s death = 3102 BCE = Kali Yuga is first found in the Aihole inscription of 634 CE. (Yet, the term yugānta, “end of an epoch”, often applied to this war [as in Irawati Karve’s title of her 1974 book on the epic], may well date back to the battle itself, but in another, more manageable meaning. A yuga, “era, epoch”, literally is a conjunction of two celestial bodies, marking the beginning or end of their interaction cycle, such as the moonless night for the sun/moon cycle also known as the month. The epic itself gives many stellar positions as marking the time of the war, arguably including the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction [this point is debated: disputant doctores], which was the end of the largest cycle known before the discovery of the precession cycle. One Jupiter-Saturn cycle takes 20 years; but after three cycles, the two planets don’t just reconnect, they also do so at the same place in the Zodiac, thus giving rise to a 60-year cycle, recognized as a kind of century or “epoch” in both Indian and Chinese astronomy. Just a tempting possibility.)

The epic itself merely says about the Kali Yuga (an already long-existing concept) that it will not touch the world as long as Kṛṣṇa’s feet walk on it. Historically, this concept of four world ages of descending quality exists in many cultures, indicating a very early common origin, certainly pre-Vedic. The Hindu notion of Kṛtā, Tretā, Dvāpara and Kali Yuga is matched by the Greek notion of a Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Age and the Germanic notion of a Spear, Sword, Wind and Wolf Age. Neither in the epic nor abroad are any specific dates or time-spans assigned to them. The phrase about Kṛṣṇa’s presence excluding and preceding the darkest age is only a literary manner of speaking and should not be taken literally.

On present evidence, the long duration of these ages originated as fractions of the precession cycle, the movement of the vernal equinox around the ecliptic of ca. 25,772 years, rounded off to 24,000 years. This motion was discovered by Hipparchus of Alexandria in 127 BC, whereupon this knowledge was transmitted via the Indo-Greeks to India. (Proof that earlier Hindus had not yet understood precessional movements is Maitrī Upaniṣad 1.4, where the precessional falling away of the Pole Star from the North Pole is wrongly interpreted as a sign of a world in chaos rather than as a regular application of an astronomical law, see Radhakrishnan 1992:797. This growth in knowledge incidentally contradicts the traditionalist idea that truth has anciently been given and must only be preserved, in favour of the evolutionist paradigm that ignorance and fanciful explanations gradually make way for better insights. Admittedly it is only peripheral information within the text and does not concern the metaphysical subject- (p.175) matter of the Upaniṣads.)

In a next move, the numbers were multiplied by 360 out of awe, in zealous application of the intuition that “a year for man is only a day for the Gods”. This innovation then, more recently than 127 BC, yields the equation: Kali Yuga = 432.000 years, beginning in -3012. It implies that the preceding Dvāpara Yuga was twice as long, so that the even earlier Tretā Yuga in which Rāma is situated, must have taken place a million years ago, even though Rāma’s epic contains Bronze Age technology from less than 10.000 years ago. Stories are fine, but adults shouldn’t take them literally, so the Yuga ages as conceived by Hindu traditionalists had better be put between brackets as just fanciful. Among outside observers, the sight of Hindus taking it literally costs the Hindu cause a lot of credibility.

In the same vein, Hindu traditionalists speak of “Vedic astrology” when they mean the horoscopy presently practised by Hindu astrologers. As Harvard Indologist Michael Witzel has said: “In India, ‘Vedic’ simply means ‘old’.” But there was no horoscopy yet in the Vedic age. There did exist a certain astrology, not based on the 12 Zodiac signs (rāśi) but on the 27 or 28 moon houses (nakṣatra), with beneficial and harmful configurations determining auspicious and inauspicious times for conducting a ritual or starting an enterprise. It would nowadays be called mundane and electional astrology; an important relic still observed today are the auspicious times for weddings. But that is something else than the individual birth horoscopes with which Hindu astrologers make a living. The first known horoscope, still quite simple, is from Babylon in 412 BC. After Alexander conquered the city, this horoscopy got combined with Greek geometry, and within decades, it developed essentially all the techniques still used by astrologers in the West as well as in India. The Indo-Greeks then brought it into India, where the oldest horoscopy writings have Greek technical loanwords, transcribe rather than translate the Greek names of the Zodiac signs, introduce the planetary names of the weekdays, and explicitly acknowledge their Greek lineage, as in the title of the oldest treatise, Yāvana Jātaka, “Greek Birth Horoscopy”. It is clear as day that horoscopy was imported, yet traditionalists graft it onto the Vedic stem.

A very consequential invented tradition concerns caste. Some elements of Hinduism have been taken to be quintessentially Hindu, so that no Hinduism is deemed possible without them; yet they turn out to have a genesis in history, as well as an ending. Traditionalists treat them as God-given and beyond history, and thus they see caste as part of unchanging Sanātana Dharma. They see caste as part of revealed scripture (Śruti) through the appearance of the four social functions (Varṇas) in the late-Vedic Puruṣa Sūkta (a beautiful summary of the doctrine of Corporatism, i.e. likeness of (p.176) the cosmos and of society to a human body, of which traditionalists won’t like to hear that it is quite banal, present in many mythologies), which actually fails to mention the two defining traits of caste: hereditary profession and endogamy. In this case, the traditionalists are enthusiastically seconded by anti-Hindus, who hurry to flaunt the hymn as “proof” that Hinduism is intrinsically and irrevocably “caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste”. Their valuation of caste is opposite, and what the traditionalists use as proof of its God-given character is used by the Missionaries and Ambedkarites all the better to incriminate Hinduism.

By contrast, the Veda fundamentalists of the Ārya Samāj emphasize the contrast between the situation in classical Hinduism, where a hard caste system reigned supreme for some two millennia, and the Vedic age which began totally free of caste and ended with a hymn that in spite of superficial appearances is really still free of caste. In this they are surprisingly seconded by Marxist historians, who tie social systems to economic conditions and deem the Vedic-age economy unfit for generating a division in castes. (Thus Shereen Ratnagar in Thapar 2006:166) In the later Vedic period, the caste system did emerge in stages, first without endogamy as caste identity was passed on in the male line, with the father free to marry a woman of another caste; and then with full endogamy, which geneticists estimate as having existed since ca. two millennnia. When caste came into its own, early votaries of this “invented tradition” started back-projecting it onto ancient scriptures. The Vedas had by then become too venerated to add a word to it, but the Rāmāyaṇa received the addition of a final chapter: the Uttarakaṇḍa. Contrary to Rāma’s carefree interaction with foreign and tribal people, contrary to Rāvaṇa’s inter-caste love for Sītā, this interpolated final chapter has Rāma rewarded by the gods for mercilessly killing the Śūdra Śambuka for trespassing against caste rules. Other writings retold and reinterpreted the implied Vedic episode of rivalry between the sages Viśvāmitra and Vasiṣṭha, which has nothing to do with caste there, as a struggle between Kṣatriya and Brāhmaṇa caste. This way, the traditionalists managed to insert their innovations into early parts of Hindu scripture and near-equate Hinduism with caste.

 

4.     The Traditionalist Veda

The traditionalist account of the Vedas is that they are the source of Hinduism, and that everything of value proceeds from them. This to them is logical, as the Veda is of divine origin: a revealed scripture, apauruṣeya, “non-human”. Unlike scriptures of various other religions, that were not written by human beings, no individual wrote the Vedas. So, those others falsely claim a revealed scripture, but Hindus have the truth on their side when they claim the same. Or in a Gandhian variety, they don’t want to (p.177) deny truth and a revealed origin to other religions, but at least they insist on a divine origin for the Vedas.

In this respect, the egalitarian anti-caste Ārya Samāj was also traditionalist. Generally it is not known as traditionalist but as fundamentalist: its “back to the Vedas” as an instance of the common viewpoint of all fundamentalists: “back to the sources”. Unlike the traditionalists, it rejected the post-Vedic practices, such as idol-worship and untouchability, and scriptures such as the Purāṇas. But it didn’t think through the fundamental assumptions of Hinduism, which then were mostly traditionalist. So, it equally continued to assume the revealed origin of the Vedas.

This contrasts with the view of the Indologists and of everyone who would stumble upon a book full of hymns: these hymns are poetry written by human poets. In the disastrous attempts by California Hindus to introduce more Hindu-friendly amendments in the state’s social science textbooks in 2005-6 (see Elst 2012:137-155), one (unsuccessful) demand was to replace the term “poetry” for the Vedas with “scripture”, on a par with the Bible and the Qur’ān. “Scripture” is a status that the believers attribute to a book, whereas “poetry” as a characterization of the Vedic hymns is just factual. Even if revealed, it remains poetry. But alright, it then also has the status of scripture. Yet, if Hindus claim their religion to be “scientific”, as they often do, they ought to do better than such primitive a-dime-a-dozen claims for a supernatural origin.

The term apauruṣeya is usually translated as “non-human”, “impersonal”. It does not come from the Vedas themselves, but from the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā school of philosophy, centuries younger than the youngest book that could reasonably be called Vedic: “The Mīmāṁsakas hold that the Veda is self-subsistent, eternal and ‘Śruti’ or divine revelation.” (Anirvan 2018:11-12) In the intervening centuries, the Vedas had been extolled, with a class of people set apart just to memorize them and pass them on unchanged to the letter; and with the best of sciences (grammar, mathematics, astronomy) growing up around them. If anything in the surroundings of an ancient Hindu approached the divine, this was it. So the idea of divinizing them or at least their source caught on among intellectually unsophisticated minds.

This attribution to the Vedas of a supernatural origin through revelation is exactly what Muslims say about the Qur’ān. But it is not what the Ṛṣis say about the Vedas. They all write their hymns in the form of man addressing God, just the opposite of the Qur’ān. Thus, in the Gāyatrī Mantra, “may You, the rising Sun, awaken our minds”; or the Mṛtyunjaya Mantra: “we worship the tryambaka deity”. The hymn chosen by Veda editor Veda-Vyāsa (at, by definition, the very completion of the Vedic period) to be the very first, 1.1.1, says that “I (the poet or Ṛṣi) worship the Fire”, and it incidentally (p.178) also refers to “earlier Ṛṣis”, i.e. pre-Vedic Ṛṣis. For another example among numerous ones: “A thought have I imagined, like a workman.” (RV 3.38.1) This refers to the craftsmanship needed, and the hard work of fashioning verses: as any poet knows, composing poetry is one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration. Likewise: “I worship Heaven and Earth, parents of the Gods.” (RV 7:53:1 and again 7:43:1) Ṛṣi Vasiṣṭha even praises himself for having, through his perfect hymns, swayed the god Indra into supporting his employer, king Sudās, into winning the Battle of the Ten Kings. (RV 7:33:1-3) The Ṛg-Vedic family books are very explicitly creations by human poets. The Ṛṣis were originally deemed Mantra-kartā, “makers of Vedic verses”, only later Mantra-draṣṭā, “seers of Vedic verses”, their now-common epithet. The devotional masses lapped this post-Vedic “invented tradition” up. This is a tamasic attitude, but unworthy of creative men of genius like the Vedic Ṛṣis.

 

5.     The Vedas as a source of history

The Ṛg-Veda (RV) is a collection (saṁhitā) of hymns (sūkta) to the gods

(devatā). Its subject-matter is not historical narratives, but praise of the gods.

Yet, inevitably, and like any human creation, it contains a lot of historical

information. Any and every text, regardless of its topic, gives information

about its time and place. The Vedic hymns allow us to deduce that they

were written in Bronze Age North India. To judge from the texts themselves,

their composers were neither cavemen nor automobile drivers, and they

mention neither African giraffes nor Arctic polar bears. The Ṛg-Veda is

neither global nor timeless. Like all human creations, it is determined in

space and time. Any historian will note that the Vedas are composed in a

specific human language, pre-classical Sanskrit, datable and enjoying a

placement on the genealogical tree of the Indo-European language family.

Like the Bible and the Qur’ān, the Vedas only contain statements that could

perfectly have been made by human beings of that place and time; nothing

supernatural.

 

The Ṛg-Veda is explicit about the existence of a pre-Vedic period. This

includes the oft-mentioned ancient patriarch and law-giver Manu, the Vedic

tribe’s foremother Ilā, the patriarchs Nahuṣa and Yayāti, who were ancestors

of the Vedic founder Bharata. It also hints at the pre-Vedic expulsion

northwestwards of the Druhyu tribe. It implies that the Vedas had a

beginning within history. This is confirmed by another text corpus, hazier

but covering a more extended area and period, the Purāṇas.

 

Likewise the Vedic hymn collection had an ending within history, just

like all mortal entities, encapsulated in their final editing attributed to Veda (p.179) Vyāsa, the “editor of the Vedas”. We find confirmation for the traditional belief that the Vedic hymn collections were completed just before the

Bhārata war, viz. by the non-mention in the Vedas of any king who,

according to the Puranic genealogical lists, is younger than Veda-Vyāsa’s

biological son Dhṛtarāṣṭra, father of the Kaurava party in the war.

 

As Shrikant Talageri (2000) showed, the Vedas are expressive of the

culture of the Paurava tribe of Northwest India, particularly of the Haryāṇā

area around the Sarasvatī basin. This was a variation on the culture of the

surrounding areas (like the Aikṣkvāku tribe to their east, featuring Rāma and

the Buddha, and the Yādavas to their south, featuring Kṛṣṇa), which likewise

were tributaries of what came to be known as Hindu civilization. Helped

no doubt by a period of expanding political power for the Pauravas, the

Vedas, as an ordered corpus of well-crafted poetry memorized by a class set

apart for this purpose, and as the centre around which several prestigious

sciences developed, gained a leading role in an ever-larger area, ultimately

all over the Subcontinent. On the other hand, Talageri’s contextualization

of the Vedas conflicts with common Hindu beliefs: that everything Hindu

stems from the Vedas, and that they can even be treated as the defining

source of Hinduism.

 

 

6.     When a Battle is just a Battle

 

In spite of not being a historical chronicle, the Vedic corpus does contain

a few accounts of historical events which were occasions to thank the gods.

These are principally several migrations and battles, best known among them

the Battle of the Ten Kings (chiefly described in RV 7:18, 7:33 and 7:83).

This was a confrontation between the Paurava tribe’s Bhārata clan and

mainly the Ānava tribe, with numerous names of participating tribes and

battles. Numerous Hindus, including the Ārya Samāj, Mahātma Gāndhi and

Sri Aurobindo, consider this a symbolic battle against materialism or against

the evil in oneself, or against the evil-doers. Terms like Asura and Dāsa, later

in classical Sanskrit used for demons c.q. serfs, get their later meaning back-projected onto their usage in the battle’s account, where in fact they are

only the names of all or some of the Ānavas. This follows a universal pattern,

where names for “foreigner” end up as terms for “barbarians”, “evil-doers”

or “demons”. Other Sanskrit examples of a similar process are Rākṣasas,

Pisācas (two mountain tribes, later reduced to something like “cannibals”)

and Mlecchas (the natives of the non-Vedic territory more or less coinciding

with the region of Sindh).

 

But no, unlike what all too pious interpreters claim, thereby considering themselves very profound and spiritual, this does not concern a battle of the good guys against the bad guys; it is only and robustly a (p.180) real-life battle of “us” against “them”. There is no indication that the Ānavas embodied evil; their only negative trait from a Paurava/Vedic viewpoint is that they were the enemy in a war for territory. And while they are described as aggressors from the Asiknī/Chenab basin eastwards to the Vedic-held Paruṣnī/Ravi basin, they may only have staged a counterattack against an intrusive king Sudās originally based more to the east in the Sarasvatī basin.

 

It is like that other battle, the core event of the Mahābhārata, which has endlessly been treated as a metaphor for some moral or spiritual struggle, where one side represent dharma, the other adharma. Even there, the moral contrast between the two warring parties is not black and white. At most, a moralizing narrative pitting dharma against adharma has been laid over a historical event, where the two sides both had their share of good and of evil, which still shines through in the final version of the evolving story. Indeed, that is what we find so great about the epic: that the good guys have somehow deserved the injustice they encounter, and that the bad guys also have a justification for whatever they do. It is not some simplistic fairy-tale.

 

Some Vedic events are verifiable, chiefly through correspondence with

the archaeological data collected in the Sarasvatī basin. Very rarely, the

textual information is even matched by information given in another text:

the Vārṣāgira Battle, a sequel to the Ten Kings’ Battle but farther west, is

also reported in a source by the then enemy, viz. the Avesta of the Iranian

section of the Ānava tribe. The military commanders on both sides are the

same, only the outcome of the battle is slightly different: clearly not as

resoundingly victorious on the Vedic side as the Ṛṣis claim. (Especially in

the longer term, it becomes clear that the initially expanding Pauravas have

to settle for the already-established border, viz. the Hindu Kush mountain

range between a Vedic India and an Iranian Afghanistan.) But two slightly

different versions is exactly what you would expect in two people’s

testimonies of a single event. So, this is what can happen in a historical

narrative; no need to take refuge in a symbolic or didactic reading.

 

7.     Pro Traditionalism

All the arguments we have ever heard against the historicity of the Vedas (and that cannot annul the Ṛṣis’ own primary testimony anyway) are based on (1) later-Vedic or post-Vedic sayings; and (2) shifting the meaning of one of the terms employed. Thus, an Ārya Samāj spokesman sent us this quotation: “The Vedas are the true knowledge of God. In the beginning after human beings had been created, the Supreme Spirit made the Vedas known to Brahma through Agni, etc., i.e., Brahma learnt the four Vedas (p.181) from Agni, Vayu, Āditya and Aṅgira. (Manu Smriti 1-23).” A better approximation of the verse’s meaning would be: “He (= Brahmā), for the perfection of sacrifice, from fire, wind and the sun, milked (out) the eternal threefold Veda (Brāhma), which consists of the Ṛg-, Yajur- and Sāma- (Vedas).” The detail that the verse only mentions a set of 3 Vedas, which is the original version (Vedatrayī), whereas the classical count implied here is 4 Vedas, including the Atharva-Veda, already amounts to a modest motion of no-confidence against the Traditionalist paradigm, for it exemplifies an element of change in the purportedly eternal Vedic tradition.

But in a general sense, it is of course true that the Manu Smṛti, the Bhagavad Gītā and other post-Vedic literature took this new narrative of uncreated revealed eternal Vedas and ran with it, making it into an unquestioned tradition. Yet, with all due respect for those authority-laden books, their claim is and remains in conflict with the evidence of the Vedas themselves, and wrong. Among the reasons not yet discussed, we might mention that it does injustice to the divine character of the gods: if these have to dictate the hymns of praise to themselves, they are narcissistic. If a girl is given a serenade by a suitor below her balcony, she is not going to dictate to him what praises to sing; on the contrary, she wants to be surprised by what new phrases he comes up with. At any rate, the claim is and remains post-Vedic, unknown to the Ṛṣis. It is the psychological result of centuries when the Vedas had been given a higher place in Hindu society than anything elsewhere. People looked ever more steeply upwards to them.

 

 

8.     Narahari Achar’s case

In reply to Shrikant Talageri’s historicization of the Vedas (Talageri 2020a), Prof. Narahari Achar argues from scripture that neither the Vedas nor other ancient sources give a historical analysis. Mostly they don’t, but that is what you would expect from a poetry book. What historians find in there are meta-data, information not intended by the writer but nonetheless present because all men unwittingly let on much about their circumstances. Even in an explicitly historiographical book from ancient Northwest India you wouldn’t find most of the modern philological and historical methods. But out of the ordinary, Achar himself uses meta-information, viz. that yajña is the essence of the Vedas, and that: “Since yajña is traced to Manu and essentially to creation, there was no time when yajña was not there and hence the concept ‘pre-Vedic’ does not arise.” (Achar 2020) Yajña was in principle possible ever since mankind mastered the “red flower” (as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books character Mowgli calls fire), hundreds of thousands of years ago. Indeed, as the first fire was probably taken from trees struck by lightning, i.e. “by the thunder-god”, it was taken (p.182) to be a gift from Above. Fire was an intrinsically divine element and thus a logical bridge from the human to the heavenly sphere, symbolized by the smoke circling up from the flames to heaven, and this since many millennia before the composition of the Vedas.

However, as per one of Shrikant Talageri’s less controversial observations, the introduction of the yajña was not made the centre of the Vedas as an age-old inheritance, but was known in the Ṛg-Veda itself to be more or less coterminous with the time of the Vedic hymns: it was introduced by early sage Bhṛgu, who stemmed from the Ānava tribe, northwestern cousins of the Vedic Paurava tribe and generators of the Avestan tradition. It was not a widespread practice, the usual form of sacrifice worldwide being either pouring a liquid on a representation of the deity, as in the pan-Indian pūjā, or sacrificing a victim on an altar. But among the Ānavas, it was standard practice, and while being passed on to the Pauravas, it continued to evolve, extolling the sacred fire thus far that they abandoned throwing their sacrifices into it.

Fire-sacrifice was typical for the northwestern tribes, the Druhyus and the Ānavas (chiefly the Proto-Iranian branch during the early Vedic period), who made up the near-total of the Indo-Europeans emigrating from India. The Abbasid caliphate’s ambassador Ibn Faḏlan, who in the 9th century sailed up the Volga river and lived with the Vikings there, describes his hosts as “fire-worshippers” (like the Zoroastrians), because while idol-worshipping was only marginally in evidence, probably borrowed through the Romans ultimately from the ancient Middle East, fire was central in their religion. The Irish Celts had a prominent fire-temple dedicated to the goddess Brigit (same root as Bhṛgu), the Romans had Vestal virgins tending the eternal fire. So, what was a marginal phenomenon in India, confined to the northwest, was exported to the whole Indo-European expanse. In India, it gained a pre-eminent position when the Vedic tradition was spread all over the Subcontinent because kings invited Brahmin families to emigrate from the Sarasvatī basin, settle in their own kingdoms and confer the sanctity and prestige of the Vedas on their dynasties.

Alright, so fire sacrifice is not intrinsically coterminous with the Vedas, but as it happens, the two do more or less coincide. Still, they are not the same, and nothing is proven about the Vedas by making a point about yajña. So when it comes to the Vedic hymns themselves, Prof. Achar should have shown something in the text that could not possibly have been thought up by a Bronze-Age NW-Indian human being, or perhaps brandished a dinosaur skeleton sporting a tattoo of the Gāyatrī Mantra or at least the Auṁ sign to prove the Vedas’ eternality.

In a reply to Achar’s paper, Talageri (2020b) notes that most (p.183) Traditionalists reject not only the notion of “pre-Vedic” but also the discerning of successive historical layers within the Vedas, the key to lots of data about the geographical gradient crucial to the “Aryan” debate. These have been elaborately distinguished by Western Orientalists and in even more consequential detail by Talageri himself: “All this massive evidence certainly cannot be discarded on the basis of the myth (yes, myth) that an individual person named Vyāsa compiled all the Vedas in one go. It is perfectly possible that Vyāsa gave the final canonical form to the collection, but to say that the books were all composed and compiled together at one point of time (I will ignore here the date of this point of time: Achar says 3100 BCE, I say 1500-1400 BCE) against all the evidence, and then further use this to deny any internal chronology to the Rigveda, is a joke.”

 

 

9.     Daya Krishna’s case

 

Philosophy Professor Daya Krishna musters even more arguments why the

Vedas are just human literature. They behave just like any human literature.

Thus, the existence of different versions of the Yajur-Veda was consciously

countenanced by the Yajur-Vedic Ṛṣis: “Obviously, they would not have

regarded it as apauruṣeya or revealed”. (Krishna 1996:84) Repetition of Vedic

verses is another key to the natural process of intertextuality: “It is not only

that a very large number of Mantras from the Ṛgveda are repeated in the

other Vedas, but that there are substantial repetitions in the Ṛgveda itself.”

(Krishna 1996:86) The Ṛṣis freely borrowed from each other, they could

see far because they stood on the shoulders of giants: “But if this was the

relation of one Vedic Ṛṣi to another, how can that relation be understood

either in terms of apauruṣeyatva or revelation, or even in terms of Vedic

authority?” (p.86)

 

Today’s devout God-fearing Hindus, temple-goers and practitioners of

a daily pūjā, would not feel at home with the old-school Hindu philosophers,

many of whom were functionally or even explicitly atheist. Daya Krishna

cites Karl Potter with approval: “If, for example, one chooses the second

century AD, one would discover that ‘the major systems extant at that time --

Sāṁkhya, Mīmāṁsā, Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika, Jainism, the several schools of

Buddhism, and Cārvāka -- are none of them theistic’. But ‘if one slices

instead at, say, the fourteenth century AD, one finds that Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

has become pronouncedly theistic, that Buddhism and Cārvāka had

disappeared, and that several varieties of theistic Vedānta have come into

prominence.” (Krishna 1996:40) This shows in passing that medieval and

modern Hindus are very different from their ancient ancestors, including

the Ṛṣis they swear by.

 

Coming to the Upaniṣads, according to Krishna: “Most are not (p.184)

independent works, but selections made out of a pre-existing text”. (Krishna

1991:104) This raises normal philological questions, such as: who made the

selection, and why? Thus, the Aitareya Upaniṣad forms the middle part of

the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, the Kena Upaniṣad forms the 10th chapter of the

Jaiminīya Upaniṣad-Brāhmaṇa, the Taittirīya Upaniṣad is the 7th to 9th

chapter of Taittirīya Āraṇyaka, while the Kaṭha Upaniṣad is part of the

Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa. Again, the fact that many later books named Upaniṣad

clearly postdate the Vedic period, even in the capacious definition of “Vedic”

current in India, casts doubt on their status of apauruṣeyatva. Like in the

hymn collections, here too, we get to know from the texts the very human

life-stories of Ṛṣis, such as Yājñavalkya, Satyakāma Jābala, Uddālaka Aruṇi and others, as of any human writers.

 

If this is God speaking, we find him, as gods go, comparatively undecided, wrapped up in trifles, changing his mind even at the solemn moment of giving a message for eternity. Yes, the doctrine of the Self is enormously important, but if God Himself had to communicate it, would he have buried it in all-too-human anecdotes? By contrast, in human beings, this is only what you can expect: even discoveries or innovations of genius get born in an all-too-human context, with circumstances that disappoint if you expect splendour befitting their world-historical importance. Yet, Traditionalists consider these texts as Śruti, “what is heard”, interpreted as “what has been revealed”.

 

 

10.                        Strategic Implications of Anti-history Positions

 

Today, in an ongoing and very consequential debate, the Traditionalist

position happens to be contrary to Hindu self-interest. The search for

historical information in the Vedas (so far both by the Western Orientalists

and by Talageri), has yielded lots of material, first establishing but on closer

look refuting the Aryan Invasion Theory decried by most aware Hindus. The

ancient but post-Vedic writers conditioned by human psychology and

cultural tendencies, extolling the for them already ancient Vedas, were in

no position yet to draw all the historical implications from these texts.

 

As Talageri (2020) notes: “All these ancient writers were totally

unacquainted with the Indo-European question or the AIT, and with the

principles of modern linguistics and historical studies, and could never have

possibly intended that their religious views be misused as weapons by present-day “traditionalist” Hindus to sabotage research on ancient history and to

disarm other Hindu researchers from dealing with the (for example, AIT-promoting) opponents.”

 

For the Traditionalists, however, it is still preferable to lose this debate

(which is mostly with foreigners, whose opinion they contemptuously ignore

(p.185) anyway), rather than to give up on their fundamental belief that the Vedas were uncreated and oblivious to mere history.

 

In another debate too, the historical approach proves quite fruitful. About caste, the diehard Traditionalists simply maintain that the Vedas are eternal and the necessity of caste with it. But at the same time, numerous Hindus are aware that caste is Hinduism’s Achilles heel. So modern activist Hindus try to disown caste and evacuate it from Hinduism. Ludicrously, they deny the emphasis on caste in their scriptures, or reinterpret caste as a matter of personal choice. Thus, they deny (or if possible, keep out of view) that in the Bhagavad Gītā, both Kṛṣṇa’s and Arjuṇa’s references to “immorality of women” as cause of “caste-mixing” obviously imply an unabashedly birth-based endogamous understanding of caste. They even claim that caste is nothing but a British concoction, the Hindu counterpart of the anti-Hindus’ claim that the Ayodhya temple was nothing but a British concoction, and for the same purpose: to “divide and rule”.

 

A historical view of caste, by contrast, concedes candidly that caste was

intertwined with Hinduism for long, but equally shows that caste was initially

absent and only intruded in stages. Hinduism can flourish all while letting

caste wither away. That may satisfy at least the more fair-minded among

Hinduism’s critics.

But then, real Traditionalists are not interested in such temporary advantages, trifles compared to timeless Tradition. And now you mention it, it may be commendable to forego a strategic advantage just to remain faithful to your most cherished beliefs. Moreover, the Aryan Invasion debate can be dismissed as but a temporary distraction. It didn’t exist for most of history, and after being resolved, it will disappear again soon, so it is not worth sacrificing an old doctrine for. Similarly, caste can be cherished as too precious (and alas, misunderstood) to justify any interference by incomprehending moderns. Right? Well, in that case, after discarding considerations of argumentative expediency, the consideration of truth remains. There is not a shred of evidence for the Vedas’ supernatural origin, and plenty for a human, historical origin.

 

 

Conclusion

 

Those who disagree with us and stick to the belief in an eternal and

uncreated Veda, shouldn’t convince us, they should go and convince the

Ṛṣis. It is they, not the cabal of Western India-watchers or Orientalists, who

have described a pre-Vedic stretch of history, and who gave us a collection

of hymns expressing the human viewpoint and addressing the gods. They

included all manner of historical details, from contingent and convoluted

family sagas through the names of rivers to descriptions of battles, all in

between their main purpose of singing praise to the gods.

 

(p.186)

 

Oddly, for people who hold the Vedas in such quasi-divinizing awe, the

Traditionalists turn out to go against the Vedic testimony itself. When the

choice is between the Traditionalists’ version and the Ṛṣisí version, we stand

with the Ṛṣis.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Achar, BN Narahari, 2020: Revisiting the Chronology of Rigveda and the exact identity of Vedic Aryans, Academia.edu.

Anirvan, 2018: Veda Mīmāṁsā, vol.1, Akshaya Prakashan, Delhi.

Elst, Koenraad, 2012: The Argumentative Hindu, Voice of India, Delhi.

Griffith, Ralph TH, 1991 (1889): The Hymns of the Rgveda, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi.

Jamison, Stephanie W, and Brereton, Joel, 2014: The Rigveda, OUP, New York.

Krishna, Daya, 1996 (1991): Indian Philosophy. A Counter Perspective, OUP, Delhi.

Oldenberg, Hermann, 2005 (1888): Prolegomena on Metre and Textual History of the Rgveda, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 1992 (1953): The Principal Upanishads, Edited with Text, Translation and Notes, Humanity Books, New York.

Talageri, Shrikant, 2000: The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis, Voice of India, Delhi.

--, 2020a: “Rigveda and the Aryan Theory: a Rational Approach”, talageri.blogspot.com.

--, 2020b: “A Reply To Prof. Narahari Achar’s Critique of my article The Rigveda and the Aryan Theory: A Rational Perspective. The Full Out-of-India Case in Short”, talageri.blogspot.com, 7 July 2020.

Thapar, R., et al.: India. Historical Beginnings and the Concepts of the Aryan, National Book Trust, Delhi 2006.

Wilson, HH, 1997 (1866): Ṛg-Veda Saṁhitā (full text plus translation), Parimal Publ., Delhi.

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