Vedas

What Makes Indian Philosophy Different From Its Western Counterpart?

Raghavan Srinivasan’s ‘Quick and Concise: Indian Philosophy’ present a bird’s eye view of the vast canvas of the Indian philosophical thought.

Many will agree that philosophy is rarely a general topic of discussion in India for the educated layman. Most of the universities in India do not even have a department of philosophy as an academic discipline. Rarely, when it happens to be a point of discussion, philosophy as a subject matter in India is generally confused with theology, religion and spirituality.

When it comes to Indian philosophy (sometimes read wrongly as Hindu philosophy), the common sense view of a layman is distorted. There is a general understanding that Indian philosophy is a unified body of knowledge, and all the discourses on it are an expatiation of a monolithic narrative of an esoteric truth that stands in direct conflict with other philosophies.

Further, it is also held as a general opinion that Indian philosophy is a repository of spiritual insights that no other world view possesses – a view that has gained a more aggressive voice under the present political regime.

Recently, a chance encounter with a friend led to a conversation on philosophy – a subject that I taught and wrote about, both out of passion and profession.

His idea of philosophy was closely linked to religion and spirituality, and he had, it appears from the conversation, a glorified sense of anything Indian including philosophy (though, from my conversation with him, I gathered that he had no idea of what is Indian philosophy beyond showering eulogies on what he considered to be a ‘pure’ Indian philosophical tradition).

When I told him that my research was on philosophy of science from the Western analytic tradition, his immediate response was whether I accept Western philosophy at the cost of rejecting Indian philosophy. This idea of acceptance and rejection, perhaps, presupposes Western philosophy and Indian Philosophy as two mutually exclusive and conflicting thought patterns (where one has to be accepted and other rejected on the grounds of truth).

It further implies that if one carries forward his study in one, this automatically implies that the other is rejected. This, to me, seemed a bit surprising – surprising because to think in terms of acceptance and rejection, in such a naïve manner, is untenable and inappropriate, as far as the subject matter of philosophy is concerned. My explanation that this is an ill-conceived understanding did not convince him.

Philosophy as Darshana

Raghavan Srinivasan’s book Quick and Concise: Indian Philosophy (Hachette India, 2024) gives an overview of Indian philosophy that best addresses the misconceptions and wrong notions of many, like that of my friend, have on this subject. It is a basic and popular exposition of Indian philosophical traditions addressed to the layman.

It would be interesting to begin with a more general question of how philosophers themselves have reflected on the concerns of philosophy. Etymologically, the word philosophy is derived from Greek words philia (love) and Sophia (wisdom) which means ‘love of wisdom’ (Srinivasan renders it as ‘love of knowledge’).

Quick and Concise: Indian Philosophy by Raghavan Srinivasan, Hachette India, 2024.

Pythagoras was supposed to have coined this word. When asked who he was by Leon, the tyrant of Philius, he replied humbly that he was a lover of wisdom, preferring the term philosopher to the expression sage or a man of wisdom (There are different versions of this story).

The etymology, by itself, does not capture what the discipline of philosophy is about unless one has an understanding of what constitutes this wisdom? This is an open question as far as philosophy is concerned because, from the time of Greek thought, philosophy has expanded its compass to accommodate different kinds of approaches on a diverse range of issues of social, moral and political concern as well as of the natural world.

When deliberating on these concerns, sometimes the word philosophy has been and is used in a most elastic way, and this point has been well articulated in a very lucidly written introductory philosophical text Living Issues in Philosophy by Harold Titus and others. They introduce the meaning of philosophy by distinguishing its informal and the formal sense.

The informal sense of “having” a philosophy, according to the authors, is a “set of views or beliefs about the life and the universe, which are often held uncritically” that refers to a certain attitude towards ideas and issues of a very general nature.

These ideas include, among others, purpose of life, meaning of life, goals of living and mysteries of life and death and god. A general reflection on these ideas coupled with ones attitude towards such ideas is referred to as philosophy. Such a broad view, as the authors rightly note, is “vague, confused and superficial”. There are occasions when the Srinivasan slips into this mode of understanding philosophy in the informal sense.

The book’s wide-ranging introduction to Indian philosophy attempts to present a bird’s eye view of the vast canvas of Indian philosophical thought.

As the author notes, “a distinctive feature of Indian Philosophy” in broad terms is its quest for truth. The method of its discourse is a “dialectical process”, engaging with the opponent’s viewpoint (poorvapaksha), challenging their position (khandana) and finally presenting an argument for their own position (uttarapaksha or siddhanta).

Srinivasan begins his exposition with the traditional Indian equivalent of the word ‘philosophy’ – darshana. This word’s derivation is from Sanskrit root drsh, which means ‘to see’. The word darshana conveys the idea that this body of literature has as its aim a “profound ‘view’ or ‘vision’ that transcends mere intellectual contemplation”, as the author states.

The transcending of intellectual contemplation means that emphasis is on direct realisation of truth that leads to liberation or salvation. This soteriological (i.e. concerns of salvation and liberation referred to by terms like moksha and mukti) aspect of Indian philosophy is captured by the word darshana that distinguishes it from the purely theoretical and analytic enterprise of Western philosophy.

This gives rise to two questions: Whether Indian philosophy is confined to soteriological concerns? and did Indian philosophers’ focus on soteriological concerns elude them from engaging in philosophical enterprise purely as a theoretical exercise or as ‘love of wisdom?’

Further, the author notes, and rightly so, that in contrast to the categorisation of modern Western philosophy into branches of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics etc. the approach of Indian philosophy is to intertwine “these areas of enquiry”. Perhaps, this contrast reflects the practical and soteriological concerns of darshanic tradition as against the theoretical exercise of Western philosophy.

It is this intertwining that makes Indian philosophy as darshana. In modern expositions of darshanas in English they are treated as systems of philosophical thought that emerged in the age just before the Common Era. Each system developed as a closed siddhanta by interacting with the other systems with thinkers claiming to be adherents of the system adding their own arguments and refining the earlier ones.

Indian philosophical systems

There are six orthodox darshanas (systems) of Indian thought (known as astika) and three heterodox systems (nastika). The six orthodox schools are the Saankhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta. The nastika schools do not accept the authority of the Vedas and the astika schools accept it.

The difference in astika or nastika, in Indian Philosophy, lies on the issue of whether one accepts the authority of the Vedas or not. These words do not stand for theistic or atheistic as it has come to be understood in general usage. This confusion is usage can be seen at some places of this book.

Each of these philosophical systems can be traced to source-books written in the form of cryptic formulas called sutras. There were commentaries on these source books and further commentaries on commentaries, each one challenging (khandana) the other position (poorvapaksha) and establishing its own system (siddhanta).

It is in this kind of a “dialectical process” that philosophy developed in Indian tradition. All these aspects have been dealt with in this short discourse on Indian philosophy revealing the different argumentative facets in establishing its own epistemology, metaphysics and logic, which, as the author rightly asserts, are ”intertwined”.

For example, in describing the Saankhya darshana or system the author provides the sources of knowledge (the epistemological aspect) and proceeds to analyse them. The Saankhya metaphysics postulates two ultimate realities, the purusha and the prakriti. The creation of this world is presented as an evolution from prakriti – it being the first cause.

Saankhya metaphysics in this manner rests on a theory of causation. Traditionally, the Saankhya and the Yoga have been treated as twin systems, where Yoga is considered a practical system with its own set of practices for liberation from sorrow. The Yoga darshana introduces the concept of god whereas the Saankhya is an atheistic system.

The reader can see the “intertwining” of different topical aspects of philosophy, as mentioned by the author in the first chapter, present in the description of different classical systems (darshanas) in subsequent chapters.

In a space of sixteen chapters the book covers the entire gamut of Indian thought, devoting four chapters for the six orthodox systems of thought or darshanas (what some would consider as the core of Indian philosophical thought).

In his brief delineation of the Vedanta system (another orthodox darshana) the author presents a gist of the different schools of Vedanta (the Advaita of Shankara, Vishishtadvaita of Ramanuja and Dvaita of Madavacharya) crisply.

The nature of Brahman (The Absolute, and not to be confused with Brahmin caste), a central concept of Vedanta, has been well elucidated with adequate coverage being given to the nature of illusion in Advaita. There are a good number of box illustrations in this chapter on Vedanta that explains certain central tenets of Vedanta for the general reader.

Beginnings of Indian philosophy

Before his exposition of the systems of Indian philosophy, Srinivasan traces the beginnings of Indian philosophy from the pre-Vedic Harappan civilisation. It is followed by the Vedic period whose civilisation was pastoral. In the chapter on the Vedas the author gives a short account of how the Vedic society was organised and the lifestyle of the people.

Rig Veda is the oldest of the four Vedas (Yajur, Sama and Atharva are the other three Vedas) and its verses speculate about the origin and creation of the world. According to the author there is a philosophical aspect that is revealed in the creation process. In the process of imagining these categories like Purusha (supreme being), individual gods, soul etc. these become part of its metaphysics.

The next chapter (chapter four) titled The Early Upanishads: Path to Knowledge and Salvation begins with the statement: “The four Vedas constitute the Samhita, sacred commandments handed over from the above”.

A lay reader, without any exposure to Vedic literature, may understand it as follows: Samhita is something that is constituted by the Vedas and, further, that it is some sort of a commandment. Samhita is actually the mantra (formulaic verses) portion of the Vedas. Etymologically it means put together and arranged (Sam + hita), where the verses (mantras) are collected, arranged and put together. It is to be noted that though the term Veda is used to refer to only the Samhitas, the later conception of Veda also included other parts like the Brahmanas (sacrificial texts), the Arnyakas (forest treatises) and the Upanishads (see p.6-7 here).

However, this chapter does give a glimpse of the subject matter of these different parts of the Vedas, which follow the Samhita portion. An explanation of the key concept of Upanishads, Brahman (not to be confused with caste Brahmin) is given in a box.

The relation between Atman and Brahman, which is the theme of the Upanishads, has been elucidated succinctly. The different schools like Advaita, Vishistadvaita, Dvaita, and Bhedabheda have been mentioned noting that these schools interpret this relationship in different ways giving rise to different schools of Vedanta.

To the layperson such “pluralism of views” of even a single subject matter of Upanishads dispels the idea that Indian Philosophy is one monolithic view of truth. On this, the author notes, and this is significant for the lay reader, that “the schools of thought that accept Vedic authority are considered the foundation of Hinduism despite their different world views”. However, as he clearly states the aim of the Upanishad texts was the liberation of the individual soul.

The author then brings the heterodox schools as a response to the orthodoxy of the Brahmin-dominated and ritual-focused tradition of the Vedas. Beginning with the Ajivikas he devotes a chapter to Buddhism, Jainism and Charvaka or Lokayata (the materialist school).

A chapter on Ajivikas introduces the readers to this heterodox school of thought. It gives a brief historical background against which this school of thought arose. Ajivikas being determinists believed that niyati (fate) controlled everything in this universe. Important leaders of this movement like Purana Kassappa and Makkhali Gosala have been covered with appropriate box illustrations in the chapter.

A separate chapter devoted to Ajivikas is welcome in a short introductory work of this kind as it informs the readers of the existence of this heterodox school which did have significant impact on lives of people even in the southern part of India.

The heterodox school of Ajivika was followed by chapters on Buddhism and Jainism. Introductory books on Indian philosophy generally distinguish between early Buddhism and later Buddhism. The early Buddhism is focused on the ethico-religious teachings of Buddha as he was not interested in abstract metaphysical speculation.

Both the early and later Buddhism is here presented in a single chapter. Srinivasan presents concise and coherent summaries of important doctrines of Buddha beginning with the four noble truths (arya satya) and connecting it to the doctrine of dependent origination (pratitya-samutpada), to the theory of twelve causes (dvadasa-nidana) of earthly misery and to the radical idea of the theory of impermanence.

His presentation of the main teachings of early Buddhism ends with the concept of Karma, Nirvana and the non-eternality of the soul. The later Buddhism has many schools, which can be considered as philosophy proper, has “indulged in metaphysical speculation”. Here the author looks into philosophies of two of the important schools: the Madhymaka and Vijnanavada schools.

Informal Darshanas

After the exposition of the systems of Indian philosophy, the discussion of the remaining four chapters treats diverse areas of thought that prevailed during the ancient and medieval period. Srinivasan refers to Bhagavat Gita as a “sacred Hindu scripture” and outlines the idea of jnana (knowledge) Karma (action) and bhakti (devotion) as the key features of the Bhagavat Gita and also the idea of duty being so central to Krishna-Arjuna dialogue. He also provides the essence of the different interpretations given by Shankara and Ramanuja.

Srinivasan then proceeds in the next chapter to give an account of the Tantra. Apart from the heterodox schools which were non-Vedic systems of thought, Tantra was another non-Vedic practice that prevailed as part of Indian culture.

The basic characteristics of Tantric beliefs and practices can be traced to agriculture and is associated with the female principle, prakriti. The author brings the influence of Tantra on the cult of Shakti and worship of the female goddess and traces similarities between Saankhya and Tantra.

Though the author ends the chapter with the observation that the Saankhya system gave a “philosophical underpinning” to Tantrism, the connection between the two, as enunciated in this chapter, only seems to hinge on the common metaphysical idea of prakriti.

After the chapter on Tantra, Ayurveda (the science of life), a school of Indian medicine, is taken up for discussion. The two most important texts of Ayurveda, the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita, have at length covered primarily on the topic of human body, treatment of diseases, diet, hygiene and all the theoretical aspects connected with physical and mental well-being.

Ayurveda is also associated, in a special way, with Atharvaveda. How can the subject matter of this medical school be a part of a philosophy book? The point of taking up this school for discussion is because of its close connection with the philosophical schools of Saankhya, Yoga and Nyaya-Vaisheshika; and also the school’s own little contribution on the epistemological matters and logical reasoning by discussing on how to conduct a debate (specifically, something the physicians have to know). In his short exposition of this school in the chapter, the author delves into these topics of philosophical interest.

However, one shortcoming is that the content of this chapter has a collection of bits and pieces of information from Surendranath Dasgupta’s History of Indian Philosophy, Vol 2.

As a result some readers may not find a philosophical relevance of this chapter. This lack of philosophical relevance is again revealed in p.168, where the author suddenly introduces the point of chronology between Charaka Samhita and Saankhya Karika by appealing to Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya’s work on Lokayata.

The final chapter is titled The Bhakti Movement: Love and Devotion. According to the author most of the texts of the Sangam period exhibited various philosophical ideas. A general account of Sangam poetry is given and also the epics written in the late or post-Sangam period. It is not clear what exactly the philosophical ideas in the texts are – those that are mentioned in this chapter.

It appears that the author is using the informal sense of philosophy when he claims that “the texts reflected the philosophy and ethics of the prevailing society very well”. More than philosophy this chapter gives a brief background of some literary and devotional movement.

It mentions how various literary texts of this movement focused on the ethical and moral principles. He then presents a very short account of the devotional movement in the Tamil region referring to the works of Vaishnavite Alwars and Saivite Nayanars.

A critical assessment

A survey of Indian philosophy and a quick and concise guide to it is a tall order. The author makes a commendable attempt to present a diverse stream of philosophical ideas of India’s past for the nonspecialist reader. The question of how far he has been successful in his attempt to present a coherent and popular exposition of Indian philosophy is for the readers to judge.

In some of the chapters, the author provides historical information culled from a number of other books (of course, he has not given the references to these specific bits of information). For instance, in presenting chapters two, three and four, he seems to focus on bits and pieces of historical information, rather than philosophical thinking of that age, culled from Upinder Singh’s A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India and Surendranath Dasgupta’s A History of Indian Philosophy (Vol 1). Chapter fifteen on Ayurveda also carries a similar demerit, as mentioned earlier.

Though these books are part of the reading list given there are no specific references to the points he has made. Citing the source for that specific information would have enabled the reader to get into greater detail on a particular topic.

This also makes the book feel sketchy at quite a few places. The nonspecialist reader may find a slight lack of continuity and coherence in the presentation of the subject matter.

When writing a book on Indian philosophy one has to refer to many Sanskrit terms. It would have been better if the author had adopted some standard of transliterating scheme (IAST) for spelling Sanskrit words with a pronunciation guide. This would have been useful for the readers.

S.K. Arun Murthi has taught philosophy in the Humanities and the Social Sciences department, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab.

Distribute Copies of the Vedas to All MPs, Rajya Sabha Chair Tells Education Minister

Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that Vedas are the original pool of knowledge in the Indian education system.

New Delhi: Responding to a suggestion by Rajya Sabha chairman Jagdeep Dhankar, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan said that he will give copies of the Vedas to all his Rajya Sabha colleagues, the Deccan Herald reported.

Pradhan was answering a question about Vedic schools during the Question Hour when Dhankar said “…it will be greatly appreciated if you make available to members of Parliament a set of the Vedas,” and asked each member to further distribute a 100 copies to others, the Times of India reported.

Pradhan, who accepted the suggestion, said that Vedas are the original pool of knowledge in the Indian education system, and it was the Modi government that formalised the learning of Vedas by setting up the Vedic Board, the Deccan Herald report said.

“The Maharshi Sandipani Rashtriya Veda Sanskrit Shiksha Board was established by our government last year to promote the formal system of Vedic education,” Pradhan said. The Board was established on August 8, 2022, the report said.

There are currently 123 paathshalas under the Board with nearly 4600 students and 632 teachers across the country, Pradhan said. In addition to that, there are 258 Guru Shishya Parampara Units which have 2,240 students and 430 teachers, the report said.

The minister also said that five regional centres of the Vedic Board will be established in Sringeri, Badrinath, Dwarka, Rameshwaram and Guwahati.

The government has also established model Vedic schools called Rashtriya Adarsh Veda Vidyalaya in six states, including Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Gujarat, Assam, Karnataka and Uttarakhand, the report said. These schools admit students on the merit of their proficiency in the Veda Bhusan and Veda Vibhushan in various grades.

Apart from the four Vedas – Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda, and Atharva — students can opt for science, english, mathematics, social science, computer science, and agriculture.

According to a 2022 decision by the Association of Indian Universities, students who clear Class X (Veda Bhushan) and Class XII (Veda Vibhushan) offered by Vedic boards are eligible to join any college for higher education, including medicine and engineering, on par with students from other boards across the country.

How Varna and Jati Were Consolidated by Two Distinct Processes

Jati only became the main principle for social segregation in India after the eighth century AD, but varna has more ancient roots.

The why, the wherefore, and the how of varna and jati in Indian civilisation need to be discussed, since they are like festering wounds for Indian society. Scholarship on these social phenomena has not yet resolved the emergence and spread of varna and jati as a social arrangement in ancient India and its continuation through ages.

While explaining the source, it is customary to point one’s fingers at the Manusmriti or Manu Samhita. When one peruses the 2,685 verses of the Manu Code, the single comprehensive statement of the statutes for social regulation in ancient India, one likes to think of the smriti as the fountainhead of varna/jati ideas in India. They also read as a definitive statement of gender segregation.

However, it is far from clear whether the Samhita is a single text composed either by a group of moral legislators – believed to be a tribe called the Manava in the northeastern part of India, or by an author Manu believed to be the ancestral patriarch of the Aryans belonging to a pre-Vedic era, or whether the one who falls historically between Vedic times and the age of composition of the statutes known as the Brahmanas.

G.N. Devy, Tony Joseph, Ravi Korisettar (editors) The Indians: Histories of a Civilisation Aleph Book Company (July 2023)

The age of Manu is conceptualised differently, ranging from the most orthodox estimate of 1500 BCE to the most modest date of 200 CE. Normally, the cross-references in other texts following the rise of a given text, or the lack of such references in the texts of any previous eras, should make the precise dating of a text possible.

Similarly, linguistic evidence based on the evolution of meanings and etymological shifts should help one guess, with fair accuracy, the historical period of a text.

This method does not work in the case of the Manusmriti.

For one thing, the variety of Sanskrit in which it has come down to us through centuries is sufficiently close to post-Vedic Sanskrit, that is, the kind of language in which the Mahabharata has come down to us through centuries.

But, without any shade of doubt, the precepts of the Samhita find unmistakable echoes in the main body of the Vedas. Thus, we have the Purusha Sukta in the Tenth Mandala of the Rig Veda.

On the other hand, the ninety-seventh verse of the tenth section of the Manusmriti is found reproduced, with very minor modification, in the third adhyaya of the Bhagavad Gita, verse 35: ‘Shreyan svadharmo vigunah paradharmat svanishtuthat; svadharme nidhanam shreyam paradharmo bhayavaha.’

The meaning is: ‘One’s own duty, even when less attractive, is better than another’s, even if it is more attractive. Death in one’s own duty is preferable over finding sustenance in another’s duty, for the latter is horrible’ (my translation).

Therefore, it is quite difficult to settle the precise period for the emergence of the Manu Samhita.

While a mythological Manu is believed to have preceded the Vedic Aryans, and numerous Manus preceded him from the beginning of human time, the version of genesis which the Manu Samhita presents, and on the basis of which it builds its entire social cartography, is several times contradicted by the literature of later Vedic times.

The Upanishads, particularly the Taittiriya drawn from the Yajur Veda, contain several versions of the genesis describing the process of evolutionary creation – a radical variation on the divinely granted creation – and several aspects of the creation dealing with the spirit, the mind, the consciousness, life and the human body.

This Upanishad proceeds in its delineation of the process of creation without any trace of influence of the Manu Samhita version of the origin of life and society.

The difficulties in deciding the precise period of the Manusmriti need not be taken as a plea for not holding it responsible for what it says. Yet, the uncertainty in dating it raises the important question as to whether the Manusmriti merely precipitated what existed as a social and legal practice before it and in its own time, or whether it originally proposed and propagated these practices.

The oldest Upanishads are between 2,000 and 3,000 years old. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Ms Sarah Welch. CC BY-SA 4.0.

As a text with a relatively more certain historical description and containing a clear statement of the basis on which ancient Indian social cartography was attempted, the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda is the most outstanding. It describes the Purusha, the universe (of whom are born the rig and the saman – the Vedas) and later the horses, and other animals like goats and sheep.

Then, the gods divided Purusha. From the mouth of the divided Purusha came the Brahmin; from the arms came the Rajanya; from the thighs came the Vaishya; and from the feet came the Shudra.

Such genesis myths mark early literature, particularly the literature that comes to be seen as scriptural, in every civilisation. In the oral literature of tribal communities in India, we come across a variety of such creation myths and stories of the rise of the human species, with a certain moral responsibility to keep the universe going.

Every religion is based on its unique genesis story, and every culture or nation finds it nourishing to have its own version of how or where it began in some mythical time. Some claim to have emerged from the Sun; others claim their origin in the Moon; yet others in some distant ocean, or a mythical mountain or forest.

What is astounding is that, in ancient India, the story of genesis was used as a basis for law governing inter-community relations. The hierarchy of the vocationally high and the low implied in the Purusha Sukta of the Rig Veda was taken to mean a prescription with legal sanction. Thus, any attempt in thought, move or gesture to change the hierarchy came to be seen as a sin against Purusha.

Later, at whatever date the Manusmriti came into circulation, Purusha of the Rig Veda was replaced by Brahma, a deity with whom Vedic lore would not have felt at ease.

The most critical account of the process through which the formulation articulated in the Purusha Sukta came to acquire an irreversible legal sanction is to be found in Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s scholarly enquiry Who Were the Shudras?

Also Read: What Dr Ambedkar’s ‘Who Were the Shudras?’ Tells Us About the Sacred Books of Hinduism

His thesis is that, initially, ancient India had only three varnas: Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya. The Shudras were not a varna but a community of the solar race. There was a continuous feud between the Shudra kings and the Brahmins. As a result of the enmity, the Brahmins refused to perform the upanayana ceremony for the Shudras. Due to the denial of the upanayana, the Shudras, who were equal to Kshatriyas, became socially degraded (Ambedkar 1970: 242).

This long historical process resulted in the creation of the Shudras as a varna. Ambedkar’s book is devoted to establishing the veracity of this historical process. In his view, upanayana was made a privileged entitlement of the first three varnas, and denied to the fourth one. The concept of upanayana rests on the idea of the possibility of a second birth, though a metaphoric one.

In the initial form of the upanayana, the ritual did not involve the wearing of a yajnopavita, or the sacred thread, around one’s chest. This practice crept in later times when post-Vedic society started reading the metaphoric as being literal. Upanayana was, in its initial days, a symbolic birth, that is, the second birth of a person to the life of both the mind and the body. It was, in its original form, a rite of initiation.

Such rites exist in various civilisations in a variety of forms. The Brahminic denial of ordaining a young person with the yajnopavatia or the denial to perform the ritual of upanayana came to mean that the possibility of a second birth was foreclosed in the case of the Shudras.

An upanayana ceremony. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/vinodbahal. CC BY-2.0.

One of the abiding concerns of the Manu Samhita was how to avoid getting into impious deeds by following the do’s and dont’s in relation to the inter-varna relations. All these prescriptions were heavily biased in favour of those who could perform the upanayana ritual, and against those who could not, and starkly severe to those who were denied the possibility of upanayana altogether.

If the Shudras were denied the entitlement to the upanayana ritual, by a slight extension of the same logic, it meant that they were denied the entitlement to all other rituals. They were, thus, ritually exiled.

If they had been denied the entitlement to rituals because they were supposed to have committed some ‘lowly acts’ in a previous life, then by a more aggressive extension of that logic, they were also destined to engage in all manner of ‘impure’ work in their present life – work such as scavenging, cleaning, skinning, tanning, etc.

Since warped logic denied the possibility of their rebirth, they came to be despised as being less than human and at par with other animals. Therefore, they could be treated as such, without any fear of the perpetrators gaining any spiritual demerits. Given that this kind of metaphysics got translated into social and legal practices, there was no possibility of creating a humane society. The argument for this was closed in India forever.

Also Read: The Laws of Manu and What They Would Mean for Citizens of the Hindu Rashtra

As the higher varnas found the given social arrangement to their advantage, they kept resisting every reformist movement.

After the eighth century, India witnessed the rise of many sects. The early sects arose round the figures of Shiva and Shakti. They originated in the southern regions first. By the eleventh century, the rise of sects had become a widespread phenomenon in the subcontinent. By the end of the fifteenth century, many founders of such sects had already been accepted in public memory as divine figures.

Since the idea of the avatar came to occupy centre stage in the dynamics of sect emergence, Krishna and Rama – the two heroes of the two pan-Indian epics – became the cult figures for many of the sects.

This entire movement highlighted the possibility of ‘release’ for any individual, born high or low, negating the logic on which the varna system was based. The eighth to the eighteenth century is the period when jati became the main principle for social segregation in India.

The jatis had no clear metaphysical basis. They were more an expression of difference in terms of language, region, occupation, cultivation practices, food habits and skills. But these differences, once accepted, lead to a particular jati formation, with its identity being invariably expressed in terms of the specific practice of worship.

If the metaphysics based on the story of genesis was the basis for varna consolidation, the perception of ‘difference’ leading to a metaphysical view was at the heart of the jati-formation process. In one, metaphysics was the cause; in the other, it was the consequence, expressive of the desire of the non-Brahminical classes to be counted at par.

It is not surprising that when the colonial Europeans arrived in India, they found the social segmentation utterly confusing. During the seventeenth century, the Portuguese in India followed the practice of describing every community as a ‘tribe’. This term became somewhat less favoured when the British, French and Portuguese started noticing the sharp distinctions between the dominating communities and the dominated communities in India.

Also Read: Caste Wasn’t a British Construct – and Anyone Who Studies History Should Know That

It was at this time that they began using the term ‘caste’ for the higher classes. The difficulty of the Europeans continued throughout their colonial rule in India, for while they could more easily understand the linguistic, racial and organised theological distribution of Indian society and the economic segregation of the different classes, the vast diversity of jatis, informal and non-institutional, eluded their anthropological grasp.

They could not fathom how jati consolidation works; how within the overall framework of varnas, the jatis place themselves in a defined social hierarchy; how endogamy and exogamy work in these jatis; and what makes a perfectly normal looking human act appear criminal in the eyes of another given community. Besides, colonial scholars had no means of grasping the structural principles of sects which permitted multiple belief affiliations.

British colonial officers, well-meaning or otherwise, made repeated attempts at understanding the social and linguistic cartography of India. Most of these attempts were initiated in order to meet the demands of consolidating the government’s authority, though that was not invariably the case. However, the inadequate understanding of the dialectic between religion and sect, varna and jati, and language and script often resulted in these attempts deepening the differences.

Excerpted with permission from Aleph Book Company from Chapter 20: Varna and Jati by G.N. Devy in The Indians: Histories of a Civilisation edited by G.N. Devy, Tony Joseph and Ravi Korisettar.

ISRO and the Myth of Civilisational Greatness

The ISRO chairman was following the trend of the times when he asserted that several scientific concepts originated in the Vedas and were later celebrated as discoveries of “Western civilisation”. But the notion of “civilisational greatness” is irrational.

The media reports reveal that S. Somanathan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) while addressing the students of Maharshi Panini Sanskrit and Vedic University at their convocation said that the concepts like algebra, square roots, concepts of time, architecture, the structure of the universe, metallurgy and also aviation originated in the Vedas, which later came to be celebrated as the discoveries of Western civilisations.

According to the reports, the ISRO chairman also said that the rules of Sanskrit grammar and structure, an ancient Indian cultural product, are suitable to be used for developing languages for computers and artificial intelligence (AI), possibly basing his argument on the statements made in a 1985 paper written by Rick Higgs, a researcher who was attached to NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California. But despite the initial ambitious claims made in that paper, no one has made any progress in devising computer codes written in Sanskrit. If Sanskrit is an ideal language candidate for software, why wouldn’t there be software based on it by now? Why wouldn’t the ISRO itself take the initiative for such a potentially noble endeavour? The story of how two software engineers in Poland developed Polish speech synthesizers sometime back in 2000 for the purpose of communicating with virtual assistants for a commercial company could be treated as a harbinger of such technologies of the future.

The intention of this article is not to dwell on the usability of Sanskrit as an AI language, but to highlight the irrationality of the notion of “civilisational greatness” that is alluded to in the statements made by the ISRO chairman.

The ISRO chairman, of course, is following the trend of the times. In recent years, we have been seeing this tendency among the new elites in the power echelons of the country to be xenophobic at the slightest provocation. Such pronouncements imply that our ancient counterparts, more specifically the Vedic Aryans, for some fortuitous genetic reasons or by the virtue of covenant with God, developed a special faculty for science, the arts and literature (for unknown reasons the ingenuity of the pre-Vedic people of the Indus Valley in town planning, water management and in introducing weighing systems are never considered in these discussions on India’s past greatness). The Vedic people thus endowed with special intuitive powers, prepared the earliest Indian religious scriptures, including the Vedas that have been propagated orally, since the 2nd millennium BCE, facilitated by elaborate mnemonic techniques.

For many, Vedas became a source for all facts that modern science now stands to represent, including technological marvels like airplanes, television, satellites, surgery and robotics. While speaking at the 105th edition of the Indian Science Congress held at Manipur University in 2018, the then Union minister for science, for instance, asserted that the cosmologist Stephen Hawking had said that an ancient Hindu text might have had a theory superior to the idea of mass-energy equivalence as expounded by Albert Einstein in the theory of special relativity. Hawking had never said such a thing. I like to imagine that the minister must have made the statement with all good intentions. It can be argued that it is one way of promoting scientific temper in the country: that modern Indians are descendants of a great intellectual culture that promoted critical inquiry and developed many ideas, many of which are now simply being rediscovered by modern science. That we must reclaim this lost world’s scientific spirit. The ISRO chairman also must have similar noble sentiments while making statements echoing the Indian civilisational superiority.

But the bigger question is whether such claims, and half-truths, can actually help or if they are counterproductive. Rather than encourage a science culture that is fundamentally rooted in raising questions, looking for a continuity between ancient and modern science will only strengthen the cause of orthodoxy in India. Further, it encourages an uncritical acceptance of ancient scriptures and traditions, both of which could allow an unhindered path to pseudoscience. Science is about challenging. To understand the implications of uncritical acceptance of any given truth, one only needs to go back to the Charvaka (Lokayata) epistemology, a part of ancient Hindu philosophy which states that whenever one infers a truth from a set of observations or truths, one must acknowledge doubt; and that the inferred knowledge is conditional. A part of the Hindu tradition, the Lokayata also implies that any inquiry can’t begin with the conviction that we have always known everything and that whatever we knew was all defined in our scriptures. The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman elaborates this concept in his book, The Meaning of It All: The Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist. He states:

“It is in the admission of ignorance and the admission of uncertainty that there is a hope for the continuous motion of human beings in some direction that doesn’t get confined, permanently blocked, as it has so many times before in various periods in the history of man.”

The Persian scholar Al-Biruni, who had come to India in the 10th century to study Indic science, had been among the first ones to comment on a growing insularity and an unrealistic sense of superiority as the reasons for the decline of science in India. This is where medieval Europe scored over other inward-looking ancient societies. The ancient intellectual history of India shows that its dominant philosophy, as it evolved, essentially negated the objective world and emphasised the relation of self with an unknowable and unmeasurable cosmic “Brahman”. The ancient Greeks, however, had realised that there was an objective world governed by natural laws outside of human consciousness and that it was amenable to testing and observation. The Europe of the 5th to 15th centuries absorbed this Greek tradition, and in turn, led to a true scientific revolution whose features were radically different from those of the ancient sciences.

In fact, Mesopotamian science (8000-2000 BCE) had a much earlier start and must have influenced both Chinese and Indic sciences in the areas of astronomy and mathematics. Euclid had already written his Elements almost 800 years before the Āryabhatīya (476-550 CE) with rigorous proofs that became the foundation of mathematics 23 centuries later. The Śhulbasūtra and the Āryabhatīya are indebted to contributions from Babylonia, Egypt, China and Greece. It was the Greek astronomer and mathematician Aristarchus (220-143 BCE) who developed the heliocentric model for the first time, and was also able to calculate the distance between the Sun, Earth and the Moon based on elementary geometry. In all these pioneering efforts, interactions between various learning centres located in various parts of Eurasia must have played a major role in the cross-fertilisation of ideas.

Whether it is of Indic or Greek origin, science can’t develop in isolation, in the present or in the past. Like the world of today, the ‘old’ world was also interconnected, and our civilisation exchanged goods, peoples and ideas with the rest of the world, although in a much slower mode than today. The Vedic, Chinese or Greek had opportunities to meet their counterparts in Persia Alexandria or Baghdad, which are considered to be some of the ancient cultural centres. To this list, one may want to add the Buddhist monastic universities of Nalanda and Takshashila. Frits Staal, an eminent Vedic scholar, in his book Discovering the Vedas (2008) discusses these ancient paradoxes very insightfully and comments that ancient science can only be understood if the Eurasian continent is treated as an undivided unit – which in turn implies that “Indic science does not stand alone and cannot be studied by isolating it artificially from the remainder of the Eurasian continent”.

The ruins of the original Nalanda University in Rajgir, Bihar. Source: YouTube

Minabere Ibelema, who wrote a recent book on the topic of cultural chauvinism says, it “is the tendency of peoples of the world to think of themselves as superior to others and therefore more valuable”. But this tendency is not unique to India, you will find modern examples of cultural chauvinism elsewhere including the western countries. The notion of “Western values” is the most consequential expression of cultural chauvinism – emanating from an assumption that the modern West is the custodian of a privileged inheritance, passed down through a kind of cultural genealogy that we usually refer to as “Western Civilisation.” This version of history is wrong. There is no scientific basis for racial superiority or for a master race – the concepts that prepared the launching pads for deadly ideologies like Fascism and Nazism. Once we recognise the fact that India or the geographic space it occupied in those days was one among this globalised network of civilisations – a tapestry woven together with strands of diverse peoples, cultures and ideas – a newer, saner, and less chauvinistic appreciation of our ancient knowledge with all its limitation will begin to take shape.

What seems to be missing in these deliberations on ‘science nationalism’ these days in India are the thoughts on the actual function of science. Aside from treating it as an agency that could accelerate the productive capabilities of the country, a point that is overstressed by politicians, science is a transformational tool for evolving a rationally conscious just society. Science is fundamentally about change; questioning accepted facts thus yielding new answers and new questions – a never-ending process. In our enthusiasm to please a particular audience, we, as scientists, forget our responsibility and keep repeating the old shibboleths that come rolling off the lips of political masters.

C.P. Rajendran is an adjunct professor at the National Institute for Advanced Studies, Bengaluru.

UGC Wants Universities to Hold Lectures on Theme That India is ‘Mother of Democracy’

Among the topics that the commission suggested are lectures on khap panchayats and their ‘democratic traditions’ and Harappans as the pioneering architect of the democratic system in the world.

New Delhi: The University Grants Commission (UGC) wants universities and colleges across the country to conduct lecturers on ‘India: The Mother of Democracy’ on Constitution Day, November 26 to push the idea that democracy was prevalent in the region since the time of the Vedas.

According to The Hindu, the UGC has provided 15 themes on which universities can hold lectures, among which are the “concept of the ‘ideal king (rajarsi or seer king or philosopher king)’ according to Kautilya as well as Bhagavad Gita, India’s ‘loktantra’ (self-governance), Harappans as the pioneering architect of the democratic system in the world, as well as khap panchayats and their ‘democratic traditions'”.

According to Deccan Herald, the other topics include “Existence of Ganarajya in Kalinga During Asoka’s Invasion”, “Governing Principles of Democracy in Ancient Sanskrit Scriptures based on Sruti, Smiti Itihasa and Mahakavya Texts”, “Kingly Democracies of Ancient India: Examining Democratic Trends in Sanskrit Literature”, “The Tradition of Local Self-Government In Ancient And Medieval Tamilnadu”, “Democratic Thoughts and Traditions as Reflected in Arthasastra”, and “Janatantra as perceived through the coins of Gana-Janapadas (BCE 400 – 300 ACE)”.

The UGC and ICHR’s push comes after Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his Independence Day address this year called India “the mother of democracy.”

UGC chairperson M. Jagadesh Kumar wrote to over 45 central universities and 45 deemed-to-be universities, asking them to organise special lectures from November 15 to 30, apart from November 26. He has also written to all governors – who are chancellors of state universities – to “encourage” such lectures.

“Democratic systems in Bharat have evolved over the ages since Vedic times; recent archaeological excavation at Rakhigarhi and Sanauli reveal that the roots of people’s self-governance date back to at least 5000 BCE. Whether the existence of two kinds of states – Janapada and Rajya or the two assemblies called Sabha and Samiti forming essential features of the government – all indicate that the ancient form of governance in India was democratic, contrary to the general belief that it was monarchical,” Kumar’s letter says, according to Deccan Herald.

The ICHR is will release a book on “Bharat: Loktantra Ki Janani”, which will be a compilation of 30 chapters by 30 authors. In a concept note, ICHR claims that “from the Vedic times itself, two kinds of states, janapada and rajya have been in existence” in India. Some aspects mentioned in Kumar’s letter are built on the note.

It adds that the “Indian experience” evolved its own form of governance at the levels of the village and the central polity. This, according to ICHR, led to the development of “self-governing institutions” like panchayat and khaps, that enabled them to “remain unaffected by and large by the changing kingdoms/ empires particularly those of the invaders hostile to Hindu culture”.

The concept note claims that from “ancient times”, a “geo-cultural definition” has been given to the Indian region or Bharata, which is the “country which lies to the south of the Himalayas and the north of the oceans is called Bharata and the Bharatiyas are the people of this country”.

Despite the existence of the caste system and subsequent social hierarchy – which Dr B.R. Ambedkar described as “division of labourers” – the concept note claims that the “key difference” that separates “Bharat from other ancient civilisations is — there was no concentration of the prestige of birth, influence of wealth and political office which made social organisations autocratic and aristocratic”.

J&K Government Official Suspended for Saying Rig Veda Permits Meat Eating

A BJP leader has also sought action against assistant commissioner (panchayat) Abdul Rashid Kohli for making the comments.

New Delhi: A senior government official was suspended for saying that the Rig Veda allows the eating of meat, which according to the Jammu and Kashmir administration had the potential to create law and order problems.

According to The Telegraph, Abdul Rashid Kohli, the assistant commissioner (panchayat), was suspended by the Rajouri district magistrate Vikas Kundal on Tuesday night for allegedly making “objectionable remarks about a particular religion”. A probe was also instituted, the newspaper said.

A BJP leader has also sought action against Kohli for making the comments.

“This office has received a complaint that AC Panchayat has made some objectionable remarks about a particular religion,” the suspension order issued by Kundal said, according to The Telegraph. The order claimed that Kohli’s comments had the potential to create law-and-order problems and that the official had violated service conduct rules.

Decolonisation or Brahminisation: What’s the Thrust Behind Karnataka’s NEP Position Papers?

This position paper on ‘Knowledge of India’ aggressively canvasses the agenda to re-assert Brahmanical ethos, intellectual currents and social order as the only “authentic” Indian knowledge system.

The 26 position papers prepared by the committee constituted by the Karnataka government to guide the path of the implementation of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 are out. The last to be published in the series was the paper on “Knowledge of India”, which is the key to understanding the thrust of the other papers also.

This position paper aggressively canvasses the agenda to re-assert Brahmanical ethos, intellectual currents and social order as the only “authentic” Indian knowledge system. And this campaign is portrayed as the civilisational project of de-colonising the Indian mind. Even though NEP-2020, which had 19 paragraphs on promoting Indian knowledge systems, had hinted that this ‘Indianisation’ will be sourced mostly from Vedic and Brahminical literature, it also mentioned the Buddha and Mahavira in passing. But the position paper does not even make such a pretence.

This re-Brahminisation is packaged as “Bhartiyata, Bharatiya Dharma Parampara” against the systems introduced by “invaders and colonisers”. This is achieved by promoting Brahminical literature, tradition, personalities, authors, and history as “Indian” and equating Sanskrit with “Bharatiya sanskriti” (Indian Culture).

Thus it is declared that Sanskrit or Saṁskṛta is the “language in which the overwhelming majority of Indian knowledge is available” and the paper recommends that Sanskrit is taught from the early childhood because it will help students in understanding of the concepts of ‘Knowledge of India’. It is also suggested that Sanskrit should be made the compulsory third language.

No deep scholarship is need to trace the inspiration for this in the doctrines of the Hindutva. In Essentials of Hindutva, V.D. Savarkar says:

“Hindus are bound together not only by the tie of the love we bear to a common fatherland and by the common blood that courses through our veins and keeps our hearts throbbing and our affections warm, but also by the tie of the common homage we pay to our great civilization—our Hindu culture, which could not be better rendered than by the word Sanskriti suggestive as it is of that language, Sanskrit, which has been the chosen means of expression and preservation of that culture, of all that was best and worth-preserving in the history of our race. We are one because we are a nation a race and own a common Sanskriti.”

The position paper privileges Sanskrit . Photo: Harish Sharma/Pixabay

No monopoly on knowledge

No one can deny that the ancient Indian civilisation produced great and indigenous knowledge systems in many fields. Students should be aware of them. But the production of knowledge is a historical and collective enterprise where the confluence of different knowledge systems leads to new or improvised knowledge. This process is not unidirectional or bereft of conflicts of vested interests.

The primary beneficiary of this human labour is the social elites. This is evident in the histories of all countries, including India. The history of democracy also shows the resistance of social elites against the democratisation of knowledge. In India – before and after, Brahminical elites were the source of such controls. While Indians should be proud of the achivements of their ancestros – in spite of these hurdles – these position papers want the students to appreciate the hurdles as benefactors.

Knowledge is also a reflection of the synthesis of different cultures and no single culture can claim a monopoly. But these position papers privilege the Brahminical wisdom as innate and inert and negate the contribution of other streams in the “Indian”. Thus the position papers not only blatantly erase Islamic influences on many disciplines but also systematically undermine non-Brahmin knowledge sources like the Buddhist, Jain and many other Shramanic knowledge systems.

The position paper derives the meaning of Indian not from the India described in the constitution but by the Vishnu purana, by Sri Ramachandra and Bankim Chandra. The “Viṣṇu Purāṇa (2.3.1) defines Bhārata as the land north of the oceans and south of the Himalayas”, it says while the “idea of Bhārata that truly resonates in the hearts of her children is the one uttered by Śrī Rāmachandra as ‘जननी जन्मभहूमश्च स्वरााद् हि र्रीयसी’ [Janani Janmabhumschya Swarad Hi Riasi] and reaffirmed by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee as … the idea of Bhārata-mātā”.

The lack of understanding of India in such cultural idioms is blamed on the decades of education systems that were followed, “which in the garb of secularisation have systematically ushered our impressionable minds into the zone of rootlessness and ignorance of the achievements by their very own ancestors”.

The position paper also parrots the age-old RSS account of Indian history when it declares, “For a nation that has been colonized for nearly a thousand years it is only in the recent past that she is awakening to the concept of decoloniality.”

Thus, with one stroke, it authenticates the Hindutva narrative that Muslim rule is considered colonisation of Hindu India along with the British colonisation. Secondly, by implying that those who arrived in India before those thousand years are the “original inhabitants” of the region, it also tries to erase the debate over the Aryan migration. So decolonising also means de-Islamising – for which the best way is re-Brahminising.

The archaeological site of Harappa, of the Indus Valley civilisation. Photo: Sara jilani/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Thus Indianisation of history right from the early childhood (3-6 years) education is envisaged through Sanskrit, where Sanskrit substitute for words “can be picked up and taught are animals, birds, flowers, professions, verbs, family” so that the students become familiar with the language that carries Indian culture.

Even in other secular fields like economics, geography, botany and administration – where there are many pioneers and contributors from non-Brahmin communities – the suggestion in the position paper is to learn from texts like the Arthaśāstra, Pañca mahābhūta, tridoṣa theory, development, etc. It adds:

“The idea of good governance from Śānti Parva of Mahābhārata, Lessons of corporate governance from Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra, Defense and war, Management concepts from Indian Knowledge, Administration and Social life under Vijayanagara [can be incorporated].”

It also mentions the Gupta empire, in which period the Varnas degenerated into the most oppressive caste system, as instrumental in “shaping the Bhāratīya civilisation (intellectual achievements and social organization; social stability that gave rise to harmony, peace, and prosperity for a period of at least three centuries)” and that it has not been sufficiently highlighted.

While it cites the invasion of Muslim rulers as the cause of the decline of Buddhism and the census introduced by the British as the reason for the proliferation of the caste system, it absolves the Manusmriti of propagating any social stratification based on birth. The social science position paper relies heavily on S.N. Balagangadhara’s writings as source material, which completely rejects the existence of the caste system during the Hindu rule.

Also Read: Battle Over Textbook Revision in Karnataka Has Helped Expose the Ideology of Brahminical-Hindutva

The position paper also claims that the Devalaya-centred school system that prevailed prior to the British did not have any caste- based discrimination and in the future also the Devalaya premises could serve as a “great centre of education for multiple disciplines ranging from art, sculpture, architecture to cultural practices”.

Interestingly, the position paper says the student should develop a critical mind and should encourage “an attitude of questioning and not merely accepting whatever the textbooks say as infallible truth”, it calls Pythagoras theorem, an apple falling on Newton’s as “fake news”.

But the position paper in the same vein demands acceptance of what ever is written in the Smritis, including Manusmriti and Puranas, and calls any critique of the oppressive Brahmanical social order as a “colonial construct”.

In dealing with promoting the “Indian way” of understanding history, the paper calls for intellectual bravery to speak the truth about “events such as the genocide of the Malabar Hindus (referred to as the Moplah riots), the genocide of Maharashtrian Brahmins, the genocide and exodus of Kashmiri Hindus” and they should be taught in mainstream textbooks. While all these three events are important, the Brahminical bias is evident when Dalit massacres by savarna Hindus are not even mentioned.

Additionally, the position paper on health and wellbeing says eggs and meat should not be served to children as they lead to “lifestyle disorders”.

Thus, decolonisation is used as an alibi for the re-Brahminisation of the Indian mind. Any curriculum based on these position papers inculcates hatred towards non-Hindus and promotes internal slavery of non-Brahmin Hindus since all that is Brahminical would be taught as not only great and virtuous but also “authentically” Indian.

The author Bhanwar Megwanshi unveils the new strategy of the RSS in his book I Could Not Be a Hindu: The Story Of a Dalit In RSS. Brahminical supremacy is furthered not by directly denigrating non-Brahmins as inferior but by advocating all that is Brahminical as superior. It is for this reason that Ambedkar declared Brahminism as internal colonialism. There is no decolonisation without de-Brahminisation.

The Age of the Unicorn, Brought to You by IIT Kharagpur

Those seeking ‘evidence’ that the Indo-Aryans were native sons of Bharat Mata, and not immigrants from western Eurasia, just can’t stay away from the unicorn.

Oh, the unicorn! Those seeking “evidence” that the Indo-Aryans were native sons of Bharat Mata, and not immigrants from western Eurasia, just can’t stay away from the unicorn.

First, about two decades ago, they tried to turn an Indus-valley unicorn seal into a horse to claim that the ancient inhabitants of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro were none other than the horse-riding, horse-worshipping composers of the Vedas. Never allowing facts to stand in the way of their fantasies – the fact, for example, that no remains or representations of a horse have been found in the ruins of the Indus valley – they “computer-enhanced” the image of a unicorn on a Harappan seal to make it look like a horse.

Now that this horseplay stands exposed for the hoax that it was, the geniuses at IIT Kharagpur have come up with a new hoax that is breathtaking in its audacity: embrace the unicorn! You can’t fudge the unicorn without being caught, so you might as well claim it for your own glory. Thus, this one-horned creature of fables found all around the world is turned into a “spinal column of light … an inner trunk of Yoga that shoots above the eyebrows.”

The unicorn that appears on numerous Indus valley seals is declared to be a representation of the “sage Risya Sringa” of the Ramayana, thus “proving” that those ancient carvers of the Indus valley seals were one and the same as the Vedic people worshipping their rishis endowed with columns of light. Ergo, the “Aryan invasion” is cancelled.

The IIT Kharagpur calendar

The unicorn as a symbol of a Vedic rishi is among the four “decisive evidences” the sages of IIT Kharagpur have presented in a 2022 calendar, whose theme is “Recovery of the Foundations of Indian Knowledge System” and whose stated purpose is to “reinterpret the Indus valley civilisation” and to rebut the “Aryan invasion myth”. The calendar has been produced under the auspices of the newly inaugurated Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge Systems at IIT Kharagpur, headed by Prof. Joy Sen.

If this inaugural calendar is a foretaste of how future generations of engineers in India will be trained, it is time to be afraid, very afraid, for the direction in which we are headed. It is clear that the most chauvinistic, chest-thumping proponents of “Vedic India” as the cradle of world civilisation are finding a welcome home in premier science and technology institutions. Even though IIT Kharagpur has been in the news because of this calendar, the so-called “Indian Knowledge Systems” (IKS) have already found a home in IIT Gandhinagar, where it has been taught since 2015. IIT Kanpur may be next in line, as it is already hosting a ‘Gita Supersite’.

The All India Council for Technical Education is also planning new credit courses in IKS for other technical and management colleges and universities. Even without the formal tag of ‘IKS’, the history of science, insofar as it is taught at all in science and technology institutions, already has a heavy bias for glorifying the sciences of the ancients.

At a time when studies of ancient DNA are providing the strongest evidence yet for an eastward migration of populations from the central Asian steppes into India, here comes a calendar bearing the authoritative imprint of an IIT. The evocative images of the calendar are meant to remind us to disregard all scientifically attested evidence and believe in the exact opposite: namely, that the Indus Valley civilisation and Vedic civilisation are one and the same; that they go as far back as 7000 BC; and that the “invading Aryans” had nothing to offer as they knew nothing of the “subtleties” of Vedic spirituality and cosmology in the first place. To drive this message home, the calendar offers 16 images in all – 12 for each month and four extra, two with quotations from Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo, and two more to rant about the colonial “suppression, compromises, contractions and distortions”, etc.

Also read: The IIT Kharagpur Calendar Is the Right’s Attempt To Appropriate the Indus Valley Civilisation

The middle four images, sandwiched between Vivekananda and Aurobindo, are supposed to provide “definite” evidence that “bring the Vedic culture and the Indus valley civilisation (7000-1500 BC) under one fold.”

The logic, if it can be called that, of these four pieces of ‘evidence’ can’t be allowed to pass without critical examination. Such “logic” is hardly original to the team of designers and content writers associated with the centre for IKS: any good swayamsevak would recognise it instantly. Precisely because this style of argumentation is so pernicious and so widespread, it must be critically scrutinised every time it raises its head – more so when it bears the imprimatur of an IIT.

In that spirit, let us look at ‘evidence’ that this calendar offers.

The ‘Virgin with the Unicorn’ hoax

Let us start with Hindutva’s unicorn fixation. An illustrated page entitled “Unicorn: The Eka Sringa Rishi” accompanies the month of June (see image below). As mentioned above, the content that accompanies the illustration makes the case that the unicorns etched on Indus-valley seals are actually representations of a “spinal column of light” produced by the yogic sadhana of rishis like Rishya Sringa of the Ramayana, and that it is from India that the symbol of the unicorn spread to the rest of Asia and Europe.

A page from the IIT Kharagpur calendar, corresponding to the month of June. Image: IIT Kharagpur

But wait. If the Harrappan unicorn is a representation of a rishi from the Ramayana who was born with horns (as the legend would have it), why is it accompanied by a reproduction of ‘Virgin with a Unicorn’, a well-known painting by Domenico Zampieri, an Italian baroque artist born in 1581? What is the connection? Just mindless cut-and-paste to add colour and style? Or is it an Indic claim over the Christian use of the unicorn motif?

This very Christian imagery of a virgin with a unicorn – the virgin represents love and innocence that could tame the fierce energy of the unicorn – actually shows the complete fallacy of appropriating the unicorn for our Vedic rishis. No one civilisation can trademark the diverse cultural meanings that this mythic beast carries in different parts of the world. It is true that among the ancient civilisations, the preponderance of unicorn images come from the Indus valley seals, although ancient Mesopotamian and Chinese artworks also depict one-horned creatures with bodies that resemble a bull, a horse, a goat or some unknown four-footed animal.

In the case of the Indus valley seals, no one really knows what animal the unicorn actually represented: a humpless bull in profile, with only one horn showing, a rhinoceros, or some now extinct animal (like the Siberian unicorn)?

It is clear that our Vedic warriors are hungry for ‘evidence’ and therefore anything goes. The calendar-makers are following in the footsteps of their illustrious predecessors, the intrepid Georg Feurestein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley who authored In Search of the Cradle of Civilisation in 1995, where they also interpret the unicorn as eka-shringa, but as a representation of the god Indra, and not of a rishi from the Ramayana!

With an undisciplined mythic imagination, combined with a commitment to making India the “cradle of civilisation,” there is no end to the ‘evidence’ that can be invented. The stories they spin would be funny if they were not so dangerous.

Shiva of the Indus valley

All the rest of the ‘evidence’ goes along the following lines: a feature – let’s call it X – of Indus valley/Vedic civilisation is not found in any ancient Indo-European tradition. So therefore the fact that X exists in India proves that “the invading Aryans, if any, had no idea of these subtle constructs” and therefore could not have contributed to the presence of X in India. Therefore no Indo-European influx of people, languages, ideas and practises into India could have possibly taken place. Whatever overlaps there are between the languages and cultural grammars of India, Iran, central Asia and Europe came out of India, while India had nothing to learn from the barbarians from the West. Case closed, and Bharat Mata ki Jai.

This mode of argument is so ignorant not just of other ancient cultures, but of the history of Hinduism’s own development that one doesn’t know where to begin. Take the pet peeve of Hindutva warriors, duly repeated in the calendar, namely, that the well-known “Pashupati seal” found in Mohenjo-Daro in 1928, which depicts a figure seated in a yoga-like posture, wearing a horned head-gear with animals surrounding him, is no “proto-Shiva” but a full-fledged Vedic-Puranic Shiva who is the “column of cosmic light and aeons of time” (whatever that means).

A page from the IIT Kharagpur calendar, corresponding to the month of July. Image: IIT Kharagpur

According to the write-up that accompanies the image of the aforementioned seal for the month of July, it is a colonial conspiracy to “misinterpret Shiva as a Pre-Aryan Dravidian godhead isolated from portions of the Vedas … On the contrary, Shiva is an integral part of the Vedic literature and the Indus valley archaeology, which refutes the very foundation of the Aryan Invasion.”

One assumes that the people behind this calendar will have a similar objection to calling the dome-shaped erect structures found in Mohenjo-Daro ‘linga’, or phallus, rather than a “column of cosmic light”. The point the calendar is making is that the Shiva of the Vedas and Puranas was always there, at least as far back as 7,000 years before the common era in the Indus valley itself. The possibility that the Vedic Hinduism may have incorporated this Indus valley motif into its own religious vision is ruled out.

But our calendar-makers are comparing apples and oranges. The deity Shiva as the ‘Lord of Yoga’, meditating on the Kailash parvat – and therefore a “column of light” “aeons” – is nowhere to be found in the early Vedic corpus that would be closer to the Indus valley dates. The Shiva-as-yogi, with all the attributes associated with him – the trident, the wife Parvati and the son Ganesha, the dance, the linga, etc. – makes an appearance only at the tail end of the Vedic era, around the fifth to fourth centuries before the common era, around the time of the Mahabharata.

This is the period when the Svetasvatara Upanishad first elevated the Vedic god Rudra to a more prominent position as a supreme being who created the cosmos and yet transcends it. The Rg Veda only knows Rudra as a peripheral god who is the opposite of a pashupati-kind of god, which the seal in question is supposed to represent. Rather than a protector of cattle, horses and other animals, Rudra injures them. Prayers to Rudra were meant to appease him so that he would not attack the animals. It is hard to imagine that the “pashupati seal” could be a representation of Rudra, who is the Vedic proto-Shiva. Our intrepid calendar-makers are projecting a later Shiva into early Indus-valley artefacts and claiming the latter for the glory of the former.

But if we were to compare apples with apples and not with oranges, the Indus valley artefacts have to be compared with those from other Indus and pre-Indus locations, with contemporaneous civilisations that the Indus Valley people were in contact with, and with the early Vedas. Such comparative pre-history shows striking resemblances between the pashupati seal and fertility gods represented on Mesopotamian cylinder seals dating to the Akkadian period (2330-2180 BC). Far from Shiva, the Lord of Yoga, being coterminous with the Indus valley, the famous pashupati seal does not even represent a “proto-Shiva” but rather a ‘Lord of the Animals’ motif that was very widespread among ancient Eurasian societies.

Deciphering the meaning of long-lost civilisations is not an easy task, especially in the case of the Indus valley, where the inscriptions are not intelligible. Such an enterprise requires careful analysis of the iconography and textual materials. Simply rushing in with preconceived agendas and inventing evidence to confirm these agendas, as this calendar does, simply muddies the waters.

Swastika and the rewriting of history

Considering Prof. Joy Sen’s earlier discovery that the swastika existed in India 11,000 years ago, it was only to be expected that it would show up in the calendar as evidence for the unbroken continuity of Indian history.

Prof. Sen’s earlier work was published in 2016 as a monograph, entitled ‘Swastika is Pre-Aryan Invasion, if any; Dates Back 11,000 Years in Vedic India: Evidences and Exploration’ by SANDHI at IIT Kharagpur, a forerunner to the newly minted Centre of Excellence for Indian Knowledge Systems. In this monograph, the investigators, led by Prof. Sen, claim to find an ancient cosmological map that contains geometrical designs resembling swastikas in a rock painting from a rock shelter at Jaora, on the Malwa Plateau in Madhya Pradesh. This, they claim, is the oldest swastika, older than that found in Mezine, Ukraine, which is supposed to be 10,000 years old.

So far, so good: we found ancient art work in a cave in Madhya Pradesh that contains the earliest recorded swastika sign. What is startling is how Prof. Sen rides on the back of this finding to rewrite the history of Vedic India. This is what he told the Times of India (emphasis added):

“We have found the most mature and geometrically ordered Swastika in the form of seals in pre-Harappan time. We have also been able to trace the mention of the Swastika in the Vedas around the same time. These are scintillating findings that will help us announce that the Indian civilisation is far more ancient than what is written in accepted history books, mostly by Europeans.”

So the Vedas existed 11,000 years ago? Well, aren’t the Vedas eternal and eternally true, without a beginning, without an author and therefore without any scope of falsifiability? Isn’t this the orthdox Mimamsa view of the Vedas? What is 11,000 years here or there when you are talking in terms of eternity? In this revisionist history-writing, not just the Arayan “invasion” but history itself gets deleted.

The swastika shows up in the calendar for the month of February, but this time as the bearer of gnostic knowledge of karma and rebirth supposedly unique to Indian spirituality. The images of swastikas, interspersed with some random unicorn-like creatures, is captioned “Cyclic Time and Reincarnation” and uses rebirth, apparently known only to the Hindus, to once again challenge the “Aryan invasion, if any”. The accompanying text reads (emphasis added):

“The gnostic foundations of Indian spirituality is an alien or unknown element to civilisations in Europe, whether from the Caucasus Eurasia or from the Steppes. It is also missing in the Semitic foundations of religions practised in the West and in the Middle East. Therefore, the invading Aryans, if any, had nothing to offer to the development of Indian cosmology.”

The claim is that “the cyclic or non-linear patterns of swastika and arrow of time” represent cyclic time and rebirth, ideas unique to Indian spirituality and unknown to the rest of the world.

A page from the IIT Kharagpur calendar, corresponding to the month of February. Image: IIT Kharagpur

Swastikas in India, as far as one can tell from contemporary use, are symbols of auspiciousness. I have yet to meet anyone who thinks ‘punarjanam’ while drawing a swastika on the door of their house on Diwali, or on an invitation card for a wedding.

But be that as it may, the notion that rebirth is unique to “Indian spirituality” is factually wrong. Ideas of rebirth were as widespread around the world in antiquity as was the use of swastika. It is well-known that the ancient Greeks, from Pythagoras to Plato, held beliefs about reincarnation conditioned by moral actions, the knowledge of which they credited to the Egyptians and the Chaldeans. But whether the Greeks or other ancient societies knew of rebirth has no bearing on “Aryan invasion, if any”. It is nobody’s claim that the idea of samsara and rebirth came to India from outside. That there was an influx of Indo-European people into South Asia does not mean that everything that developed afterwards was Indo-European.

What is most troubling is the ignorance our calendar-makers display towards the historical evolution of “Indian spirituality” itself. As Johannes Brokhorst convincingly showed in his 2013 book, Greater Magadha, the idea of rebirth guided by karmic retribution was originally a Buddhist and Jain idea that was only later absorbed in the Vedic tradition, in the later Upanishadic phase. The Rg Vedic idea of death and rebirth is devoid of any karmic burden carried over from this or previous lives. By making such “gnostic knowledge” foundational to “Indian spirituality” supposedly present in the Vedas “11,000 years ago”, they are eternalising the Vedas, removing them from historical change and development.

Dark Age of the Unicorn

This calendar is supposed to showcase and celebrate what Indian Knowledge Systems have to contribute to “a holistic framework of education based on integration of the Indian value systems and deep ecosystem approach, and the modern sciences.”

To that end, it promises to offer courses in everything from ‘jyotish’, ‘Vastu’, ‘Rasayana’ and Ayurveda along with the classic schools of philosophy of ‘Samkhya’ and ‘Nyaya’. So apparently now engineers-in-training will be taught astronomy that is geocentric, biology that admits only five bhutas and three gunas, and a metaphysics of purusha and prakriti that goes against everything that we know about the physical world and its evolution. Ideas that should be consigned to museums are now going to be taught in a “Centre of Excellence” in a premier technology institute.

If this calendar is any indication, we are entering a Dark Age of the Unicorn.

Meera Nanda is a historian of science.

The Truth of the Ill-Defined Hindu Rashtra, as Narrated by Golwalkar

Golwalkar privileges the Vedic faith, its obscurantist beliefs and practices like varnashrama, as constituting the ancient Hindu Rashtra, but without any textual basis.

In his new book, The Truths and Lies of Nationalism: As Narrated by Charvak, Partha Chatterjee argues convincingly that the idea of nationhood is not applicable to any of the ancient civilizations, however rich they may be, and this applies for India as well. In other words there was nothing like an ancient Indian nation. The same argument can be made against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s idea of a Hindu Rashtra.

It would be interesting, and also appropriate, given the present times where Hindutva defenders so fanatically invoke nationalism, to analyse M.S. Golwalkar’s We or Our Nationhood Defined in the light of Chatterjee’s argument. In this book, Golwalkar, the RSS ideologue and its second chief, attempted to present what M.S. Aney, who wrote the foreword, calls a thesis on the concept of nationhood. Over the years, the book has come under severe criticism for its extremely narrow and sectarian way of conceiving the idea of a Hindu Rashtra in terms of an essentialist understanding of religion and an exclusivist definition of Hinduism that clearly reflects a fascist view. So uch so that in 2002, Atal Bihari Vajpayee distanced himself from the fascist views Golwalkar expressed in this book, saying that these were “his own” views.

Golwalkar’s views on Hindu Rashtra and his narrative were flawed from the start. In the preface to his book, Golwalkar acknowledges that G.D. Savarkar’s Marathi work Rashtra Meemansa was the primary source of inspiration for his book. Meemansa, traditionally, means rules of correct interpretation where the word has to clearly reflect the sense. Rashtra Meemansa, literally, means the correct interpretation of Rashtra, the word.

Has this word Rashtra been correctly interpreted by Golwalkar? This is the important question in the context of his book. In chapter six, he makes a futile attempt to interpret Rashtra. The concept of a nation, he says, was very much part of the Hindu heritage and not something that we have borrowed from the West. The word, he claims, is as old as the Vedas. True, the word did find reference in the Rigveda. But it never meant “a nation” there.

The term as is currently used in Hindi, and other Indian languages, means nation. However, in the Rigveda, it meant the realm, dominion or jurisdiction where the command or order holds. In the Mahabharata it meant an empire or kingdom. Partha Chatterjee takes examples from the history of great empires like the Mauryas, the Guptas, the Delhi Sultanate, Vijayanagara, the Mughals and the Marathas. According to him, they held different parts of the state “by military force and tribute-paying arrangements.” Such tribute paying arrangements can be enforced by a state order or command that can be exercised over a particular realm and that idea of force corresponds with the meaning inherent in the word Rashtra in the Rigveda.

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However, it is a different matter that the word has been appropriated to stand for nation. Having appropriated the word to mean nation, Golwalkar goes on to list what the constituents of the nation are as it stands today.

To him, the idea of a nation is a compound of five “Unities”: 1) Country 2) Race 3) Religion 4) Culture 5) Language. These five “Unities” are what together make a nation. In other words, he gives an essentialist view of nation when he says that these are “the necessary and indispensable ingredients”, all of which have to exist for the nation to exist. Of all these factors, he makes religion central because, according to him, it is religion that shapes the race and culture of people of a geographical territory (the country).

Drawing upon the meaning of the word janapada to emphasise his point, he claims that it prominently encompasses the sense of religion and culture. This sense of religion is revealed, he claims, in expansion of the meaning of the term janapada. The rough translation of the Sanskrit quotation ‘janasya varnashramalakshanam dravyotpatte sthanamiti’ cited is “the place where people follow the caste codes enriches itself.” The three components of religion, culture and language, that Golwalkar so unconvincingly adumbrates as essential constituents of a nation, are not reflected in the meaning of the word janapada.

Golwalkar and his Hindutva proponents also hold the view that the idea of a Hindu Rashtra or a Hindu nation has been in existence from the glorious past. This idea coincides with what Chatterjee characterises as “a conventional idea”. But there is no basis for such an idea even in the Vedas.

Two authoritative works can be referred here. A.A. Macdonell and A.B. Keith have compiled a comprehensive and authoritative two volume work, Vedic Index of Names and Subjects (Vedic Index), giving all the details of the names and terms occurring in the Vedas. Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English dictionary is the other work that also gives the diverse meanings of names and terms tracing their sources.

Golwalkar, and before him V.D. Savarkar, draw upon the word Hindu and connect it to the idea of nationhood. The word Hindu is derived from the word Sapta Sindhu (seven rivers) and references to this word can be found in the Vedas. According to the Vedic Index, however, there is only one reference to Sapta Sindhu as a territory and no mention of nationhood connected to it. Further, Macdonell and Keith go on to mention how other scholars tried to identify what these seven rivers were. The authors favour the view of Zimmer, who does not take this identification seriously, stating that Sapta or seven was a favourite number of the Rigveda and nothing more. Also, this term does not find a place in the Monier-Williams Sanskrit English dictionary.

By proceeding in this fashion Golwalkar privileges the Vedic faith, its obscurantist beliefs and practices like varnashrama, as constituting the ancient Hindu Rashtra, but without any textual basis. This is the ill-defined Hindu Rashtra, or the lie of the ancient Indian nation.

S.K. Arun Murthi taught Philosophy in the Humanities and the Social Sciences department, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research , Mohali, Punjab.

Tracing India’s History Through the Changing Landscape of Languages

An excerpt from ‘Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through its Languages’.

Excerpted from Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through its Languages, released by Penguin Viking in April 2021.

Everywhere we turn for answers about un-Sanskritic features in Indo-Aryan languages we find ourselves back in pre-Vedic India with the languages that were there before Sanskrit and the first Prakrits—old tongues that refused to pack up and go away. We can sense the presence of people who held themselves apart from the world of Sanskrit, and of the Vedic families where the wives and young children spoke a different language from the outlanders who were their menfolk. And so here we are now, with a line of new mixed languages that drew all their vocabulary from the Prakrits, but held on tight to an old mindset that had nothing at all to do with the Sanskrit family. How did these two streams merge to make mixed languages that are so reminiscent of Caribbean creoles?

…What would it take to qualify Hindi or Marathi as creoles? Well, modern Hindi and Marathi don’t really come into the picture as yet. We are going back a long, long time, to the early vernacular languages that were spoken in the days of the oldest Prakrits. We are looking at what very ordinary people all the way across the north of the subcontinent were speaking, as they listened at a distance to the Ārya flitting by in their chariots, getting used to a new normal, realizing that these people were not going to go away. There would have been many, many of these early local dialects, as many as in our hinterland today, where, to quote the old adage, ‘the air and dialect change every kos (every two miles)’.

Peggy Mohan
Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through its Languages
Penguin Viking, 2021

When exactly did little dialects emerge looking like Tiramisu bears, with coffee-coloured paws inspired by old preVedic languages and cream-coloured topcoats of words and word endings totally drawn from Prakrit? In Chapter 2, we found that there were two distinct phases of Vedic settlement in the subcontinent. The first was the initial influx of small groups of Vedic men over a period of generations, or even centuries, tribes that were almost as divided among themselves as they were hostile to the local population. The second phase was hundreds of years later, after the Kuru super-tribe sorted out the squabbling between the Ārya tribes and set up the beginnings of an empire, collecting the Rig Vedic hymns that were dispersed among different Brahmin families and standardizing retroflexion, that Indian ‘tag’ [a new line of consonants in the sound system] that had crept into recitation over the centuries.

The first phase of settlement had, besides Sanskrit, local languages and Prakrits. To recap, Prakrits were languages that were close enough to Sanskrit in their grammars to have been approximations of Sanskrit itself, though spoken with a local accent, maybe even including the colloquial Sanskrit that the Vedic men would have been speaking when they were not composing and reciting Rig Vedic hymns. The second phase, which began with the Kurus, saw the Vedic people spreading over the north of the subcontinent, all the way from the Kabul River to Bengal, and down south into Maharashtra and Andhra. If there was ever a time when a chain of new mixed languages could get started, not just in one tiny area, but across the entire north of the subcontinent and down the west coast, it would have to be during this second phase.

What did these mixed dialects look like? Did they come up suddenly, replacing the earlier languages the little people had been speaking, or did they take time and sink in, new words from Prakrit replacing all the old words and word endings of the earlier languages in a slower accommodation to the new status quo? Had there been the scramble of a pidgin phase, as in the Caribbean, or was the fitting of new words to old grammars more in the nature of a gradual substitution?

…Hindi and Marathi, and all the other Indo-Aryan languages, came up separately, under similar pressures, not as the large regional languages they are today, but as many little dialects all with very local relationships to the Prakrits from which they drew their new vocabulary. For centuries they remained below sea level, keeping their place in an increasingly segregated society, their speakers unable to blend into the elite world of kings and Brahmins, full of Prakrit and Sanskrit, and bound by caste to stay put in small clan groups that suited the little dialects they spoke. Things to do with religion and literature, both Brahminical concerns, called for Sanskrit, which was more memorized and recited than written. That left the work linked to commerce and the law courts to what were evolving from the unwritten dialects of villages into languages of the towns, useful for making stock lists, doing accounts and writing legal notes.

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…Somewhere between the tenth and twelfth centuries, signs of these little languages broke the surface and began to find their way into the written record, which is how we are able to know about them now. In the area around Delhi there was poetry in Braj and Awadhi, and there was soon a new and unnamed variety around Delhi which grew into the language we know today. When you see written languages emerging out of the continuum of tiny dialects, you know that the landscape was changing. Old alignments were crumbling. The time when Sanskrit and literary Prakrits spoke for a far-flung elite, and unwritten dialects were used by people far below, was coming to an end. An unwieldy old order had begun to fragment into smaller, more compact regional entities that sought political autonomy. In this new age, languages that would one day be called Hindi and Marathi began to emerge out of the little dialects around them. (extracted from pages 121-129)

The story we are following in this book is thus the bittersweet story of convergence, of language following as a faithful mirror when the entry of super-groups linked to empire, literacy and the market draw small communities together into a wider and faster flow, full of people who will never meet face to face. Language is not an independent player in this convergence. It makes no sense for us to dream of preserving the little languages without raising questions about the political and economic forces that are connecting us into one mega-community, and asking ourselves whether this system that causes the mass extinction of our languages and our old ways of life is something we even want. Preservation, in any case, is an unfortunate choice of word: you preserve things that are already dead, not things that are going to grow and evolve in new directions without your help. A language that is kept in a box and never used will die for lack of the oxygen it needs: little children who speak it natively, and a community of native speakers who will use it for both the simple and the sophisticated things that they do.

A closer look at the convergence in India shows that besides the earliest migration of Austroasiatic men, about which we know nothing beyond what genetic studies tell us, there were only two migrations whose linguistic impact extended beyond the elite to affect the rest of the population. These were the Vedic people, who brought Sanskrit, and the British, who brought English. The Central Asian settlers were fortunate to happen upon a Hindi that was already more or less in final form by the twelfth century CE, though it was always happy to try on new nouns.

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An even closer look tells us that it was not the initial entry of these people that brought the phase change in Indian society. Both influxes started out modestly, with a trickle of men who settled on the edge of India: the North-west, in the case of the Vedic people, and the port cities of the coast, in the case of the British, who came by sea. But both these sets of languages got a second wind, as it were, when later upheavals created new super-groups who ‘owned’ these languages. The second Sanskrit age was after the Kuru dynasty united the warring Rig Vedic tribes and went on to expand its sway across the north of the subcontinent and down south to Maharashtra and Andhra, ending with the Namboodiri Brahmins who tinted the language of Kerala. And the second English age was after Independence, after the British who had brought English to India were gone.

In their second avatar, Sanskrit and English were only the faces of new dispensations that needed convergence. The spread of Sanskrit and English was just a way of showing at a glance how much territory these new political formations covered. (extracted from pages 273-274)

Peggy Mohan is a linguist and writer who lives in Delhi.