Pride of India

This is a passage taken from the text book prescribed for Class VI in India that is used in the schools in Hyderabad, A.P.

Lesson 6; The early Vedic age

Origin of the Aryans

"Scholars have different views with regard to the original homeland of the Aryans. The most accepted theory is that they came from Central Asia, the region around the Caspian Sea. According to historians, one group broke away from the main stock of Indo-Europeans in Central Asia and moved eastward. They are called Indo-Aryans. The Indo-Aryans first settled in present day Iran and then migrated to India”

Name of the book: "Transitions"; Subject of the book: History & Civics; ICSE class VI (ICSE means "Indian Certificate of Secondary Education)

Authors: Shiladitya Ghosh, Education Consultant; former Vice- Principal, Shri Ram School DLF Phase III, Gurgoan

Consulting Editor: Padma Vaswani, Former Principal Hiranandani Foundation School, Powai, Mumbai, Publisher: Madhubun Educational Books

First published in 2004; Reprint:2012,

Why Indian government and Indian education system still dishes out a theory of non-native Indians invading or migrating to main land Bharat where in there is increasing evidence of that being not right?

This "Aryans" as a separate race was not in public discussion till Europeans invaded India in around 1600 AD. This has become a theory with missionary early Europeans started framing an argument to fir their world view. What imperialist saw was an extremely advanced India (Compared to medieval Europe at that time) with people varying physical features - folks with longer noses and fairer skin in the north to folks with shorter and stubby noses and darker skin in the South. The early European scholars were all missionaries and not anthropologists. These missionaries had a strong belief that the creation happened around 4000 BCE in around the so called Middle Eastern region. They genuinely believed that around 3000 BCE there was a massive flood and Noah had rescued the humanity by picking species for preservation. With this belief they set out to establish the origins of people who look different in India.

They speculated that the descendants of Homs - the cursed son of Noah, who were cursed to look dark and serve Noah's other sons  - migrated to Africa and from their entered South India.

The fair skinned sons of Noah have become scholarly and migrated to north eastern and entered India from North. As it is norm in those days with the British - who excelled in divide and conquer philosophy  - they proposed that the early migration to India happened by Homs descendants from Africa and later 'Aryans' who are advanced culturally - had invaded India into Ganges planes and later to the south.

First they postulated an Invading Aryans and later changed it to Migrating Aryans cohabitating peacefully with Dravidians (Homs descendants).

When Indian scholars who believed in ancientness of Indian origins way past 4000 BC started questioning this, Europeans brought two aspects. One they founded a proto Indo Dravidian language and made Sanskrit as an off shoot of this original language. They also speculated that since there was so much mention of Horses and Horses sacrifice in Indian literatures (Vedas etc) and that Horse is not a native species of India hence the Aryans must have brought the Horse to India from Europe or West Asia.

These early European scholars have completely ignored the existing Indian literature at that time. In our literature there was abundant mentioning of great kingdom of Indra who ruled with Meru as his capital and rules the whole world. The fountain of Vedic life being in between the Sarasawati and Ganges planes extending all the way to South India - Lanka, Indonesia to North Pole, Europe, North Africa, North America and northern part of South America.

Balagangadhar Tilak had written two seminal works in which he traced the Vedic influences as far back as 30000 years prior to last glacial period. He traced the Vedic civilization even in North Pole. Our Puranas trace Vedic civilization even prior to the onset of last glacial period of about 100000 years.

Now here is the question we need to ask. Do we believe in the Aryan Migration theory of European missionaries which is continued to be propagated by certain Indologists or do we allow a modicum of doubt that indeed there was an Advanced civilization existed in the land mass called greater India and extended way back in History. Not with any superiority one way or other but with honesty to know collective human history. After all, the civilization does not have to start with Adam and Eve in some remote corner of present day Middle East or North Africa.

There is much debate all around as to the motive of imperialist Europeans in dishing out this theory and many blame British for decadence of Indian social and scientific ethos. No doubt the present day India as a unit has become quite corrupt. And in the last few hundred years there were many atrocities and various section of people in the name of religion and social status by birth. The descendants of those who are at the receiving end of this discrimination started to believe in invasion and migration of non-natives to impose their superiority.

There is a section of people who are emotionally attached to the greatness of Sanatana Dharma and set to defend dharma and ancientness of Bharateeya culture but are getting branded by secular and western folks as blindly religious and set to impose Hindutva on mother land.

There is another section of intellectuals who grew up with secular bent of mind and want to keep religion out of public policy and they became skeptics. They would question the perceived greatness of India before Islamic and imperial invasions.

There is yet another section such Balagangadhara Tilak, Aurobindo Ghosh, Kota Venkatachalam, Rajiv Malhotra etc. who are trying to bring awareness of Bharat's greatness with fact based arguments.

Skeptics typically mix two issues. One is feeling superior about one's ancestry and another is one's right place in the history of human development.

It is important to know one's history and what we as people inheriting Vedic thought have contributed to the human development.

If history is not important then why read Dalton theory knowing very well that it is no longer applicable but then why not even mention Kanada's Vaiseshika which proposed an atomic model that is more elegant than Dalton's theory?

Why give Pythagoras the name and fame whereas a similar theorem was proposed by  Baudhayana Sutra).

Why not acknowledge the holographic model of existence propounded by Vedanta way back but only extoll the recent scientific rediscovery.

These are all universal principles and do not belong to one section of people. No one has right of usage of these concepts but the original author has right of owning its discovery. Otherwise the copy right laws and patents are useless.

If an imperial force used the perceived superiority of their history to subjugate a nation and make them believe that they are inferior then it is important of that nation to assert the rightful place. I am saying rightful place but not right to everything ever invented.

Skeptics start their arguments with a doubt, whereas folks who are trying to argue with facts start by giving a benefit of doubt.

Samskruta Vaangmayam has four vedas and its various recensions, Brahmanas, Samhitas, Agamas, four upavedas which includes medicine, fine arts, advanced weaponry, economics etc. and six Vedangas like Astronomy, Grammar and language, different mathematical treatises, then itihaasas and Puranas, innumerable prakana grandhas, six darsanas (philosophies) each one in itself very comprehensive.  Our tree of knowledge is enormous. And this tree was in fully grown and blooming state when the rest of western world was at its infancy.

My belief is that a culture and a tradition that has so much body of knowledge had to be advanced just like todays advanced west.

Many of the modern inventions were cited in the works done in Samskrutha Vaangmayam.

We grew up learning that Copernicus was the discoverer of Earth rotating around sun and Galileo and others were credited for planetary motion. But ...

On the heliocentric planetary system look at this verse 2.8.15 from Vishnupuranam which is translated as "There is, in truth, neither rising nor setting for the Sun, for it always there, and these terms of rising and setting merely imply appearance and disappearance"

And this passage from Yajur Aranyakam 1.8.3 "The Sun holds the earth from all sides with his rays"

And from Yajur Veda - Taittriya Samhita 3.4.10.34 - "The Sun holds the earth and the celestial region. The sun is the attracting power"

Or on Earth rotating around Sun and Moon around Earth in this passage of Rik 10.189.1

"The moon, being a satellite of the earth, revolves around its mother planet and follows it in its revolution round the self-luminous father (the sun)"

Or on the Elliptical path planetary motion, in Rik 1.164.2 - "The elliptical path through which all the celestial bodies move, is imperishable and unslackened".

We have known about 5 planets long back and scholars were able to decipher accurate planetary motion of each of the 5 planets. We know that Jupiter is a massive plant as we named it as Guru. We have known about the gravitational pull of a large body and the small body orbiting the large body. Our practice of doing Pradakshina around a deity (Guru - Superior) has come from the same knowledge.

How is that western education system has completely ignored these discoveries made by ancient Indians and taught us as if it was all done by European inventors?

Take the oft quoted Sayana's commentary on Rik 1.164.2 and 1.50.4 that tells the Speed of Light "It is remembered that Sun, the traveler of 2202 yojanas in half a nimisha" which yields it as 185,016  miles/sec as opposed to 186,282 per modern observation."

Yajnavalka talked about 108 times of sun diameter as the distance between Sun and Earth which is very close to modern calculations.

How are these scholars able to estimate these with such accuracy without any of the modern instruments? What was method of inquiry they followed?

We were very advanced in Astronomy. We had time scales that were very tiny fraction of a present day second and we have unique names for large numbers - up to trillion trillions. If a society was using such tiny time scales and large measurements then, in my belief, is an advanced society.

  

Even in Mathematics, the second degree intermediate equations were solved by Bhaskara-I's Bija ganitham around 1000 AD but we learnt them as solved by Euler and La Grange in 1600 AD!

Theory of Permutations were mentioned in Bhaskara II's  Lilavati around 1000 AD and combinations of given things were mentioned by Mahaviracharya in 850 AD and we were told that a western scientist Herigone found them in 1634 AD!

Brahmagupta (628 AD) gave the method of solving the cyclic quadrilaterals which we were taught as done by W Snell's theorem (1619 AD)

Rational Quadrilaterals were solved by Brahmagupta but we learnt them as Euler's discovery in 1750s

Aryabhatta in 499 AD gave the value of Pi as "When 100 plus 4 is multiplied by 8 and added to 62000 it gives an approximate value for the circumference of a circle whose diameter is 20000" which comes to 3.1416 and he said it is just an approximation. Madhava gave rational approximation of Pi as 3.141592965359 as an Infinite series. And in between there were dozen or so definitions of Pi. But we were taught that they were given by John Wallis (1655) and Abraham Sharp (1717 AD)

Recently scholars found most of the infinite series similar to Fourier and Taylor series in Sankhaya philosophy. Vedic scientists mastered encoding and encrypting a verse and error detection mechanism rivaling present day computer algorithms.

These are all great discoveries and inventions made by our ancestors which we were not taught at all in our school curriculum. We have had few paragraphs of Aryabhatta and Bhaskara in history. No western or non-Indian text books even mentions them.

I am not even mentioning the advances made in Physics, Chemistry, Mining, Architecture, medicine and many more.

You see that from Pre Vedic period to up to 1200 AD there were tremendous inventions and discoveries made both in Spiritual, Scientific and Social Sciences. That spans at least 10,000 years. Any human society that had such a long tradition of scientific expertise will have its expertise seep into society at large and the society will be advanced. We can see that with just 100 years of modern Industrial revolution how advanced the western society has become.

We can see that the scientific development in India started dropping very fast after 1200 AD. By 1600 AD it had completely gone starting British occupation of India. And from then on India has become corrupt. Now there are no traces of that greatness and not only that many intellectuals have become skeptics of our ancient advancement. One can see this deterioration coinciding with Islamic invasion and later occupation till 1600 AD where the ruthless rulers with utmost spite for anything Hindu destroyed the complete knowledge base we had. Nalanda University supposed to have 9 million books during that time and an Islamic ruler burnt the whole library. There are so many such documented cases. Similarly imperialist with missionary zeal have decimated a civilization's self-confidence. These are all documented but the history taught to us in schools just glosses over it hiding the details in plain sight. If the Indian government does nothing for reviving our confidence, who will do? Why do we assume we hurt minorities' feelings by stating history as it is and teaching how the invaders dealt with a civilization's knowledge base and treasures? Stating history is not blaming the present Muslims and Christians in the country. What is wrong in telling the Indian Muslims and other minority that they too have common ancestry that is rich in its contributions though they converted from Hindu dharma? How is that we have no problem in reading scientific development of Newton and Einstein and many more stalwarts even though they themselves were openly religious but when it comes to ancient and medieval scientists of Bharat's descent we have a problem in teaching their work. Is it because their name is uniquely Hindu and almost all their work starts with a Santhi mantam that appears to be religious?

Yes one's past does not give any right to one's present. But the history of human development and achievement should be known to all. One can agree that by and large individually an American and an Indian are more or less equal in capabilities. However, as a collective psyche American is more confident of its capabilities than an Indian because of the knowledge an American (or Western) has about the contribution it made towards common human development. That is because Westerner is rooted in the knowledge of its history and that is what taught in schools all over the world. If the world acknowledges contributions made by ancient Indians and give the due recognition and the kids all over the world study the names such as Bhaskara, Madhava, Aryabhatta, Varahamihira, Boudhayana, Apasthamba etc the image of Indian all over the world will be enhanced. When an Indian starts understanding its past contributions and believing in them it gives the nation confidence to become a truly great global inventor and contributor.

Finally, if your starting point is self-doubt, then you will stop at the first available meaning of Vedic word just like Griffin and many other western scholars who produced weird and caricatured translations of scriptures. If your starting point is conviction of our scientific past positive contribution it made, then we will not stop at a ridiculous meaning of a verse but give a benefit of doubt and probe further like Aurobindo.

In peace - Om Santhi, Santhi Santhihi