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Re: Article : A new look at out History
Vidyasankar Sundaresan wrote:
> greatness. Similarly, it does not matter when the R.gveda was first
> transmitted. From the Hindu point of view, such talk of dates is
> pointless, as the Vedas are ageless. It is time we Indians stopped
> whining about our colonial heritage, and looked towards the future. Let
> the dead past bury its dead.
Correct. It was the mistake of Indians in the first place, to fall into the
trap of Europeans. Complaining about it now is of no use.
> Forget about the Archbishop of Ireland. Does anyone seriously think that
> the astronomical time-scales given in our Puranas are historically
> valid? According to these kinds of notions, human beings lived on earth
> simultaneously with dinosaurs, and even before, when the atmosphere on
> earth could not have supported life. The notions of the Puranas are
> meant for poetic effect. To attach serious historical validity to them
> is being extremely short-sighted.
While I like reading puranas and personally think that there is a lot in many
of the puraaNas, there are problems with these books. The puranas doubtless
serve as expalanations for the vedas by illustrating many philosophical points
with stories. However, many other things are so patently wrong that it should
just be discarded as arthavaada. Why go to time scales etc? Even the geography
of India itself is completely wrong in the puraaNas I have read. The size of
India is bigger than that of the earth itself :-).
Apart from these the it was an accepted tradition to insert things into
puraaNas. Thus we have multiple copies of various puraaNas and depending on
the philosophical inclination of the scholars various verses have been added.
A good discussion is given in Ludo Rocher's book in the series on Indian
literature.
> > Another important issue discussed in this book is an
> > artificial division created between Aryans and Dravidians
> > by the Western Indologists. Actually Kulkarni argues
> > that 'Aryan' as such is not a race. The term 'Arya'
> > means civilised and does not appear in any source other
> > than the Vedas.
>
> Whether it is racial or not, the fact remains that Arya and Dravida were
> two separate groups of people. Ancient Tamil sources prove beyond any
> possibility of doubt that Arya essentially meant "northerner, who
> follows the Vedas," while Dravida referred to the peoples living in the
> peninsula of India. The southerners formed their own separate linguistic
> and political groups, with no reference to the north. Read K. A.
> Nilakanta Sastri and P. T. Srinivasa Aiyangar for proper historical
> details.
Yes, however it also seems to be the fact that the two cultures mixed very
quickly. By the 5th-6th century AD itself we have brahmin poets like
jnaanasampanthar etc writing poems in Tamil and according to their poems the
temples like kapaaliishvarar, arunachaleshvarar already had an aura of hoary
tradition around them!
> Mahendravarman, fine, we do have a sense of history. On the other hand,
> if by "sense of history" he is talking of the various Puranas which
> contradict one another in their historical details, he is highly
> mistaken.
> Sorry, the Puranas are more mythology than history. That is why the
> Brahmanas of old classified Purana separately from Itihasa. Itihasa
> means "thus it happened" and can be admitted as historical, but not so
> with the Puranas, as a class.
Very true. Relying on puraaNas for history would be quite laughable.
Ramakrishnan.
--
Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, "The flag is moving." The other
said, "The wind is moving." The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He
told them, "Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving." - The Gateless Gate
