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Re: Article : A new look at out History
Ramakrishnan Balasubramanian wrote:
>
>
> 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
I don't mean to devalue the Puranas completely. They have their purpose
and their uses, but to assume that they are historical documents is
plainly wrong.
> 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.
That is right. In the same padma purANa, for instance, there is one set
of verses condemning all who worship vishNu to hell, and other portions
where Siva is clearly subordinated to vishNu. Clearly, different groups
of people with different sympathies have been at work, putting in things
according to their own prejudices.
> 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!
>
The interaction between north India and south India goes back to quite a
few centuries before Christ. In the upanishads, there are references to
r.shis living in the Vidarbha region of modern Maharashtra. And if the
Vedic Aryans were in Maharashtra at the time of the upanishads, crossing
the rest of the Deccan plateau is no big deal. There are plenty of
rivers along the way, like Godavari, Tungabhadra, Krishna and Kaveri,
along the courses of which people could have settled in large numbers.
The Jain monuments in Sravanabelagola and other places in the south date
to around the 5th cent. BC. The new historians might be better off
looking at the earliest south Indian references, to show how the
influence of the culture of the Aryans seems to have been wholeheartedly
accepted by those in the south. There does not seem to be any evidence
for animosity or large-scale invasions from the north to south.
However, my point is that it is not only in the Vedas that one finds
references to the word Arya. The Buddhists and Jains, who rejected the
Vedas, thought of themselves as Arya. The Tamil references clearly
connect the word Arya with the north. It is a stretch to assume that
Arya means nothing more than "civilized." The Dravidians were as
civilized as the Aryans. There is a significant geographical component
to the terms Arya and Dravida, as seen from the names Aryavarta and
Dravida-desa. It is important for historians not to lose sight of this.
In the later smr.ti literature, the word Arya gives way to gauDa as a
geographical reference. Thus there is mention of the panca gauDa (gauDa,
i.e. Bengal, sArasvata, kAnyakubja, maithila and oDra, i.e. Orissa) and
the panca drAviDa (drAviDa, karNATa, Andhra, mahArAshTra and gurjara)
peoples. But in the earlier references to Aryavarta and brahmavarta, the
term is geographical to a significant degree.
S. Vidyasankar
