Questioning the Aryan Invasion Theory and Revising Ancient Indian

History1
Klaus Klostermaier

NB. The footnotes for this article are linked to a separate footnote page.

Introduction
Tacitus, the classical Roman writer, claimed to have described past events and personalities in
his works sine ira et studio, free from hostility and bias. This motto has guided serious
historians through the ages, and it became their highest ambition to write history 'objectively',
distancing themselves from opinions held by interested parties.

The ideal was not always followed, as we know. We have seen twentieth century governments
commissioning re-writings of the histories of their countries from the standpoint of their own
ideologies. Like the court-chroniclers of former times, some contemporary academic historians
wrote unashamedly biased accounts of events and redesigned the past accordingly.

When, in the wake of World War II the nations of Asia and Africa gained independence, their
intellectuals became aware of the fact that their histories had been written by representatives of
the colonial powers which they had opposed. More often than not they discovered that all
traditional accounts of their own past had been brushed aside by the 'official' historians as so
much myth and fairytale. Often lacking their own academically trained historians-or worse,
only possessing native historians who had taken over the views of the colonial masters-the
discontent with existing histories of their countries expressed itself often in vernacular works
that lacked the academic credentials necessary to make an impact on professional historians.

The situation is slowly changing. A new generation of scholars who grew up in post-colonial
times and who do not share the former biases, scholars in command of the tools of the trade-
intimacy with the languages involved, familiarity with the culture of their countries, respect for
the indigenous traditions-are rewriting the histories of their countries.

Nowhere is this more evident than in India. India had a tradition of learning and scholarship
much older and vaster than the European countries that, from the sixteenth century onwards,
became its political masters. Indian scholars are rewriting the history of India today.

The Aryan Invasion Theory and the Old Chronology

One of the major points of revision concerns the so called 'Aryan invasion theory', often
referred to as 'colonial-missionary', implying that it was the brainchild of conquerors of foreign
colonies who could not but imagine that all higher culture had to come from outside 'backward'
India, and who likewise assumed that a religion could only spread through a politically
supported missionary effort.

While not buying into the more sinister version of this revision, which accuses the inventors of
the Aryan invasion theory of malice and cynicism, there is no doubt that early European
attempts to explain the presence of Indians in India had much to with the commonly held
Biblical belief that humankind originated from one pair of humans- Adam and Eve to be
precise (their common birth date was believed to be c.4005 BCE)-and that all peoples on earth
descended from one of the sons of Noah, the only human to survive the Great Flood (dated at
2500 BCE). The only problem seemed to be to connect peoples not mentioned in Chapter 10 of
Genesis ['The Peopling of the Earth'] with one of the Biblical genealogical lists.
One such example of a Christian historian attempting to explain the presence of Indians in
India is the famous Abbé Dubois (1770-1848), whose long sojourn in India (1792-1823)
enabled him to collect a large amount of interesting materials concerning the customs and
traditions of the Hindus. His (French) manuscript was bought by the British East India
Company and appeared in an English translation under the title Hindu Manners, Customs and
Ceremonies in 1897 with a Prefatory Note by the Right Hon. F. Max Müller.2 Abbé Dubois,
loath 'to oppose [his] conjectures to [the Indians'] absurd fables' categorically stated:

It is practically admitted that India was inhabited very soon after the Deluge, which
made a desert of the whole world. The fact that it was so close to the plains of Sennaar,
where Noah's descendants remained stationary so long, as well as its good climate and
the fertility of the country, soon led to its settlement.

Rejecting other scholars' opinions which linked the Indians to Egyptian or Arabic origins, he
ventured to suggest them 'to be descendents not of Shem, as many argue, but of Japhet'. He
explains: 'According to my theory they reached India from the north, and I should place the
first abode of their ancestors in the neighbourhood of the Caucasus.'3 The reasons he provides
to substantiate his theory are utterly unconvincing-but he goes on to build the rest of his
migration theory (not yet an 'Aryan' migration theory) on this shaky foundation.

Max Müller (1823-1903), who was largely responsible for the 'Aryan invasion theory' and the
'old chronology', was too close in spirit and time to this kind of thinking, not to have adopted it
fairly unquestioningly. In his Prefatory Note he praises the work of Abbé Dubois as a
'trustworthy authority. . .which will always retain its value.'

That a great deal of early British Indology was motivated by Christian missionary
considerations, is no secret. The famous and important Boden Chair for Sanskrit at the
University of Oxford was founded by Colonel Boden in 1811 with the explicit object 'to
promote the translation of the Scriptures into Sanskrit, so as to enable his countrymen to
proceed in the conversion of the natives of India to the Christian Religion'.4 Max Müller, in a
letter to his wife wrote in 1886: 'The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent
on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their
religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has
sprung from it during the last 3 000 years.'5

When the affinity between many European languages and Sanskrit became a commonly
accepted notion, scholars almost automatically concluded that the Sanskrit speaking ancestors
of the present day Indians were to be found somewhere halfway between India and the Western
borders of Europe-Northern Germany, Scandinavia, Southern Russia, the Pamir-from which
they invaded the Punjab. (It is also worth noting that the early armchair scholars who conceived
these grandiose migration theories, had no actual knowledge of the terrain their 'Aryan
invaders' were supposed to have transversed, the passes they were supposed to have crossed, or
the various climates they were believed to have been living in). Assuming that the Vedic
Indians were semi-nomadic warriors and cattle-breeders, it fitted the picture, when Mohenjo
Daro and Harappa were discovered, to also assume that these were the cities the Aryan invaders
destroyed under the leadership of their god Indra, the 'city-destroyer', and that the dark-skinned
indigenous people were the ones on whom they imposed their religion and their caste system.

Western scholars decided to apply their own methodologies and, in the absence of reliable
evidence, postulated a timeframe for Indian history on the basis of conjectures. Considering the
traditional dates for the life of Gautama, the Buddha, as fairly well established in the sixth
century BCE, supposedly pre-Buddhist Indian records were placed in a sequence that seemed
plausible to philologists. Accepting on linguistic grounds the traditional claims that the Rigveda
was the oldest Indian literary document, Max Müller allowing a time-span of two hundred
years each for the formation of every class of Vedic literature, and assuming that the Vedic
period had come to an end by the time of the Buddha, established the following sequence that
was widely accepted:

Rigveda c. 1200 BCE

Yajurveda,Samaveda,Atharvaveda, c. 1000 BCE
Brahmanas, c. 800 BCE
Aranyakas,Upanishads, c. 600 BCE

Max Müller himself conceded the purely conjectural nature of the Vedic chronology, and in the
last work published shortly before his death, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, admitted:
'Whatever may be the date of the Vedic hymns, whether 1500 or 15 000 BCE, they have their
own unique place and stand by themselves in the literature of the world' (p.35). There were,
even in Max Müller's time, Western and Indian scholars, such as Moriz Winternitz and Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, who disagreed with his chronology and postulated a much higher age for
the Rigveda.

Indian scholars pointed out all along that there was no reference in the Veda of a migration
from outside India, that all the geographical features mentioned in the Rigveda are those of
north-western India and that there was no archaeological evidence whatsoever for the Aryan
invasion theory. On the other side there were references to constellations in Vedic works whose
timeframe could be calculated. The dates arrived at, however, 4500 BCE for one observation in
the Rigveda, 3200 BCE for a date in theShatapatha Brahmana, seemed far too remote to be
acceptable, especially if one assumed-as many nineteenth century scholars did, that the world
was only about 6 000 years old and that the flood had taken place only 4 500 years ago.

Debunking the Aryan Invasion Theory: The New Chronology

Contemporary Indian scholars, admittedly motivated not only by academic interests,
vehemently reject what they call the 'colonial-missionary Aryan invasion theory'. They accuse
its originators of superimposing-for a reason-the purpose and process of the colonial conquest
of India by the Western powers in modern times onto the beginnings of Indian civilisation: as
the Europeans came to India as bearers of a supposedly superior civilisation and a higher
religion, so the original Aryans were assumed to have invaded a country on which they
imposed their culture and their religion.

A recent major work offers 'seventeen arguments: why the Aryan invasion never happened'.6 It
may be worthwhile summarising and analysing them briefly:

1. The Aryan invasion model is largely based on linguistic conjectures which are
unjustified (and wrong). Languages develop much more slowly than assumed by
nineteenth century scholars. According to Renfrew speakers of Indo-European
languages may have lived in Anatolia as early as 7000 BCE
2. The supposed large-scale migrations of Aryan people in the second millennium BCE
first into Western Asia and then into northern India (by 1500 BCE) cannot be
maintained in view of the fact that the Hittites were in Anatolia already by 2200 BCE
and the Kassites and Mitanni had kings and dynasties by 1600 BCE
3. There is no memory of an invasion or of large-scale migration in the records of Ancient
India-neither in the Vedas, Buddhist or Jain writings, nor in Tamil literature. The fauna
and flora, the geography and the climate described in the Rigveda are that of Northern
India.
 4. There is a striking cultural continuity between the archaeological artefacts of the Indus-
Saraswati civilisation and subsequent Indian society and culture: a continuity of
religious ideas, arts, crafts, architecture, system of weights and measures.
5. The archaeological finds of Mehrgarh (copper, cattle, barley) reveal a culture similar to
that of the Vedic Indians. Contrary to former interpretations, the Rigveda shows not a
nomadic but an urban culture (purusa as derived from pur vasa = town-dweller).
6. The Aryan invasion theory was based on the assumption that a nomadic people in
possession of horses and chariots defeated an urban civilisation that did not know
horses, and that horses are depicted only from the middle of the second millennium
onwards. Meanwhile archaeological evidence for horses has been found in Harappan
and pre-Harappan sites; drawings of horses have been found in paleolithic caves in
India; drawings of riders on horses dated c. 4300 BCE have been found in Ukraina.
Horsedrawn war chariots are not typical for nomadic breeders but for urban
civilisations.
7. The racial diversity found in skeletons in the cities of the Indus civilisation is the same
as in India today; there is no evidence of the coming of a new race.
8. The Rigveda describes a river system in North India that is pre-1900 BCE in the case of
the Saraswati river, and pre-2600 BCE in the case of the Drishadvati river. Vedic
literature shows a population shift from the Saraswati (Rigveda) to the Ganges
(Brahmanas andPuranas), also evidenced by archaeological finds.
9. The astronomical references in the Rigveda are based on a Pleiades-Krittika (Taurean)
calendar of c. 2500 BCE when Vedic astronomy and mathematics were well-developed
sciences (again, not a feature of a nomadic people).
10. The Indus cities were not destroyed by invaders but deserted by their inhabitants
because of desertification of the area. Strabo (GeographyXV.1.19) reports that
Aristobulos had seen thousands of villages and towns deserted because the Indus had
changed its course.
11. The battles described in the Rigveda were not fought between invaders and natives but
between people belonging to the same culture.
12. Excavations in Dwaraka have lead to the discovery of a site larger than Mohenjodaro,
dated c. 1500 BCE with architectural structures, use of iron, a script halfway between
Harappan and Brahmi. Dwarka has been associated with Krishna and the end of the
Vedic period.
13. A continuity in the morphology of scripts: Harappan, Brahmi, Devanagari.
14. Vedic ayas, formerly translated as 'iron,' probably meant copper or bronze. Iron was
found in India before 1500 BCE in Kashmir and Dwaraka.
15. The Puranic dynastic lists with over 120 kings in one Vedic dynasty alone, fit well into
the 'new chronology'. They date back to the third millennium BCE Greek accounts tell
of Indian royal lists going back to the seventh millennium BCE.
16. The Rigveda itself shows an advanced and sophisticated culture, the product of a long
development, 'a civilisation that could not have been delivered to India on horseback'
(p.160).
17. Painted Gray Ware culture in the western Gangetic plains, dated ca 1100 BCE has been
found connected to (earlier) Black and Red Ware etc.

Let us consider some of these arguments in some detail. As often remarked, there is no hint in
the Veda of a migration of the people that considered it its own sacred tradition. It would be
strange indeed if the Vedic Indians had lost all recollection of such a momentous event in
supposedly relatively recent times- much more recent, for instance, than the migration of
Abraham and his people which is well attested and frequently referred to in the Bible. In
addition, as has been established recently through satellite photography and geological
investigations, the Saraswati, the mightiest river known to the Rigvedic Indians, along whose
banks they established numerous major settlements, had dried out completely by 1900 BCE-
four centuries before the Aryans were supposed to have invaded India. One can hardly argue
for the establishment of Aryan villages along a dry river bed.

When the first remnants of the ruins of the so-called Indus civilisation came to light in the early
part of our century, the proponents of the Aryan invasion theory believed they had found the
missing archaeological evidence: here were the 'mighty forts' and the 'great cities' which the
war-like Indra of the Rigveda was said to have conquered and destroyed. Then it emerged that
nobody had destroyed these cities and no evidence of wars of conquest came to light: floods
and droughts had made it impossible to sustain large populations in the area and the people of
Mohenjo Daro, Harappa and other places had migrated to more hospitable areas. Ongoing
archaeological research has not only extended the area of the Indus-civilisation but has also
shown a transition of its later phases to the Gangetic culture. Archeo-geographers have
established that a drought lasting two to three hundred years devastated a wide belt of land
from Anatolia through Mesopotamia to Northern India around 2300 BCE to 2000 BCE.

Based on this type of evidence and extrapolating from the Vedic texts, a new story of the
origins of Hinduism is emerging that reflects the self-consciousness of Hindus and which
attempts to replace the 'colonial-missionary Aryan invasion theory' by a vision of 'India as the
Cradle of Civilisation.' This new theory considers the Indus-civilisation as a late Vedic
phenomenon and pushes the (inner-Indian) beginnings of the Vedic age back by several
thousands of years. One of the reasons for considering the Indus civilisation 'Vedic' is the
evidence of town-planning and architectural design that required a fairly advanced algebraic
geometry-of the type preserved in the Vedic Shulvasutras. The widely respected historian of
mathematics A. Seidenberg came to the conclusion, after studying the geometry used in
building the Egyptian pyramids and the Mesopotamian citadels, that it reflected a derivative
geometry-a geometry derived from the Vedic Shulva-sutras. If that is so, then the knowledge
('Veda') on which the construction of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro is based, cannot be later than
that civilisation itself.7

While the Rigveda has always been held to be the oldest literary document of India and was
considered to have preserved the oldest form of Sanskrit, Indians have not taken it to be the
source for their early history. The Itihasa-Purana served that purpose. The language of these
works is more recent than that of the Vedas and the time of their final redaction is much later
than the fixation of the Vedic canon. However, they contain detailed information about ancient
events and personalities that form part of Indian history. The Ancients, like Herodotus, the
father of Greek histo-riography, did not separate story from history. Nor did they question their
sources but tended to juxtapose various pieces of evidence without critically sifting it. Thus we
cannot read Itihasa-Purana as the equivalent of a modern textbook of Indian history but rather
as a storybook containing information with interpretation, facts and fiction. Indians, however,
always took genealogies quite seriously and we can presume that the Puranic lists of dynasties,
like the lists of paramparas in the Upanishads relate the names of real rulers in the correct
sequence. On these assumptions we can tentatively reconstruct Indian history to a time around
4500 BCE.

A key element in the revision of Ancient Indian History was the recent discovery of Mehrgarh,
a settlement in the Hindukush area, that was continuously inhabited for several thousand years
from c. 7000 BCE onwards. This discovery has extended Indian history for several thousands
of years before the fairly well dateable Indus civilisation.8

New Chronologies
Pulling together available archaeological evidence as it is available today, the American
anthropologist James G. Schaffer developed the following chronology of early Indian
civilisation:

1. Early food-producing era (c. 6500-5000 BCE): no pottery.

2. Regionalisation era (5000-2600 BCE): distinct regional styles of pottery and other
artefacts.
3. Integration era (2600-1900 BCE) : cultural homogeneity and emergence of urban
centres like Mohenjo daro and Harappa.
4. Localisation era (1900-1300 BCE ) blending of patterns from the integration era with
regional ceramic styles.

The Indian archaeologist S.P. Gupta proposed this cultural sequencing:

1. Pre-ceramic Neolithic (8000-600 BCE)

2. Ceramic Neolithic (6000-5000 BCE)
3. Chalcolithic (5000-3000 BCE )
4. Early Bronze Age (3000-1900 BCE)
5. Late Bronze Age ( 1900-1200 BCE)
6. Early Iron Age (1200-800 BCE)
7. Late Iron cultures

According to these specialists, there is no break in the cultural development from 8000 BCE
onwards, no indication of a major change, as an invasion from outside would certainly be.

A more detailed 'New Chronology' of Ancient India, locating names of kings and tribes
mentioned in the Vedas and Puranas, according to Rajarama9 looks somewhat like this:

4500 BCE: Mandhatri's victory over the Drohyus, alluded to in the Puranas.
4000 BCE Rigveda (excepting books 1 and 10)
3700 BCE Battle of Ten Kings (referred to in the Rigveda) Beginning of Puranic
dynastic lists: Agastya, the messenger of Vedic religion in the Dravida country.
Vasistha, his younger brother, author of Vedic works. Rama and Ramayana.
3600 BCEYajur-, Sama-, Atharvaveda: Completion of Vedic Canon.
3100 BCE Age of Krishna and Vyasa. Mahabharata War. Early Mahabharata.
3000 BCEShatapathabrahmana, Shulvasutras, Yajnavalkyasutra,Panini, author of
the Ashtadhyayi, Yaska, author of the Nirukta.
2900 BCE Rise of the civilisations of Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus-
Sarasvati doab.
2200 BCE beginning of large-scale drought: decline of Harappa.
2000 BCE End of Vedic age.
1900 BCE Saraswati completely dried out: end of Harappa.

Texts like the Rigveda, the Shatapathabrahmana and others contain references to eclipses as
well as to sidereal markers of the beginning of seasons, which allow us by backward
calculation, to determine the time of their composition. Experts assure us that to falsify these
dates would have been impossible before the computer age.

Old verses new? Or scientists verses philologists?

We are left, at present, with two widely differing versions of Ancient Indian History, with two
radically divergent sets of chronology and with a great deal of polemic from both sides. Those
who defend the Aryan invasion theory and the chronology associated with it accuse the
proponents of the 'New Chronology' of indulging in Hindu chauvinism. The latter suspect the
former of entertaining 'colonial-missionary' prejudices and denying originality to the
indigenous Indians. The new element that has entered the debate is scientific investigations.
While the older theory rested on exclusively philological arguments, the new theory includes
astronomical, geological, mathematical and archaeological evidence. On the whole, the latter
seems to rest on better foundations. Not only were the philological arguments from the very
beginning based more on strong assertions and bold guesses, civilisations both ancient and
contemporary comprise more than literature alone. In addition, purely philologically trained
scholars-namely grammarians-are not able to make sense of technical language and of scientific
information contained even in the texts they study.

Consider today's scientific literature. It abounds with Greek and Latin technical terms, it
contains an abundance of formulae composed of Greek and Hebrew letters. If scholars with a
background in the classical languages were to read such works, they might be able to come up
with some acceptable translations of technical terms into modern English but they would hardly
be able to really make sense of most of what they read and they certainly would not extract the
information which the authors of these works wished to convey to people trained in their
specialities. The situation is not too different with regard to ancient Indian texts. The admission
of some of the best scholars (like Geldner, who in his translation of the Rigveda, considered the
best so far, declares many passages 'darker than the darkest oracle' or Gonda, who considered
the Rigveda basically untranslatable) of being unable to make sense of a great many texts-and
the refusal of most to go beyond a grammatical and etymological analysis of these-indicates a
deeper problem. The Ancients were not only poets and litterateurs, but they also had their
sciences and their technical skills, their secrets and their conventions that are not self-evident to
someone not sharing their world. Some progress has been made in deciphering medical and
astronomical literature of a later age, in reading architectural and arts-related materials.
However, much of the technical meaning of the oldest Vedic literature still eludes us.

The Rigveda-a code?

The computer scientist and Indologist Subhash Kak believes he has rediscovered the 'Vedic
Code' which allows him to extract from the structure, as well as the words and sentences of the
Rigveda, and the considerable astronomical information which its authors supposedly
embedded in it.10 The assumption of such encoded scientific knowledge would make it
understandable why there was such insistence on the preservation of every letter of the text in
precisely the sequence the original author had set down. One can take certain liberties with a
story, or even a poem, changing words, transposing lines, adding explanatory matter,
shortening it, if necessary, and still communicate the intentions and ideas of the author.
However, one has to remember and reproduce a scientific formula in precisely the same way it
has been set down by the scientist or it would not make sense at all. While the scientific
community can arbitrarily adopt certain letter equivalents for physical units or processes, once
it has agreed on their use, one must obey the conventions for the sake of meaningful
communication.

Even a non-specialist reader of ancient Indian literature will notice the effort to link macrocosm
and microcosm, astronomical and physiological processes, to find correspondences between the
various realms of beings and to order the universe by establishing broad classifications. Vedic
sacrifices-the central act of Vedic culture- were to be offered on precisely built geometrically
constructed altars and to be performed at astronomically exactly established times. It sounds
plausible to expect a correlation between the numbers of bricks prescribed for a particular altar
and the distances between stars observed whose movement determined the time of the offerings
to be made. Subhash Kak has advanced a great deal of fascinating detail in that connection in
his essays on the 'Astronomy of the Vedic Altar'. He believes that while the Vedic Indians
possessed extensive astronomical knowledge, which they encoded in the text of the Rigveda,
the code was lost in later times and the Vedic tradition was interrupted.11

India, the cradle of (world-) civilisation?

Based on the early dating of the Rigveda (c. 4000 BCE) and on the strength of the argument
that Vedic astronomy and geometry predates that of the other known Ancient civilisations,
some scholars, like N.S. Rajaram, George Feuerstein, Subhash Kak and David Frawley, have
made the daring suggestion that India was the 'cradle of civilisation'. They link the recently
discovered early European civilisation (which predates Ancient Sumeria and Ancient Egypt by
over a millennium) to waves of populations moving out or driven out from north-west India.
Later migrations, caused either by climatic changes or by military events, would have brought
the Hittites to Western Asia, the Iranians to Afghanistan and Iran and many others to other
parts of Eurasia. Such a scenario would require a complete rewriting of Ancient World History-
especially if we add the claims, apparently substantiated by some material evidence, that Vedic
Indians had established trade links with Central America and Eastern Africa before 2500 BCE.
It is no wonder that the 'New Chronology' arouses not only scholarly controversy but emotional
excitement as well. Much more hard evidence will be required to fully establish it, and many
claims may have to be withdrawn. But there is no doubt that the 'old chronology' has been
discredited and that much surprise is in store for the students not only of Ancient India, but also
of the Ancient World as a whole.

Sorting out the questions:

The 'Revision of Ancient Indian History' responds to several separate, but interlocking
questions that are often confused.

1. The (emotionally) most important question is that of the original home of Vedic
civilisation, identified with the question: where was the (Rig-)Veda composed? India's
indigenous answer to that question had always been 'India', more precisely 'the Punjab'.
The European, 'colonial missionary' assumption, was 'outside India'.
2. The next question, not often explicitly asked, is: where did the pre-Vedic people, the
'Aryans' come from? This is a problem for archeo-anthropologists rather than for
historians. The racial history of India shows influences from many quarters.
3. A related, but separate question concerns the 'cradle of civilisation', to which several
ancient cultures have laid claim: Sumeria, Egypt, India (possibly also China could be
mentioned, which considered itself for a long time the only truly civilised country).
Depending on what answer we receive, the major expansion of population/civilisation
would be from west to east, or from east to west. The famous lux ex oriente has often
been applied to the spread of culture in the ancient world. India was as far as the 'Orient'
would go.
4. It is rather strange that the defenders of the 'Aryan invasion theory', who have neither
archaeological nor literary documents to prove their assumption, demand detailed proof
for the non-invasion and refuse to admit the evidence available. Similarly, they feel
entitled to declare 'mythical' whatever the sources (Rigveda, Puranas) say that does not
agree with their preconceived notions of Vedic India.

Some conclusions:
If I were to judge the strength of the arguments for revising Ancient Indian History in the
direction of 'India as Cradle of Civilisation' I would rate Seidenberg's findings concerning the
Shulvasutra geometry (applied in the Indus civilisation; Babylonian and Egyptian geometry
derivative to it) highest. Next would be the archeo-astronomical determination of astronomical
data in Vedic and post-Vedic texts. Third is the satellite photography based dating of the drying
out of the Saraswati and the archeo-geographical finding of a centuries long drought in the belt
reaching from Anatolia through Mesopotamia and Northern India. Geological research has
uncovered major tectonic changes in the Punjab and the foothills of the Himalayas. At one
point a section rose about sixty metres within the past 2 000 years.

'Vasishta's Head', a bronze head found near Delhi, was dated through radio-carbon testing to
around 3700 BCE- the time when, according to Hicks and Anderson, the Battle of the Ten
Kings took place (Vasishta, mentioned in the Rigveda, was the advisor to King Sudas). A
further factor speaking for the 'Vedic' character of the Indus civilisation is the occurrence of
(Vedic) altars in many sites. Fairly important is also the absence of a memory of a migration
from outside India in all of ancient Indian literature: the Veda, the Brahmanas, the Epics and
the Puranas. Granting that the Vedic Samhitas were ritual manuals rather than historic records,
further progress in revising Ancient Indian History could be expected from a study of Itihasa-
Purana,rather than from an analysis of the Rigveda (by way of parallel, what kind of
reconstruction of Ancient Israel's History could be done on the basis of a study of the Psalms,
leaving out Genesis and Kings? Or what reconstruction of European History could be based on
a study of the earliest Rituale Romanum?)

An afterword:
Hinduism today is not just a development of Vedic religion and culture but a synthesis of many
diverse elements. There is no doubt a Vedic basis. It is evident in the caste-structure of Hindu
society, in the rituals which almost every Hindu still undergoes (especially initiation, marriage
and last rites), in traditional notions of ritual purity and pollution, and in the respect which the
Veda still commands. There is a large area of Hindu worship and religious practice for which
the Veda provides little or no basis: temple-building, image worship, pilgrimages, vows and
prayers to gods and goddesses not mentioned in the Veda, beliefs like transmigration, world-
pictures containing numerous heavens and hells and much more which appear to have been
taken over from non-Vedic indigenous cultures. There have been historic developments that led
to the developments of numerous schools of thought, sects and communities differing from
each other in scriptures, interpretations, customs, beliefs.

Apart from its Vedic origins Hinduism was never one in either administration, doctrine or
practice. It does not possess a commonly accepted authority, does not have a single centre and
does not have a common history. Unlike the histories of other religions, which rely on one
founder and one scripture, the history of Hinduism is a bundle of parallel histories of traditions
that were loosely defined from the very beginning, that went through a number of fissions and
fusions, and that do not feel any need to seek their identity in conforming to a specific historic
realisation. While incredibly conservative in some of its expressions, Hinduism is very open to
change and development under the influence of charismatic personalities. From early times
great latitude was given to Hindus to interpret their traditional scriptures in a great many
different ways. The ease with which Hindus have always identified persons that impressed
them with manifestations of God has led to many parallel traditions within Hinduism, making it
impossible to chronicle a development of Hinduism along one line. The presentation of a
history of Hinduism will be a record of several mainstream Hindu traditions that developed
along individual lines; only very rarely do these lines meet in conflict or merge to generate new
branches of the still vigorously growing banyan tree to which Hinduism has been often
compared.