Am sure that
each of us, Indians have read laboriously the volumes of history books during
high school, slept very peacefully during those classes where the teacher
talked at length about kings, how they built wells, trees etc. I being a
intrigued by history remember them very well. I also remember the initial
chapters of the history textbooks (plural used since I, out of curiosity
managed to read history books of different boards) where they mention a few
scant references to Indus Valley and other civilizations of the ancient
past.
Regarding
the Indus Valley Civilization, it is usually mentioned that the society was
divided into 4 groups and how Aryans came from the west and immigrated into
India and gradually established themselves. This was referred to as the Aryan
Invasion theory and as of 2003 it was accepted by all until probing by some
historians, archeologists, geologists etc revealed severe inconsistencies in
the theory. Initially this came with the finding that Saraswati which was
usually referred to as 'The Mythological river' is in fact not so out of the
world and was once a vast rich river in the Indus valley. The finding of the
river led to the understanding that Indus valley civilization ended due to
drying of the saraswati river around 1900 BC which corroborated with the end of
the civilization. So now we know how the greatest civilization of early period with
more than 1500 settlements around the basin came to an end. One interesting
note is that there haven't been much written word that could be found in the
ruins to decipher the language used then. So I would like to make clear that
the language of the Indus civilization is not known.
But as for the river saraswati, the
Rig veda talk at length about the river, its waves, its vastness and celebrates
it. It also mentions that the river swells from its various tributaries, is 14
km wide at some point and flows from The Himalayas to the great sea. Scientific
evidences regarding the river saraswati and the course of it getting dried is well documented and is
proved that the river drained into the sea only until 3067 BC, then started
drying and got completely dried by 1900 BC. So what does that suggest about the
Rig Veda. Obviously when Rig Veda was composed, the river had been in its prime
which means the Rig veda's date is definitely before the year 3067BC. Further
evidences point to the fact that Rig Veda, the oldest of vedas should have been
composed somewhere before 3500BC. Some would like to believe it definitely
predates before 4000BC ( I personally find it awesome if that’s the case). These findings undoubtedly makes it certain
that Rig Veda is by far the oldest surviving written manuscript in the world.
This would be first of many of my
ideas and thoughts connecting it to the current day world etc.
Finally
I would also like to give a link to the video by Dr. Nicholas Khazanas, a vedic
researcher who did a great amount of work to make certain that Aryan Invasion
theory is complete non-sense.
P.S:
I would like to make myself clear at this point that I feel highly elated to
know the rich and ancient history of our country. Though it is partly because,
I myself am a Rig Vedhi, it is also true that I am an Indian and am sure that
as an Indian everyone would like to be proud of our lineage. Again, this doesn’t
mean dravidians has nothing to do with this. Indians, we, are all part of this
rich tradition and irrespective of our language, culture, tradition and
religion, we must acknowledge our past and I would like to push my surroundings
a little bit into that through the blog series
