The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis

Language: English
Pages: 544\nAbout the Book\nShrikant Talageri is one of those scholars who have come forward in recent years to challenge the colonial-missionary model imposed on world history during the era of Western-Christian imperialism. In his earlier book, The AryanInvasion Theory: A Reappraisal, he had conclusively established that India was the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages. In the present volume, he has confirmed equally emphatically that India was also the original homeland not only of the lndo-Aryans but also of the Indo-Iranians and the Indo- Europeans.\nThe Rigveda is the oldest and most important source of material for Indian, Indo-Aryan, and even Indo-European history. It is a text which has been part of a hoary and widespread living tradition thousands of years old. Naturally, a text which has remained alive, as part of a living tradition, for so long cannot and should not be analysed without reference to what that tradition has to say about it.\nBut modern scholars have chosen to interpret the Rigveda in its historical context, solely on the basis of an extraneous linguistic theory, bolstered by stray sentences hunted out of the Rigveda and interpreted out of context, and totally without reference to certain indispensable and unassailable traditional information contained in certain basic texts. Tills is how the theory of an Aryan invasion of India in the early second millennium BC has been propounded and continues to be propped up, even though it finds no support whatsoever either in archaeology, or in literature, or in the racial-ethnical composition of India.\nShrikant