The secret of the Vedas

Though we have literature dating back to almost 4,000 years, Indian history begins only 2,500 years ago. Part of the problem of this lost history lies in us trying to run ourselves up in interpreting our literature against perceived injustices in previous interpretations. It is time we got our feet back on the ground, says SUDHANSHU RANADE.

IT is strange. Yet it is true. The Hindus are a community without a history; and, it would seem, without a religion either. Ask a Hindu about Hinduism,and he will in the end tell you with a shrug that "it is just a way of life". This is only to be expected, given the contrary and wide-ranging customs and beliefs that the Hindu religion is made up of. Anyone who has experienced the cheering, steadying, reflection-inducing effect of diyas or deepams in Hindu homes, temples and festivals will have no trouble understanding why Hindus have always regarded Agni as "the invoker of the gods". And it is so refreshing to hear that "even a flower, fruit, or drop of water, offered with devotion, He accepts from him whose heart is pure"; and to see the refreshing, personal, intimate, informal, "nodding" relationships that Hindus, as individuals, have directly with their Maker - and the trust they repose in Him.

But, side by side, we find long, endless rituals that go on for ever and ever; without the participation of, and without a word being understood by, those on whose behalf prayers are uttered, intricate rituals gone through, and offerings offered. In this sort of Hinduism, one can approach the gods only through the "proper channels", only through an intermediary who alone has the connections or qualifications necessary for direct access; who alone knows the ways of the gods. To my surprise, this sort of "mystiquification" is to be found even in the Rg Veda, where one finds priests "offering prayers on behalf of those who do not comprehend them".

Then again, there is the puzzle of the odd contrast between the basic large-heartedness of the Hindus and the intense status consciousness of Hinduism; and the odd practice that some people have of deliberately tarnishing or "polluting" others, so that they themselves can seem pure.

How does one reconcile Krishna's advice to "see all beings, without exception, first in yourself, and then in Me" (Gita, Ch. 4), with his statement in the same chapter that "the four castes have been created by me"; and his concern about the "intermingling of castes" (Ch. 1): such and such castes one may not marry into; such and such castes one must not share a meal with. In later times it came to the point where the pure began to consider themselves "polluted" even if touched by the shadow of an outcaste; who were therefore required to roam around with a bell around their necks to warn people of their approach.

Contrary to popular belief, these things were not merely an unintended byproduct of the fact that, in ancient times, professional skills could only be preserved and built on if sons followed in the footsteps of their fathers. If that were all, one would expect only castes; not caste discrimination. The fact is that a somehow-legitimated hierarchy of castes was believed to be crucial for the maintenance of order in Vedic society; and therefore became an intrinsic part of the Vedic religion -- along with the romance, sentiment and colour that was required to maintain a sense of community of one-ness, within a community that was in fact so deeply divided.

This "divinely ordained" pecking order has outlived whatever utility it might once have had. The caste system today divides us instead of keeping us together, as it once did - with each in his "proper" place. So much so that it is hard to imagine that this particular link between religion and politics could ever have had an integrative function.

Having outlived its utility, caste has now indeed become an "aberration". It no longer serves a political purpose; only "self-satisfying" prejudices remain. "There are real differences between the higher and lower castes", one priest told a BBC television crew, in all innocence; adding woefully that it was, nevertheless, "so hard to make them understand".

Notwithstanding the impression sometimes conveyed by "nationalist" scholars of the stature of Sri Aurobindo, the literal and/or integral fidelity of the best translations of ancient Indian literature has never been seriously challenged. Nor is it true that the translations, almost all of which were compiled by reputed German, Indian and English scholars while India was still under British rule, were bent on showing us in a poor light.

This did happen in some cases, in some places, because of faulty interpretation. But most of the time the reason lay simply in the sad state of Hindu society that scholars could see out of their windows over the first half of the 19th Century, whenever they looked up from their labours; coupled with the fact that they conscientiously sought to record the good in ancient times along with the bad in their attempt to faithfully portray the texts as they originally stood; instead of coming up with sanitised versions that today, three or four thousands years later, we might feel less embarrassed by.

This perfectly sound method unfortunately knee-jerked many "patriots" into "running us up", giving free rein to their imagination and creativity; simply because so many people seemed intent on running us down. But in fact, for politico- administrative reasons, British rulers of India, like most Muslim rulers before them, went out of their way to avoid or prevent any actions that might grievously hurt the sentiments of the people they ruled. This made it difficult for 19th Century missionaries to go public with the highly offensive characterisations of Hinduism that are to be found in books written by them; addressed essentially to liberal, westernised, upwardly mobile Hindus. This is why even after centuries of Muslim and British rule, and despite the rough and rude treatment that the majority of Hindus had put up with, at the hands of "high caste" members of their own community, the overwhelming majority of Indians are still Hindus.

But let us leave the Hindu religion to fend for itself, while we ourselves turn to history. By definition, history begins only with the availability of reliable literature. Until literature of a meaningful sort becomes sufficiently available, nations have to rest content with the patchy, fragmented, brick and mortar sketches of pre- or proto-history. This, sadly, has been our fate, even though a massive amount of literature, running into hundreds of thousands of pages, has come down to us from ancient times; much of it in the form in which it was originally composed. This literature is easily and cheaply accessible today, thanks to reprints by the Gita Press (Gorakhpur), the Advaita Ashram, the Ramakrishna Mission, and "Indological" publishers like Motilal Banarsidass, Munshiram Manoharlal and a whole lot of smaller publishers, some of whom, too, maintain the highest standards of quality. Knowledge of Sanskrit is not a problem; excellent English translations are available, many of which interweave the Sanskrit and English texts, verse by verse.

Nevertheless, though ancient Hindu literature takes us back three to four thousand years, the history of India begins only 2500 years ago; with Buddhism! Looking at it from another angle, one finds a gap of more than a 1000 years (and kilometres) in the ancient history of India; from the time the "pre-historic" Indus Valley Civilisation collapsed (in the west), almost 4000 years ago, till the beginning of "history proper" with the advent of Gautam Buddha (in the east) in the sixth Century BC. The only "history" we have for the intervening period and the intervening territory is the theory of the aryan invasion. But this "theory" stood on a wobbly foundation to begin with, because of its excessively literal and somewhat naive reading of the Rg Veda. And it has been getting more and more shaky ever since, with each passing year, as more and more archaeological evidence comes to light; indicating quite clearly that the "invasion", if any, could not possibly have happened in the way that earlier generations of historians had "discovered" in and between the lines of the literature studied by them; or, for that matter in the "theories" of the aryan invasion that modern historians have since been concocting to explain away the differences between the ancient literature (what little they knew of it), and the "hard" archaeological evidence, and the "soft" interpretations based on it, that has/have now become so abundantly available.

There are four main reasons for our ancient history having got lost (together with the blueprint for the architecture of the Hindu religion), even though our ancient literature has remained reasonably intact. First, the failure to adequately recognise that the ancient texts were not written for us; the failure to recognise that they can only be understood after one has understood the context in which they were written thousands of years ago, and the audience to which they were addressed. A chicken and egg problem, essentially. One can become aware of the context only by poring over individual texts, but these cannot really be understood until one is aware of the context. In effect, you cannot understand any of the ancient texts unless you understand them all.

The second problem makes it harder to solve the first one. The division and subdivision of labour that made it possible for ancient literature to be handed down generation after generation for hundreds of generations, scripted a situation in which, even after a lifetime of labour, most players knew only their own part. People who had a good grip on both text and context, people like Adi Shankara and Ramanuja, were few and far between. There are, and always were, many lesser mortals with a firm grasp of the Vedic religion in its entirety; for instance Agnihotra Ramanuja Tattacharya of West Mambalam, Chennai, whom it was my privilege to meet while researching this story. But, lacking a comparable stature, they would never be able to credibly get their message across, even if they wanted to do so - except to people who already knew.

As for the ancient history of the Hindus, though there are, and always have been, many Hindus who "know"/"knew" that India was their "original" homeland, not one of them has ever been able to prove his point; while simultaneously giving a reasonably comprehensive account of ancient history; one that goes beyond a barebones narrative of "kings and queens and battles", to give an intelligible and reasonably comprehensive overview of, say, the economic, social and political conditions that then prevailed.

Another version of the "knows only his own part" problem cropped up over the past two centuries, as scholars laboured to bring together, resurrect, understand, the ancient literature. Individual texts were obviously reliable; there was hardly any variation in the various "editions" that were found across the length and breadth of the country, whether preserved in the form of centuries-old manuscripts, or in the form of "oral tradition" - by people who had, as Max Muller put it, "strengthened their memory to such a degree that once their apprenticeship was finished you could open them like a book, and find any passage you liked, any word, any accent".

However, life is short, and funding limited; so most "Indological" scholars concentrated almost exclusively on the "less devious" Vedic or religious literature. The traditional literature (namely the Epics and Puranas in which our history lies buried, and along with it the answer to the puzzle about the location of the Rg Veda in the space/time matrix of ancient Indian history) was almost totally ignored on account of its fancifulness (with the honorable exception of a few largely self- financed civil-servants-turned-scholars like H.H. Wilson and F. Eden Pargiter); despite the fact that it was this very fancifulness that had kept its stories alive and kicking as recently as the middle of the 20th Century (and free from the clutches of the priests). It was precisely this fancifulness that gave the literature its popular appeal, and thus ensured its financial viability.

Be that as it may, the net result was that students of the "Indological" literature too ended up knowing only the parts they had studied; or picked up second-hand. They too had only a skimpy idea of how the various parts fitted into one another. In general one could say that the literature was not understood even by those who wrote it.

The third problem is the sheer mass of the literature that has been passed on to us, together with its apparent ambiguities/inconsistencies, the blurring caused by the passage of time, and the confusion caused by numerous attempts to "clarify" it. Taken together, these things make one tremble at the thought of venturing into dusty manuscripts and decrepit libraries to extricate their treasures. As Arjun tells Krishna in the Gita, when the war is just about to commence, the very thought of it "makes the limbs droop, the mouth dry, the body tremor, the hair stand on end, the bow slip from one's hand, and the skin burn intensely. I am unable, too, to stand up; and my mind whirls around".

But it is the fourth set of problems that is the most serious; the problems that have been caused by all those efforts to "run ourselves up", allowing romance to cloud our judgment; refusing to be satisfied even with superb drama - insisting that we must have cheap melodrama as well.

Despite all that talk about the ancient Hindus having discovered or invented thousands of years ago the things that the rest of the world is only now waking up to, despite the picturesque characterisation that one finds in folklore about the grand palaces and forts of ancient India, the fact is that even the grandest palace or fort described or hinted at anywhere in the Rg Veda was an altogether modest affair.

What we need to do to get our feet back on the ground is to take a cue from Vishwakarma who, in the Markandeya Purana, is found telling the sun that the latter's wife has been "practising the most ardent austerities in the forest on account of thy too glorious form - if it please thee, my lord, I will restrain thy beloved form, O lord of heaven". So, singing his praises all the while, and keeping him entertained with divine music and the dancing of "the choicest among the apsaras", they pared away fifteen parts of the sun's glory; with the prayer "may thy glory become endurable to created beings, thou who causest created beings to exist" (Sec. 106-8).

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : So near and yet so far-I
Next     : No sound of bangles