Versatile Genius

VI. External Interpretation of Veda

It is not our intention in this essay to dismiss the surface or exoteric interpretation of the Veda. A surface reading of the Veda throws immense light on the daily life of the Vedic Aryans and their attitudes to various happenings like growing up, youth, marriage, childbirth, construction of house, old age, death, various callings, etc. The general attitude can be summed up as one of "celebration of life" ³¹. There is no tendency here such as the glorification of poverty which can be seen in some books of Hinduism of later periods. Some scholars view the various yogas such as Jnana Yoga (yoga of knowledge), Karma Yoga (yoga of works), Bhakti Yoga (yoga of devotion), Vibhuti Yoga (yoga of supernatural manifestations), etc., as developments whose basic idea can be traced to several hymns of the four Veda Samhitas, primarily to those of Rig Veda. Bose ³² for instance, has prepared an anthology of Vedas divided according to the various yogas whereas Raimundo Pannikar ³³ has prepared an anthology of the Veda exemplifying it as the celebration of life.

It is easy to declare, as some Western historians of India and their Indian followers have done ^{34 35}, that the Vedic Indians are basically tribes who composed ballads, sang them, fought wars, performed rituals, etc. A deeper investigation reveals that the knowledge possessed by the Vedic Aryans in fields like mathematics is comparable to that possessed by the Greeks at least a milliennium later. For example, both the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Taittereya Samhita indicate the specifications of the altars for performing the fire ritual like Mahavedi, the falcon-shaped altar made of seven and a half "square purushas." These specifications involve the knowledge of geometrical ideas like the theorem of Pythogoras and properties of isosceles trapezoid. Based on an examination of the geometric ideas in the Vedic books Professor Seidenberg ³⁶ proposed recently that the origin of mathematics must be attributed to the Vedic Aryans, not to the Babylonians as done by the great scholar Van der Warden.

However, most books of Indian history have statements such as the following about Vedic Indians ³⁷³⁸: The land of the seven rivers (modern Punjab of India and Pakistan) was originally populated by the dark skinned, flat nosed natives, most probably Dravidians. Aryans who came from North defeated the natives in the battle, massacred them, and drove away the remaining who went south to occupy the land called southern India. Usually the, historians refer to the Rig Veda as their source for this theory and quote occidental Sanskrit scholars as the source for the above scenario. The latter group have made conjectures based on faulty and flimsy evidence and presented them as well-proven hypothesis. The above mentioned conjecture assumes that the gods headed by Indra in the Vedas are the incoming Aryans, the demons or asuras and dasyus as the natives of the soil, the title of Indra as Purandara (destroyer of cities) supposedly indicates the battle between the two groups and finally the dasyus of the Veda are supposed to be the same as Dravidians because the former group is addressed as "Anasika" (or noseless) in the Vedas and the Dravidians supposedly have flat noses. No serious student of the Vedas can make such silly statements. The Vedas repeatedly and explicitly state that the gods and the dasyus are not human beings, but beings on a different plane of consciousness. The word "Anasika" quoted earlier occurs only once in the whole of Rig Veda having more than 10,000 verses. In the particular context of its use, the sage uses the objective "noseless" to indicate the non-human character of the dasyus. The existence of a small tribe even today in Baluchistan, part of Pakistan, whose members speak a language close to the Dravidian group can be more easily explained using Sri Aurobindo's reasoning ³⁹ that the Aryan languages and the so called Dravidian languages like Tamil, Kannada, etc., have a common origin and there is no need to invoke two distinct groups of people in ancient India who fought for real estate.