Origin of Vedas

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This book is primarily about the Rgveda, the avowed source text of all Hindu religious texts. It is a collection of 1028 mostly unrelated hymns. The language in which it is composed is known as ‘Vedic’, from which Sanskrit is believed to have evolved later. About a fifth of the poems are prayers addressed to what could be ‘Nature Gods’. Others cover a motley of subjects. About fifteen of these hymns relates to cosmogony, but differing in essentials.

Vedic clearly belongs to the Indo-European language family. Apart from many cognate words that are common in all these languages, many of the stories mentioned in the Rgveda have a strong resemblance to mythologies in the other languages of the family; not just to the Zoroastrian ones, but also to those of Greek, Celtic, Nordic, Slavic, Hittite and others. Origin of Vedas also discusses a wide range of issues related to the origin and expansion of the Indo-European language family.

The author has managed to collect together a lot of information about the Rgveda; some of which most would not have heard about earlier. Those interested in these may go through chapter 4 and 9.

I had started writing this as brief notes, mainly for my own reference, as I tend to forget what I read. The materials and data for it were collected from various sources; various internet pages as well as written texts during the past few years. In the course of time, the notes became unmanageable as they were too many. It was then that I began to write it in the present form. It was not meant for anybody else when I started it. This may have resulted in some inconsistencies and repetitions that escaped my editing. As the sources are varied, it is possible that some of the information may be outdated, contested or even of doubtful authority. Thus, in case anybody happens to read this, the contents should be treated only as a source of preliminary reading on the subject. This is not a seminal or scholarly work, but something for the laymen and laywomen.

I am also not able to acknowledge the sources of some of the information and data I have included here, as I did not make a note of it at the time I read it. I hope these are not significant, as these should be mostly bits and pieces I picked up in casual readings. In any case, I have no claim of deep scholarship in the subject, or rather subjects, I have dealt with in this book and will have no hesitation in admitting it, if it turns out that some of these bits and pieces had appeared in some other document earlier. Besides, my intention in undertaking this work is only to present facts and data and their different interpretations already in the public domain in a consolidated manner; and not to attempt the development of new interpretations or a new model on my own.

Even though I have obtained the information contained in this book from various sources, this is not a 'cut and paste' job. The language is mostly my own, except where I have quoted the text, and I have arrived at the final conclusion on my own. There has been no intentional plagiarizing of ideas, language or expressions. Similarities observed, if any, should be chance correspondences.

This book is primarily about the 'Origin of Vedas'; or more particularly 'The Rgveda'; the language in which it was composed; the people who composed it; and the chronology of their arrival in North-west India in prehistoric times. Since 'Vedic language'; the language in which 'Vedas' has been composed, is clearly an Indo-European Language, I have tried to go into various theories regarding the origin and expansion of Indo-European Languages also. Finally, I have also discussed the structure and contents of Rgveda in the last two chapters, as it could be of help in appreciating in the proper context some of the issues I have discussed in this book.

The origin and expansion of Indo-European Languages in the pre-historic past is a deeply mysterious and interesting subject. Indo European languages are spoken by almost half the humanity now and the geographical spread of these languages virtually covers the earth. This is so unlike all other known language families as all these, more or less, have remained within their limited geographical areas. The circumstances and dynamics of the spread and enormous expansion of Indo-European Languages in Eurasia in pre-historic times is not quite clear at present. We do have many theories, but all of them have too many weak points and leave too many questions unanswered. An enormous number of scholarly works on the subject have appeared in the past 150 years, each of which is in disagreement with others in respect of various aspects of the problem. Almost every aspect of it is controversial.

Until recently all related theories were essentially based on linguistics. But linguistics cannot determine chronology or dates of phases of language evolution it is inquiring into. It can at best arrive at a comparative order. Attempts have been made to resolve this by linking archaeological discoveries with historical linguistics. But then archaeology cannot determine the language spoken by the people who produced the artefacts recovered by it unless a piece of writing from that period that we can read is also recovered from the same stratigraphic context. There is nothing that really can connect archaeological finds other than actual writing to languages except subjective inferences, as bones and pots found in archaeological digs do not talk. Here we are inquiring into patterns of human migrations almost a millennium before writing was invented anywhere.

From the turn of the century, we began getting results from Archaeogenetics based on Y-DNA mutations, which can throw light on ancient migrations. With improving techniques for whole-genome sequencing using next-generation sequencing (NGS) methods, it is now possible to extract similar information from autosomes also in a short time at low cost. Further, during the past decade techniques to extract DNA data from biological remains of long-dead life forms have been developed. These techniques are revolutionising our understanding of prehistory, as ancient population migrations can be reconstructed far more clearly than before. Though the methods of archaeogenetics seem to be promising, it has not been able to resolve the issue emphatically, as the pattern of the DNA mutations are found to be extremely complex, giving room for different, often mutually contradictory interpretations. Also, data sets of ancient DNA available for study from different locations at present are so limited that it may not be enough to arrive at an emphatic generalised conclusion. Besides, a-DNA also has the same limitation as archaeology; it cannot tell us the language of ancient people whose DNA is extracted and analysed.

Part of the difficulty in unravelling the mystery arises from the fact that all the Indo European language forms in use during the initial stages of the evolution of the language group have become extinct now. The earliest attestation of an Indo-European language is from the end of the third millennium BCE. By then not only the original Proto Indo-European dialect, but also its direct proto daughter dialects had undergone so much transformations and evolution in their syntax, semantics and phonetics, that these original dialects had probably become unrecognisable from their historical known forms or had become incomprehensible by speakers of the first attested forms of the language family. We now depend on forms of these dialects, reconstructed using tools of historical linguistics. These reconstructed forms are used to build the tree of language families and the order of its different nodes, apart from the syntax, semantics and phonetics of the extinct dialect forms. Models of various related linguistic theories are largely based on reconstructed proto-languages. Thus the reliability of these reconstructed forms is of crucial importance. But it is not clear how reliable these are. We could be certain about these reconstructed forms only if we have clear empirical evidence like a written text from that period, as the reconstruction of unknown proto-languages is inherently subjective. The existence of these proto-languages, in the form they are reconstructed, is at best conjectural, as there is no direct or even indirect empirical evidence for their actual existence. Asserting that the reconstructed model language is the only one possible will be misplaced confidence, given the uncertainties inherent in the available tools. As one author said, these conjectures will be inadmissible in any court of law.

**Contents and Sample Pages**