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Subrat SaurabhAuthor of Kuch Woh PalThis 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.
K S Krishnan
I am from a Kerala Namboodiri family and grew up frequently hearing the Rgveda being chanted in the Kerala style. My father could recite the entire Rgveda from memory effortlessly, as was usual for most Namboodiries of that time. But I always held the view that this kind of rote learning, without understanding a word of it, is wasted effort, and I never had any emotional or ideological attachment to Vedas. In fact, my attitude to these texts was one of a rebel.
Until recently, it was my firm belief that the ‘Aryan invasion’ was a fact of history. It was a series of articles that appeared in ‘The Hindu’ that kindled my interest in the subject. Since then I was an avid reader of anything that dealt with the subject. Gradually, I began to have doubts about the model, particularly its chronology. I am now convinced that the Proto-Vedic language, if it is not autochthonous to South Asia, reached here well back in time and not in the second millennium BCE as proposed by the ‘Aryan invasion theory’chronology.
I had retired from Indian Overseas Bank as a middle-level officer. I live with my wife near Trichur, Kerala.
