A friend sent me the following query:
Please see the attachment and there is a link in the attachment pointing to Rigveda, a PDF file. I also found 18 references to Rakshasas in Rigveda, and you can find them in the attachment. I wonder who are raksasas? Are they our ancestors who fought against the invading Aryans? The blood flowing in our veins belong to raksasas? Time has come to reread our history. Rigveda is the first Aryan Sanskrit book and the hyms filled with how they drank 'Soma' and destroyed raksasas. The Avestan literature(old Iranian) said the Rakshasa (Asura) warriors fought against the Aryan invaders. Deepavali is a celebration Krishana killing Narakasura ( asura) warrior. Are we celebarting the death of our own warriors because history was written by Aryan victors? Reading these hyms gives the impression that Rakshas were the Bagath Singhs of their time. Were they warriors of noble kind?
I sent him the following reply :
I have gone through the attachment and your views on our history. I am no expert on history or Vedas. Hymns could be allegories. If an European who does not understand the nuances of the language may translate it literally and deduce different meaning. It is said that dashavatara is nothing but evolution of man and even many stages of man's life - from the conception to death.
One thing that our history professor told us in the college and school was that Indians or Hindus have not kept a record of their past. However, there have been considerable literature in Sanskrit and in Pali on contemporary affairs of that time. There were visitors from China and from the Arab World.- Huensang, Ibn Batuta etc. Then came the Muslim invaders and their chroniclers.So when the British came there was a fertile field for them and other Europeans to write our history. We read our history written by the Europeans.
Sometime ago I read about the famous book, "Orientalism" by Edward Wadie Said, famous Palestinian author and English professor in the Columbia University, where he argues that the studies of Europeans on the Arab and Islamic people were tinged with their prejudices and had implicit justification for colonialism and imperialism. Much the same could be said about the our own history mostly written by V.A.Smith and others. Now after Independence, many Indians have started writing it from the Indian point of view.
One of the thesis of the British historians was about Aryan invasion of India. This has been disproved by B.B.Lal, DG (Retd), Archaelogical Survey of India, in his paper, Why Perpetuate Myths ? You can read his other paper, Let not the 19th Century paradigm continue to haunt us, a paper he read at the 19th International Conference on South Asian Archaelogy,University of Bologna in July,2-6,2007. This you can access by goggling B.B.Lal.
Hindus or Indians have never been exclusive but inclusive. They believe every one has a right to his belief and the worship.That is why so many deities are in India - village deities and weird customs. One of the English writers, Valentine Chirol says : " The supple and subtle forces of Hinduism had already in prehistoric times welded together the discordant beliefs and customs of a vast variety of races into a comprehensive fabric sufficiently elastic to shelter most of the indigenous populations of India, and suficiently rigid to secure the Aryan Hindu ascendancy." You see two things here - one of appreciation for inclusion and also his prejudice - Aryan Hindu ascendancy. Contrast this with how the Americans and the Spaniards have dealt with Native Americans - most have been exterminated and now some live in small enclaves. Pope when he visited South America apologized for the same.
The quote from Valentine Chirol is from the book, The Hindu View of Life by Dr.S.Radhakrishnana. It is slim book of 105 pages and explains Hinduism in a nut-shell. It is based on his Upton Lectures in 1926 at Manchester College,Oxford.
December 24,2009.
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