The question of the original home of the Aryans and their migrations to India is only part of the problem of their “elusiveness.” Their subsequent assimilation and nativization in India also contributed to this elusive quality. This socio-cultural process can be traced through a study of their gods, rituals, and philosophy. Thus changes in the nature and function of Ṛgvedic gods; the appearance of upstart gods in the late Ṛgvedic period; the elaboration of the soma ritual with elaborate supplementary rituals; the introduction of the new ritual of Agnicayana; the rise of the eschatology of “punarjanma” (rebirth) and “saṁsāra” (eternal return) based on “karma”; and the ideal of “mukti”, or liberation from life, in place of the former ideal of a life of “śaradaḥ śatam” (a hundred autumns) are symptoms of, as well as a witness to, the transformation of the original identity of the Aryans as revealed in the Family Books of the Ṛgveda. This cultural transformation is no less significant than the “Yakṣa praṣṇa” (knotty question) of their original home and their “indubitable” archaeological traces. The book addresses itself to both these questions, and, for that purpose, takes another look at some of the archaeological material and Aryan life and thought as reflected in Vedic literature.

In Aryans, Jews, Brahmins, Dorothy M. Figueira provides a fascinating account of the construction of the Aryan myth and its uses in both India and Europe from the Enlightenment to the twentieth century. The myth concerns a race that inhabits a utopian past and gives rise first to Brahmin Indian culture and then to European culture. In India, notions of the Aryan were used to develop a national identity under colonialism, one that allowed Indian elites to identify with their British rulers. It also allowed non-elites to set up a counter identity critical of their position in the caste system. In Europe, the Aryan myth provided certain thinkers with an origin story that could compete with the Biblical one and could be used to diminish the importance of the West's Jewish heritage. European racial hygienists made much of the myth of a pure Aryan race, and the Nazis later looked at India as a cautionary tale of what could happen if a nation did not remain "pure." As Figueira demonstrates, the history of the Aryan myth is also a history of reading, interpretation, and imaginative construction. Initially, the ideology of the Aryan was imposed upon absent or false texts. Over time, it involved strategies of constructing, evoking, or distorting the canon. Each construction of racial identity was concerned with key issues of reading: canonicity, textual accessibility, interpretive strategies of reading, and ideal readers. The book's cross-cultural investigation demonstrates how identities can be and are created from texts and illuminates an engrossing, often disturbing history that arose from these creations.

This is the fourth volume of the Ancient Pakistan - An Archaeological History. It deals with a number of issues of the Indus Civilization, which are primarily of theoretical importance. The main topics that have been discussed are the social and political organization of the Harappan society, the Harappan religion, the Indus script and language, the beginning and the end of this vast civilization, and the recent attempts in creating some myths around the Indus Civilization. Since this volume is primarily dedicated to the theoretical and the abstract, descriptive material is kept to a minimum.

It has been observed in the previous book titled ‘Origin of Hindu √ The Name’ that the dictum of going, moving forward became the central tenet of a huge number of human beings who essentially were the residents of India. Those people were termed as Hindu. Even when the root of that concept is logically proven, then also a question crops up and remains unanswered. Why did the act of going, moving forward become so important that a large number of people needed to accept it as the guiding principle of their lives? No tangible evidence has been found of any coercive actions on the part of the propagators of that way of life, not even in the folklores or in the legends. The adherence in all probability was voluntary and self-imposed. For that happening, two broad categories of influences may be credited to: physical and/or cerebral. The physical environment of the land in reference was set by the actions and interactions of the geological forces. Cerebral input must have come from some knowledge base. Structured and recorded knowledge base that is unique to India is found in the Vedas and its annotations. The period, during which the geological timeline shows that that land was becoming ready for human inhabitation, was the time around which the trace of the oldest literature of that land may be found. A little later, the world came to know about the existence of a human settlement in that land, which was more splendorous than anything known to the Greeks, who were the most advanced ones in the known world up to that time. This book finds the relationship between the geological formation of the Ganga Plain and the propagation of a new way of life that would be known as ‘Hindu’ religion in later time. It has been established that the word ‘Arya’ is a Sanskrit word that means ‘the son of the Rishi’ and no large human movement that may be termed as invasion, migration etc. needed to be introduced to explain what have happened in that land duri

This work studies how Indian scholars have rejected the idea of an external origin of the Indo-Aryans, by questioning the logic assumptions and methods upon which the theory is based.

The Indian subcontinent was the scene of dramatic upheavals a few thousand years ago. The Northwest region entered an arid phase, and erosion coupled with tectonic events played havoc with river courses. One of them disappeared. Celebrated as -Sarasvati' in the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata, this river was rediscovered in the early nineteenth century through topographic explorations by British officials. Recently, geological and climatological studies have probed its evolution and disappearance, while satellite imagery has traced the river's buried courses and isotope analyses have dated ancient waters still stored under the Thar Desert. In the same Northwest, the subcontinent's first urban society"the Indus civilization"flourished and declined. But it was not watered by the Indus alone: since Aurel Stein's expedition in the 1940s, hundreds of Harappan sites have been identified in the now dry Sarasvati's basin. The rich Harappan legacy in technologies, arts and culture sowed the seeds of Indian civilization as we know it now. Drawing from recent research in a wide range of disciplines, this book discusses differing viewpoints and proposes a harmonious synthesis"a fascinating tale of exploration that brings to life the vital role the -lost river of the Indian desert' played before its waters gurgled to a stop.