In The Vedic People, well-known astro-physicist Rajesh Kochhar provides answers to some quintessential questions of ancient Indian history. Drawing upon and synthesizing data from a wide variety of fields linguistics and literature, natural history, archaeology, history of technology, geomorphology and astronomy Kochhar presents a bold hypotheses by which he seeks to resolve several paradoxes that have plagued the professional historian and archaeologist alike.

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 Book Deals With Aspects Of Everyday Life Of The Vedic People Seers And The Elite As Well As That Of The Common People Their Housing, Mode Of Production And Occupations, Social Organisation, Education, Food And Drink, Entertainment, Dress And Cosmetics, Etc.

This Is A Remarkable Book. It Untangles The Many Complexities Of The Vedas And Combines Staal S Scholarly Respect For The Texts, With Explanations That Are Lucid And Occasionally Witty. His Insights Are Thoughtful And Perceptive. Romila Thapar In This Unprecedented Guide To The Vedas, Frits Staal, The Celebrated Author Of Agni: The Vedic Ritual Of The Fire Altar And Universals: Studies In Indian Logic And Linguistics Examines Almost Every Aspect Of These Ancient Sources Of Indic Civilisation. Staal Extracts Concrete Information From The Oral Tradition And Archaeology About Vedic People And Their Language, What They Thought And Did, And Where They Went And When. He Provides Essential Information About The Vedas And Includes Selections And Translations. Staal Sheds Light On Mantras And Rituals, That Contributed To What Came To Be Known As Hinduism. Significant Is A Modern Analysis Of What We Can Learn From The Vedas Today: The Original Forms Of The Vedic Sciences, As Well As The Perceptive Wisdom Of The Composers Of The Vedas. The Author Puts Vedic Civilisation In A Global Perspective Through A Wide-Ranging Comparison With Other Indic Philosophies And Religions, Primarily Buddhism For Staal, Originally A Logician, The Voyage Of Discovering The Vedas Is Like Unpeeling An Onion But Without The Certainty Of Reaching An End. Even So, His Book Shows That The Vedas Have A Logic All Their Own. Accessible, Finely-Argued, And With A Wealth Of Information And Insight, Discovering The Vedas Is For Both The Scholar And The Interested Lay Reader.

Hinduism has two major roots. The more familiar is the religion brought to South Asia in the second millennium BCE by speakers of Aryan or Indo-Iranian languages, a branch of the Indo-European language family. Another, more enigmatic, root is the Indus civilization of the third millennium BCE, which left behind exquisitely carved seals and thousands of short inscriptions in a long-forgotten pictographic script. Discovered in the valley of the Indus River in the early 1920s, the Indus civilization had a population estimated at one million people, in more than 1000 settlements, several of which were cities of some 50,000 inhabitants. With an area of nearly a million square kilometers, the Indus civilization was more extensive than the contemporaneous urban cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt. Yet, after almost a century of excavation and research the Indus civilization remains little understood. How might we decipher the Indus inscriptions? What language did the Indus people speak? What deities did they worship? Asko Parpola has spent fifty years researching the roots of Hinduism to answer these fundamental questions, which have been debated with increasing animosity since the rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1980s. In this pioneering book, he traces the archaeological route of the Indo-Iranian languages from the Aryan homeland north of the Black Sea to Central, West, and South Asia. His new ideas on the formation of the Vedic literature and rites and the great Hindu epics hinge on the profound impact that the invention of the horse-drawn chariot had on Indo-Aryan religion. Parpola's comprehensive assessment of the Indus language and religion is based on all available textual, linguistic and archaeological evidence, including West Asian sources and the Indus script. The results affirm cultural and religious continuity to the present day and, among many other things, shed new light on the prehistory of the key Hindu goddess Durga and her Tantric cult.