PART I
One or Many?
Part I 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. It shows that, contrary to what is often assumed, the Vedas are not one and all of a piece. They were composed on Indic soil, in different parts of North India and Pakistan, over a long period. That also holds for the so-called ‘schools’ of the Veda to which we return in Chapter 4 of Part II. But some features of the Veda do not come from the subcontinent itself. They include language, some mythologies and technologies, ritual altars and the cults of fire and Soma. It turns out to be a large puzzle which consists of many different puzzles, some of them large themselves. Part I puts them together for the first time and a consistent picture of historical development and chronology appears.
In geographical terms, Part I explores ancient links between the northern subcontinent, the Near East, the Indus civilization, Central Asia, South-east Asia and the extreme west of what is now China. It ends with a review of the various itineraries and routes that some ancestors of the Vedic Indians took and that were later taken, but in the opposite direction, by Buddhist pilgrims. India’s openness to other peoples and cultures is nothing special. If we exclude a few isolated pockets, it is a common feature of Asian and European civilizations or what has been called the Old World. The uniqueness of the subcontinent seems to lie in the fact, that some outside influences were imported by a small number of people. The discussion of this issue will continue and an explanation will be given in the section on Rathakāra in Chapter 3 of Part II.