After the Vedas
The book is complete in a manner of speaking but how can we end it and do justice to the topic unless we place it in a wider perspective? Several worthy endings may be considered. A natural end might consist in the story of what happened to the Vedas after the Vedas—the ‘Destiny of the Veda in India’ as Louis Renou called it in a memorable study. Renou’s ‘Destiny’ was supplemented with an article on inscriptions, but it could be further improved and should be updated. Its orientation is exclusively textual. It does not mention, for example, the Vedic revivals of the dynasties of the Gupta (fourth–fifth century CE), Chola (ninth–eleventh century CE) and Vijayanagar (fourteenth–fifteenth century CE)
Much is now known about the arrival of Vedism in South India. T.P. Mahadevan distinguishes two waves. The first is represent by pūrvaśikhā brahmans with their fronted top-knots. They are well established in the Tamil country by the Sangam period, thus plausibly departing from the core areas of Vedic culture by circa 100 BCE. The second are aparaśikhā brahmans with their top-knots towards the back of their heads, making a ponytail. They arrived during the Pallava and Chola periods, from the fifth century CE. These periods are of special interest because they carried traces of Vedic to South-east Asia, a large topic that includes the wanderings of brahmans and so-called brahmans and is only beginning to be explored in depth.
Even if Renou’s work had dealt with earlier revivals, it could not have mentioned more recent ones, especially in Kerala. These and other contemporary developments have been studied by Harold F. Arnold, C.G. Kashikar, David M. Knipe, T.P. Mahadevan, Asko Parpola, V. Raghavan, Frederik Smith, Michael Witzel and myself.
I have looked for another appropriate challenge and found it in Buddhism, an immense and immensely specialized area outside my field of expertise, like many others that I have touched, but altogether fitting. Buddhism is in some respects closer to the Vedas than some of the later developments in Indic thought and religion. Before its spread beyond the borders, it was part of the same civilization.