The Vedas form the foundation of our religion. When it is said that the Vedas are the emanations of the breath of Brahma (the creator), it is to be understood that the Vedas constitute both essential and sustaining knowledge, as vital as the breath for life. As Vedas are the most sacred book of Hinduism and perhaps, the most controversial. There is no agreement on the nature and purpose of the texts, their date or the origin of the people who composed them. The controversies began almost as soon as the Vedas were translated and became known in the West. There are certain disinformation concerning the Vedic religion. This disinformation has led to many misconceptions. Vedas has been distorted and have created prejudices for their benefits while translating it.

Alain Danielou, considered to be an expert on Shaivism acted as a bridge between India and the western world and was generally seen as a great scholar of Hinduism. Danielou maintains that the original Vedas were an oral Dravidian tradition, which was reshaped by the Aryans and later put down in Sanskrit. Danielou concerns the theory of categorizing, Lord Shiva as a non-Aryan god. According to him, Shiva was a pre-Aryan God and Shaivism, a pre-Aryan religion, whose elements were gradually incorporated by Vedic Aryans. In his book Shiva and the Primordial Tradition (translated by Jean Louis Gabin, Danielou & Gabin, Shiva and the Primordial Tradition), he says,

“Since prehistoric times, India has known two great religious traditions. The first, Shaivism, is a nature religion, which seeks to perceive the divine in its works and to become part of them. The second is Jainism, a humanistic religion, dealing essentially with ethical and social values. Aryan Vedism gradually incorporated the concepts of these two ancient traditions, at many contradictory levels, resulting in what is now known as Hinduism, whereas Shaivism and Jainism as such have continued down to our own times in parallel with Hinduized Vedism.”

However, his guru Swami KarpAtri Ji rejects this theory pointing to the importance of Shiva Rudra in the Vedas.

In ‘LingopAsana Rahasya in The Linga and the great Goddess, (p.113)’, it says, “Shiva is frequently claimed to be non-Aryan. However, in the Vedas, Shiva- Rudra has been given an important stature. In this way, the eternal and of non-human origin (Apaurusheya) Vedas, Puranas, Tantras and the stories concerning them have proved the reality of Shiva having the nature of ultimate lordship (Parameshvaratava), peacefulness(Shantatva) and the all-praised (sarvapujyattava); so what is the basis to say that the worship of Shiva was taken from the non Aryans? What is the value of such baseless talk?”

Alain Danielou finds lineage between the Vedic religion and the Persian religion (Zarathustra), as well as the Greek Gods. He seems to imply that the Vedic religion may have sprung from the Zoroastrian creed. Zoroaster (died 553 B.C.) (his devotees say he lived a thousand years earlier), a little before the occupation of the Indus by Cyrus (533 B.C.), had reformed the Persian religion (which was close to Vedic polytheism) and adopted the Jaina theory of transmigration and retribution for actions after death (but Zoroaster's theology is theistic, and dualistic, and like Judaism and Islam sees no merit in celibacy). Xenophanes, a Greek from Asia Minor, (c. 540 B.C.), opposed polytheism and anthropomorphism. Alain Danielou puts down all Vedic symbols as purely physical. Finally, he sees the Rig Veda as “only a remarkable document on the mode of life, society and history of the Aryans. (Histoire de I’Inde,page 62)”

The missionaries said in the Vedas “the root of the evil”, the source of paganism and went systematically about belittling it. The Jesuit, in their dialectical cleverness, brought it down to a set of pagan offerings without great importance. The first Jesuit to name the Vedas is Jacome Fenicio, who had been in India since 1584, for the most part in Cochin and Calicut. In 1603 Fenicio reports writing a manual of Hindu mythology, in which he mentions that he has copied three hundred verses critical of idolatry from a text in Malayalam ascribed to Pakkanar. Texts of this sort held an obvious appeal for missionaries—a century after Fenicio, the Protestant Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg was to seize on texts like Tirumantiram and Civavakkiyam because of their opposition to image worship. Some of Pakkanar’s verses are included in Fenicio’s Livro da Seita dos Indios Orientais, probably completed in 1609. Here Fenicio also mentions and names the four Vedas in connection with the mythology of Brahma, but he does not otherwise show any knowledge of Vedic sources. Fenicio writes that the four laws, “irea, ueressa, samam, edaruna,” came from the four heads of Brahma, but as Isvara cut off one head, the Brahmins lack the fourth law, which is the one “pertaining to God.” It may have thus have been from Fenicio that his more famous colleague, Roberto Nobili, first heard the idea that one of the Vedas was lost.

Henceforth, this theory was perpetuated by most Western historians, who not only stripped the Vedas of any spiritual value, but actually post-dated them to approximately 1500 to 1000 years BC. It is very unfortunate that these theories have been taken up blindly and without trying to ascertain their truth.

Max Muller says Vedas as “that it is full of childish, silly, even monstrous conceptions, that it is tedious, low, commonplace, that it represents human nature on a low level of selfishness and worldliness and that only here and there are a few rare sentiments and that come from the depths of the soul.” In 1881 he translated the first edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, wherein he wrote in the preface:

“The bridge of thoughts and sighs that spans the whole history of the Aryan world has its first arch in the Veda, its last in Kant’s Critique. … While in the Veda we may study the childhood, we may study in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason the perfect manhood of the Aryan mind. … The materials are now accessible, and the English-speaking race, the race of the future, will have in Kant’s Critique another Aryan heirloom, as precious as the Veda—a work that may be criticized, but can never be ignored.”

This narrative turned into Racist Theory with a whole new propaganda fed by the East India Company with a huge contribution from another celebrated Indologist ‘Thomas Babington Macaulay’, whose writings had an enormous negative impact on the history of India and its people.  Mueller was unable to erase the false narrative which was being accepted as fact as more and more scholars wove more outlandish theories, wrote highly illogical research papers to feed the selfish agenda of the colonial rulers. Max Muller wrote to his wife that he has been asked to bring out defects in the Vedas so that people will no longer have faith in it, so that the Christian Missionaries could counter and convert the Indian.

All Religions lead to ‘Perfection’: The Vedas or any scripture of any religion, are trying to place before us that knowledge which is beyond sense-perception and our limited intellect and experience. The only option for the time being is to proceed, accepting the Vedanta or our respective scripture, as a valid authority by themselves, and able to reveal that wisdom, that cannot be revealed by any other proof, other than by ourselves experiencing it following righteous conduct, prayers, meditation as per our respective religious faith. Our British sepoys, rather, our Indian Historians still parrot the disinformation without any archaeological evidence to support their theories. Its high time that such propagated ideologies should be thrown out and Vedas should be understood in a spiritual and not in a historical sense.

Sources:

1. The Vedas, Sri Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, Bhavan’s Book University

2. In Defence of a Billion Hindus, Francois Gautier

3. The Vedas - An Introduction to Hinduism’s Sacred Texts by Roshen Dalal

Image provided by the author.