Indian Antiquary Vol 42

SR No.: 032534
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications
Publication Year: 1984
Total Pages: 400
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 16 MB

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MARCH, 1913.] THE MYTH OF THE ARYAN INVASION OF INDIA
tongue than the Vedic speech. This shows that the Vedic tongue came to India as a foreign language, and underwent there a levelling down of its vowels and other alterations. Now, as regards the cults, associated with this language. The soma plant is described in the Vedic mantras as growing on distant hills, like those of Gandhara, and generally procured with some difficulty, and stored in a dried-up form as charas is to-day. In later times, when the centre of the fire cult shifted into the heart of India, the soma plant could not be procured, its identity was forgotten, and substitutes came to be used in its stead. The soma cult flourished in ancient times in Persia. We may thence infer that it found its way into India from without. But once it was introduced, it underwent a great development in this country. The Aryan Rishis appreciated the virtues of soma juice so much that a large part of the Vedic mantras is devoted to its praise; King Soma attained a distinguished position in the Vedic pantheon, and the soma sacrifice became the principal rite of the Brahman. The fire cult, like the soma cult, existed in ancient Persis, but with this difference, that to the Persians fire was so holy that throwing offerings into it would pollute it; so parts of the bodies of slaughtered animals were shown to the fire and thrown aside. As in India the offerings to gods were burnt out in the sacrificial fire, the fire cult underwent a fundamental change in this country.
When the cult changed, there resulted a corresponding and equally profound change in mythology. It is surprising that though the language of the Avesta and that of the Veda are so nearly allied that very often a sentence of the one can be turned into the other by merely making the necessary changes, there is very little in common between Avestan and Vedic mythology. In fact, quite as little of the mythology associated with the ancient Iranian speech as of that with the Indo-Germanic ursprache seems to have reached India. The only god common to the Vedic. Aryas and the races that spoke Indo-Germanic dialects in Europe is Dyaus, and Dyaus is scarcely worth the name of god in the Vedic pantheon, being so little removed from the physical sky. Then, again, Mitra is practically the only god common to the Vedas and the Zend Avesta, and is in both literatures a subordinate person. Indra, the chief god of the Indian Aryas, is a minor demon of the Iranian Aryas. Varuna was unknown in Persia, All other Indian gods are of pure Indian origin, Rudra, Vishnu, Aditi, Maruts, Asvins, Ushas, etc. The very name of the fire god, Agni, is also Indian, the corresponding Persian god being Atar. It is impossible to discuss here how many of the Vedic gods were borrowed from the people of India, and then Aryanised, and how many were evolved on Indian soil from pre-Aryan sources latent in Aryan speech, but the fact is triking that so few Aryan gods came to India along with Aryan speech. From this we see that the language and the cult of the Aryas were borrowed from without, and profoundly altered on Indian soil. If this cultural drift had been accompanied by any appreciable racial drift, if the cult and the language had been brought into India by any considerable body of foreigners, who formed a race by themsleves, and lived apart from the native races, neither the eult nor the language would have undergone such serious alterations as they have, but would have remained relatively pure. Hence the only conclusion that is borne out by the facts that a foreign tongue, the Vedic, and a foreign cult, the fire and soma worship, drifted into India from without, and were adopted by certain tribes, later called Aryas, among whom the cult and the speech developed in new ways, and distinguished the tribes that possessed them from the other tribes of this country.
The comparative study of religion has brought out the fact that the movement of religious thought in early times was not from polytheism to monotheism, but the other way about, from tribial monotheism to inter-tribal polytheism. In his Religion of Egypt, p. 4, Professor Flinders Petrie says: "Wherever we can trace back polytheism to its earliest stages, we find that results from combinations of monotheism." The polytheism of the Vedas is one of the many proofs that the Vedas refer not to the beginning of any onlt, but the eulminating stage of many pre-existing tribal cults, which had coalesced chiefly out of political causes. This is the real explanation of the perplexing henotheism (as Max Müller called it) that runs throughout the Vedio mantras. At the time of the composition of the Vedio hymns, the tribe that worshipped Indra seems to hare acquired predominance over the tribes that worshipped other gods.