Nahta Bandhu Abhinandan Granth

Author(s): Dashrath Sharma
Publisher: Agarchand Nahta Abhinandan Granth Prakashan Samiti

Page 595

Even Winternitz is not free from the theological bias, when he upholds the sublimity of the poetry of the Old Testament and fails to allude to the sublimity of the Bhagavadgitā or the Nāsa diya-sūkta, 1 the latter being, in contrast, adjudged by no less a historian than Will Durant as the loftiest poem, and which Zenaide A. Ragozin finds "reaching the uttermost bounds of philosophical abstractions .... never obscure, unless to the absolutely uninitiated.”
As a net result of this combined and organized conspiracy of the past few generations of European Indologists in the direction of undermining the supreme sanctity of fundamental Scriptures of ancient Indian religion, the hymns of the Rgveda are nowadays almost readily accepted by educated Indians and most of the modern Sanskrit scholars to be nothing more than the sacrificial composition of a primitive and still barbarous race, written around a system of ceremonial and propitiatory rites, addressed to personified Powers of Nature and replete with a confused mass of half-formed myths and crude astronomical allegories yet in making; and that it is in the later hymns that the first appearance of deeper psychological and moral ideas are perceived, which, some think, are borrowed from the hostile Dravidians, identified with "robbers" and "Veda-haters" freely cursed in the hymns themselves. 4
As has been very succinctly put by Shri T. V. Kapali Sastry, Europe, inspite of the scrupulous care associated with all scholarly labours that it brought to bear upon its Vedic studies, could not escape the limitations of its temperamental mould which is in fact diametrically opposed to the Indian spirit; it surmounted the difficulties in understanding the texts by partly drawing upon conjectures and; partly on certain inexact sciences, very often conjectural-comparative philology comparative mythology or comparative religion.5 Indian students and seekers of knowledge of the Vedas especially in the last century followed the lines of European scholarship and swallowed as gospel-truth European opinion because it had gained in prestige by its association in their minds with European science and culture which is a different matter altogether, estimable indeed, based as they are on different firmer grounds. Now, there is no reason why we should continue to repeat the same song of the nineteenth century Europe, be it the theory of imaginary migration of imaginary Indo-European race, the fancifully "reconstructed" IndoEuropean language, the imaginary chronology and consequent relative contemporaneity of the Rgveda in relation to Avesta and Ancient Greek of Homer, the pre
1. Dr. M. Winternitz, History of Indian Literature. Vol. I, p. 79. 2. Will Durant, Story of Civilization, p. 409. 3. Vedic India, 1195, pp. 426-427. 4. Shri Aurobindo, op. cit., p. 3. 5. T. V. Kapali Sastry, Lights on the Veda, Pondichery, 1961, p. 10. 6. Ibid., p. 11.
१०६ : अगरचन्द नाहटा अभिनन्दन-ग्रन्थ