The Arctic Home in the Vedas

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The Arctic Home in the Vedas
Book Page.jpg
The title page of the 1925 edition
of The Arctic Home in the Vedas
Author Bal Gangadhar Tilak
CountryIndia
LanguageEnglish
SubjectHistory
Publication date
1903
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages340
ISBN 9781907166341

The Arctic Home in the Vedas by Indian nationalist, teacher and independence activist Bal Gangadhar Tilak is a 1903 book on the origin of the Indo-European peoples , which he in accordance with academic consensus in his time, refers to as Aryans for the totality of his book. [1] Based on his analysis of Vedic hymns, Avestic passages, Vedic chronology and Vedic calendars, Tilak argued that the North Pole was the original home of Aryans during the pre-glacial period, which they left due to climate changes around 8000 B.C., migrating to the Northern parts of Europe and Asia.

Contents

Publication

The book was written at the end of 1898, but was first published in March 1903 in Pune. Tilak cited a book by first Boston University president William F. Warren, Paradise Found or the Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, as having anticipated his ideas.[ citation needed ]

Tilak's Arctic homeland hypothesis

Tilak in his Study Lokmanya.jpg
Tilak in his Study

According to Tilak, writing at the end of the 19th century, the Neolithic Aryan race in Europe cannot be regarded as autochthonous, nor did the European Aryans descend from the Paleolithic man. Hence, the question of the original Aryan home is regarded as unsettled by Tilak.

According to Tilak, the close of the Pliocene and the whole of the Pleistocene period were marked by violent changes of climate bringing on what is called the Glacial and Inter-Glacial epochs:

The Arctic was inhabited by the Aryans. The ending of the Glacial age changed the climate there, and set the Aryan people on a migration to new habitats:

Characteristics of an Arctic home, characterised by a climate different from today's, are clearly recorded in several Vedic hymns and Avestic passages. There are descriptions of the prevailing conditions and of the day-to-day experience, but also recordings of stories told by the earlier generation, sometimes presented as myths. Tilak gives the following chronology of the post-glacial period:

Influence

M. S. Golwalkar, in his 1939 publication We or Our Nationhood Defined , famously stated that "Undoubtedly [...] we – Hindus – have been in undisputed and undisturbed possession of this land for over eight or even ten thousand years before the land was invaded by any foreign race." [2] Golwalkar was inspired by Tilak's The Arctic Home in the Vedas. [3] [note 1] Gowalkar took over the idea of 10,000 years, arguing that the North Pole at that time was located in India. [3] [note 2]

Tilak's ideas influenced Soviet Indologist Natalia R. Guseva [4] and Soviet ethnographer S.V Zharnikova, [5] who argued for a northern Urals Arctic homeland of the Indo-Aryan and Slavic people; [6] their ideas were popularized by Russian nationalists. [7]

Robin Waterfield asserts that the book was influential on the esotericism of the Italian philosopher Julius Evola. [8]

See also

Notes

  1. Carol Schaeffer: "Tilak, dubbed the "father of Indian unrest" for his advocacy of violent tactics against British colonialists and inspiration to later Indian Hindu nationalists". [3]
  2. See also Is our civilisation really 10 millennia old? Or are we simply insecure?; Sanjeev Sabhlok (2013), Not to be outdone by Müller, Tilak proposed that Aryans descended from the north pole. and Golwalkar's most fantastic and absurd attempt to “prove” that the non-existent Aryans were from India.

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References

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