THE VEDIC PEOPLE
Their History and Geography
Rajesh Kochhar
Orient Longman, Hyderabad
2000, Paperback, 259 pp
ISBN 81 250 1080 7
IRs 275
By Rhoderick Chalmers
The search for origins lies at the heart of many current debates. In India, claims and counter-claims about nativeness have come to symbolise major political faultlines and the histories of peoples have been subjected to intensified scrutiny. Gradually, such historical probings have been extended further into the past, to the extent that the prehistory of the major South Asian population groups is now inextricably intertwined with the political status of current communities. Amidst concerns for demonstrating enduring historicity and asserting age-old claims to belonging, the word 'Vedic' has acquired an ever more talismanic status.
Writing in English on Vedic traditions used to be a dusty corner of textual scholarship peopled by some of the more obscurantist Orientalists and characterised by debates that could hardly be translated into a popular format. Now, however, Vedic studies has been reinvented and reinvigorated as a field replete with a rash of new research institutes and vocal scholars and commentators divided by their sharply polarised motivations and methodologies. To publish today on the subject of the hymns and rituals of an ancient, migratory branch of the Indo-European family is to enter into one of the most testing and politicised of academic arenas. In such a context, the unpleasant controversy that arose earlier this year with the appointment of Professor Romila Thapar as the first holder of the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress in Washington DC was perhaps only to have been expected. The petitions against her selection and counter-petitions defending her academic integrity illustrate only too tellingly that the ancient history of India is an area as controversial as any contemporary topic. Or rather, that India's ancient history is a contemporary topic; that the chronological distance of the subject material is no bar to its ability to whip up passions.
With The Vedic People, one of India's most distinguished scientists has decided to navigate a path through this tricky terrain in a work designed to be accessible to the general readership. Rajesh Kochhar is by profession an astrophysicist but his interests extend to science policy, the sociology of science, and ancient history. And the unmistakable subtext of his title is the quest to uncover the origins of the Vedic people. In short, where did they come from? Or, in more provocative terms, how 'Indian' were the Vedic people? For a non-specialist to venture into the thick of controversies which are shaped by present-day beliefs and whose roots must be sought in a corpus of highly specialised literature is a bold undertaking. So how does Kochhar fare in his exploration and what does he have to tell us of Vedic history?