THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE
VEDAS
Being Also a New Key
to the Interpretation of
Many Vedic Texts and Legends
By
Lokamanya Bâl
Gangâdhar Tilak
The proprietor of the Kesari and the Mahratta newspapers,
The author of the Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas,
The Gita Rahasya (a Book on Hindu Philosophy) etc., etc.
Publishers
Messrs. TILAK BROS
Gaikwar Wada
1903
Balawant
Gaṅgādhar Ṭiḷak (July 23,
1856 - August 1,
1920), was an Indian nationalist, social reformer and freedom fighter
who was the first popular leader of the Indian Independence Movement and is known
as "Father of the Indian unrest." Tilak sparked the fire for complete
independence in Indian consciousness, and is considered the father of Hindu nationalism
as well.
“Self
Rule is our birthright, and We shall have it!”
This famous quote of his is very
popular and well-remembered in India even today. Reverently addressed as Lokmanya (meaning "Beloved of the
people" or "Revered by the world"), Tilak was a scholar of Indian history,
Sanskrit,
Hinduism,
mathematics
and astronomy.
He was born on in a village chikhali,
near Ratnagiri,
Maharashtra,
into a middle class Chitpavan Brahmin family. Tilak had a divisive philosphy. He
was among India's first generation of youth to receive a modern, college
education. After graduation, Tilak began teaching mathematics in a private
school in Pune
and later became a journalist. He became a strong critic of the Western
education system, feeling it demeaning to Indian students and disrespectful to
India's heritage. He organized the Deccan Education Society to improve the
quality of education for India's youth. He taught Mathematics
at Fergusson College in Pune. Tilak founded the Marathi
daily Kesari (Lion) which fast became a popular reading for the common
people of India.
Tilak strongly criticized the government for its brutality in suppression of
free expression, especially in face of protests against the division of Bengal in 1905, and
for denigrating India's culture, its people and heritage. He demanded the
British immediately give the right to self-government to India's people.
Tilak joined the Indian National Congress in the 1890s, but soon
fell into opposition of its liberal-moderate attitude towards the fight for
self-government.In 1891 Tilak opposed the Age of Consent bill introduced after
the death of a child bride from sexual injuries. The act raised the
marriageable age of a child bride from 10 to 12 which was already 16 in Britain
since 1885. This was one of the first significant reforms introduced by the
British since Indian rebellion of 1857. The Congress and
other liberals whole-heartedly supported it but Tilak raised a battle-cry
terming it as 'Interference in Hindu Religion'. Since then he was seen as a
hard-core Hindu nationalist. When in 1897 bubonic plague spread from Bombay to
Pune the Government became jittery and Assistant Collector of Pune, Mr. Rand
and his associates, employed extremely severe and brutal methods to stop the
spread of the disease by destroying even 'clean homes'. Even people who were
not infected were carried away and in some cases, the carriers even looted
property of the affected people. When the authorities turned a blind eye to all
these excesses, furious Tilak took up people's cause by publishing inflammatory
articles in his paper Kesari, quoting Hindu Scripture Bhagwat Gita that no
blame could be attached to anyone who killed an oppressor without any thought of
reward. Following this, on 27 June, Rand and his assistant were killed. Tilak
was charged with incitement to murder and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment.
When he emerged from prison he had become a national hero and adopted a new
slogan 'Swaraj(Self-Rule)is my birth right and I will have it'.
Tilak opposed the moderate views of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and was supported by
fellow Indian nationalists Bipin Chandra Pal
in Bengal
and Lala Lajpat Rai in Punjab.
They were referred to as the Lal-Bal-Pal triumvirate. In 1907,the annual session of the
Congress Party was held at Surat(Gujrat). Trouble broke out between the
moderate and the extremist factions of the party over the selection of the new
president of the Congress and the party split into the Garam Dal
(Extremists), led by Tilak, Pal and Lajpat Rai, and the Naram Dal
(Moderates). Tilak as well as Gopal Krishna Gokhale regarded this as a
'catastrophe' for the national movement and Tilak did his best to avoid it. But
it was too late and older moderates were glad get rid of the troublemakers(extremists).
H.A.Wadya, one of the closest associate of Sir Pherozshah Mehta, wrote ' The
union of these men with the Congress is the union of a diseased limb to a
healthy body and the only remedy is surgical severence '.
On 30 April 1908 two Bengali youths,
Prafulla Chaki and Kudiram Bose, threw a bomb on a carriage at Muzzafurpur in
order to kill a District Judge Douglass Kenford but erroneously killed some
women travelling in it. While Chaki committed suicide when caught, Bose was
tried and hanged. British papers screamed for vengeance and their shrill cries
became even more insistent when Police raided and found a cache of arms at
Calcutta. But Tilak in his paper Kesari defended the revolutionaries and called
for immediate Swaraj or Self-rule. The Government swiftly arrested him for
sedition. He asked a young Muhammad Ali Jinnah to represent him. But the
British judge convicted him and he was imprisoned from 1908 to 1914 in Mandalay,
Burma.
Upon his release, Tilak re-united with
his fellow nationalists and re-joined the Indian National Congress in 1916. He
also helped found the All India Home Rule League in 1916-18 with
Annie Besant
and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.
Tilak, who started his political life
as a Maratha Protagonist, during his later part of life progressed into a fine
nationalist after his close association with Bengal nationalists following the
partition of Bengal. When asked in Calcutta whether he envisioned a Maratha
type of government for Free India, Tilak replied that the Maratha dominated
Governments of 16th and 17th centuries were outmoded in 20th century and he
wanted a genuine federal system for Free India where every religion and race
were equal partners. Only such a form of Government would be able to safe-guard
India's freedom he added
Tilak was a critic of Mahatma Gandhi's
strategy of non-violent, civil disobedience. Although once considered an
extremist revolutionary, in his later years Tilak had considerably mellowed. He
favored political dialogue and discussions as a more effective way to obtain
political freedom for India. His writings on Indian culture, history and Hinduism
spread a sense of heritage and pride amongst Indians for India's ancient
civilization and glory as a nation. Some consider Tilak as the spiritual and
political leader of Mahatma Gandhi. But Gandhi himself considered Gopal Krishna Gokhale, a contemporary of Tilak,
as his political mentor. When Tilak died in 1920, Gandhi paid his respects at
his cremation in Bombay,
along with 200,000 people. Gandhi called Tilak "The Maker of Modern
India". Tilak is also today considered the father of Hindu Nationalism.
He was the idol of Indian revolutionary Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who penned the
political doctrine of Hindutva.
Later, in 1903, he wrote the much more
speculative Arctic Home in the Vedas. In it he argued that the Vedas could only have been
composed in the Arctics, and the Aryan
bards brought them south after the onset of the last Ice age.
Tilak also authored 'Geetarahasya' -
the analysis of 'Karmayoga' in the Bhagavadgita,
which is known to be gist of the Vedas
and the Upanishads.
Other collections of his writings
include:
- The Hindu
philosophy of life, ethics and religion (published in 1887).
- Vedic
chronology and vedanga jyotisha.
- Letters of
Lokamanya Tilak, edited by M. D. Vidwans.
- Selected
documents of Lokamanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak, 1880-1920, edited by Ravindra
Kumar.
- Trial of
Tilak.
PREFACE
The present volume is a sequel to my
Orion or Researches into the Antiquity of
the Vedas, published in 1893. The estimate of Vedic antiquity then
generally current amongst Vedic scholars was based on the assignment of
arbitrary period of time to the different strata into which the Vedic
literature is divided; and it was believed that the oldest of these strata
could not, at the best, be older than 2400 B.C. In my Orion, however, I tried to show that all such estimates, besides
being too modest, were vague and uncertain, and that the astronomical
statements found in the Vedic literature supplied us with far more reliable
data for correctly ascertaining the ages of the different periods of Vedic
literature. These astronomical statements, it was further shown, unmistakably
pointed out that the Vernal equinox was in the constellation of Mṛiga or Orion (about 4500 B.C.)
during the period of the Vedic hymns, and that it had receded to the
constellation ofthe Kṛittikâs, or the Pleiades (about 2500 B.C.) in the days of
the Brâhmaṇas. Naturally enough these results were, at first, received
by scholars in a skeptical spirit. But my position was strengthened when it was
found that Dr. Jacobi, of Bonn, had independently arrived at the same
conclusion, and, soon after, scholars like Prof. Bloomfield, M. Barth, the late
Dr. Bulher and others, more or less freely, acknowledged the force of my
arguments. Dr. Thibaut, the late Dr. Whitney and a few others were, however, of
opinion that the evidence adduced by me was not conclusive. But the subsequent
discovery, by my friend the late Mr. S. B. Dixit, of a passage in the
Shatapatha Brâhmaṇa, plainly stating that the Kṛittikâs never swerved, in those
days, from the due east i.e., the
Vernal equinox, has served to dispel all lingering doubts regarding the age of
the Brâhmaṇas; while another Indian astronomer, Mr. V. B. Ketkar, in a
recent number of the Journal of the
Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, has mathematically worked out the
statement in the Taittirîya Brâhmaṇa (III, 1, 1, 5), that Bṛihaspati, or the planet Jupiter, was
first discovered when confronting or nearly occulting the star Tiṣhya, and shown that the observation
was possible only at about 4650 B.C., thereby remarkably confirming my estimate
of the oldest period of Vedic literature. After this, the high antiquity of the
oldest Vedic period may, I think, be now taken as fairly established.
But if the age of the oldest Vedic
period was thus carried back to 4500 B.C., one was still tempted to ask whether
we had, in that limit, reached the Ultima
Thule of the Aryan antiquity. For, as stated by Prof. Bloomfield, while
noticing my Orion in his address on
the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of John Hopkin’s University, “the
language and literature of the Vedas is, by no means, so primitive as to place
with it the real beginnings of Aryan life.” “These in all probability and in
all due moderation,” he rightly observed, “reach back several thousands of
years more,” and it was, he said, therefore “needless to point out that this
curtain, which seems to shut off our vision at 4500 B.C., may prove in the end
a veil of thin gauze.” I myself held the same view, and much of my spare time
during the last ten years has been devoted to the search of evidence which
would lift up this curtain and reveal to us the long vista of primitive Aryan
antiquity. How I first worked on the lines followed up in Orion, how in the light of latest researches in geology and.
archeology bearing on the primitive history of man, I was gradually led to a
different line of search, and finally how the conclusion, that the ancestors of
the Vedic Ṛiṣhis lived in an Arctic home in inter-Glacial times, was
forced on me by the slowly accumulating mass of Vedic and Avestic evidence, is
fully narrated in the book, and need not, therefore, be repeated in this place.
I desire, however, to take this opportunity of gratefully acknowledging the
generous sympathy shown to me at a critical time by that venerable scholar
Prof. F. Max Müller, whose recent death was mourned as a personal loss by his
numerous admirers throughout India. This is not the place where we may, with
propriety, discuss the merits of the policy adopted by the Bombay Government in
1897 Suffice it to say that in order to put down certain public excitement,
caused by its own famine and plague policy, the Government of the day deemed it
prudent to prosecute some Vernacular papers in the province, and prominently
amongst them the Kesari, edited by
me, for writings which were held to be seditious, and I was awarded eighteen
months’ rigorous imprisonment. But political offenders in India are not treated
better than ordinary convicts, and had it not been for the sympathy and
interest taken by Prof. Max Müller, who knew me only as the author of Orion, and other friends, I should have
been deprived of the pleasure,— then the only pleasure, — of following up my
studies in these days. Prof. Max Müller was kind enough to send me a copy of
his second edition of the Ṛig-Veda, and the Government was
pleased to allow me the use of these and other books, and also of light to read
for a few hours at night. Some of the passages from the Ṛig-Veda, quoted in support, of the
Arctic theory in the following pages, were collected during such leisure as I
could get in these times. It was mainly through the efforts of Prof. Max Müller,
backed by the whole. Indian press, that I was released after twelve months; and
in the very first letter I wrote to Prof. Max Müller after my release, I
thanked him sincerely for his disinterested kindness, and also gave him a brief
summary of my new theory regarding the primitive Aryan home as disclosed by
Vedic evidence. It was, of course, not to be expected that a scholar, who had
worked all his life on a different line, would accept the new view at once, and
that too on reading a bare outline off the evidence in its support. Still it
was encouraging to hear from him that though the interpretations of Vedic
passages proposed by me were probable, yet my theory appeared to be in conflict
with the established geological facts. I wrote in reply that I had already
examined the question from that stand-point, and expected soon to place before
him the whole evidence in support of my view. But, unfortunately I have been deprived of this pleasure by his
deeply mourned death which occurred soon after.
The first manuscript of the book was written at the end of
1898, and since then I have had the advantage of discussing the question with
many scholars in
People are hardly aware of the benefit which every branch of science derives from the free and generous exchange of ideas, particularly in our Universities, where every body may avail himself of the advise and help of his colleagues, whether they warn him against yet impossible theories, or call his attention to a book or an article, where the very point, that interests him, has been fully worked out and settled once for all.” But alas! It is not given to us to move in an atmosphere like this, and small wonder if Indian students are not found to go beyond the stage of passing the examinations. There is not a single institution in India, nor, despite the University Commission, can we hope to have any before long, where one can get all up-to-date information on any desired subject, so easily obtainable at a seat of learning in the West; and in its absence the only course open to a person, investigating a particular subject, is, in the words of the same learned sch