Archival Notes
SOME PONDICHERRY SIDELIGHTS
This article does not necessarily reflect the views of the publishers of Sri Aurobindo: Archives and Research. The writer, a member of the staff of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives and Research Library, accepts full responsibility for the contents of the article, which is the result of his own research and his own interpretation. The purpose of the biographical portions of Archival Notes is to present materials dealing with the period of Sri Aurobindo's life covered by the current instalment of Documents in the Life of Sri Aurobindo. The form of presentation selected is a variety of the classic biographical narrative, one that, owing to the nature of this journal, makes rather heavy use of documentary quotations. Any historical narrative must be written from a particular point of view, and, however much the writer may follow the ground rules of objectivity, this point of view must necessarily be subjective. Evaluations, judgments and conclusions, explicit or implicit, must be made at every step. The references given in the notes will enable the reader to turn to the sources and, after study, to form his own conclusions.
The India Interview
In a previous article we mentioned the contact between Sri Aurobindo and the revolutionaries of Pondicherry who published the Tamil newspaper India.1 In that article we spoke in particular of Sri Aurobindo's meeting with Parthasarathi Iyengar, which apparently took place in July 1909. It is also known that Sri Aurobindo gave an interview to a correspondent of India shortly after this. An excerpt from this interview appears in the book On Himself (p. 390). It is published there as though it were an original English text, but in fact it is a retranslation into English of part of the Tamil translation of the interview published in India. The source of this excerpt was an English article by Swami Shuddhananda Bharati that was published in 1947.2 Most of this article consisted of the author's translation and paraphrase of parts of Sri Aurobindo's interview, which the author misdated, saying that it took place "in 1910 January". In fact the text of the interview was published in the issue of India dated 18 September 1909. The newspaper said that the interview itself had taken place "a few days" before this.
Sri Aurobindo seems to have mentioned the India interview a year before Shuddhananda Bharati published his article. In a message dated 24 March 1946, Sri Aurobindo wrote: "In 1910 he [Sri Aurobindo] authorized the publication of his prediction that after a long period of wars, world-wide upheavals and revolutions beginning after four years, India would achieve her freedom."3 If the prediction Sri Aurobindo referred to here was indeed the one contained in the
1 A & R ll (1987): 218-20.
2 Shuddhananda Bharati. "A Prophecy Recalled". Sunday Times, 17 August 1947.
3 On Himself 400.
India interview (as the editors of On Himself have justifiably assumed), Sri Aurobindo's dating of it was off by a few months.
The name of the correspondent who spoke to Sri Aurobindo is not known. It apparently was not Parthasarathi Iyengar. One of Sri Aurobindo's early companions at Pondicherry once wrote of having met a brother-in-law of Parthasarathi named Rangachari "who had once gone to Calcutta and met Aurobindo".4 It is possible that this Rangachari, who was related to members of the India group in Pondicherry, was the correspondent who conducted the newspaper's interview with Sri Aurobindo.
In the present issue of Archives and Research we publish the full Tamil text of the interview (Document la) as well as a new and complete English translation (Documents lb). The original interview was considered significant enough to be cited in a Government of India report of 1912. The relevant passage of this report is reproduced as Document 2.
Vedapuri, Agastya, and the Ashram
According to a widely circulated story, the main building of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram of Pondicherry is built on the site of the hermitage of the sage Agastya. Pondicherry itself, it is said, often as part of the same story, was in ancient days known as Vedapuri, and was a major centre of Vedic learning.5
As an inhabitant of Pondicherry, and as a member of the Ashram, I could not but find this story intriguing. But as a historical researcher, I felt a need to get to the bottom of it. In history, to get to the bottom of something means to examine the sources. Where were the documents that supported the Agastya-Vedapuri story?
Before beginning this study I would like to make it clear that it is not my intention to comment on the significance, value, or possible spiritual or inner truth of the story. I simply propose to find out whether, as claimed, there is any objective evidence demonstrating the story's historical truth. For most printed versions of the story assert that Jouveau-Dubreuil, a French archaeologist and historian, discovered scientific evidence that the story was true. This claim brings the story into the purview of a research journal such as Archives and Research. Either there is objective evidence or there is not. And if there is not, the story cannot be considered to have any historical value.
Saigon-born Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil (1885-1945) came to India from France in 1909. For twenty-seven years he was a professor in the College Colonial, a French-medium higher secondary school of Pondicherry subsequently known as the College Francais and at present as the Lycee Francaise. Jouveau-Dubreuil is remembered as an archaeologist who made significant contributions to the study
4 Sureshchandra Chakravarty. Smritikatha. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1952; 114. Translated from the Bengali.
5 In what follows I will refer to these three claims together as "the Agastya-Vedapuri story". Its details differ according to the teller. Secondary Text (ST) 9 is a complete and concise version of the story as generally known today.
of South Indian antiquities. He is credited by some with the discovery of the Roman emporium at Arikamedu. He had in fact nothing directly to do with its discovery, though he did correctly hypothesize the existence of a Roman emporium some years before Wheeler and others carried out their digs.6
Jouveau-Dubreuil was a lover of his adopted city, and in a series of articles written during the thirties, he inquired into several aspects of Pondicherry's past. These articles were published in an ephemeral Catholic monthly review called Le Semeur de l'Inde Francaise. The Semeur has almost completely disappeared; only stray copies are available in Pondicherry. After a long search, I discovered that Jouveau-Dubreuil's articles on Pondicherry were reprinted in 1952 in La Revue Historique de l'lnde Francaise. Three of these articles deal with elements of the Agastya-Vedapuri story. English translations of the three are reproduced as Secondary Texts (STs) 1 to 3.7 The reader is encouraged to go through them and to form his own judgment.
Those who read Jouveau-Dubreuil's articles will doubtless be disappointed to find that the author makes no direct mention of what I have called the Agastya-Vedapuri story. To some this may indicate that Jouveau-Dubreuil either wrote about the story in articles that have been lost or that he never wrote about it at all but only communicated his findings orally to persons who later publicized them. I will show below that there is more reason to believe that Jouveau-Dubreuil simply did not make the discoveries in question than that he made them but did not publicize them. Had such discoveries been made they would be known to local archaeologists. And if, as is the case, they are known neither to specialists nor to laymen they have no documentary value and no historical conclusions can be based on them.
I will show that while Jouveau-Dubreuil is claimed as the source of the Agastya-Vedapuri story, the story in fact took shape over the course of twenty-five years through a process of progressive corruption or embellishment of certain factual assertions made by Jouveau-Dubreuil in the articles reproduced in this issue. STs 5-8 are versions of the Agastya-Vedapuri story published between 1963 and 1972. These four accounts, by well-known Ashram authors, undoubtedly are responsible for the current popularity of the story; but none of them presents it in the form in which it generally is known. This form is given in STs 9-10, both published during the 1980s. All of these STs except 7 claim to be based on Jouveau-Dubreuil's discoveries; but I do not think it likely that more than one of
6 Jean Renault. Jouveau-Dubreuil a Pondichery. Pondicherry: Imprimerie de Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1953.
7 Fifteen articles were reproduced in the Revue Historique in 1952. Twelve of these do not bear in any way on the Agastya-Vedapuri story. Most deal with Pondicherry after the coming of the Europeans. Ten other articles were proposed for later publication in the same journal but this proposal was never carried out. Judging from the titles of these articles none of them dealt with Pondicherry in the period we are interested in. Jean Renault's Jouveau-Dubreuil a Pondichery contains a seventeen-page bibliography of the archaeologist's works. None of the items listed (other than the articles translated in this issue) would appear to have anything to do with our story. To be fair it must be mentioned that Renault considered his work only "a contribution to an exhaustive bibliography, which remains to be compiled". Given the current lack of interest in Jouveau-Dubreuil's work, it may be doubted whether a better bibliography than Renault's will ever be attempted. In any case, the three articles translated here are the only ones available for scrutiny that bear upon the Agastya-Vedapuri story. In the body of my article I make the point that materials said to have been discovered by Jouveau-Dubreuil that are not available for scrutiny cannot be considered documentary evidence.
the authors got his information from Jouveau-Dubreuil. The exception is Nolini Kanta Gupta, author of ST 5, who was personally acquainted with the French archaeologist. It is to my mind all but certain that Nolini's account is the source of the Agastya-Vedapuri story as we know it; but, as we will see, Nolini is not responsible for the current form of the story, which postdates his account by two decades.
While tracing the history of the story, it will be convenient to consider its three propositions separately.
Proposition 1
The Ashram is located on the site of Agastya's hermitage
Agastya is the reputed author of hymns 165 to 191 of the first mandala of the Rig-Veda. There is no other historical documentation concerning him. There are of course innumerable legends about the rishi, the best known being the story of how he fooled the Vindhya on his way to South India. Jouveau-Dubreuil does not mention either the Ashram or Agastya's hermitage in STs 1-3. He does, however, assert in ST 2 that Agastya worshipped at the Vedapurishwara temple that existed in Pondicherry until 1748. This assertion does not form part of the Agastya-Vedapuri story, but it is worth examining since it will help us place Agastya in time. Jouveau-Dubreuil states that one of the fragmentary inscriptions that he believed to be from Pondicherry's Vedapurishwara temple contains the name Agastyeshwara.8 The archaeologist then asserts that Agastyeshwara means "god of a temple where Agastya worshipped". This translation assumes the truth of the proposition the author is trying to prove. The word agastyesvara means simply "the Lord of Agastya". This is a common name of Shiva in South India, particularly in the region around Pondicherry. There are not less than seventeen Agastyeshwara temples in South Arcot District.9 In Chingleput District there are even more.10 Those who accept the historicity of Agastya assign him a date from one to three thousand years before the Christian era. The only archaeological remains in South
8 I follow Jouveau-Dubreuil's argument as stated in ST 2. In ST 3 he writes that the Agastyeshwar (or Agastishwar — the terms are equivalent) inscriptions of Pondicherry belonged not to the Vedapurishwara temple but to a supposed temple to Agastyeshwara located in the same place (near the site of the present cathedral). There is no evidence that such a temple ever existed. There is however documentary evidence that Pondicherry's principal Shiva temple was once located outside the city, perhaps in what is now Ozhugarai, a village about 5 kilometers west of the town. The Chevalier de la Farelle, who was in Pondicherry between 1725 and 1735, writes of a temple located une lieue et demie (about 6 km) from Pondicherry (Memoires et correspondance du Chevalier & du General de la Farelle. Paris: Berger-Levrault et Cie, 1896, pp. 67-74). It has been suggested that the temple mentioned by the French adventurer was a temple to Shiva Agastyeshwar in Ozhugarai and that after its destruction some of the pillars etc. of this temple were brought from Ozhugarai to be used in the reconstruction of the cathedral. This seems to me to be a Better explanation of how inscriptions mentioning Agastyeshwar and Ozhugarai came to be found near the cathedral than the one advanced by Jouveau-Dubreuil in ST 3. I am indebted to Mr. Cyril Antony for information used in this note.
9 Census of India 1961. Volume 9. Madras. Part XI-D. Temples of Madras State, ii. Tiruchirapalli & South Arcot.
10 26 by a rough count. Census of India 1961. Volume 9. Madras. Part XI-D. Temples of Madras State. i. Chingleput District and Madras City.
India that go back that far are from neolithic or other prehistoric settlements that have never been thought to represent Vedic culture. Many of the local Agastyesh-wara temples are less than a hundred years old. Can Agastya have visited these?
Nolini Kanta Gupta, in ST 5 (1963), does not mention Agastya's hermitage. He does however speak of "a centre of Vedic learning" or "Vedic college", adding that Jouveau-Dubreuil discovered that this college stood on the site of the Ashram main building. We will consider the question of whether there was such a college in the next section. Nolini mentions Agastya in the paragraph that follows his discussion of the "Vedic college", but he does not in any way connect Agastya with the college or with Pondicherry.
The authors of STs 6-8, following Nolini,11 speak of the Vedic college but not of Agastya's hermitage. All of them however improve Agastya's role in the story. ST 6 (1965) says, "The legendary Patron of the city [ancient Pondicherry] was the great sage Agastya." ST 7 (1966) says that a centre of Vedic learning "had once prospered under the aegis of the legendary Agastya, the patron saint of the South". ST 8 (1972) says that "the sage Agastya himself was the guardian spirit of the city that was also a university" (a phrase that sounds remarkably similar to descriptions of Auroville current in 1972). I do not believe that the authors of STs 6-8 had independent sources: it is more likely that they added these refinements to the story themselves. And they prepared the way for the final leap of imagination, made by the authors of STs 9 and 10, that the actual hermitage or ashram of Agastya stood on the site of the present Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Both authors give Jouveau-Dubreuil as their authority. The author of ST 10 adds the name of Pavitra (Philippe B. Saint-Hilaire), a disciple of Sri Aurobindo. It should be noted that the highly respected Pavitra is not cited as an authority himself. The author says that Pavitra said that Jouveau-Dubreuil said that Agastya's ashram stood on the site of Sri Aurobindo's. No doubt Pavitra was acquainted with his countryman Jouveau-Dubreuil; but it may be questioned whether Jouveau-Dubreuil told him what he is reported to have said in ST 10. Nolini (ST 5) gives quite a different account of what Jouveau-Dubreuil is supposed to have said. I will show below that it is highly unlikely that Jouveau-Dubreuil ever made any discovery connected with the site of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. Certainly nothing in his known writings suggests that he did. In any case a scrutiny of STs 5-10 shows clearly that the story that the Ashram stands on ground once occupied by Agastya's hermitage is less than twenty years old and has no documentary basis. Proposition 1 as stated may therefore be rejected. It is possible however to reformulate it following Nolini's account as follows:
Proposition 1A
The Ashram is located on the site of an ancient Vedic college
The only available support for this proposition is found in a single sentence from a Bengali book by Nolini Kanta Gupta that was originally presented as talks given
11 ST 6 almost certainly follows Nolini in regard to this point. In the second paragraph of ST 6 the author mentions the temple of Vedapurishwara, which is not mentioned by Nolini. It is possible that the author got this information from Jouveau-Dubreuil, but it is more likely that he came across it in a text based on Jouveau-Dubreuil, such as Gaebele (ST 4).
to the children of the Ashram. After saying that ancient Pondicherry had a "centre of Vedic learning", the author adds: "And he [Jouveau-Dubreuil] discovered further — from old indications and maps — that this Vedic college was on the very spot where our Ashram's main building stands."12 The problem with this statement is that the "old indications and maps" are not known to exist. Jouveau-Dubreuil certainly does not mention them in STs 1-3. Nor are they published in any other book known to me or to anyone I have spoken to, nor have any of the scholars of Pondicherry with whom I have discussed the matter ever heard of anything resembling the documents Jouveau-Dubreuil is supposed by Nolini to have discovered. The only "indications" that are likely to have survived from "old" days would be inscriptions on stone or metal. The epigraphy of Pondicherry has been studied quite thoroughly. A volume of all known inscriptions of the union territory, including those cited by Jouveau-Dubreuil in his article, will soon be published by the Ecole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, Pondicherry.13 I have been assured by Mr. N. Venketesan, the present editor of this volume, that no inscriptions have ever been found that mention the site of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. And how, one wonders, would it be mentioned? There are no geological features or archaeological remains near the Ashram by which the site could be pinpointed. Even the coastline could not be used as a point of reference, since it has changed even in historical times and would be changing still if it were not for the seawall. Indeed Jouveau-Dubreuil's suggestion in ST 3 that in ancient times what is now the city of Pondicherry was marshes and lagoons is not at all improbable. At the time of the arrival of the French most of the eastern part of Pondicherry (the "White Town") consisted of uninhabited sand dunes such as still survive south of the new pier. As for maps, Indian cartography began with the Europeans. Ancient documents like the brass plates found at Bahur (Document 3) specify locations with statements like this: "the eastern boundary is to the west of a forest surrounding the village (nattam); the southern boundary is to the north of the boundary of Nerunjikurumbu". This and similar statements can be correlated to modern places only when the document under consideration has been discovered near the location it describes and the places mentioned retain their old names. No ancient inscriptions have ever been found in the Ashram compound. Indeed no inscriptions have even been found in the "White Town" area of Pondicherry other than some stray fragments known to have been brought from elsewhere.
As I mentioned previously, there is nothing to prevent a layman from arguing that Jouveau-Dubreuil did find certain inscriptions that he wrote about in an article that has disappeared so completely that the inscriptions are known to no one living, or that he chose not to publish his findings but took his knowledge with him to the grave after communicating its substance to Nolini and Pavitra. It must be admitted however that both these scenarios are highly unlikely. Why would a man with many publications to his credit decide to keep such an interesting discovery
12 I follow the Bengali text more closely than the translator of ST 5. The text is as follows:
13 Tentative title: The Inscriptions of Pondicherry Stale, edited by the late S. Kuppuswami and N. Venketesan. I would like here to acknowledge the help I have received while writing this paper from the scholars and staff of the Ecole Francaise and of the Institut Francais de Pondichery.
secret or to publish it so inadequately that no scholar at work in Pondicherry is aware of the "indications"? In scholarship as in science discoveries are not given any consideration unless they are adequately published. No doubt the argument sketched above could not be disproved; but this would make it what a scientist would call a non-falsifiable proposition. According to a widely accepted definition of science (Popper), a proposition cannot be considered scientific if it is not falsifiable. The proposed argument, as well as the mysterious "indications" it seeks to defend, would not be taken seriously by any archaeologist or historian. Indeed, to put it in simpler terms, before any reasonable person could accept that certain "old indications and maps" proved that a Vedic college existed on the site of the Ashram, the indications and maps would have to be produced. As we will see when we come to consider Proposition 3 there is archaeological evidence that about a thousand years ago there were "seats of learning" located as close as seventeen kilometers from the present site of the Ashram. This fact may have been the basis of the idea that archaeological evidence was discovered that proved that a Vedic centre of learning once occupied the very site of the main building of the Ashram.
Proposition 2
Pondicherry was once called "Vedapuri"
In ST 2 Jouveau-Dubreuil asserted that a temple that existed in Pondicherry until 1748 was known as the Vedapurishwara temple. The source of this information, he says, is the diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai. This remarkable journal, passages from which are reproduced as Document 4, deserves a brief introduction. Ananda Ranga Pillai (1709-1761) was the dubash (bilingual commercial agent) of Joseph Francois Dupleix, the Governor of French India from 1741 to 1754. Between 1736 and 1761 Ranga Pillai kept a detailed private diary in which he spoke both of official and personal matters. Since its discovery in 1846 this has been one of the principal sources of the history of the period. Some of Ranga Pillai's observations may not be factual, since he sometimes relied on hearsay reports; but the overall accuracy of his diary has never been questioned.
There are many references in Ananda Ranga Pillai's diary to a temple he referred to as the Vedapuri Iswaran Koil. (In Sanskrit this name is written vedapurisvara. I will follow Jouveau-Dubreuil in using this form in what follows.) Eighteenth-century maps show that this temple, then the principal one of Pondicherry, stood next to St. Paul's Church, which apparently occupied the plot where the Pondicherry Cathedral (La Cathedrale de Notre-Dame de l'Immacule Conception) now stands. According to Ananda Ranga Pillai's diary the Vedapurishwara temple was destroyed on Dupleix's orders on 8 September 1748 (see Document 4).
Ananda Ranga Pillai's mentions of the Vedapurishwara temple are apparently the ultimate source of the commonly accepted notion that Pondicherry itself was once known as "Vedapuri". Ranga Pillai himself never suggested this. Neither did Jouveau-Dubreuil, Nolini (ST 5), nor the authors of STs 6-7. All of these modern writers wrote that Pondicherry was a Veda-puri, that is, "a city of the Veda". The
first text I have been able to find that asserts that Pondicherry was once called "Vedapuri" is ST 8, which was published in 1972. There is no reason to accept this account as authoritative (it clearly is based on STs 5 and 6), or to believe that Pondicherry was ever called "Vedapuri".
Proposition 3
Pondicherry was once a great centre of Vedic learning
The question remains whether Pondicherry was once a city of the Veda (veda-puri), that is a centre of Vedic studies. Jouveau-Dubreuil, attempting to prove this in ST 2, argued as follows. Puri means city. In the names of temples, puri indicates the city where the temple is located. Thus Vedapurishwara means "Shiva (the Ishwara or Lord) who lives in this city consecrated to the Vedas". A city consecrated to the Vedas was always inhabited by Brahmins instructed in the Veda. Therefore Pondicherry was always inhabited by Vedic scholars.
This argument, like Jouveau-Dubraeuil's argument concerning the word Agastyeshwara, is based on a translation that assumes the thing to be proved. Vedapurishwara, like Agastyeshwara, is a name of Shiva. There are a number of Vedapurishwara temples in the Pondicherry area. The principal Shiva temple in the modem town, commonly called the Ishwaran Temple, is known in full as "Vedapureeswaran Koil". This temple may have been built to replace the temple that was destroyed. There are also are at least four Vedapurishwara temples in South Arcot District,14 and certainly others elsewhere. Jouveau-Dubreuil mentions a famous one in Tanjore District. It cannot be assumed, without other evidence, that all the places where these temples were located were centres of Vedic studies. In his numerous references to the Vedapuri Iswaran Koil, Ananda Ranga Pillai never spoke of Vedic studies being pursued there. The activities that he mentioned were these one might expect in any temple: puja, chariot processions, etc. It is of course possible, even likely, that a temple dedicated to Vedapurishwara would have had attached to it pandits versed in the Vedas. Moreover authentic inscriptions have been found that indicate that in the ninth and tenth centuries A.D. there were "seats of learning", Vedic or otherwise, in the Pondicherry area.
In 1879 a set of five inscribed copper plates was discovered in Bahur, a village 17 kilometers south of Pondicherry. At present they are kept in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.13 On the plates is inscribed a text written in Sanskrit verse (Grantha script) and Tamil prose. It records a land-grant made by a Pallava king named Nripatungavarman in the eighth year of his reign. The Sanskrit text contains a genealogy of the donor, beginning with the birth of Brahma from the lotus arising from the navel of Vishnu. More recent ancestors include men known from other documents to have lived around 800 A.D. For this reason scholars agree in dating the plates to the ninth century. The portion of the text of the plates most relevant to the present study (reproduced as Document 3) concerns the recipient of Nripatungavarman's land-grant. The text says that the revenues of three villages
14 Census of India 1961. Volume 9. Madras. Part XI-D. Temples of Madras State, ii, Tiruchirapalli & South Arcot.
15 B.N. 577 (Tamoule-574).
near Bahur were to be given, tax-free, to a vidyasthanam or seat of learning. Hultzsch, the editor of the text of the plates, underlines the significance of this grant by saying that it is "perhaps the earliest case on record" of an "educational endowment".16
The Bahur vidyasthanam is sometimes spoken of as a "university". In fact, its nature is not described in the plates, and it is quite unlikely that it was anything like a modern university or even that it resembled such ancient academies as Nalanda or Taxila. The Bahur vidyasthanam is also supposed to have been a centre of Vedic learning. In fact nothing at all is known of its curriculum. The idea that it was a Vedic academy arose partly from a misreading of line 24 of the text of the plates. Instead of caturdisa ("the four quarters") an early twentieth-century transcriber read caturdasa ("fourteen"). Basing himself on this misreading, an earlier editor of the text of the plates wrote that the vidyasthanam "consisted of fourteen ganas", which he identified as "the fourteen divisions of learning", namely "the Vedas (4), the angas (6), Mimamsa (1), Nyaya (1), Purana (1) and the Dharmasastra(1)".17 It should be noted that even if the reading caturdasagana is correct (which is very doubtful, see footnote to Document 3a), the plates themselves do not mention what the fourteen-fold gana consisted of. Neither the word veda nor any of its derivatives occurs in the text of the plates. It is of course likely that the four Vedas, six Vedangas, etc. formed part of the curriculum of the Bahur vidyasthanam, but there is no documentary evidence to support this. All that may be ventured from the existing evidence is that the word vidya in the name of a tenth-century institution would tend to imply Vedic studies.
Other known inscrptions point to the existence of three other ancient vidyasthanams in the Pondicherry area. One was associated with the temple of Thirubhuvanai (a village 20 kilometers west of Pondicherry). This vidyasthanam is said to have existed around the time of Raja-Raja I (tenth century).18 I have not been able to find a published text of this inscription; but the secondary sources I have consulted suggest that the Thirubhuvanai vidyasthanam was devoted to Vedic studies. I have been reliably informed that there is evidence of other ancient vidyasthanams in Ennayiram and Brahmadesam, adjoining villages located approximately 24 kilometers north of Villupuram, or about 45 kilometers from Pondicherry as the crow flies.
In regard to Proposition 3 we may say with some certainty that a millennium ago there was more than one centre of learning not far from present-day Pondicherry. It is possible, even likely, that the Vedas formed at least part of the curriculum of these centres.
Conclusions
To sum up, there is no documentary evidence whatever to support the idea that Agastya's hermitage once stood on the site of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. There
16 E. Hultzsch. "Bahur Plates of Nripatungavarman". Epigraphia Indica 18 (2) (1925-26): 8.
17 South-Indian Inscriptions. 2 (4) (1916): 514.
18 Gazetteer of India. Union Territory of Pondicherry. vol. II. Administration of the Union
Territory of Pondicherry, 1982, p. 1573; A. Ramaswamy, History of Pondicherry. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1987, pp. 39-40.
is no available documentary evidence to support the idea that a Vedic college once stood where the Ashram's main building now stands, and it is exceedingly unlikely that there ever was a vidyasthanam here, although there were certainly vidyas-thanams not far away some thousand years ago. There was once (and in fact still is) a temple in Pondicherry called the Vedapurishwaran Koil, but no reliable authority has assumed from this that Pondicherry was ever known as "Vedapuri". The name "Vedapurishwara" does not in itself constitute proof that Pondicherry was once a centre of Vedic studies, but it is probable that the Vedas were taught in ninth- and tenth-century vidyasthanams located near the site of the modern city.
P.H.