-13_The Rigveda^s Remote Antiquity and the Rigvedic Maryanni of 1360 B.C.htm Chapter Ten THE RIGVEDA'S REMOTE ANTIQUITY AND THE RIGVEDIC MARYANNI OF 1360 B.C. With the Rigveda dated by us to 3500-3000 B.C. and the Mitanni documents put by all historians at c. 1360 B.C., how shall we explain the affinity of these documents with the Rigvedic language and religion? The large time-gap between the latter and the Aryan rulership of the Mitanni people as known to history from about 1500 B.C. poses a challenge. Within that time-gap we have the post-Rigvedic Pre-Harappān Civilization and the Harappā Culture. With the Harappā Culture in the Indus Valley, the descendants of the Rigvedics in India w

-14_The Linguistic Argument about the Rigveda^s Date.htm Chapter Eleven THE LINGUISTIC ARGUMENT ABOUT THE RIGVEDA'S DATE A linguistic argument apart from the Boghaz-keui documents is also in the field. Perhaps the best statement of it is in the words of B.K. Ghosh. "The language of the Rigveda," he writes in one place, "is certainly no more different from that of the Avestan Gāthās than is Old English from Old High German, and therefore they must be assigned to approximately the same age: and the relation between the language of the Gāthās and that of Old Persian inscriptions of the sixth century B.C. cannot be better visualised than by comparing the former with Gothic and the latter with Ol

Chapter Two THE SUPPOSED ARYAN INVASION The first question has to be considered under two heads: archaeological and literary. In an article of 1966, "The Decline of the Harappans", G.R. Dales, director of archaeological fieldwork in South Asia, particularly in West Pakistan, for a good number of years, wrote in connection with the topic of an Aryan invasion of India: "The Aryans... have not yet been identified archæologically."1 Even a diehard defender like Sir Mortimer Wheeler of the Aryan-invasion hypothesis and of the theory that the Rigvedic Aryans destroyed the Harappā Culture had to state: "It is best to admit that no proto-Aryan material cultu

Chapter XIII   The Formation of the Nation-Unit — The Three Stages   THE THREE stages of development which have marked the mediaeval and modern evolution of the nation-type may be regarded as the natural process where a new form of unity has to be created out of complex conditions and heterogeneous materials by an external rather than an internal process. The external method tries always to mould the psychological condition of men into changed forms and habits under the pressure of circumstances and institutions rather than by the direct creation of a new psychological condition which would, on the contrary, d

Chapter XX   The Drive towards Economic Centralisation   THE OBJECTIVE organisation of a national unity is not yet complete when it has arrived at the possession of a single central authority and the unity and uniformity of its political, military and strictly administrative functions. There is another side of its organic life, the legislative and its corollary, the judicial function, which is equally important; the exercise of legislative power becomes eventually indeed, although it was not always, the characteristic sign of the sovereign. Logically, one would suppose that the conscious and organised determination of its own rules

Chapter XXIV   The Advent and Progress of the Spiritual Age   IF A subjective age, the last sector of a social cycle, is to find its outlet and fruition in a spiritualised society and the emergence of mankind on a higher evolutionary level, it is not enough that certain ideas favourable to that turn of human life should take hold of the general mind of the race, permeate the ordinary motives of its thought, art, ethics, political ideals, social effort, or even get well into its inner way of thinking and feeling. It is not enough even that the idea of the kingdom of God on earth, a reign of spirituality, freedom and unity, a real and inner

  Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry   A page of the Arya with changes made in the 1930s   The Human Cycle   Publisher's Note to the First Edition   The chapters constituting this book were written under the title "The Psychology of Social Development" from month to month in the philosophical monthly, "Arya", from August 1

Chapter XVII   Religion as the Law of Life   SINCE the infinite, the absolute and transcendent, the universal, the One is the secret summit of existence and to reach the spiritual consciousness and the Divine the ultimate goal and aim of our being and therefore of the whole development of the individual and the collectivity in all its parts and all its activities, reason cannot be the last and highest guide; culture, as it is understood ordinarily, cannot be the directing light or find out the regulating and harmonising principle of all our life and action. For reason stops short of the Divine and only compromises with the problems of life

Chapter XXV   War and the Need of Economic Unity   THE MILITARY necessity, the pressure of war between nations and the need for prevention of war by the assumption of force and authority in the hands of an international body, World-State or Federation or League of Peace, is that which will most directly drive humanity in the end towards some sort of international union. But there is behind it another necessity which is much more powerful in its action on the modern mind, the commercial and industrial, the necessity born of economic interdependence. Commercialism is a modern sociological phenomenon; one might almost say that is the

Chapter XXVI   The Need of Administrative Unity   IN ALMOST all current ideas of the first step towards international organisation, it is taken for granted that the nations will continue to enjoy their separate existence and liberties and will only leave to international action the prevention of war, the regulation of dangerous disputes, the power of settling great international questions which they cannot settle by ordinary means. It is impossible that the development should stop there; this first step would necessarily lead to others which could travel only in one direction. Whatever authority were established, if it is to be a true authority i