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The internal chronology of the Rigveda being firmly established, the next step in our historical analysis of the Rigveda is the establishment of the geography of the text.
The geography of the Rigveda has been the most misrepresented aspect of the text in the hands of the scholars: the geographical information in the Rigveda, to put it in a nutshell, more or less pertains to the area from Uttar Pradesh in the east to Afghanistan in the west, the easternmost river mentioned in the text being the GaNgA, and the westernmost being the western tributaries of the Indus.
This geographical information is treated in a simplistic manner by the scholars, and the result is a completely distorted picture of Rigvedic geography:
1. Firstly, taking the, Rigveda as one monolithic unit, the information is interpreted to mean that the area of the Rigveda extended from western Uttar Pradesh to Afghanistan.
It is further assumed that the habitat of the Vedic Aryans, during the period of composition of the Rigveda, was the central part of this area: the Saptasindhu or Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers bounded on the east by the SarasvatI and on the west by the Indus. Their eastern horizon was western Uttar Pradesh and their western horizon was Afghanistan.
The consensus on this point is so general that even in our own earlier book dealing with the Aryan invasion theory, where we have not yet analysed the Rigveda in detail, we have automatically assumed the Punjab to be the habitat of the Vedic Aryans during the period of the Rigveda.
However, as we shall see in the course of our analysis, the habitat of the Vedic Aryans during the period was considerably to the east of the Punjab.
2. Secondly, after taking the Punjab to be the habitat of the Rigvedic Aryans, the matter is not left at that. A further slant is introduced into the interpretation of the geographical data in the Rigveda: it is automatically assumed, on the basis of an extraneous theory based on a misinterpretation of linguistic data, and without any basis within the Rigvedic data itself, that a movement from west to east is to be discerned in the Rigveda.
Thus, western places within the horizon of the Rigveda are treated as places old and familiar to the Vedic Aryans, being their “early habitats”; while eastern places within the horizon of the Rigveda are treated as new and unfamiliar places with which the Vedic Aryans are “becoming acquainted”.
Author : Shrikant G. Talageri
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