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POV concerns; tangential argumentation about dates

Hindu texts y are broadly considered Hindu scriptures. These include the Puranas, Itihasa and Vedas. Scholars hesitate in defining the term "Hindu scriptures" given the diverse nature of Hinduism, but many list the Bhagavad Gita and the Agamas as Hindu scriptures, and Dominic Goodall includes Bhagavata Purana and Yajnavalkya Smriti in the list of Hindu scriptures as well.

Quotes

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  • The Indologists had for so long told themselves that Indians lacked access to the “true” meaning of their texts that they no longer considered it a prejudice but a methodological principle and a necessary one at that.
  • [Hindu lore, like the Mahābhārata, ] “must have already been current in some form (…) as many have realized, the Vedic texts relate only a small part of the culture of the Vedic period. But it is much less recognized how much comparison can do to fill out the picture, and identify the material that bypassed the Vedas.”
    • Nick Allen: “Why the Telemachy? Vyasa’s answer”, Nouvelle Mythologie Comparée, 2016) as quoted in [1]
  • By his [= Playfair’s] attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books against absolute facts, he thereby supports all those horrid abuses and impositions found in them, under the pretended sanction of antiquity. Nay, his aim goes still deeper, for by the same means he endeavours to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very foundation of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction.
    • John Bentley: Hindu Astronomy, republished by Shri Publ., Delhi 1990, p.xxvii; also discussed by Richard L. Thompson: “World Views: Vedic vs. Western”, The India Times, 31-3-1993. On p.111, we find that Bentley has "proven" that Krishna was born on 7 August in AD 600 (the most conservative estimate elsewhere is the 9th century BC), and on p.158ff., that Varaha Mihira (AD 510-587) was a contemporary of the Moghul emperor Akbar (r.1556-1605). quoted in Elst, Koenraad (1999). Update on the Aryan invasion debate New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan., also in Elst, Koenraad (2007). Asterisk in bharopiyasthan: Minor writings on the Aryan invasion debate.
  • As an experiment, therefore, though as no more than an experiment, we propose to fix the years 600 and 200 B.C. as the limits of that age during which the Brahmanic literature was carried on in the strange style of Sutras.
  • Max Mulller (1892), who hastily acknowledged that he had only considered his date for the Veda a terminus ad quern, completely submitted to his detractors: "I need hardly say that I agree with almost every word of my critics. I have repeatedly dwelt on the hypothetical character of the dates. . . . All I have claimed for them has been that they are minimum dates . . . Like most Sanskrit scholars, I feel that 200 years . . . are scarcely sufficient to account for the growth of the poetry and religion ascribed to the Khandas period" (xiv-xv). A few years later, at the end of his long and productive life, he again acknowledged the complete arbitrariness of his previous calculations: "Whether the Vedic hymns were composed 1000, or 1500, or 2000, or 3000 years B.C., no power on earth will ever determine" (Muller 1891, 91).
    • Max Muller ** in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12
  • Whitney ([1874] 1987) had made a point of mentioning that Muller himself had made no pretensions that his dates had "in any essential manner contributed to the final settlement of the question." But his concern is that Muller "is in danger of being misunderstood as doing so; we have already more than once seen it stated that 'Muller has ascertained the date of the Vedas to be 1200-1000 B.C.'" (78).
    • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12
  • As Varma (1984) states, "it is amazing to note that all the supporters of the date 1200-1000 B.C. for the Veda very conveniently ignore the caution which Max Muller had initially observed" (6). Indeed, we find present-day scholars stating that "Max Muller's chronological estimate, though not devoid of weak points, has . . . often been more or less tacitly regarded as nearest the mark. . . . As far as the Rgveda is concerned [his] computation is not unreasonable" (Gonda 1975, 22).
    • in Bryant, E. F. (2001). The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture : the Indo-Aryan migration debate. Oxford University Press. chapter 12
  • The noted sanskritist Aklujkar (Professor at British Columbia, Canada) does not consider the mainstream chronology incontestable and writes “only relative chronology has been well argued for”(1996: 66).
    • Aklujkar A 1996 ‘The Early History of Sanskrit as Supreme Language’ in EM Houben (ed) Ideology and Status of Sanskrit… Leiden, Brill. in Kazanas, N. (2002). Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda: Indo-Aryan migration debate. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 30(3-4), 275-334.

Improperly sourced

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  • The Indologists had for so long told themselves that Indians lacked access to the “true” meaning of their texts that they no longer considered it a prejudice but a methodological principle and a necessary one at that.
    • Adluri, V. Against Occidentalism. The New School Research Matters. (2017); quoted in Kak, S. Racism, Eurocentrism, and Indology.
  • The Upanishads supply the basis of later Hindu philosophy; they alone of the Vedic corpus are widely known and quoted by most well-educated Hindus, and their central ideas have also become a part of the spiritual arsenal of rank-and-file Hindus.
    • Wendy Doniger, Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism, 1st ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 2–3
  • But in the first place, Sanskrit literature alone is a very big mass. Although, perhaps, three-fourths of it has been destroyed and lost through successive invasions, yet, I think, the sum total of the amount of literature in Sanskrit would outbalance any three or four European languages taken together, in number of books. No one knows how many books are there yet and where they are, because it is the most ancient of all these Aryan languages. And that branch of the Aryan race which spoke the Sanskrit language was the first to become civilized and the first to begin to write books and literature. So they went on for thousands of years. How many thousands of years they wrote no one knows. There are various guesses - from 3000 B.C. to 8000 B.C. - but all of these dates are more or less uncertain.
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