The Indian Saura-mata (or the Hindu sect of the Sun) is an amalgam of two distinct layers [Footnote 1]: 1) The endogenous layer of solar deities going back to the Veda and 2) the neo-morphic layer of Iranic origin which was transferred to India as as a result of contact with Zoroastrians and to an extant non-Zoroastrian Iranians from a period spanning the beginning of the common era to the around the 6th-7th centuries of the common era. While primarily an āstika tradition, the later period the nāstika traditions of the Bauddha-s and to some degree the Jaina-s also developed reflexes of the Saura system. Among Bauddha-s, the earlier manifestation crystallized around the goddess Marīcī whose roots as a warrior goddess lay in the Saura pantheon. In the later phase, the high-point of the Vajrayāna tradition, in the form of Kālacakra also incorporated several Saura elements.

The Veda, like other Indo-European traditions, preserves a strong element of worship of solar deities. It should be stressed that the solar deities are not necessarily the sun: they are associated with solar characteristics. This means they are inspired by the experience of the sun but go beyond the sun and are more general in their manifestations encompassing the stars, the laws of cyclicity and invariance, and light and darkness. While one could say that all Vedic deities simultaneously have a solar character, the most prominent among them are the Ādityas who were to play a major role in the Indian Saura-mata:

In the most ancient layers of the Veda six (or perhaps seven) of them are named together as a group:
imā gira ādityebhyo ghṛtasnūḥ sanād rājabhyo juhvā juhomi |
śṛṇotu mitro aryamā bhago nas tuvijāto varuṇo dakṣo aṃśaḥ ||RV 2.27.01

imās= these [feminine accusative plural]; gira= invocations [feminine accusative plural]; ādityebhyo= for the Āditya-s; ghṛtasnūḥ= dripping with ghee [feminine accusative plural]; sanāt= always; rājabhyo= for the royal; juhvā= with the juhū ladle; juhomi= I offer; śṛṇotu = each one hears; mitraḥ; aryaman; bhagaḥ; nas= us; tuvijātaḥ= widely manifest favor; varuṇaḥ; aṃśaḥ.

Before we render a translation we should note three points: 1) juhū ladle: The scholiast Sāyaṇa explains that as the invocations are said to be dripping with ghee, it should be understood metaphorically, with the juhū standing for the tongue that composes the said invocation. 2) While a plurality of Āditya-s are named the imperative class-5 verb śṛṇotu is in the singular. Sāyaṇa explains that it implies that each one of the Āditya-s starting from Mitra are called to hear the invocation [as per Sāyaṇa: naḥ śṛṇotu -> asmadīyāstā giro mitrādayaḥ pratyekaṃ śṛṇotu] – it should be noted in this context that they are not named as a compound or with an enclitic ‘ca’ but simply as a list. 3) While the names of the 6 Āditya-s are plain in this mantra, the word tuvijātaḥ is traditionally taken as an adjective for Varuṇa. Indeed, it is a fairly common adjective in the Ṛgveda for Mitra and Varuṇa, and more generally the Āditya-s as also for Indra, Bṛhaspati and Agni. Sāyaṇa explains the word as one who widely manifests his favor to many nations. Going against the grain we suggest that it is possible that tuvijātaḥ here is another Āditya, i.e. Vivasvān.

Hence we have:
With the juhū ladle [which is my tongue], I perpetually offer to the royal Āditya-s these ghee-dripping invocations. May each one of them, Mitra, Aryaman, Bhaga, the one with widely manifesting favor [or Vivasvān], Varuṇa, Dakṣa and Aṃśa, hear us!

The reason why the list of 7 is a possibility is because elsewhere in the Ṛgveda the number of Āditya-s is stated as 8 (RV 10.72), with 7 being the immortal gods and the 8th being the dead-egg Mārtāṇḍa from which the rest of the universe was fashioned. A similar tale is elaborated in the brāhmaṇa sections of Taittirīya Saṃhitā 6.5.6 and Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa 1.1.9 in the context of the brahmaudana ritual (rice offering to the goddess Aditi). The still-born Āditya Mārtāṇḍa might have had old Indo-European antecedents as suggested by the dead solar deity Baldr in the northern Germanic tradition. Moreover, the Āditya-s are recorded as numbering 8 even in the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka 2.10.7. However, there Mārtāṇḍa is replaced by Indra and Dakṣa by his ectype Dhātṛ. Thus the list runs as: Mitra, Varuṇa, Aryaman, Bhaga, Vivasvān, Dhātṛ, Aṃśu and Indra.

In the late Vedic period we also have statements that give the number of Āditya-s is given as 12:

sa manasaiva vācam mithunaṃ samabhavat | sa dvādaśa drapsān garbhy abhavat | te dvādaśādityā asṛjyanta | tān divy upādadhāt || Śatapatha Brāḥmaṇa 6.1.2.8
By his mind he [god Prajāpati] came into copulation with speech; he became pregnant with twelve drops; they were emitted as 12 Āditya-s; he placed them in the sky.

By the epic period the 12 Āditya-s are specifically named as Mitra, Varuṇa, Aryaman, Bhaga, Vivasvān, Dhātṛ[or Dakṣa], Aṃśa, Puṣan, Savitṛ, Tvaṣṭṛ, Indra and Viṣṇu.
e.g. the Mahābhārata has:
adityāṃ dvādaśādityāḥ saṃbhūtā bhuvaneśvarāḥ |
ye rājan nāmatas tāṃs te kīrtayiṣyāmi bhārata ||
dhātā mitro ‘ryamā śakro varuṇaś cāṃśa eva ca |
bhago vivasvān pūṣā ca savitā daśamas tathā ||
ekādaśas tathā tvaṣṭā viṣṇur dvādaśa ucyate | 1.59.14-16a (“Critical”)

From Aditi were generated 12 Āditya-s, the lords of the universe, whose names, O king, I shall narrate:
Dhātṛ, Mitra, Aryaman, Śakra (i.e. Indra), Varuṇa, Aṃśa, Bhaga, Vivasvān, Puṣan, Savitṛ, Tvaṣṭṛ, and Viṣṇu.

In this regard we may point out a sūkta from the Atharvaveda where the above 12 are all named, albeit along with other gods (AV 11.6). Taking the number of Āditya-s as 12 also allows us to explain the traditional short count of male deities, i.e. 33 [Footnote 2], which is seen in both the Veda and the Itihāsa-s, in a straight-forward way. For example the Rāmāyaṇa has:

adityāṃ jajñire devās trayastriṃśad ariṃdama |
ādityā vasavo rudrā aśvinau ca paraṃtapa || 3.13.14c-15a (“critical edition”)
From Aditi were born the 33 deva-s, O foe-crusher (i.e. Rāma): the Āditya-s (12), the Vasu-s (8), the Rudrā-s (11) and the twin Aśvin-s (2), O foe-scorcher. [Traditional numbers in brackets]

One may note that the same counts as above for the Āditya, Vasu-s and Rudrā categories are given in the Śatapatha Brāḥmaṇa 6.1.2.6-8. Regarding these categories and the total count, in the Ṛgveda we have:

tvam agne vasūṃr iha rudrāṃ ādityāṃ uta |
yajā svadhvaraṃ janam manujātaṃ ghṛtapruṣam ||
śruṣṭīvāno hi dāśuṣe devā agne vicetasaḥ |
tān rohidaśva girvaṇas trayastriṃśatam ā vaha || RV 1.45.1-2
You O Agni offer ritual here to the Vasu-s, the Rudra-s and also the Āditya-s [on behalf] of the people who are Manu’s descendants, who perform proper rituals and pour offering of ghee.
O Agni and the gods, wise ones, do hear the worshiper: O you with a red-horse, delighting in Vedic chants, bring those 33 gods!

Thus, we find both the categories (Ādityas, Rudra-s, Vasu-s, and also Aśvin-s), and the total number 33 to be an ancient one. Indeed this count 33 likely goes back to the Indo-Iranian period as the Zoroastrians also enumerate 33 yazata-s. Hence, it is possible that there was a system of counting even from the earlier Vedic period that already had 12 Āditya-s, 11 Rudra-s, 8 Vasu-s, 2 Aśvin-s, and it would suggest that the count 8 or lower for the Āditya-s seen in the Ṛgveda is a parallel tradition.

Accepting this proposal allows us to account for most major Vedic deities within those 3 categories plus the Aśvin-s: The 12 Āditya-s as listed above already includes a big fraction of the chief Vedic deities going back to the Indo-Iranian period. Indeed, such a number 12 for the chief gods might have ancient Indo-European antecedents for among the Hittites, Greeks and the northern Germanic people we either see pantheons with 12 chief gods or a category of deities with 12 gods [Footnote 3].

The 12 Hittite gods from Yazılıkaya

The Rudra category originally also included the Marut-s who constitute a second block of major Vedic deities. The Vasu category includes Agni, Vāyu, Soma and Dyaus, among others who make another key set of Vedic deities. This way one can see why the Vedic pantheon is often described as triad of Vasu-s, Rudra-s and Āditya-s. Finally, we have the twin Aśvin-s and Bṛhaspati, who are usually in the Viśvedeva category. Finally, we may note that the functional principle of the triad of Vasu-s, Rudra-s and Āditya-s also lurks behind the classical Hindu trinity: Dyaus, who is the old Indo-European father figure in the Vasu category, reemerges as the father-deity Brahman; Śiva is the exemplar of the Rudra category; Viṣṇu the epitome of the Āditya category. In this regard the Mahābhārata has: “jaghanyajaḥ sa sarveṣām ādityānāṃ guṇādhikaḥ ||” 1.59.16cd (“Critical”) i.e. He [Viṣṇu], who is the last-born (of the Āditya-s) is the most endowed of all of them. This marks the rise of Viṣṇu to the preeminent status in that category.

This position of Viṣṇu among the Āditya-s, while a hallmark of Vaiṣṇava ascendancy [Note that elsewhere in the Mahābhārata, Indra or Varuṇa are mentioned as the foremost of the Āditya-s], was also interiorized in part by the Saura-mata. We see this an iconographic representation (below), which was stolen from a Saura shrine in Madhya Pradesh, and auctioned in 2002 (Likely of the Chandela dynasty based on stylistic grounds). Here we can see that the central image of the Āditya is accompanied by both a distinctive Saura pantheon (see below) and also Brahman and Śiva on either side of his head. This implies that the central Āditya is being implicitly identified with Viṣṇu.

Central Āditya implicitly identified with Viṣṇu; flanked by Brahman and Rudra

Despite the above-noted parallelism with the Vaiṣṇava-mata, the 12 Āditya-s as a group were central deities of the Saura-mata, especially, in their solar aspect embodied by Vivasvān. They were combined with the Iranic elements to give rise to a distinctive Saura pantheon. In iconographic terms this is represented by several images showing the 12 Āditya-s as a group. We shall consider one of those, which was first described by the historian AL Shrivastava [A Rare Representation of Dvādaśāditya; East and West, Vol 52], to illustrate the peculiarly Saura pantheon (below). On stylistic grounds this image can be considered a production of the rājpūt dynasty of the Pratihāra-s, who were known to be major votaries of the Saura-mata: We have king Mihira Bhoja who was said to have been born upon the invocation of Mitra by his father, and the kings Rāmabhadra and Mahīpāla whose inscriptions described them as Saura-s. The image shows stylistic and material similarity to a toraṇa with 12 Āditya-s from Hinglajgarh, Madhya Pradesh, which was noted by AL Shrivastava as being housed in the Central Museum, Indore. Image was auctioned by the Sotheby’s auction house and has been since lost to the public. Hence, it is possible that the image was stolen from the Hinglajgarh ruins or a temple renovated by the Chandela-s or Paramāra-s by one of the image thieves who have been operating at these sites for several years.

The 12 Āditya-s with the Saura pantheon

Here the central Āditya may be identified with his primary solar aspect, i.e. Vivasvān. Forming a right triangle around around his head are the triad of Āditya-s who come as a group from the Ṛgveda: Mitra, Varuṇa and Aryaman who are also associated with the rising, setting and meridian solar aspects. The remain tetrads on either side of the “top-center” Aryaman account for the remaining 8 Āditya-s of the dodecad.

In addition to the 12 Āditya-s the image also depicts the distinctive Saura pantheon which includes:

The twin Aśvin-s: These are horse-headed deities depicted at extreme lower corners of both images. The twins are ancient deities going back to the Proto-Indo-European period and are attested in most branches of the Indo-European tree. They may even go back to an earlier phase of human history being related to twin deities seen elsewhere in Eurasiatic cultures and their New World descendants. In the Hindu tradition they are said to be born of Vivasvān and his wife Saṃjñā when they assumed the form of horses. They are the physicians of the gods who are supposed to have transmitted the science of medicine to the Bhṛgus

Saṃjñā: On the right of the god is his wife Saṃjñā also known as Rājṅī. She is said to have assumed the form of a mare in the realm of the Uttarakuru where Vivasvān is a said to have mated with her in the form of horse to sire the Aśvin-s.

Chāyā or Nikṣubhā: The left of the god is his wife Chāyā the personification of the shadow or darkness. She is specifically known as Nikṣubhā in the Iranized flavors of the Saura-mata and is central to the origin mythology of the Iranic Saura ritualists. The Bhaviṣyata purāṇa narrates the following tale in her regard:
Kṛṣṇa, the hero of the Yadu-s married Jāṃbavatī, the daughter of the great bear Jāmbavān. Their son was the valiant Sāmba. As Sāmba grew up he secretly dallied with some of numerous wives of Kṛṣṇa. Hence, Kṛṣṇa cursed him with an incurable disease that disfigured his skin. To relieve himself of this curse Sāmba went to the banks of the river Candrabhāgā, worshiped Vivasvān, and honored the god by constructing a temple at Mūlasthāna (what is today Multan, where the temple was destroyed by the Mohammedans). No local brāhmaṇa knew of the mysteries of his worship; hence, they could not take up priesthood at the temple. So Sāmba sought help of Gauramukha, the adviser of the Yadu chief, Ugrasena. Gauramukha asked him to go to Śakadvīpa and obtain a special class of ritualists called magācārya-s to worship Sūrya. Sāmba then asked regarding the antecedents of these worshipers of the sun. Gauramukha told him that the first of the brāhmaṇa-s amidst the śakha-s was called Sujihva. He had a daughter of the name Nikṣubhā. Sūrya was enamored by her took her as his wife. Thus, she gave birth to Jaraśabda [the Indianized Zarathushtra of the old Zoroastrians], who was the founding father of all the Magacārya-s [Indianized Magi]. The gotra he founded was hence termed the Mihira gotra. They are distinguished by the sacred girdle called the avyaṅga [Avestan: Aiwyanghana, i.e. Parsi kusti] that they wear around their waist. Sāmba there upon requested Kṛṣṇa to send him Garuḍa and flying on the latter’s back he landed in Śakadvīpa. He collected the magācārya-s, brought them back to Bhārata and installed them as priests of his Sūrya temple.

Piṅgala: On the proper right of the god is a deity with a pen and inkpot. He is the attendent of Vivasvān known as Piṅgala. He is the deity of writing. Thus, he becomes the patron deity of the kāyastha-s or the old Indian scribal guild. Sometimes, he is identified with Citragupta who records all the deeds of beings. In the later Saura tradition he came to be identified with Agni.

Daṇḍin: On the proper left of the god is the attendant deity Daṇḍin. He is depicted typically with a scepter of law. He is said to be the enforcer of law among the beings even as Piṅgala records their deeds. In the later Saura tradition he came to be identified with Yama.

Srauṣa and Rājña: Like Piṅgala and Daṇḍin another pair of attendants of Vivasvān, Srauṣa and Rājña, are mentioned in the Saura tantra literature, like the tantra sections of the Sāmba purāṇa. Their origins from the Mithraic branch of the Iranic tradition are transparent: In the Avesta, Mithra (cognate of Indic Mitra) is said to be flanked on either side by the deities Rašnu and Sraoša. They were Indianized as Rājña and Srauṣa even as Mithra (Mihira) was identified with primary solar deity in the Saura-mata. In later tradition, Rājña is further identified with Indic Rudra and Srauṣa with Skanda. The latter’s identification is unsurprising as Indic Skanda and Iranic Sraoša are deities sharing an ancient common origin, as supported by two diagnostic iconographic features. The first is found in the Sraoša yasht of the Avesta:

sraoshahe ashyehe taxmahe tanu-mãthrahe darshi-draosh âhûiryehe
xshnaothra ýasnâica vahmâica xshnaothrâica frasastayaêca ||
To the embodiment of universal law, the mighty Sraoša,
whose body is made of mantra-s, the mighty-speared and lordly god,
be propitiating ýasna offering, recitation, propitiation, and praise. [Translation from Avestan modified by me based on Darmesteter]

Here we note that Sraoša’s primary weapon like that of Skanda is the spear, a epithet repeated for Sraoša in the Iranian holy book the Fargard 18.

In Fargard 18.23 we have:
âat hô sraoshô ashyô aom merekhem frakhrârayeiti parô-darsh nãma spitama zarathushtra ýim mashyâka avi duzhvacanghô kahrkatâs nãma aojaite, âat hô merekhô vâcim baraiti upa ushånghem ýãm sûrãm |
And then the universal-law embodied Sraoša awakens his rooster named Parodarsh, O Zarathushtra of the Spitama clan, which ill-speaking people call Kahrkatas, and the rooster lifts up his voice against the mighty Ushah [demonized cognate of Indic dawn goddess the Uṣas; Translation from Avestan modified by me based on Darmesteter].

Here were see that Sraoša’s bird is the rooster, which is the same as the bird of Skanda.

This identification of Sraoša and Skanda might relate to the fact there is some evidence for the worship of Skanda by Iranians in the Indosphere in first few centuries of the common era [Footnote 4].
In this later period where Skanda is explicitly identified with Srauṣa we observe Daṇḍin being replaced by Skanda or iconographically converging to Skanda. We can see that in the above image.

Mahāśvetā: Below the solar deity rising from the pedestal is seen the image of a goddess named Mahāśvetā, a key deity of the Saura-mata. She is identified sometimes with the white light emitted by the sun or more commonly with the deity of the earth i.e. Pṛthivī.

The Marīcī-s: Above the two wives are shown two archer-goddesses in the above image. Sometimes there might 4 such archer goddesses. They are known as the Marīcī-s or the light goddess and sometime explicitly named as Uṣas and Pratyuṣas when present as a pair. They represent the darkness dispelling function of the sun with the arrow they shoot representing the rays of light. Their warrior nature was combined with elements drawn from another āstika warrior goddess Vārāhī and essentialized in the bauddha tradition in the form of the solo goddess Marīcī.

Aruṇa: The lame charioteer of the sun, the brother of the celestial eagle Garuḍa, is sometimes shown managing the seven horses of the solar chariot. He can be seen the first of the images shown above.

The Saura pantheon also includes other deities like Revanta and Yama the god of death and the netherworld, both of whom are the sons of Vivasvān. They are rarely depicted in classic Saura images as those shown above. However, Revanta along with deities of his maṇḍala, including Piṅgala and Daṇḍin, where depicted in images specifically dedicated to him.

::::::::::::::::::::
Footnote 1: Picture showing reconstructed evolution of Saura-mata

Footnote 2: The short count is 33; the long count given in the Veda as 3339 (A lunar eclipse cycle number, as noted by R. Shamasastry) and subsequently later day Hindus hold that number to be 33 x 107.

Footnote 3: The significance of this number was also transmitted to Japan, where the Indo-Aryan deities inherited via the Bauddha was developed into a Nipponic pantheon of 12 gods drawn from different original categories (dvādaśadevāḥ).

The Nipponic dvādaśadevāḥ are (left to right each row): Pṛthivī [Vasu], Soma [Vasu], Kubera [Yakṣa], Vāyu [Vasu], Varuṇa [Āditya], Nairṛta [Rākṣasa], Brahman, Vivasvān [Āditya], Rudra [Rudra], Indra [Āditya], Agni [Vasu], Yama

Footnote 4: For example: We have Skanda depicted on the early Iranic ruler Ayalisha (Azilises) in India. We also have an inscription of an Iranian general in the Kadamba army who records worshiping Skanda in South India and then building a temple for Skanda in Gandhara upon his return.

It is said that Śiva transforms continually into many forms for his own enjoyment not all of those are enjoyed by the consciousness housed in a paśu

*∆*∆*∆*

It was the time around Dīpāvalī, an year after when Somakhya and Lootika had come to know each other. Their school had closed for the autumnal vacation. Lootika’s mother had woken up at night due some commotion on the street but being rather tired from the day’s labors she fell back asleep. Her husband was out of the country for several days to attend a conference. The next morning remembering that commotion she checked the news before heading out to get some vegetables. She saw in the news that the serial murderers who left a characteristic card signed Rahul and Robert had broken into a house near theirs. The owners were not there but a Nepali street guard had challenged them while they were in the premises. He was injured in the encounter even as the killers had made an escape, but not before dropping their signature card and a bludgeon, which they evidently had wished to use in the crime. Lootika’s mother grew rather concerned. While her husband kept a couple of illegal revolvers she had never used them. As she was still pondering whether to fetch the vegetables herself of take the help of the community gardener, she got a call regarding a close relative who lived in the province to the south of theirs. The said relative had been bitten by a cobra and was in a serious condition in the hospital. She needed to go right away give her kinfolk some help but under those circumstances she did not want to leave her daughters alone in the house because she could be away for up to 4 days irrespective of the fate of her relative. So she decided to leave her four kids with Somakhya’s family. She apologetically called up Somakhya’s parents and explained her situation to them and sought permission to leave her precious brood there. Lootika was not at all unhappy with the arrangement because it meant they had more opportunity to discuss the stuff they were collaborating on and generally more time to chat about things.

Accordingly their mother packed them up to drive them to Somakhya’s house. Lootika and Vrishchika insisted on having their bikes with them, so grudgingly she let them ride their bikes along, checking on them repeatedly. But she absolutely forbade Varoli and Jhilleeka from taking their cycles. Before dropping them off at Somkhya’s house she gave Lootika a purse with cash and told her to be in charge of any needs that might arise for her younger sisters. When they reached Somakhya’s house they learned that Somakhya had gone with his other classmates to play a match. Somakhya’s mother told Lootika’s mother that she had come to know of the very existence of the serial killers only when the latter had called. But Somakhya’s mother made it clear to the latter that henceforth they would not be let to wander around by themselves far from home. She also assured Lootika’s mother that they would not be allowed to stray after taking the younger ones to their scheduled language lessons.

That evening, though Somakhya wanted to go out again to meet his friends Sharvamanyu and Vidrum, he was sternly instructed to stay at home with the girls. Hence he spent his time working on the bow he was making. After dinner Somakhya opened his home lab with his books and instruments to the four sisters. He took his seat on a low stool at the back door of his home lab crushing rain-tree pods to make a ball. The four sisters were excited by Somakhya’s extensive library and started combing through it. Lootika grabbed for herself a book titled “The evolution of synapsids in the Paleozoic and Triassic”, which was so absorbing that she seated herself cross-legged on the floor right next to the bookshelf reading it. Jhilleeka made herself comfortable on the couch with her tablet and a book titled “Trigonometric delights”, even as she worked out some of the interesting results therein, occasionally consulting Lootika and Somakhya if she got stuck. Varoli curled herself on the mat having grabbed for herself a book titled the “Biochemistry of coenzymes” and also an interestingly-written textbook of organic chemistry to help her along. Vrishchika picked up a peculiar old book titled the Kāvya-kautūhalam and was soon busy savoring its contents. She was enamored by a verse she had just read and recited it out aloud to the rest:

na gajā nagajā dayitā dayitā vigataṃ vigataṃ calitaṃ calitaṃ pramadā ‘pramadā mahatā mahatām araṇaṃ maraṇaṃ samayāt samayāt ||

Vrishchika: “That poem is by a rājaputra chieftain bhaṭṭi in the court of the king śrīdharasena. While it is a low-complexity sequence we can confer meaning on it thus:
The mountain-born beloved elephants were not attended to;
the flight of the birds stopped and all movement disappeared;
lovers were no longer loved; by the great one [the Hanumat fire]
death of the great ones [the Rakṣa-s] arrived in due time, [though] not in battle.”

Somakhya: “What would be the biological analog such a verse?”
Lootika: “Two adjacent nucleosomes, while otherwise identical, could have a different biological meaning due to modification of their side chains!”
Somakhya: “Good!”
Vrishchika: “Could you tell me more about this?”
Lootika picked up a textbook on the biochemistry of epigenetics from Somakhya’s collection and handed it to Vrishchika warning her: “Not all of its contents should be taken at face value; I or Somakhya could clarify things further once you get up to speed with the basics.”

Having started her up on that, Lootika went over to Somakhya and took a seat on the floor beside him even as he was starting to the gather the paste for the final act of the kanduka-kṛti. As he was doing so, Lootika, as though induced by her relative’s fate, started talking about snakes with Somakhya. She reminded Somakhya of the day when they were looking for beetles and wasps at an abandoned quarry in the hills when a cobra had dashed forth at him from its elevated lair. As Lootika yelled out to him, Somakhya instinctively ducked and ran out of the mouth of the quarry, even as the snake literally flew over his head with the momentum of the attempted strike. Somakhya: “I thought that day I may have become a sacrificial victim for the dreadful Vāsuki or Takṣaka.”

Having placed the ball to solidify, Somakhya went on to look at microbial eukaryotes and microscopic animals under his microscope even as the four sisters joined him. Thus, they would have spent the whole night, had Somakhya’s parents not constantly pestered them to go to sleep.

◊◊◊◊

The next day Somakhya and Lootika were to accompany the younger three to Shilpika’s house for their language lessons and fetch them back. Somakhya and Lootika had stopped attending the language lessons, so they were sternly instructed not to wander in the hills, go to any eatery to have snacks, or go to the woods of the university campus. The only thing they were allowed to do was to visit the aquarium which was near Shilpika’s house while the younger ones took their class. They nodded in acquiescence, and left to drop off the three younger ones.

On the way Somakhya told Lootika: “If Vivasvān’s black son has to visit us in the form of the serial killers then none of these precautions would really help.”
Lootika: “I agree, but given this whole atmosphere of fear if we are caught in the surveillance of your parents elsewhere from where we are supposed to be we could be in unnecessary trouble. By the way there are other dangers. My friend Maurvi mentioned that there was a kidnapper on the prowl.” Somakhya: “I have my knife. I believe that should do for the kidnapper, given that Sharvamanyu, Vidrum and I have practiced for many attack scenarios.”
Lootika: “But what about me?”
Somakhya: “We could get a knife for you from Vidrum and Sharvamanyu. They have figured out a place to get an excellent gravity knife and we could teach you the right defensive moves with it.”
Lootika: “But to get the cash for that might be difficult now.”
Somakhya: “We are planning to get ourselves Kukri-s. I could lend you mine then.”
Lootika: “I need to have something for me and my sisters that might be easier to use. My father did tell me that some day he will teach me to shoot. But I think for the immediate future we should talk more about our other ideas for weapons; may be later tonight. As we discussed before we should make use of the ghasa-ghasā plant or even more spectacularly the yavaviṣa plant.”
Somakhaya: “Lootika, you must realize that you would still need to learn the moves and it is no joke to put them to use when being actually attacked by someone bigger and stronger than us. But, indeed, we should continue the weapons project. Praise be to our ancestors the Bhṛgu-s and Āngirasa-s and the cunning of Cāṇakya. We should also continue working on that prototype for the stun ray weapon with the new sapphire lenses.”

Thus conversing they arrived at Shilpika’s house and dropped off the younger three. While Shilpika was scholarly, she was a boring teacher. That was one of the main reasons that Somakhya and Lootika no longer continued the literary lessons even though she liked them a lot and was very good them. That day they realized that her husband was instead teaching the lesson. Shilpika told them that he had decided to conduct free courses in autumn for a month by taking time off from his job as an archaeologist and epigraphist. She mentioned that he was doing this because he very keen to revive the Devabhāṣā as the language of the Hindus. Lingering on, Somakhya and Lootika realized that, unlike Shilpika, her husband was a great teacher who had a knack for making the students immediately attentive and interested. Somakhya whispered to Lootika that he was a man who possessed brahmavarcas and might be in possession of brahman power. So they did a namaskāra to him. He asked them if they might be interested to join the readings he conducted from the samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra, yuktikalpataru, and mānasāra. They thought that was interesting and expressed their desire to attend the readings.

On the way back the weather was pleasant, so Lootika and Vrishchika had Jhilleeka and Varoli sit on seats attached to the back of their respective bikes even as they slowly walked their bikes along towards Somakhya’s house. Just then Lootika noticed that Shilpika had sent her a mail, with something her sister Varoli had done, adding that her sister was just like her. Lootika showed it to Somakhya. On a piece of paper, on one side Varoli had drawn an elephant written out the below words under it:

sa nāgaḥ | so ‘tīva sthūlas tuṅgaś ca+āsīt | tena tulyo ‘paraḥ paśur na+āsīt | avartanta tasya sthulāś ca kaṭhiṇāś ca ghorāś ca dantāḥ | ko ‘yaṃ nāgaḥ ?

On the other side, she had written in those same words along with the additional words:

cakāra taraṇam arṇāyāṃ dakṣiṇa-krauñca-dvīpe | babhakṣa nakraṃ mahāghora-rūpaṃ |

But now the earlier words were placed in a winding pattern in compartments placed inside the body of another zoomorphic figure.

Somakhya: “Why this seems like the Titanoboa we used to draw in śrī Shilpika’s sleepy class?”
Saying so, he gave it back to Lootika. In a flash he took it back from her, looked hard at it and continued: “What do you think is in the serpent’s mouth?”
Lootika: “Why that looks like the two inverted crossed ₹ symbols! Is that not the sign the serial killers Rahul and Robert leave behind at the venues of their crimes?”
Somakhya: “Yes, indeed. Ask your sister why she drew that symbol in the serpent’s mouth.”
With some trepidation Lootika asked Varoli who was riding in the seat attached to Vrishchika’s bike in front of them: “Why this symbol dear Varoli?”
Varoli: “agrajā, I think you were the one who first showed it to me in a news article. Then I had this dream last night where I saw the snake with that symbol. I don’t remember anything else of that dream other than that I awoke from it in sort of a scare but quickly fell back asleep because you hugged me. I decided to incorporate it into my sarpabandha after Shilpika’s husband showed us the sarpabandha-s of Paramāra kings along with a little play on homonymy to confound the other students.”
Lootika: “Yes, being too sleepy I only vaguely remember that you suddenly woke up.”

Just then Lootika got a call from Somakhya’s mother: “Where are you all? Hurry home right away. Apparently Rahul and Robert had struck again near your house and killed someone.” Deciding not to worry their parents and guardians too much with such news, they quickly mounted their bikes and sped homewards.

As they reached home they saw Somakhya’s mother standing at the gate and to their amusement she counted them twice to make sure they were all in. She then asked Lootika to call her mother and inform her that they were alive and well.

◊◊◊◊

Realizing that with such news, that too in broad daylight, there was no hope for their outdoor activities, the five filed into the home lab to resume where they had stopped the previous night. Just then Somakhya got a message from Sharvamanyu:
“You might know of this girl Meghana in our class in whom our friend Vidrum has a particular interest. I understand she was killed by the serial killers Rahul and Robert. Thankfully Vidrum was not with her at the time. Her body was found on the middle of the quiet Subhas Chandra Bose Road with her skull shattered by a club, which is apparently the trademark of these murderers.”

Somakhya showed it to Lootika. Lootika: “Now that is really scary! That girl was a good-for-nothing, but to be brained this way on the middle of the road is very tragic indeed!”

As the day proceeded they got moving with the lab and the books. Somakhya saw a strange large non-photosynthetic euglenozoan growing in one of his water cultures. He called Lootika over to see it and they decided they should catch a few of them and try to get them to grow by themselves in tube with bacterial suspension. He handed over the microscope and a pipette to Lootika to catch them even as he proceeded to set up a bacterial suspension. Having done completed that task they felt good and sat down on the couch hoping their plan would work even as they swiped through the photographs of the said protist. Suddenly, Lootika got distracted by a message from her friend regarding the murder of their classmate Meghana. She remarked: “How many times have we ridden on the SCB road. Rather frightening indeed to imagine Rahul and Robert were prowling there.”
Somakhya: “Well they had struck on the same lane as your house the previous night. In what way is this more frightening in that regard?”

Lootika: “Perhaps it is just beginning to sink in now.”
Somakhya: “Talking of this, it just strikes me that there is something strange here. Do you think this girl would have been walking in the middle of the road? The news reports say that she was found dead on the middle of the SCB road. If that is where she was, why did they not find her bike or some other vehicle. If she was crossing the road then she could have seen her assailants and would have reacted in some way, as consequence of which they could not have killed her right in the middle of the road.”
Lootika: “What if they had attacked her on the footpath and she had run to the middle of the road to avoid them?”
Somakhya: “Possible, however note this: the assailants are supposed to operate in a white van. Quiet as the SCB road is, if they were lying in wait, their white van should have been parked somewhere near if they wished to commit the crime on the footpath. The reports say that two men on the motorbikes supposedly noticed R&R’s trademark white van speeding away at the end of the SCB road to enter the University road even as they entered the road in the opposite direction and saw the corpse. That does not seem to square with the report saying that none of the residents saw or heard anything: her screams, noises of the girl being clobbered, or the white van being parked for a substantial time on their parking spaces.”

Varoli who was nearby remarked: “Now that you say all this, I remember little more of my dream. I think I saw someone being chased by two men in a lonely place. She tripped and fell and they struck her with hunting crops. I think that’s when I woke up in a fright.”

Just as they were taking in Varoli’s curious statement, Vrishchika chimed in sounding rather shaken: “Well, we are not going to be seeing two of our schoolmates when school resumes…”
Lootika: “What do you mean!”
Vrishchika: “I just got a message from my friend that my classmate Vikas died today. Apparently, he had unwrapped a large number of those ‘atom-bombs’ which come wound in a green rope and collected the explosive to make a big one. He put the stuff in a tin, inserted a magnesium wire into it, and set it alight. Before he could run it apparently went off straight on his face and he succumbed to his injury today.”

Somakhya: “Ouch, what a sad way to go! That is one experiment which should be done with utmost caution; not at all something for the casual pyrotechnic enthusiast. The poor boy should have really listened to the warnings of the elders for that one.”

For some time they remained silent, each turning in their mind how close Vaivasvata could be. Finally, perhaps to articulate her sense of disquiet little Jhilleeka broke the somber stillness: “Ain’t it strange that Varoli had a such a prognostic dream? Aren’t dreams supposed to recapitulate past events rather than prognosticate future ones?”
Lootika: “Dear antajā, I don’t think Varoli’s dream was prognostic. See she was already primed by the fact that R&R had struck near our house. Then there was the snake looming large on our minds. She already knew from the reports that R&R had dispatched their victims by slugging them on the head and I had shown her the article which showed the symbol they left behind. So all that congealed into her dream. Moreover she remembered this only post-facto; so how can we even be sure that her recall was perfect. We tend to see patterns, so we think it was prognostic. After all no one dreamed of Vrishchika’s classmate detonating his own face.”

Varoli: “But then you surely recall that August Kekule von Stradonitz discovered the aromatic ring structure of benzene in his dream. Would this not fit the bill as being prognostic? After all this is one discovery on which we peg much of what we do even today.”

Vrishchika: “Lootika, in the same vein I am sure you also remember the studies which have shown that rats dream of futures movements in locales that they have not been able to actually explore. That is in a sense a prognostic pre-view in a dream. So when we put all those things together we can arrive at something close to being a real prognosis.”

Somakhya asked Varoli to pass him her drawing of the sarpabandha, which was related to the on going discussion amongst the sisters. Having closely looked at it and then checking out a map on his computer he returned it to Varoli remarking: “I suspect that Meghana was not killed on the middle of the SCB road but was rather clubbed to death at the Manorañjanodyānam near Vidrum’s house.”

Lootika: “Why do you say so?”
Somakhya: “Well, all I will say for now is that if it proves to be right then Varoli’s dream was genuinely prognostic.”

◊◊◊◊

Lootika’s mother came back a couple of days later after having helped her relative who had survived but for the loss of a couple of toes. She headed straight to collect her daughters from Somakhya’s home and returned home. With Rahul and Robert claiming further victims, Lootika and Somakhya never got to meet again that vacation except for the day when their families had assembled together at the hilltop shrine of the god Kumāra for a major triannual festival. But they did not get to talk much that day as they were totally taken in by the bustle of the ritual. However, Somakhya managed get the large euglenozoan growing but to his disappointment he could not get it over to Lootika to do her molecular biological wizardry for them to proceed ahead. As he was ruing this on the last day of the vacation, he received a message from her:
“Hey, I just heard from Maurvi and Nikhila that there is a shootout going on outside the gym near school.”

Somakhya checked the news and confirmed that something like that was indeed underway. He hoped that this might lead to school being closed for at least one more day. But his hopes were dashed as he got a message from Vidrum: “The situation has resolved in the most unbelievably dramatic fashion. Apparently, Awrangzeb Khan and Sher Khan, the suspects in the mall bombing that took place last year had a brush with none other than Rahul and Robert outside the gym. In the ensuring skirmish Awrangzeb Khan was killed and the remaining three were seriously injured. Consequently, they were unable to flee and have been taken into custody.”

◊◊◊◊

It was many years after these incidents. Lootika was in the last semester of her college and Vrishchika deep in med-school. At the end of the day Lootika had gone over to the medical campus to pick up Vrishchika since she had given her bike for servicing. There she saw Vrishchika waiting for her along her former classmates Vidrum and Gardabh and Vrishchika’s classmate Mahish. Since they were seeing Lootika after a long time they paused to chat a little.

Gardabh: “What are you guys doing for the commute tomorrow? Do you think it might be better to take the train or bus?”
Mahish: “What is the matter?”
Gardabh: “Did you not hear that Sher Khan is going to be hanged?”
Mahish: “Who on earth is this Sher Khan and why are they hanging him?”
Vidrum: “Don’t tell me you don’t know who Sher Khan is. He was the brain behind the mall-bombing when we were kids.”
Mahish: “I really don’t bother about all this politics. It is so boring and as it is there is so much to study with exams round the corner. I seriously want to become a doctor. ”
Gardabh: “But then this could be a life and death issue; especially if the two communities decide to clash. That is why I say we must be more enlightened like Europe and abolish this death punishment.”
Vidrum: “What nonsense. I would say let us not just hang Sher Khan but also Rahul and Robert. They are no less deserving of this.”
Vrishchika: “I am sure you have seen the news that the church of the baptists is working hard to get Robert’s sentence commuted right away.”
Gardabh: “Now why are you bringing religion into all this. That is why we could be caught in riots tomorrow.”
Lootika: “Hey Gardabh – you are the guy who procured me the knife that I am still carrying with me. Now why are you getting worried about riots.”
Gardabh: “See Lootika those were old days. I am not into all this anymore. Like Mahish says I am serious about becoming a doctor.”
Vidrum: “So you think I am not?”

Gardabh: “No, No. I am just trying to bring sense to you guys. Killing the killer does not right the wrong. Yes they were a danger to society; let us keep them in jail so that they can never cause trouble to us again. Now by killing them we are only worsening the communal divide. Also think about this Rahul and Robert were young and misguided. They confessed that they thought killing people was like hunting tigers on a safari, just more exciting. If they lived in a humane society they would not think like this. So jail has to be corrective experience for them not just punitive. By executing them the government is being given power to do the very thing they are being punished for. Moreover, R&R killed Awrangzeb Khan. So have the not also contributed to fighting terrorism? Now look at Sher Khan. He has a young daughter who might one day be a student like us. Should we not have compassion?”
Vrishchika: “Well I am not exactly waiting with bated breath for that. If she gets to see anything beyond the haze of her veil that would achievement enough! I agree with Vidrum all three of them should be put to death forthwith.”
Mahish: “Friends, I am sure there are so many such cases all over the country. Why waste our energy arguing over all this useless stuff. We could have talked about those difficult questions on resistance to beta-lactams that I am not making any sense of.”

Vidrum: “Lootika, you don’t have an opinion?”
Lootika: “I do but not that it would matter much to the world.”
Gardabh: “Let’s hear it anyhow.”
Lootika: “I think Sher Khan should not be hanged because he becoming a martyr would only further the marūnmāda meme-complex. Instead he should be subject to such treatment so that he repeatedly confesses that marūnmāda is utter nonsense, that he has given it up, and that all marūnmatta-s should give it up. These statements should then be widely broadcast for both the Hindus and marūnmatta-s to see and hear. If you think that it is impossible, we hear that a Japanese lord made it happen to the pretasādhakas in the past, and we have had Bhāgurāyaṇa. As for R&R I think they should be given the mṛtyu-daṇḍa and not waste the tax-payer’s money. And Vidrum I do hope you get you closure with R&R.”
Gardabh: “All that will never happen. You are just being a cruel girl.”

Vidrum: “I have already got it: even if not total, it is a liberating closure. I doubt you have seen the details that came out during these cases. Apparently Meghana was waiting for none other Sher Khan’s junior partner Awrangzeb Khan at the sitting area in the Manorañjanodyānam. That was when R&R clobbered her and then threw her corpse out of their van on the middle of the SCB road. R&R’s skirmish with the marūnmatta-s was apparently precipitated by this.”

Lootika: “Vrishchika, did you hear that! Let’s be going.”
Vrishchika: “Vow! We must stop at Somakhya’s house on the way home!”

◊◊◊◊

Somakhya: “Gautamī-s, look at this; your sister’s old drawing and the udyāna’s walk way. What would you say pareidolia or prognosis?”

Lootika: “Unbelievable.”
Vrishchika: “And the biological equivalent of that would be recombination of transposons on chromosome.”

Our illustrious ancestor Dadhyaṅc Ātharvaṇa is supposed to have possessed privileged knowledge from the great Indra that even the twin gods, the Aśvin-s, sought to get it from him. However, speaking out this secret knowledge would have cost him his head as that was the condition under which Indra had imparted it to him. Hence, they surgically fitted him with a horse’s head so that he could convey it to him. The great Ṛṣi Kakṣīvān, the son of Dīrghatamas, the founder of the Gotama clan, alluded to this act of the Aśvin-s in a mantra in the Ṛgveda thus:

tad vāṃ narā sanaye daṃsa ugram
āviṣ kṛṇomi tanyatur na vṛṣṭim |
dadhyaṅ ha yan madhv ātharvaṇo vām
aśvasya śīrṣṇā pra yad īm uvāca || RV 1.116.12

O manly twins, that awful wonder-act of yours [done] for gain,
I make widely known, as thunder [announces] rain,
indeed Dadhyaṅc Ātharvaṇa spoke to you two
that which is “honey” through the head of a horse.

In Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa 14.1.1.25 it is stated that the privileged knowledge possessed by Dadhyaṅc Ātharvaṇa concerns the Pravargya ritual by which the Soma-yāga is made “whole”. The Pravargya ritual again refers to a severed head, that of Makha, Viṣṇu, or Rudra in different brāhmaṇa-s, which is represented by the central implement of the ritual, the Gharma pot. The Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa 14.1.4.13 further elaborates this Madhu-vidyā and it is presented as the high teaching of the upaniṣat in 14.5.5 (i.e. the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣat).

This mythic nucleus serves as a locus for further elaboration in later Hindu tradition. The Purāṇa-s incorporate the frame of the Pravargya myth into a narrative to explain how the horse-headed Viṣṇu came into being. His head is described as being severed, even as it was in one of the Pravargya legend, and was then replaced with that of horse. This horse-headed Viṣṇu is then able to slay a horse-headed asura, who had invulnerability from everyone else, except another with a horse’s head.

Interestingly, Russian archaeologists claimed that such a chimeric form, a man with a horse’s head, was found in a kurgan of the Potapovka culture [A sister of the more famous Sintashta culture] near the Samara Bend on the Volga steppes – a place close the original homeland of the Aryans. However, subsequent dating showed that the human and horse skeletons belong to different ages and the superimposition of two separate burials human and horse at the same site separated by several hundreds of years had accidentally created the impression of a chimera.

Archaeological chimeras have nevertheless re-emerged recently. An Iron Age site from Dorset, UK has provided extensive evidence for chimeric creations by Britonic Celts. These include chimeras between horses and cows as well as burial of multiple heads of sacrificed animals. It is uncertain if these were purely Celtic innovations or have earlier Indo-European precedents. The human sacrifice at the site seems to have placed the human remains on various animals remains with a correspondence of the parts.

This is reminiscent of aspects of the funerary custom of our ancient Ātharvaṇa ancestors (Kauśika-sūtra 80-89): cremation of the human along with a sacrificed animal. An animal, typically a cow, is sacrificed and its parts are cut up carefully and placed on the corresponding parts of the Ātharvaṇa’s body along with all the ritual implements he had used while alive, smeared with goat butter. His right hand is made to hold a staff. The text specifies that in the case of a kṣatriya his bow is placed instead. Thereafter, it being a cremation, the equivalence diverges. The pyre is then lit using the fires in which he had made offerings during his life and an invocation of Yama is made, followed by the mantra honoring the ancient Aṅgiras-es and Bhṛgu-s. Once he has burned his remains are collected sprinkled with milk and collected in an urn mixed with scented powders and unguents. Then the urn with the remains or just the remains are buried and a śmaśāna is piled over it. A version of a similar cremation is narrated in the Greek epic by Agamemnon’s ghost to Achilles about his own funeral:

The daughters of the “Old Man of the Sea” stood around your [Achilles] corpse lamenting bitterly. They wrapped your body in an imperishable shroud. And the nine Muses chanted your dirge, responding each to each in their sweet voices. There was not a single Argive to be seen without tears in his eyes, so moving was the clear song of the Muse. Immortal gods and mortal men, we mourned for you, seventeen days and nights, and on the eighteenth we delivered you to the flames, sacrificing herds of fattened sheep and spiral-horned cattle round you. You were burnt clothed as a god, drowned in unguents and sweet honey, and a host of Achaean heroes streamed past your pyre as you burned, warriors and charioteers, making a vast noise. And at dawn, Achilles, when Hephaestus’ fires had eaten you, we gathered up your whitened ash and bone, and steeped them in oil and unmixed wine. Your mother gave us a gold two-handled urn, saying it was the gift of Dionysus, and crafted by far-famed Hephaestus himself. There your ashes lie, my glorious Achilles, mixed with the bones of the dead Patroclus, Menoetius’ son, but separated from those of Antilochus, who next to dead Patroclus you loved most among your comrades. And on a headland thrusting into the wide Hellespont we, the great host of Argive spearmen, heaped a vast flawless mound above them, so it might be seen far out to sea by men who live now and those to come.

The Greek account is notable in several ways: The parallels to the Atharvan version (and more generally the Vaidika version) is apparent. The use of sweet honey is interesting for the Atharvanic injunction for a kṣatriya’s corpse is: “madhūtsiktena kṣatriyasyāvasiñcati” (A stream of honey is poured over the kṣatriya’s); thus, Achilles was being given a kṣatriya’s funeral. Eating of Achilles by the fires of Hephaestus may be compared with the phrase of the corpse-eating Agni Kravyāda in the Veda. The Kurgan custom of the steppes is also retained by the Greeks who pile a Kurgan for Achilles, even as described in the Atharvan and Ṛgvedic Kurgan burial.

Irrespective of whether the chimeras and sacrificed animal heads at the Celtic site had any earlier Indo-European connection, we find references to both such animal heads and the chimeras in the Vedic ritual.

In the soma ritual at the base of the altar heads of five animals, including humans, are laid as a foundation. This is described thus in the brāhmaṇa section of the Taittirīya-saṃhitā thus:

prajāpatir agnim asṛjata |
Prajāpati emitted Agni.

so ‘smāt sṛṣṭaḥ prāṅ prādaravat tasmā aśvam praty āsyat |
He (Agni) [when] emitted ran away east from him (Prajāpati); he (Prajāpati) hurled a horse at him (Agni).

sa dakṣiṇāvartata tasmai vṛṣṇim praty āsyat |
He (Agni) turned to the south; he (Prajāpati) hurled a ram at him (Agni).

sa pratyaṅṅ āvartata tasmā ṛṣabham praty āsyat |
He (Agni) turned to the west; he (Prajāpati) hurled a bull at him (Agni).

sa udaṅṅ āvartata tasmai bastam praty āsyat |
He (Agni) turned to the north; he (Prajāpati) hurled a goat at him (Agni).

sa ūrdhvo ‘dravat tasmai puruṣam praty āsyat |
He (Agni) fled upwards; he (Prajāpati) hurled a man at him (Agni).

yat paśu-śīrṣāṇy upadadhāti sarvata evainam avarudhya cinute |
Thus, he (the ritual specialist: adhvaryu) places the animal-heads, enclosing them all around, he piles [the altar].

etā vai prāṇa-bhṛtaś cakṣuṣmatīr iṣṭakā yat paśu-śīrṣāṇi |
These, the animal-heads, truly life-supporting [and] possessed of sight are the bricks (i.e. of the ritual’s foundation).

yat paśu-śīrṣāṇy upadadhāti tābhir eva yajamāno ‘muṣmin loke prāṇity atho tābhir evāsmā ime lokāḥ pra bhānti |
Because he places the animal-heads, the ritualist lives (breathes) by means of them in that [other] world; also indeed these worlds shine forth for him by them (the heads).

mṛdābhilipyopa dadhāti medhyatvāya |
Having smeared them (the heads) with mud for ritual purity, he places them down.

paśur vā eṣa yad agnir annam paśava eṣa khalu vā agnir yat paśuśīrṣāṇi |
Agni, indeed is [embodied in] an animal; animals are food; verily the animal-heads are this Agni.

yaṃ kāmayeta kanīyo ‘syānnam syād iti saṃtarāṃ tasya paśuśīrṣāṇy upa dadhyāt kanīya evāsyānnam bhavati |
If he perhaps wishes that: ‘May his food be less’, he should lay his animals-heads more closely together; verily his food becomes less.

yaṃ kāmayeta samāvad asyānnaṁ syād iti madhyatas tasyopa dadhyāt samāvad evāsyānnam bhavati |
If he perhaps wishes that: ‘May his food remain the same’, he should lay his animals-heads medium [spacing apart]; verily his food remains the same.

yaṃ kāmayeta bhūyo ‘syānnaṁ syād ity anteṣu tasya vyudūhyopa dadhyād antata evāsmā annam ava runddhe bhūyo ‘syānnam bhavati ||
If he perhaps wishes that: ‘May his food be more’, he should lay his animal-heads widely-separated at the ends of the pit; verily by enclosing the food his food becomes more.

Thus, the different animal-heads being placed at the base of the soma ritual altar are reminiscent of the multiple heads of different animals found at the Celtic site. While in many modern performances clay or golden heads might be used, it is clear that in the earlier ritual actual heads were used. As for the human head it is apparent that it was not obtained by human sacrifice in the core śrauta tradition. Āpastamba clarifies that the corpse of a Kṣatriya or Vaiśya who has been slain in warfare by an arrow or struck dead by lightning is purchased for 7 or 21 units of cash and the head is severed at the time of the sale. The Kaṭha-s clarify that a dead man’s head is bought for 21 units of cash at a cemetery and severed from the corpse at the time of purchase.

Finally, coming to the issue of chimeric animals in the veda, we might cite the famous verse of Vāmadeva Gautama on the embodiment of Sanskrit language as chimeric animal:

catvāri śṛṅgā trayo asya pādā
dve śīrṣe sapta hastāso asya |
tridhā baddho vṛṣabho roravīti
maho devo martyāṃ ā viveśa || RV 4.58.3

Four horns, his feet are three,
his heads are two, his hands seven;
bound thrice the bull roars,
the great god has entered into the mortals.

The god Agni enters the mortals as the Sanskrit language comprised of:
4 four horns: nominals, verbs, preverbs and particles.
3 feet: the 3 accents of the old language.
2 heads: the vocalized word and the inner word associated with the first person experience of meaning.
7 hands: the 7 cases
3 bonds: The articulations in the lungs, throat and head that express the language in spoke form.

We shall be elaborating on this and its significance to the performance of ritual in a separate story.

A slightly modified version of article was originally published at IndiaFacts

Pāṇini stands at the pinnacle of Hindu intellectual achievement. His sūtra-pāṭha may be considered a monument in the same league as the invention of the śūṇya-based numeral system for which the Hindus are renowned. However, like several other Hindu figures of note, his life and times are the subject of divergent or contradictory narratives. To write about Pāṇini’s times would be in large part merely a rehash of Vasudeva Sharana Agrawala’s excellent monograph on the topic. Yet, we present some of the material on this matter (indeed partly just retelling what VS Agrawala has covered) for it might be of some interest to those not too well-acquainted with this topic.

A key pre-modern record of Pāṇini by a non-Indian is that given by Xuanzang, the Chinese scholar and agent of the Tang emperor Taizong. In his magnum opus, Da Tang Xiyuji, he provides a detailed report of his journey to and within India, which was presented at the Tang court in Chang’an before the emperor Taizong in 646 CE. While he was born in an orthodox Confucian family, Xuanzang became acquainted with bauddha texts early in his life from his brothers, and decided to study the bauddha-mata in greater depth. In 626 CE, the 24 year old Xuanzang became interested in the in depth study of Sanskrit as he was working through mahāyāna texts and the associated yogacāra literature. After having acquired a good grasp of the language after three years of study he had a dream, in which he saw himself being in India. This urged him to undertake a journey to India and directly study the texts of the bauddha-mata in their original language. He immediately set off for India having surreptitiously crossed the Chinese border with the Blue (Gök)Turk empire. The Khan of the Turks was pleased with his interaction with Xuanzang and gave his party a feast and assistance to reach the city of Tashkent and then enter the Iranian territory at Samarkand. The Iranian lord of Samarkand heard his lecture on mahāyāna and provided passage to go southwards towards India.

Location of Śalātura

Having entered India, he visited the visited the vihāra-s in Bāhlika and Gandhāra and eventually reached Śalātura, which is today the village of Chota Lahore in the terrorist state of Pakistan (on the North-west bank of the Sindhu river, moving north from Attock). Xuanzang wrote in his Da Tang Xiyuji: “To the north-west of U-to-kia-han-c’ho at a distance of 20 li or so we come to the town of So-ls-tu-lo (i.e. Śalātura). This is the place where the ṛṣi Pāṇini, who composed the Ching-ming-lun (the Aṣṭādhyāyi) was born… The children of this town, who are his disciples, revere his eminent qualities, and a statue erected to his memory still exists.” Evidently this statue of Pāṇini has been destroyed by the Moslems who have since occupied those regions. However, the village Chota Lahore apparently has several elevated mounds corresponding to the ruins of the ancient town of Śalātura, which were briefly explored by a Belgian woman named Corbeau close the middle of the last century; many Gandharan artifacts from there have apparently been looted and sold to western markets the Pakistanis. The monumental effort of Pāṇini is sometimes referred to in Hindu tradition as the Śālāturīya-matam after this now ruined town. Indeed, this is a stark reminder of how a site so important to the Hindu tradition, a center from which a monument of human thought emerged, can be so completely erased by the barbarism of the third Abrahamism – a fate that can overtake the whole of Jaṃbudvīpa.

Then the Da Tang Xiyuji records an interesting tradition regarding the life of Pāṇini:
“Referring to the most ancient times, letters were very numerous; but when in the process of ages, the world was destroyed and remained as a void, the Deva-s of long life descended spiritually to guide the people. Such was the origin of the ancient letters and composition. From this time and after it the source (i.e. the root language) spread and passed its (former) bounds. Brahma-deva and Śakra-deva established rules according to requirements. Ṛṣi-s belonging to different schools each drew up forms of letters. Men in their successive generations put into use what had been delivered to them; but nevertheless students without ability were unable to make use (of these teachings). And now men’s lives were reduced to the length of a hundred years, when ṛṣi Pāṇini was born; he was from birth extensively informed about things. The times being dull and careless, he wished to reform the vague and false rules – to fix the rules and correct improprieties (of usage). As he wandered about asking for the right ways, he encountered Īśvara-deva and recounted to him the plan of his undertaking. Īśvara-deva said, “Wonderful! I will assist you in this.” The ṛṣi, having received instruction, retired. He then labored incessantly and put forth all his power of mind. He collected a multitude of words (i.e. the Gaṇa-pāṭha), and made a book on letters which contained a thousand śloka-s; each śloka was of 32 syllables. It contained everything known from the first till then, without exception, respecting letters and words. He then closed it and sent it to the supreme ruler, who exceedingly prized it, and issued an edict that throughout the kingdom it should be used and taught to others; and he added that whoever should learn it from beginning to end should receive as his reward a thousand pieces of gold. And so from that time masters have received it and handed it down in its completeness for the good of the world. Hence, the brāhmaṇa-s of this town are well-grounded in their literary work, and are of high renown for their talents, well-informed as to things, and of a vigorous understanding.”

VS Agrawala discusses this account in detail, and, in our opinion, correctly indicates that Xuanzang is recording a real Hindu tradition. As for the Aṣṭādhyāyi being in thousand śloka-s rather than the sūtra-pāṭha as we have it many divergent views are offered; however, Agrawala supports the view that it was merely an approximation of the actual number of syllables in the sūtra-pāṭha, which add up to approximately 32,000. Further, Agrawala holds the view that the presentation of the Aṣṭādhyāyi to the supreme ruler of India (Cīna term: da wang) is related to by an account given by learned Rājpūt author Rājaśekhara in the Pratihāra court (~late 800s-900s of CE):
śrūyate ca pāṭaliputre śāstrakāra-parīkṣā:
atropavarṣa-varṣav iha pāṇini-piṅgalāv iha vyāḍiḥ |
vararuci pataṅjalī iha parīkṣitāḥ khyātim upajagmuḥ ||

One hears that in Pāṭaliputra (modern Patna) there was an examination of the authors of technical works: It was here that Upavarṣa, Varṣa, Pāṇini, Piṅgala, Vyāḍi, Vararuci and Pataṅjalin were tested and thereby attained fame.

That Rājaśekhara was recording an ancient tradition becomes evident from the Greek philosopher Strabo(~64 BC–24 CE)’s account of the court of Pāṭaliputra (Book 15.1, section 39):

“…the population of India is divided into seven castes: the one first in honor, but the fewest in number, consists of the philosophers (the Brachmanes); and these philosophers are used, each individually, by the people making sacrifice to the gods or making offerings to the dead, but jointly by the kings at the Great Synod (mahāsabhā at Pāṭaliputra), as it is called, at which, at the beginning of the new year, the philosophers, one and all, come together at the gates of the king; and whatever each man has drawn up in writing or observed as useful with reference to the prosperity of either fruits or living beings or concerning the government, he brings forward in public; and he who is thrice found false is required by law to keep silence for life, whereas he who has proved correct is adjudged exempt from tribute and taxes.”
Hence, it is indeed likely that Pāṇini had presented his work at such a mahāsabhā at the capital of the Magadhan empire and it was accepted by it. This was probably a long-standing practice in the region going back to the Mithilan court where the Janaka-s held such sabhā-s (described in the brāhmaṇa literature) and eventually shifted to Pāṭaliputra with rise of the Magadhan power.

This leads us to another Hindu tradition regarding Pāṇini: In the Bṛhatkathā tradition, the scholars Upavarṣa, Varṣa, Pāṇini, Piṅgala, Vyāḍi, Vararuci are all linked together by a web of connections. While at Pāṭaliputra, Vararuci and Vyāḍi are said to have been students of Varṣa. Then Vararuci was enamored by the beauty of Varṣa’s niece, Upakośā, the daughter of Upavarṣa, and wooed her till Upavarṣa acceded to marry her to Vararuci. After Vararuci and Vyāḍi graduated, Varṣa got Pāṇini as a student from the northwest, whom Vararuci described as being an idiot. Pāṇini learned little, and one day Varṣa’s wife being frustrated with him threw him out. The dejected Pāṇini is then said to have gone to the Himālaya to worship the god Rudra with austerities. Finally, please with Pāṇini, Rudra gave him a new grammar of the Sanskrit language. Armed with this Pāṇini is said to have returned to Pāṭaliputra and challenged Vararuci in the sabhā. Their debate raged for seven days and Vararuci felt he was close to defeating Pāṇini. But then on the eight day Rudra made a terrible noise from the skies and the Aindra grammar, which was taught in the days of the Veda by Indra, in which Vararuci was an expert, was erased. With that Pāṇini emerged the victor. Utterly dejected by this, Vararuci is then said to have left his wife with his mother, deposited his wealth with a Vaiśya, and gone to the Himālaya to propitiate Rudra. In the mean time his wife Upakośā is said to have been violently harried by the Vaiśya and other men seeking to have extra-marital affairs with her. However, she tricked them by inviting them to her house and capturing them in a box and had them conveyed to emperor Nanda’s court. Nanda then arrested them and exiled them. In the meantime, Vararuci succeeded in pleasing Rudra and returned upon receiving the same grammar as Pāṇini. He was elated to hear how his wife had outwitted the rival males and now lived a contended life with his newly acquired grammatical knowledge. His former teacher Varṣa too now expressed the wish to acquire the same grammar. He worshiped the god Kumāra who then gave him the same grammar.

This narrative is contrasts that of Xuanzang. There, Pāṇini is a great genius, who is said to have been informed of all things right from his birth. In that narrative Rudra’s teaching is only the start of a process of intense mental effort on part of Pāṇini. This is also consistent with the tradition that while Pāṇini obtained the Māheśvara sūtrāṇi from Rudra, the rest of the exposition was his own effort. Indeed, Xuanzang’s story is more in line with the tradition of the Pāṇinīya-s who acknowledge that Pāṇini was a supreme scholar. As Agrawala points out the Kāśika commentary on Pāṇini plainly states:

mahatī sūkṣmekṣikā vartate sūtrakārasya |
The sūtrakāra (i.e. Pāṇini)’s insight is profound and subtle.

However, the narrative of the Bṛhatkathā tradition attempts to consistently put down Pāṇini:
1) It suggests that Pāṇini was a sluggard who got his grammar purely due to divine intervention.
2) It further makes the point that even with the superior grammar he was unable to defeat Vararuci, the foremost proponent of the Aindra school of grammar – even here his victory was solely due to Rudra’s aggressive intervention on his behalf.
3) It then suggests that, although Vararuci and Varṣa eventually switched to the Pāṇinīya school, they did not acquire it from Pāṇini. Rather, they independently obtained it respectively from Rudra and Kumāra.

This suggests that the older Aindra school, while beaten, only grudgingly accepted the defeat. Their chief proponent Vararuci seems to have pushed his own story, where Pāṇini is not only put down but his role is also minimized – he played no part in their eventual acceptance of the Pāṇinīya system; rather, they all obtained the same grammar independently from the gods by themselves. This is keeping with the evidence that that the Aindra school was once influential, and would not have easily bowed out to Pāṇini’s despite its apparent superiority. It seems to have lingered on in the peripheral zones. In the Dramiḍa country, it was the Aindra grammar that was used as the model for the analysis of a language from a totally different family, Tamiḻ (a Dravidian language), resulting in its early grammar, the Tolkāppiyam. A preface appended to that work states:

vaṭa vēṅkaṭam teṉ kumari
āyiṭait
tamiḻ kūṟum nal ulakattu
vaḻakkum ceyyuḷum āyiru mutaliṉ
eḻuttum collum poruḷum nāṭic 5
cen-tamiḻ iyaṟkai civaṇiya nilattoṭu
muntu nūl kaṇṭu muṟaippaṭa eṇṇip
pulam tokuttōṉē pōkku aṟu paṉuval
nilam-taru tiruviṉ pāṇṭiyaṉ avaiyattu
aṟam karai nāviṉ nāṉmaṟai muṟṟiya 10
ataṅkōṭṭu ācāṟku aril tapat terintu
mayaṅkā marapiṉ eḻuttu muṟai kāṭṭi
malku nīr varaippiṉ aintiram niṟainta
tolkāppiyaṉ eṉat taṉ peyar tōṟṟip
pal pukaḻ niṟutta paṭimaiyōṉē. 15

Vēṅkaṭam [Tirupati hills] in the north, Kumari (Southern tip of peninsula) in south,
where Tamiḻ is spoken in the good world,
common and poetic usage, beginning with these two,
analyzing syllables, words, and meanings,
with the topic closely related to chaste Tamil,
seeing the foremost text, devising it to be in proper form,
a faultless discourse, he strung together
in the assembly of the Pāṇṭiyaṉ monarch Nilamtaru Tiruviṉ,
with his tongue the shore of dharma [ocean], knowledgeable in [all] 4 Veda-s,
Ataṅkōṭṭu ācārya examined and corrected errors,
showing as per un-deluded tradition the formulation of syllables,
full of the Aindra [grammar] like the ocean of water,
presenting his name as Tolkāppiyaṉ,
He is the standard (Skt: prathimā) established in great fame.
(Translation done with the help of a relative familiar with classical Tamiḻ usage)

There are some interesting features concerning this narrative regarding the Tolkāppiyam: First, it is said to have been presented at the Pāṇṭiyaṉ court in a manner similar to what is said of the Pāṇinīya grammar at the Magadhan court. Second, this act of presentation in the court, and it is apparent subsequent acceptance, seems to have been the basis of it being established as a standard. This again parallels the case of Pāṇini. Finally, it is of considerable significance to note that Tolkāppiyaṉ is said to have studied the colloquial and poetic usage of Tamiḻ throughout the Dramiḍa country, from Tirupati to Kanyakumari and analyzed it thoroughly to generate his grammar. This is an exact parallel of Pāṇini’s creation of the famed Gaṇa-pāṭha, which stands as one of the remarkable ethnological, geographical and linguistic explorations in the history of science. Pāṇini gathered comparable data from the greater Indo-Aryan realm from Prakaṇva (the Ferghana region of the modern Uzbek-Kyrgyz zone) to Kaliṅga (Odisha) and Sūramasa (Assam). This suggests that as the big Tamil kingdoms arose, several models, already perfected in the North, were transplanted to the southern courts, sparking similar endeavors in the Pāṇṭiyaṉ realm. The fact that an Aindra grammarian carried out a comparable exercise as Pāṇini in South India suggests that this method had already been imbibed by the rival school or perhaps both Pāṇini and Tolkāppiyaṉ inherited this methodological framework from the original Aindra tradition.

This finally leads us to the thorny question of the date of Pāṇini. Given that the Bṛhatkathā tradition places him as a contemporary of the first Nanda, one might say that he lived around 350 BCE. This tradition is also supported by the bauddha kriyā tantra, the Ma~njuśrīya-mūlakalpa, where Pāṇini is described as a good friend of [Mahāpadma]-nanda. Most white indologists, who generally favor late dates for all Hindu texts, also not surprisingly find such a date appealing. Further, it is suggested that this also brings him comfortably close to the date of his second great commentator Pataṅjalī (first being Kātyāyana) who is placed in the Śuṅga court. However, despite the existence of such a tradition, we recommend caution in ascribing such a late date to Pāṇini. The political geographical tradition that he records is clearly more consistent with several smaller ekarāja monarchies and saṃgha republics belonging to a period prior to the rise of the large Magadhan empire of the Nanda-s. We might also note in this regard that there is tendency in kāvya literature to “telescope” history by combining characters of different eras into a single historical layer. We see this even in the later Gupta court, where Bhartṛhari, Varāhamihira, Śabara-svāmin and Kālidāsa are all stated as existing side-by-side in Vikramāditya’s court. Hence, we cannot uncritically accept Pāṇini as a member of the Nanda court. Nevertheless, we believe that tradition is correctly recording the role of the Magadhan scholarly assembly in peer-reviewing and accepting Pāṇini’s monumental work.

Further reading: India As Known To Pāṇini by Vasudeva Sharana Agrawala

It was some time just before the first vacations of Somakhya and Lootika’s first year in the pre-university college. Lootika’s family was visiting a nearby temple of the massive ape Hanūmat on a Saturday evening. In the sabhā-gṛha of the said prāsāda a saṃnyasin of the paraṃparā of Śaṃkarācarya was to deliver a lecture on the Kenopaniṣad which is appended to the Sāmaveda. Lootika’s parents wanted to hear it but none of their daughters seemed to be too keen to sit through the lecture. So they asked them to wait outside and entertain themselves. The middle two went to the river-side to watch birds. Jhilleeka brought out her lego blocks and started making things with them. Lootika was busy working her way through the text Somakhya had found known as the Suṣeṇa-pratikriyā-saṃgraha, a medical treatise which was attributed to Suṣeṇa that mighty physician among the apes of Kiṣkindhā. After the lecture got over Lootika’s parents wanted them to go over and do a namaskāra to the saṃnyasin.

Filled with unwise parental pride over her daughters, Lootika’s mother remarked to the saṃnyasin that Lootika was working on editing a remarkable text known as the Suṣeṇa-pratikriyā-saṃgraha, which was the result of the conversation between the ape Suṣeṇa and the god Dhavantari. She asked Lootika to respectfully show the text to the saṃnyasin. The saṃnyasin cursorily examined the text and turning to Lootika’s parents said: “Wise Viṣṇugupta declared – pustaka-pratyayādhītaṃ na+adhītaṃ guru-saṃnidhau | bhrājate na sabhā-madhye jāragarbha iva striyaḥ || So it is with your daughter. With this bookish reading she is doing, she is pretending to play paṇḍitā. She needs to mature and acquire real knowledge from a guru rather than from fancy-sounding books.” To the utter horror of her parents, before they could stop her, Lootika retorted: “O learned svāmin, why do you think I don’t have guru-s? I do have many, even as Satyakāma Jābāla when he was breeding cattle for my ancestor Hāridrumata Gautama. You would have certainly learned that in the śruti of the udgātṛ-s.” The saṃnyasin cast a piercing glance at Lootika and said: “Sadly, this daughter of yours will need several more janma-s before she can near jñāna that liberates her.” Her parents mumbled some apology and in silence filed out of the sabhā-gṛha. Her mother felt like castigating Lootika but her father reminded her mother that incident was in part her doing and so they should not place the blame solely on their daughter.

As they reached the archway of the temple to collect their footwear they ran into Somakhya’s parents, who were just then entering to visit the shrine. They stopped to talk a briefly. Somakhya’s parents asked them if they were not traveling anywhere for the vacations. Lootika’s parents said they had not yet made plans and asked if Somakhya’s parents had any such plans. They replied in the negative. Then Lootika’s mother told Somakhya’s mother: “May we should then make plans together and perhaps go as a group to some place interesting – that could be great fun.” They then asked Lootika what she thought. Lootika: “I am pretty happy not going anywhere – we have the Suṣeṇa-pratikriyā-saṃgraha, and a whole slew of experiments and explorations, planned for myself and the anujā-s.” Somakhya’s mother: “Let us go for not more than 10 days that might be a good break for all of us. You can also find new things to think about that way.” Lootika’s parents suggested that they could make a trip to Indraprastha and some other places in the north so that their children could see the history they had only read about and experience the evils of marūnmāda first hand. After some discussion they all agreed that they should indeed make such trip and the fathers decided to work out the finances and tickets of the trip.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

It was rather early in the morning for Somakhya’s circadian cycle. Somehow he had managed to complete the prayāṇeṣṭi oblations to Puṣaṇ and Revatī with his parents and head out to the railway station. A little later Lootika and her family arrived at the platform to join them. Lootika’s father remarked that they were happy that Puṣaṇ had at least brought them that far it was quite a pain to get the catur-bhaginī ready so early in the day. Somakhya parents had one rather large bag which his mother was holding carefully. Lootika’s mother asked: “Is there something of note in that bag? You seem rather nervous with it.” Somakhya’s mother: “It is a long journey and it is imperative that we have a good supply of food. I had to wake up at 3:00 AM to make this large volume of viands. Also we need water to last the whole way. Given all that is in the bag I would rather that it not make contact with any surface of platform.” Somakhya frustratedly cursed in his mind – he simply hated the fact that for his parents, on any journey small or big, food was biggest issue, with a particular fascination for elaborate menus that were most inconvenient to eat and carry. He had often felt that food mattered more to them than any other issue during travel, including the sights at the destination. Perhaps due the presence of their parents Somakhya and Lootika felt a certain unwillingness to talk to each other. So after hi-fiving on meeting they stood in silence thought on opposite sides of clump their party had formed on the platform. Vrishchika was intently watching other travelers like an ethologist observing baboons on an African highland. Varoli was lost in her book on molecular orbitals: being still tentative with her calculus, and Lootika not paying any attention to her, she found the going tough. Little Jhilleeka had slumped into slumber by her father’s side.

To their luck the train did arrive reasonably close to the expected time and they were soon on their long way to the capital of the nation with its long and blood-stained history. The one thing all of them were happy about was that they did not have to share their compartment with strangers: being a large group they had every seat in it to themselves. Somakhya’s father being a rather taciturn individual made little conversation and took the central seat with his computer and a notepad working out the dynamics of a vibrating pipe. Lootika’s father likewise sat with his computer composing case studies with Vrishchika snuggled up beside him and reading along, and occasionally asking questions. Their occasional interjections were rather morbid. However, it hardly bothered Somakhya’s father who had shut himself off from all of that; nor did it distract the mothers who were lost in their ever-changing conversations. Lootika and Somakhya sat on the side seats that faced each other, and they kept looking out of the window taking in the great expanse of Bhārata which was being spooled out before them. While neither spoke a word, they were both repeatedly amazed by the fact the their ancestors had completely unified so vast and so geographically varied a land at so early a time in history. But again seeing all of that and the occasional ekarākṣasālaya scarring the landscape neither could avoid the disappointment of how close they had come to nearly losing all of that to the ekarākṣasavādin-s. But the rare sight of a tree split by the bolt from welkin roused their spirits reminding them of the presence of the deva-heti and the supreme Maghavan.

Jhilleeka stirring up refreshed from sleep took her seat at the window beside Somakhya’s father and gazed at the delightful landscape of the holy land. After a while he suddenly noticed her and remembered his son mentioning that she was unusually sharp in mathematics at a young age, especially for a girl. Hence, he posed her a quadratic equation, which Jhilleeka promptly solved. Now thinking of teasing her a bit he gave her one more with no real roots. She promptly solved that one too giving the two complex roots. He asked her if she knew what that meant or if she had merely learned the quadratic formula by rote. Jhilleeka: “In my mind’s eye I see a mysterious parabola that does not intersect the x-axis but passes through two points in another plane, which is one containing the complex numbers.” Somakhya’s father patted her and said “That’s good but I don’t want to praise you more lest you get caught up in that.”

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

After a couple of silent hours Lootika suddenly spoke out to Somakhya: “I had this encounter with a yati who informed me that our knowledge was not something acquired from guru-s. He said that it will hence be shunned in learned assemblies much like a woman who has borne a bastard would be shunned in respectable society.”
Somakhya: “If the yati’s thinking were true then the lessons learned by the wise Viṣṇuśarman or Glāva Maitreya would have all been naught.”

Lootika: “Indeed, I tried to tell the yati he was just failing to the see our guru-s. But he would have none of it. Hence, I wonder why the yati is taken so seriously as a teacher by most of our people.”
Somakhya: “The yati is perhaps competent in his domain – mokṣa-śāstra. Since, as the tathāgata pointed out, life is full of sorrow, most of our people hope or believe that they might be able to break the away from realm of sorrow and enter the realm of ānanda. After all even my ancestor Bhṛgu said upon following the directives of the great asura Varuṇa: ānandena jātāni jīvanti | They hope that the teaching of the mokṣa-śāstra by the yati would lead them to that ānanda, which is supposed to hold good even after death – ānandaṃ prayanty abhisaṃviśanti | They die and go into ānanda. So they probably take him seriously for teaching the upāya for that.”

Lootika: “That may be so, but he seems to disregard other types of knowledge using specious arguments, like asserting that it does not come from a guru. After all the rājan Varuṇa of infallible nooses, asked your ancestor to go and explore other things like nutrition, metabolism, dynamics of information, and signal-sensing before he discovered ānanda. And only if one knows all of that does one become a big man on account of his yaśas.”
Somakhya: “That is true. However, since a yati seeks and has perhaps attained ānanda the rest of knowledge seems useless to him. Hence, it is more an issue on part of those who go to him to seek advice on other matters, which he considers unimportant.”

Lootika: “Remember, people are like our classmates, like say Vidrum, who are in this mad rush to become doctors or computer programmers, irrespective of their aptitudes. Thus, there is a rush for the yati’s teachings. Moreover, with yati-s’ personalities exuding a type of ‘magnetic attraction’ due to their dwelling in the ānanda they tend to draw certain people towards them and fill them up with their teachings. With this rush to the mokṣa-śāstra more and more think that alone is dharma and that alone is vidyā. Pegged to the mokṣa-śāstra these yati-s cannot generate new knowledge or protect existing knowledge of importance. Hence, I would posit that the ascendancy of yati-s within the Hindu fold was the cause for the denudation of our dharma: a movement that took people away from action and concerns of the rāṣṭra”

Somakhya: “Remember that there used to be yati-s who were karmakṛt-s. They possessed wide knowledge and abilities beyond the mokṣa-śāstra and used those selflessly in the world. Hence, they earned respect. You may think of Vidyāraṇya who helped revive the limp Hindus when the marūnmatta-s nearly exterminated them, or of the bāla-brahmacārin who slew several turuṣka-s with his sword on behalf of Kuṃbha in the fight against the Army of Islam, or of Baṇḍā vairāgin. This might be seen as an extension of the earlier role played by other sections of the ati-mārga as royal advisers – like Harita-Rāśī the pāśupata for Bāppā Rāval who drove out an early wave of marūnmatta-s. Hence, when brahman and kṣatra had fallen before the Abrahamistic assault these yati-s helped in shoring up dharma at the expense of their own fitness. Thus, the verdict of history does not entirely support your contention.”

Lootika: “But against your position I could offer up the historical counter-claim epitomized by the advaita-vedāntin-s and naked paramahaṃsa-s par excellence anūpagiri gosvāmin and uṃrāvagiri gosvāmin. As you known only too well they were astra-dhārin-s of high rank and had amassed hand and field guns that would have made their cognates, the Negoro-ji bhikṣu-s, green with jealousy. The maharaṭṭa-s had inferior guns to an extent. Yet their service to the sanātana-dharma went no further than performing funerals for fallen Hindu warriors, many of them slain by the gosvāmin-s’ own guns. Instead, they devoted themselves in large part to furthering the cause of marūnmatta-s and cozying up with the English despite them showering obscenities on their nagnatvam. Certainly, the certainty of being mumukṣu-s and dwelling in ānanda had relieved them of all concerns sustaining the ārya-patha and the rāṣṭra.
Somakhya: “I would hardly attempt to counter this point for all that is rather indisputable. However, playing on both sides of the divide is not unique to the yati-s . It is seen across the board with Hindus; like for a Śivājī you have Mirza Rāje Jayasiṃha, and both were good Hindus. Even today numerous enemies of ours were born in brāhmaṇa families. So the wayward yati rather than being the cause is a symptom, like many others great and small, of a very deep affliction that ails the Hindus.”

Lootika: “But was the emergence of śramaṇa-mata not the beginning of this affliction? The seeds of the disease are seen right in the upaniṣat of Muṇḍaka-s, which grew into a raging malady in the teachings of the gośālā, the nagna and the tathāgata. It is this disease that threatened to subvert the sanātana-dharma. Is it not this disease that forced the dharma to accord a high place for the śramaṇa-mata and continues to manifest through the ills of the yati’s ideas.”
Somakhya: “There is no doubt of the emergence of a disease in the upaniṣat of Muṇḍaka-s that exploded as you mention. I would even go against the grain of tradition of our own people to state that the emergence of prājāpatya tradition in the brāhmaṇa texts in opposition to the ancestral Indo-European aindra system was already a wobble with potentially unhealthy consequences. However, a civilization like an organism can lay claim to success only if it can defeat such afflictions, continue surviving, and restore its past luster. I would say such a triumph did happen with the re-emergence of Empire at Saṃrāṭ Samudragupta aśvamedha. While Candragupta and Aśoka the Mauryans succumbed to the diseases despite having a sage guru in Cāṇakya, I hold that the crippling affliction we succumbed to was something that hit us at a later in time, at a time when the yati’s metaphor had hardly triumphed, and when outwardly we were blazing forth with the brilliance of the Sanskrit cosmopolis, with adornments like king Bhoja-deva of the Paramāra-s, through whose erstwhile lands we shall traverse shortly.”
Lootika said “you speak like the muṇḍaka among the śulapuruṣa-s, whom I am still grappling with” and lulled by the rocking of the train she fell asleep on her seat.

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After a long journey the two families finally arrived in Indraprastha. While they felt good to be in the land of the Kuru-s, which was the old, venerable seat of ārya culture in India, they found its modern harshness and decadence behind the facade of opulence to be jarring. Smeared with the grime of the long journey, which was made longer by the delay from the collision of their train with a buffalo, they tried to get to their guesthouse as fast as they could upon disembarking. Having occupied  their rooms, bathed and refreshed, they took in some cool air of the north on the terrace of their guesthouse. That evening Somakhya’s family had been invited to visit the home of their clansman, who was a bureaucrat in the election commission. Lootika’s family had intended to explore some nearby places but Somakhya’s clansman insisted on them too visiting his family along with Somakhya’s for he felt Lootika’s family fitted his social status well. Lootika’s clan was initially rather uncomfortable with this but then gave in to the insistence thinking it might be not be a bad idea to come know new people.

On reaching the house of Somakhya’s kinsfolk he saw his cousin Babhru who was roughly the same age as him. As the elders chatted about mundane, morbid and tragic issues, Babhru led Somakhya and the catur-bhaginī to his room and started conversing with them. In course of the conversation Babhru let it slip, not without a tinge of pride, that he had received a certificate of national talent. Babhru: “Due to this I have been asked by my school (he continued in school rather than joining a pre-university college) to prepare for competitions, one in chemistry and one in history. The former even has international levels.” Babhru continued: “All this stuff before the secondary school certificate was really easy. But all this high school and college chemistry stuff is rather difficult. They have hardly covered any of this in the first semester at school. I don’t know if would be able bring honor to my school.” Varoli asked him for some samples of the difficult stuff. He looked at her with some disbelief that she might be interested in stuff which was difficult for people four classes ahead of her and pointed to one which he was struggling with: Why does cyclooctatetraene easily form salts with alkali metals but cyclooctane does not?

Varoli: “This is rather trivial – cyclooctatetraene needs just two electrons more to become a planar aromatic anion which is more stable than the polyene itself – remember Hückel’s rule 4n+2? It can achieve this state by acquiring two electrons from alkali metals, which very easily give up their outermost electron. Thus it forms salts with them.”
Lootika: “Talking of Hückel’s rule, Somakhya showed me a nice way of arriving it using by setting up a Schrödinger’s equation for a particle in one-dimensional ring.”

Hearing all this Babhru felt rather deflated. With his voice choking a bit he asked Varoli: “Is this not just your second year of chemistry at school. We used to just begin organic chemistry then – you know, methane and all that. How come you have figured all this out.”
Varoli downplaying what she really knew said to him: “Somakhya and Lootika were looking at the enzymes involved in the biosynthesis of cyclooctatetraene, which is made by a bacterium isolated by people at the university. Thus, I got introduced to this compound; so no big deal.”

Seeing that such discussions could result in some tension they let Babhru talk about others he was passionate about. At some point, after bypassing dead-end avenues like music and cinema, he began telling them of his great interest in the history of the World War 2. He spoke with much excitement about British and American exploits. He noticed that Somakhya and the rest hardly felt any excitement about the Allies and to his horror kept characterizing them as their enemies. He passionately spoke about how so many Indians had sacrificed their lives for the Allied cause and tried to inform his guests that the Indians and the Allies were on the same side, fighting the same enemies to the east and the west. Somakhya merely responded that it was a pity that the Hindus had to fight for preta imperialists and the tragedy of history had put them on the wrong side. In response Babhru tried to explain that he had great regard for Subhas Chandra Bose and that he was not downplaying his contributions. To his great surprise Somakhya said that he did not rate SCB highly and that he was having an entirely different perspective informed by civilizational elements. Babhru was intrigued and wanted to know more but they were summoned for dinner and the thread of conversation was broken.

After dinner they resumed but not exactly where they had dropped off. Babhru now wished to show them some very interesting memorabilia he possessed. He had acquired them from his ancestor on the line he did not share with Somakhya. The said ancestor was an āyudhajīvin; originally part of the Allied army, he had later served the Indian state in the reconquest of Goa from the monstrous Christian rulers. He showed Somakhya and the catur-bhaginī an oriental hand fan and a Nipponic sword called a katana. Somakhya took the sword and examined it closely. He noticed a stamp on it and asked Babhru if he knew what it was. Babhru: “That is a sign of the regnal name of the emperor Hirohito.” He also pointed to a tag on the scabbard and said that it was the surrender tag, which took place in Malaysia, and it was thus obtained by his ancestor.

He then passed it around to the four sisters. Jhilleeka did not hold it long and almost as though cut by it passed it to Lootika. Lootika examined the sword closely and passed it back to Babhru remarking: “This sword has some kind of presence attached to it. There is some thing tad agitating about it.” Jhilleeka: “I felt something aggressive in it while holding it too.” Babhru: “It is very interesting you all say so. I must confess there is something very spooky about it. I fear you people will think me to be a bit unhinged if I say there is more to it than just it reminding you of the gruesome atrocities committed by the Japanese in WW2.”
Lootika: “No No, we won’t take you to be unhinged. Pray tell us more.”
Babhru: “Hey it already dark I don’t want to frighten you girls.”
Vrishchika: “Please go ahead. We are seasoned campaigners in this realm. Had we been with our implements at our familiar śmaśāna I am sure we could have figured this one out.”
Babhru: “Wow! I guess you all believe in such stuff.”
Somakhya a touch concerned at Vrishchika’s spilling the beans about their ways, and seeing the turn of the conversation looked at Lootika with knitted eye brows.
Lootika: “My sister Vrishchika is being a tad brash here. It is not so much an issue of belief as much as following the contours of the interaction of an object with your own psyche. But we seemed to have interrupted you – you were going to tell us something.”

Babhru: “I know this is weird but let me say it any how. When my parents first allowed me to have the katana in my room I hung it up on the wall and would see it even as I lay on my bed to sleep. A couple of nights passed without an event but on the third night I had something which was in between a dream and an hallucination. I saw a sallow man with almond eyes and large teeth laughing out aloud. He then picked up the katana and lunging at me delivered a blow to slice off my head. This repeated itself for a week and I would feel a severe pain around my neck each time he would slice it off. Shaken by this I placed it deep in my closet in a suitcase. The apparition ceased there after but I do feel as though I hear some strange laughter coming from the closet on moonless nights.”

Vrishchika: “Wow that sounds exciting. I am sure we can figure this guy out using a bhūtalekhana-prayoga if you would be willing.”
Babhru: “I would be more than willing; I am itching to get to the bottom of this but I am really scared of it. What would it entail?”
Somakhya: “Vrishchika, I don’t think we should try it out, it may be a bit too much for Babhru.”

Now, rather than being discouraged, Babhru felt his manliness was being challenged and kept insisting that they go ahead with Vrishchika’s suggestion despite Somakhya’s and Lootika’s reluctance. Seeing him being so persistent Lootika thought it might be a good thing to test her sister’s mettle. So Lootika asked Vrishchika to perform the prayoga by herself, without any help from either herself or Somakhya, if she was really capable. At that time only Somakhya possessed the magic-wand siddhi; none of sisters did. Hence, Somakhya was curious as to what Vrishchika might do. But at the same time he was also worried that she might botch it up. Vrishchika first took piece of paper and drew a yantra on it. Then she performed the vastu-khārkhoda mantra on that yantra. Thereafter she tied a kerchief around Babhru’s eyes and then placing the katana on his head deployed the VAJRA CAṆḌEŚVARA ḌĀMARA mantra. Somakhya whispered to Lootika: “You have taught her well – that was a clever thing to do.” Babhru felt as though he was hit by a pole on his head and collapsed in a heap. The rest watched tensely as Vrishchika taking a pen and a pad placed them in his hand. She let him lie like that for a couple of minutes and then using the said mantra with a new saṃpuṭikaraṇa drew the bhūta into the yantra. She then folded the yantra and put it into her pocket: “That shall be my khārkhoda”. With that Vrishchika joined Somakhya and Lootika in being successful at creating a khārkhoda. Babhru then woke up as though nothing had happened and started furiously writing on the pad. When he finished he snapped out of the bewitched state and said: “That was one hell of a trip.”

Lootika: “Babhru, kindly read out what you wrote out. That should resolve the mystery for all of us.”

Babhru read it out aloud: “I, Sorimachi Gojobori, went up the mount Izuna to worship kami Izuna Gongen mounted on a fox, who is none other than the god Garuḍa [Somakhya whispered to Lootika that this was the manifestation of the pūrva-srotas to atiprācya-s]. I hoped to receive an oracular forecast from the deity. What I received was terrible. The kami informed me that I will meet a horrible death while serving the lord Emperor even as the nation of Nippon is being utterly humiliated, and become a bōrei who will have to wander for long in a far away land.

All this unfolded. I joined my brothers in fighting against barbarians who wished to squelch the glory to which a superior people like us were entitled. After all as general Nureki had said there was nothing comparable on this earth to the national force of our people. I fought bravely in the battle to conquer the island of Bali from the barbarians in 1942. After we defeated them we went to the island. There I met a mantravādin. He gave me further prognostications conforming the oracle of Izuna Gongen. He declared that after I wander for a while as a bōrei I will captured and maintained as a yōkai serving a Brahminical mantriṇī. Finally, after having served her purpose I will be able to join my ancestors. After the conquest of Bali I was moved to Malaya on the side near Singapore. In 1945 we got the news that we had to give up fighting because the lord Emperor had surrendered. My company was surrounded by barbarian troops from England and Australia. My sword was taken away by a brutish barbarian named Dale Ponting, and along with 2000 of my comrades in arms we were dumped into store rooms. Many of my companions perished that night from suffocation. The next morning we were marched out and each given a jam bottle and asked to dredge a dock for 12 hours at a stretch. We were constantly beaten and kicked by the whites even as we were doing that labor. My hands were blistered and chaffed by the end of the day.

The next day I was asked to descend to into a drain and clean the feces and pull out rats with my bare hands. Many of my companions perished from the clubbing the received from the whites as they would emerge from the drain. I might have even survived all this for I was a hardy man. But as I was emerging out from the drain after several hours of labor I saw Dale Ponting giving orders to his Indian subordinates to detonate the great shrine for Amaterasu Omikami, which we had set up there, and level ground for making a golf course. The senior Indian officer objected saying that they should first let the Japanese dismantle the shrine ritually. Dale Ponting fired off several expletives at him, warned him of a citation for treason, and said he was being demoted for insubordination. I could not stand watching our shrine to be demolished. So raising the filth-caked jam bottle I rushed at Dale Ponting to strike him with it. Before I could reach him I was bayoneted by his guard. As told by Izuna Gongen I passed into the state of a bōrei. That night I possessed Ponting and made him drink voluminously. In that drunken state possessed by me he started firing his gun indiscriminately at others in the bar. In the shootout that ensued Ponting was killed. I then went to my sword and would myself around it. The Indian officer whom Ponting had slated for demotion took my sword as his trophy. I spared the Indian since he had put himself at risk to try to save the honor of the shrine. Since, I had caused the death of all those who could have carried out Ponting’s orders the Indian was not fired. It was with him that I was transported to his land so distant from mine. Residing there for long I have now been bound and forced to speak my story by the Brahminical mantriṇī.”

Somakhya: “Babhru, there you go. This narration has a lot for you. Reflect about it and I am sure it will inform you and bring new perspectives to you in more than one way.”

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

The sight-seeing phase of their journey was now underway. That day Somakhya’s and Lootika’s families were at the Qutb complex. They were not there to admire specimens of Saracenic architecture but to specifically see for themselves the vestiges of the Hindu past which had been erased by wave upon wave of Mohammedan irruptions. As they passed through the disputable structures commemorating a long line of Mohammedans, Qutb-ud-din Aibak, Iltutmish, Balban, Ala-ud-din Khalji, and Firoz Shah Tughlaq, each rivaling the other in monstrosity, they were reminded of the Kashmirian Kṣemendra’s verse that the turuṣka-s were truly like sores bursting forth on the body of the earth. As they approached the symbol of Islamic phallocracy looming large over them in the form the minār they encountered a step. There the families halted upon sighting an image of Vināyaka, which had been plastered into the step with the express intent of it being stepped upon by a visitor to the minār or the masjid. Hence, the families instead ascended by way of the railing wall. As they did so little Jhilleeka remarked: “If one had believed our history textbook it would seem that Qutb just made himself comfortable in Dillikā and started a program of architectural embellishment to fill in unoccupied real estate.” The rest quietly nodded in acquiescence and walked ahead.

Once at the masjid, which was named Quwwat-ul-Islam or the might of marūnmāda to thumb it into the Hindus’ faces, they saw the Persian inscription mentioning the demolition of numerous Hindu temples (of the āstika and nāstika variety). As they came out and turned around after seeing the inscription they saw a remarkable sculptural element plastered as is into the wall of the Masjid. It displayed seven deva-s: Viṣṇu reclining on his serpentine bed, accompanied by Prajāpati, Agni, Indra, Kumāra, Rudra and Yama in a row. Varoli remarked: “I guess that is what our my dopey history textbook tries to indoctrinate as syncretic Indo-Saracenic art.” Vrishchika: “Or what the speakers of a most barbarous bhraṣṭa-bhāṣā would term Gaṃgā-Yamunā tehzīb”. Lootika added: “And simultaneously it is what the white South Asianists and assorted marusaṃbhava-ekarākṣasavādin-s will tell us that it never happened, all while emptying their gall-bladders on us āstika claiming that we wiped out the shrines of the nāstika-s.”. Just then they passed a side door and Varoli pointing to the lintel with a triad of nagna ford-makers said: “Well, here we can see who really busted the nāstika prāsāda-s!”. At another place Jhilleeka sighted a panel of the incarnations of Viṣṇu, while Vrishchika sighted a Vināyaka and Skanda, all plastered into elements of the masjid.

Thus completing their circuit they came back to the main archway and stopped to closely examine the glorious non-rusting iron pillar. Somakhya’s father who had hardly said anything all that time remarked that they should closely study the iron pillar as there was much to learn from it. Lootika zoomed in on the pillar using her camera to get the focus on the inscription and showed it to Somakhya asking what it was.

Somakhya: “That is the inscription of the great emperor Candragupta-II Vikramāditya.” Using the cheat-sheet for Gupta Brāhmī that he had brought along he tried to illustrate a few points of the verse and added: “Originally this was the dhvaja of Viṣṇu with a cakra atop it, also the symbol of the cakravartin. Note closely how the inscription was made. All letters are clearly created from a limited set of dies probably with 8-12 basic shapes, each of a strikingly constant width of one yava, the ancient Hindu unit.”
Varoli: “Ain’t it remarkable that the pillar was not just non-rusting but was inscribed with these dies: it would be like a printing process on metal with a specific font given that the whole Sanskrit varṇa-mālā is achieved with this limited set of dies which appear to be so elegantly fashioned. How could these dies indent the iron?”

Somakhya: “Studies have shown that the inscription was struck cold. The dies were evidently much harder than the pillar iron and likely made from a high-carbon steel with ~1.5% C, which the Hindu engineers had learned to fashion into required shapes in a specific temperature range. The analysis of the depth of the inscription shows a remarkable uniformity with a mean of .89mm in a very tight normal distribution. This means the Gupta engineers had some means of controlling the ~20kg hammer strikes to deliver uniform impressions on the horizontal pillar that weighed about 6.5 tons when made and then erect it.”

Just then Jhilleeka who was scanning the pillar with the camera noticed an indentation high up on the pillar and asked: “What could that crater mean?”

Somakhya: “That crater was due to a cannon fired by Nadir Shah the Mohammedan tyrant from Iran in March of 1739 CE. The Mohammedan invader having conquered Dillikā was enamored by the rustless iron pillar and wanted to take it back with him. In addition filled with righteous indignation he wanted to remove this Hindu monument from the masjid. Unable to do so he decided to break it into two pieces or at least take a piece with him. Hence, he decided to deploy one of his new cannons based on the Russian models originally commissioned by Czar Peter and fired a 12 centimeter lead ball at the pillar. But praise be to the gods! The ball rebounded off the pillar without breaking it and smashed into the Quwwat-ul-Islam damaging it. Not wanting to be seen as a masjid-breaker Nadir discontinued his attempts to break the pillar.”

Lootika: “That is rather remarkable not only is the pillar rustless but it withstood cannon shot and gave the marūnmatta-duṣṭa-s a fitting back-hurl! Praise be to the great Vikramāditya!”

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

With their minds brimming with the experiences of the rājadhānī the two families were back on the train chugging its way back to their home city. As their parents had intended the visual impact of the Saracenic structures made history unforgettable for them – if there was even a rudiment of secularism in any of their minds it was now dead and cremated. Lootika and Somakhya had taken the same seats as before and were staring out at the expanses of Bhāratavarṣa speeding away before them.

Lootika: “The iron pillar is so representative of what the Hindu civilization has come to be. We are unable to make such alloys today! In the 1600s the great rājan of the maharaṭṭa nation captured a printing press from the mleccha-s and tried to adapt it for Hindu use. However, they were stuck due to their inability to create a font. Here, we see that the Gupta empire more than 1000 years before him had already achieved a solution, which could have been easily used to make an efficient Devanāgari font! Likewise, the same rājan had to purchase a German blade. This was despite our engineers having already mastered intricacies of hard steels more than 1000 years before him. If we had only continued it would have certainly helped us in our industry even today.”
Somakhya: “Indeed. So also for the mysterious technology for making a very hard bronze, which we Hindus are unable to achieve even today or the special copper alloys of the copper hoard cultures. Metal technology is the beginning of all industry and there is something to the fact that we have lost even what we had not just in terms of the alloys but also precision. The precision which we saw with the Gupta dies is something we do not see naturally occurring in our modern industry. Indeed, the average Indian product can be held out as an epitome of impreciseness.”

Varoli: “These alloys of the old Hindus sound fascinating. I must study this literature more closely! When was the last such material was made?”
Somakhya: “We really don’t know when exactly it came to an end. But we know that the great Paramāra-rājan Bhoja-deva had made an enormous rustless iron triśūla over 13 meters in length. It was broken up by the monstrous Ala-ud-din Khalji but three pieces of it still remain and appear rather resistant to corrosion in air due to a peculiar type of phosphate inclusion.”

Lootika: “Bhoja-deva – the last flash before the end – it seems even superior technological achievements cannot survive the rapacious barbarian if there is some deeper problem in a people. But if you have that something, like say the Vietnamese, even if you are pummeled with a mleccha sledgehammer, you can come out on the other side, much like the iron pillar of Trivikramasena withstanding Nadir’s evil designs. What do you think happened?”

Somakhya: “I would say a nation needs a combination of military genius and robust ideology. While the Maurya-s had military might they were beset with the wrong-headedness of the nāstika-mata-s. But the repeated challenges posed by the nāstika-mata-s were finally overcome by the āstika-s resulting it coming out more robust than before. This coincided with the military genius of the Gupta-s giving us the right combination to shine forth. But success in arms is often creates centrifugal ambitions as many local power centers tried to repeat the military achievements of the Gupta-s. The emergence of localized power structures foster a stark individualism with utter disregard for the superorganism – the puruṣa. This also left its mark on the ati-mārga, which sought to situate itself outside the puruṣa, resulting in what you felt regarding the yati-s. As long as these centrifugal forces were counter-balanced by the cultural continuity maintained by the sanātana-dharma the people’s genius remained intact, as was seen in the period between the Gupta-s to Bhoja-deva. But when the balance is broken by the burgeoning regionalism and individualism it opened the people to destruction by extrinsic invasions, finally paving the path to loss of technology and inability to sustain the genius. If the extrinsic invasions, especially of the Abrahamistic type, are not quickly reversed then a decrepitude sets in. Thus, a civilization feels much like an old man, afflicted by disease, who despite the insights of his accumulated wisdom is unable to achieve what he was able to do in his vigorous youth.”

Lootika: “If this were the case Somakhya then it would pay rich dividends to study more closely the parallels between biological senescence and its civilizational cognate.”

From: Evolutionary origin of the turtle skull G. S. Bever, Tyler R. Lyson, Daniel J. Field & Bhart-Anjan S. Bhullar; A Middle Triassic stem-turtle and the evolution of the turtle body plan Rainer R. Schoch & Hans-Dieter Sues; An ancestral turtle from the Late Triassic of southwestern China Chun Li, Xiao-Chun Wu, Olivier Rieppel, Li-Ting Wang & Li-Jun Zhao; Evolutionary Origin of the Turtle Shell Tyler R. Lyson, Gabe S. Bever, Torsten M. Scheyer, Allison Y. Hsiang & Jacques A. Gauthier

In the eighth year of our life we became fascinated by the remarkable reptile Eunotosaurus and its most unusual anatomy. Most of the work on it was rather obscure and hardly accessible on the Indian subcontinent. Hence, we almost had to move heaven and earth to get our hands on some primary literature on this beast. What we learned suggested that it was of unprecedented importance to understand the evolution of reptiles, but frankly we were left puzzled about many of its features.

Eunotosaurus was discovered in 1892 at Beaufort West, South Africa and first described by Harry Seeley, a naturalist from Britain. Seeley was an aggressive critic of Darwin and Huxley and sought to find fault in their studies. He represented a certain strain of British paleontologists whose ghosts persist to this date. Seeley was a sharp observer of important anatomical similarities between organisms but often ended up drawing wrong evolutionary conclusions in part due to his fixation with showing the Darwinian camp wrong. Hence, while Seeley initially saw a possible link between Eunotosaurus and turtles he finally decided that it was related to the primitive parareptilian group, the mesosaurs. The other British paleontologist and prolific collector of fossil reptiles, DMS Watson, who again had an exceptional eye for vertebrate anatomy, brought Eunotosaurus back to the limelight by pointing that it was the likely ancestor of turtles. However, in the late 1960s, paleontologist Cox restudied Eunotosaurus and declared that it had little to do with the ancestry of turtles. Just an year before I began my studies, a new complete skull of Eunotosaurus was discovered and it was declared that it was indeed unrelated to turtles. By the 1990s a series of studies made a return to the past and reinstated the basic evolutionary model propounded by DMS Watson based on earlier studies by the forgotten paleontologist Goodrich that reptiles came in two great clades: eureptiles and parareptiles. Eureptiles include the and basal forms like captorhinomorphs and protorothyrids and the diapsids. The latter in turn include the the archosaurs, today represented by crocodiles and avian dinosaurs, and the lepidosaurs, today represented by lizards and the tuatara. The parareptiles were seen to include a wide-range of forms including the mesosaurs, millerettids, procolophonids, pareiasaurs, lanthanosuchids, bolosaurs, nyctiphruretids and nycteroleterids, which were all completely extinct by the beginning of the Jurassic. In this period, morphological cladistic analyses recovered Eunotosaurus as a parareptile too.

In parallel there was the vexing morphological question of the origin of the turtles. Turtles have linked to almost every major clade of amniotes at some point in the past. Despite an early view of them being diapsids due to the pioneering work on the reptilian skull by the Danish anatomist Tage Lakjer, the consensus shifted towards them being “anapsids”. As with Eunotosaurus the early cladistic studies on the origin of the turtles put them among the parareptiles; indeed, they were seen as the only parareptile lineage surviving to date. Within Parareptilia, some workers claimed that turtles were related to procolophonids, like Owenetta. Others claimed turtles was related to or nested within the parareptile clade of the pareiasaurs. But none of these early workers recovered a link between turtles and Eunotosaurus within Parareptilia. Rather Eunotosaurus lay close to the base of Parareptilia along side the millerettids or forming a clade with them.

In a dramatic shift from the emerging consensus, Rieppel reverted to the position of Lakjer by showing that turtles were not parareptiles but nested within diapsids. His trees recovered them as being as sister group of the lepidosaurs in a clade with the sauropterygians (nothosaurs and plesiosaurs among others) within the now more inclusive clade of Lepidosauromorpha. While this was being debated, the first molecular phylogenies of reptiles were published. They established beyond any measure of doubt that the turtles were diapsids. But contrary to all morphological analysis they were recovered as archosauromorphs. This position of the turtles has become unquestionable with the advances in genomics. However, barring Merck’s mostly unpublished phylogeny, the morphologists in this period failed miserably to obtain any evidence for the archosauromorph position of the turtles. They either obtained the same result as Rieppel, with some minor reconfigurations or they regressed back to the old parareptile hypothesis, but this time with a twist. Within Parareptilia, turtles emerged as the sister group of the enigmatic Eunotosaurus.

It is against this background that in the past couple of months there have been dramatic developments concerning turtle origins from the morphological side. Both these studies concur on the following: 1) Eunotosaurus is a stem turtle and 2) the Eunotosaurus+turtle clade is now within Diapsida.

One of these papers describes a new reptile Pappochelys from the Ladinian age (late Middle Triassic ~240 Mya) of Germany. Thus, it predates the previous oldest turtle Odontochelys by at least 20 My. This reptile has large, antero-posteriorly broad ribs with the dorsal surface sculpted with ridges and rugosity suggesting that it formed some kind of a protective surface. The shape of these ribs and their approximately T-shaped cross-sectional outline is strikingly similar to that of Odontochelys to the exclusion of all other reptiles with expanded ribs, except for Eunotosaurus. This form of the ribs has also be noted in an early developmental stage of the snapping turtle before the ossification of the shell elements begins. Odontochelys while lacking a carapace of the crown turtles is clearly turtle, with a well-developed plastron. Pappochelys has no plastron but it does have thickened paired gastralia. Their orientation is also similar to the spinous ends of the plastron ossifications of Odontochelys, suggesting that the turtle plastron arose via fusion of the gastralia, into which were incorporated elements of the shoulder girdle in the anterior region. Consistent with this, at least some gastralia are fused in Pappochelys resulting two-headed forms similar to the spinous endings of the plastral elements of Odontochelys. The general form of the pelvis is also close to that of Odontochelys. The tail is long and whip-like, again closely paralleling that of Odontochelys.

While the post-crania of Pappochelys resemble the basal turtle Odontochelys, the skull is notably primitive. Both Odontochelys and Pappochelys share the feature of having conical teeth on their jaws. These are however lost in the first turtles with shells, namely Proganochelys, which only retains palate teeth on the vomer and the pterygoid like the more primitive forms. However, unlike the un-fenestrated skull of Odontochelys, Pappochelys displays a proper diapsid skull, but the lower temporal fenestra is ventrally open.

The second paper re-examines the skull of Eunotosaurus the approximately 260 My old reptile from the Middle Permian period of South Africa. Earlier work had shown that the ribs of Eunotosaurs are indeed close to Odontochelys and now to those of Pappochelys. Surprisingly, the new study of the skull showed that the skull is not anapsid as previously believed but diapsid. The juvenile specimen of Eunotosaurus shows a plainly diapsid skull with both the upper and lower temporal fenestra being clearly visible. Scanning of the adult skull revealed that the growth of the long supratemporal bone obscured the upper fenestra, which could be otherwise seen in its classical form below that bone. A similarly, obscuring of the upper fenestra by the supratemporal bone is also seen in the thalattosaurs, engimatic marine reptiles from the Triassic. Interestingly, the lower fenestra was ventrally open just as in Pappochelys. The discovery of a plainly diapsid skull in Eunotosaurus thus brings it out of the parareptile part of the tree, where it had remained for a good part of the last two decades, because the upper temporal fenestra is considered synapomorphic for diapsids. There are other subtle features that might be relevant to the potential relationship of Eunotosaurus to the turtles: The tall but narrow quadratojugal is similar to that seen basal turtle Proganochelys and also the archosauromorphs like Azendohsaurus and archosauriformes. Eunotosaurus further has a bony laterosphenoid in the brain case, which while not clearly illustrated by the authors, still seems to have the general shape of the laterosphenoid seen in the turtles and archosauromorphs. Moreover, like in the turtles it makes a similar limited point contact with the preotic bone. The squamosal of both Eunotosaurus and Pappochelys is dorso-ventrally tall and narrow. This resembles the state for primitive diapsids and certain parareptiles like nycteroleterids and millerettids with lower temporal fenestration. However, this is very distinct from the more dorsally placed and shorter squamosals of the basal turtle Proganochelys and the archosauromorphs.

With these forms being presented as diapsid stem turtles the morphologists can at least rescind the parareptile position of turtles to which they kept returning even as of recently. As a consolation they could claim that their intuition (dressed up with the pseudo-objectivity of cladistics) regarding Eunotosaurus was partly right and it was a stem turtle, although now as a diapsid rather than a parareptile. But does this mean the morphologists finally have all they need to get a better picture of early reptilian evolution? They certainly have good new data that could get them there, but the indications are they are as of now faced with crisis in reptilian phylogeny from the morphological viewpoint:

1) Despite having a diapsid Eunotosaurus and Pappochelys morphologists thoroughly fail in getting the correct archosauromorph position of turtles within Diapsida in their trees. Instead they usually get them as lepidosauropmorphs grouping with the sauropterygians, which might be part of a larger clade of aquatic reptiles. Some trees, like those in the Eunotosaurus work show the turtles as a sister group of Sauria (i.e. Archosauromorpha+Lepidosauromorpha). Thus, despite the new data, morphologists are doing no better with the position of the turtles than Rieppel in the 1990s.

2) All this time Eunotosaurus was firmly nested inside the parareptile part of the tree. There was never a hint that it might be deep in Diapsida as suggested by the current analysis of its skull and the discovery of Pappochelys. Even when the similarities between its ribs and those of Odontochelys were noted it pulled the turtles back into Parareptilia in morphological trees and not the other way around. In fact the authors earlier tried to compare the broadening of the ribs shared by Odontochelys and Eunotosaurus to the incipient broadening of the ribs observed in the parareptile Milleretta. This raises the serious question as to what is going on with the anatomical studies on parareptiles: Is that the morphologists got it all wrong only with Eunotosaurus in placing it with the parareptiles?; have they got it wrong with other parareptiles too, which should actually be occupying positions elsewhere in the reptilian tree?; is that Eunotosaurus is still a parareptile and its move into Diapsida is all wrong?

From: The first record of a nyctiphruretid parareptile from the Early Permian of North America, with a discussion of parareptilian temporal fenestration Mark J. Macdougall & Robert R. Reisz; Early loss and multiple return of the lower temporal arcade in diapsid reptiles Johannes Müller

3) With regards to moving Eunotosaurus into Diapsida we would like to point out that temporal fenestration is way more common than it was previously believed. It is unclear if the mesosaurs had a temporal fenestra because it has been argued both ways, and the interpretation depends on the preservation of the specimens. However, in the following groups temporal fenestration has been confirmed:
Millerettids – here in Milleretta the lower temporal fenestra was reported in juvenile individuals which is closed up in adults.
Australothyris – a basal parareptile has lower temporal fenestra.
Lanthanosuchids and their sister group Delorynchus – show lower temporal fenestra, suggesting that fenestration was possibly fixed early in this clade of parareptiles despite their proclivity for ontological variability.
Microleter – displays narrow ventrally open lower temporal fenestra.
Bolosaurs – closed lower temporal fenestra.
Nycteroleterids – At least Macroleter displays small closed lower temporal fenestra.
Procolophonoids – several procolophonoids show a ventrally open lower temporal fenestra. Within the procolophonoids the owenettids show a similar pattern but addition in at least one form, Candelaria there is also an apparent upper temporal fenestra, which is not very different from the state seen in Eunotosaurus.
Nyctiphruretids – displays narrow ventrally open lower temporal fenestra.

Thus, the lower temporal fenestration of Eunotosaurus in itself is not inconsistent with what is widely seen in parareptiles, especially the ventrally open state it displays is not uncommon among several parareptilian lineages. Moreover the tall narrow squamosal is also seen in some parareptiles as noted above. Thus, the prevalence of the lower temporal fenestra in parareptiles, and its presence in Diapsida and in Synapsida, the other great amniote clade, suggest that the lower temporal fenestra could have been ancestral to amniotes and merely lost in certain early reptiles like captorhinomorphs and possibly mesosaurs due to developmental plasticity – a feature already suggested by the condition in the procolophonoids and millerettids. Now the upper fenestra, which is considered synapomorphic for diapsids, cannot be taken for granted either because as noted above it seems to be present in the parareptile owenettid Candeleria. This could mean that either i) the upper fenestration could have emerge independently more than once; or ii) that it is more widespread and has merely been overlooked as it was in Eunotosaurus. The second point could mean that the reappraisal of Eunotosaurus as a diapsid might be premature as it could merely group with other parareptiles with a previously undetected upper fenestra or that at least some further parareptiles are actually diapsids like what is now being proposed for Eunotosaurus (let us not forget that the ribs of Milleretta were compared to Eunotosaurus). All this means that there might be more uncertainty in reptilian phylogeny than currently believed.

4) Recently there has been the redescription of another enigmatic diapsid, Elachistosuchus from the Upper Triassic of Germany. The phylogenetic analysis using the data from this reptile and various recent data matrices deployed in reptilian phylogeny reveals the great degree uncertainty in them. Elachistosuchus as well as the overall tree topology considerably varies depending on the matrix and the method used (maximum parsimony or Bayesian analysis): Sometimes Elachistosuchus groups with archosauromorphs, sometimes with lepidosauromorphs and other times emerges as a basal diapsid. This suggests that the character states are considerably discordant throughout the base of the diapsid tree and we should be rather circumspect about our understanding of early diapsid relationships. In a similar vein this uncertainty is likely to play into any matrix used to test the origin of turtles.

In conclusion, these new discoveries regarding Pappochelys and Eunotosaurus are likely to play a major role in the phylogenetics of reptiles by morphological means for a long time to come. There is no doubt that Pappochelys is a diapsid. However, we would be a bit cautious regarding its identity as a stem turtle. It has several primitive features that are not quite typical of crownward archosauromorphs, which share several features with stem turtles like Proganochelys. While the most basal confirmed archosauromorphs are rather conservative there is nothing linking the turtles to those or Pappochelys. Regarding Eunotosaurus, we do see its striking similarities with Pappochelys. It is because of this, with considerable caution, we accept it as being a diapsid. But again there is nothing particularly archosauromorph about it.

However, there could be light at the end of the tunnel. The recent work by Rieppel and colleagues recovered the large clade of aquatic reptiles, first seen in the fossil record from the Triassic, including thalattosauriformes, sauropterygians, saurosphargids, ichthyosauriformes, hupehsuchids, and Wumengosaurus as archosauromorphs. It is conceivable that turtles too belong to this clade, thus aligning morphological and molecular phylogenies. However, it remains to be seen how Pappochelys and Eunotosaurus might fit in such a framework.

Fossils of the first bona fide amniotes, both synapsids and reptiles, are from the Moscovian Stage of the Carboniferous period (311.7–307.2 Mya). The first diapsids fossils are from the slightly later Kasimovian stage of the Carboniferous period around 305 Mya – right in this period we see evidence for some diversification of the diapsids, with a fully terrestrial lizard-like morph represented by Petrolacosaurus (albeit with synapsid-like canines) and a partly aquatic form represented by Spinoaequalis. However, the first confirmed archosaurmorphs and lepidosauromorphs appear much later: respectively Eorasaurus ~260-255 Mya and Paliguana 251.2-252.6 Mya. Thus there is a nearly 50 My or more gap between the first diapsid and the first representatives of the two crown clades. This window is one of great obscurity. If indeed Eunotosaurus was a stem-turtle as proposed by the authors of these recent reports then it would mean that archosauropmorpha had already begun diversifying before 260 Mya. In this scenario Eunotosaurus will have the enormous significance of being the earliest currently recognized archosauromorph and point to a cryptic diversity of Archosauromorpha, which still remains unrecognized or unsampled in the fossil record. Under this scenario the phylogenetic positions of many Permian diapsids, which are typically considered basal members of Diapsida as a whole, might need to be re-examined more closely to see if they actually represent stem versions of Archosauromorpha and Lepidosauromorpha. Likewise some parareptiles could also find a place in Eureptilia. If Eunotosaurus was not related to turtle ancestry then it could mean that it was yet another basal diapsid or parareptile that merely converged to a diapsid state with convergent turtle-like features. Thus it is poised to be of considerable significance for dating the split between the line leading to lizards and that leading to birds.

Vidrum had just finished up with his last patient for the day. Before heading out to his office one of his assistants offered him a rich halvā. He curtailed his temptation reminding himself how bad it could be for one’s health. Hence, with great determination he helped himself to a small piece and warned his assistant of the dangers of such foods. After completing some analysis of the cases in his office he had decided attend a T20 match that was supposed to take place in his city that evening. As he was walking towards his office the somber light of the low autumnal sun reflected off his window casting a strange glow along the corridor. Somewhere in his mind that lighting triggered a deep sense of gloom, which was perhaps in resonance with the thoughts regarding Meghana’s violent death the previous month that mobbed his brain. In the aftermath of that event his ties with his old friends Somakhya, Lootika and his colleague Vrishchika had gone cold for he had reacted rather impulsively to what he felt was their chill or even frivolous response to Meghana’s death. Hence, he had been spending more time with his other friends Gardabh and Mahish. With them he had much more in common to talk than what seemed to him like arcana punctuated by occasional remarks of the cryptic type, which marked his meetings with Somakhya and Lootika or Indrasena and Vrishchika. Yet Vidrum sensed that for some reason he felt more comfortable and at greater contentment with them than with Gardabh or Mahish despite their conversations seeming much more lively and cheerful.

Thus, with his mind thronging with conflicting thoughts Vidrum was just about to turn round the corridor to reach his office when he ran into a woman. She greeted him and he returned the greeting. As he did so he found her to be vaguely familiar. At the same time he felt a strange and instantaneous attraction towards her. Hence, he introduced himself and she too responded as though she had known him. Hence, they talked a little bit more and then went their own ways. She told him that her name was Kalakausha (Kālakauśā). She had just begun her fellowship with the high-profile professor Vardhanga who had been newly-appointed to start the organogenesis division. Upon finishing the business in his office Vidrum returned home. As there was still sometime before he had to leave for the stadium, Vidrum sat down in his study to catch up with the literature. But his constant sleep deficit conspired with his plush new chair and ere long he had lapsed into the world of a dream; therein he beheld the following:

Those were days when they were rather young and when Vidrum’s house still seemed to have a presence within it. It was a somber autumnal afternoon when Vidrum left his home and walked towards the bus stop that was close to the western wall of the cemetery. While he still had an hour to catch the bus, he left early because he hoped to chat with Meghana on the way. As he kept chatting with her he wondered if he should rather not go to the bus stop at all. But he feared that his parents might somehow know that he had not gone to the intended destination and severely upbraid him. Hence, with much reluctance he pulled himself away from Meghana and reached the bus stop. Even as he reached there he saw Lootika walking up to it as had been already planned. After a short initial exchange of pleasantries the two remained quiet but for an occasional oligosyllabic remark. The bus soon arrived and as they got into it they saw Somakhya waving out to them and they ran up to join him. Thus journeying together they arrived at the stop next to an interestingly constructed building bearing the board Kalāvihāra. They saw many other young individuals like themselves assembling there. Even as they entered the compound of the Kalāvihāra and headed to the registration desk they saw a girl hail Lootika, who in return called her to join them. As she joined the three of them Lootika introduced her as a good acquaintance from the school she had formerly attended before joining that of Vidrum and Somakhya. Her complexion was grayish brown, her eyelids thick and her eyes slit-like. She was not someone who would be described right away as universally beautiful, yet she was not without certain strong subliminal charms that would appeal to a male. It was these charms that ensnared Vidrum right away and for some reason he felt deeply enamored by her.

Their program was to visit the Kalāvihāra daily for a week and on each day learn different arts. Upon registering they were handed a card on which were printed boxes that were to be stamped based on which activity they chose. They could not chose the same activity again after attending it on one day. The different activities were taking place in different rooms, in the garden, or the central space in the building. Soon Vidrum found himself drifting in and out of the rooms with his new companion, i.e. Lootika’s old acquaintance, leaving his other two friends to their own devices. Lootika and Somakhya each went their own different ways – Somakhya settled for a room where they were teaching people to make human faces with clay. Somakhya already knew to make many different animals from clay but found humans extraordinarily difficult. Hence, he thought that it might be a useful thing to learn. Lootika found herself in a room where they were teaching the art of making marbled paper. Vidrum and his new companion went to the room where they were to act out a mleccha play. As the week wore out Vidrum and his new companion grew inseparable – they were beside each other from the time they saw each other upon entering the Kalāvihāra and always chose the same activity to do for the day.

After the first day Vidrum had even stopped visiting Meghana and on the last day he felt a certain anguish that he might not see his new friend from the Kalāvihāra again. To his surprise after they finished up the activities of the Kalāvihāra she came with him to join Lootika and Somakhya rather than take her bus to a distant part of the city. She explained that she was intended to go to with Lootika who was to make some soap – she wished to get herself some of that special soap. Vidrum told her that he lived close to Lootika’s home and wondered if she might stop by briefly near his house to chat. Lootika sensing that they might want to hangout together offered to get her the soap once it was made if she remained with Vidrum at fixed spot in the vicinity of his house. When they reached the bus stop near the cemetery the three bade Somakhya good bye and got off. But Vidrum’s plans all came to naught – as he stepped out of the bus he saw that Meghana had come there for some reason, and she immediately called out to him. He had to embarrassingly cancel his plans without much explanation and go away with Meghana even as he watched his new companion vanish down the road with Lootika.

This deep embarrassment in the dream awakened Vidrum with a start. But his horror quickly turned to a pleasant buzz in his mind as the realization dawned on him that Kalakausha whom he had just met was perhaps none other than this companion from the past who had appeared in the dream. He turned this over and over again in his mind until he felt convinced that it was indeed so. He dropped the idea of going to the match and instead called Kalakausha and asked if she might want to join him for dinner.

◊◊◊◊◊◊◊

It was a chilly autumn day. Even as Somakhya and Lootika were arriving with their kids at the house of Varoli and her husband Mitrayu they were joined by Indrasena, Vrishchika, their kid and Jhilleeka. Somakhya’s elder kid ran up to his aunt Varoli and hugged her and expressed happiness that she was back. Somakhya: “I think he is really relieved and happy to see you back.”
Lootika: “He would cause us so much distress by daily asking if you and Mitrayu might be killed by various entities in Africa. First he asked he you might eaten by a lion or a Nile crocodile or a Rock python. Then he wondered if you might be a victim of a hippo. Passing through the possibility of a bite from a mamba he descended to the microscopic realm wondering if you might get malaria or Ebola or an arenavirus.” Varoli patted her nephew and said to Lootika: “At least he does not appear to have regressed all the way to the mean as you had feared. In any case we survived and I think at least for now we can place our entry into Vaivasvata’s abode in the dramatic or dismal future.”

Then Jhilleeka embracing her sister asked: “Varoli, I seem to have been completely out of the loop. How come you and Mitrayu ended up going to Ghana of all places and that to on so sweeping an adventure?”
Varoli: “It is not something we expected either. It so happened that when we were in grad school there was this fellow from Ghana who took lessons from Mitrayu to pass his course. The link further developed as I had helped the said Ghanaian with the synthesis of a pyrazinone obtained from a fungus from those lands. Somakhya, you may recall I used a dipeptide synthetase you had discovered followed by selective chemical reduction of one of the keto groups taking advantage of the bulky side chain. Subsequently, he seems to have become a man of some note there and invited us to advice on some matters. Given that it might be a once in life chance to visit the heart of Sthūladvīpa teeming with Kṛṣṇa-jana-s of all types, Mitrayu and I decided to go; I also realized that it might be a good opportunity to obtain samples for studies on various natural products and obtained the necessary permits for the same.”
Jhilleeka: “It seems you guys had some great adventures there. I need to hear all of it.”
Mitrayu: “Well, why don’t you and everyone else have lunch first then we could yarn to our heart’s content about the adventures. But frankly while one feels like a hero to be back from Citragupta’s clutches, I am sure it will give us dreams for a while to come. It also gave us a first hand glimpse of the life our early ancestors in Sthūladvīpa and the effects it has had on the rest of the fauna – for after all man is the most wicked of all animals.”

After lunch they all gathered in the porch, and Mitrayu and Varoli started narrating their adventures to the rest. After spending the first five days in Accra they spent the next 10 days before their return in navigating down the Afram river into the forest preserve on the shores of the gigantic Volta lake, studying life and obtaining samples all along. It was here that their narration reached its high-point and had all spell-bound even as they displayed the pictures they had taken in course of it. Reproduced below is a paraphrase of the relevant section from Mitrayu’s memoir of the journey:

“…We were about a day’s journey away from the main entry into Volta lake via the Afram river. We had sailed on our barge the whole night on the Afram river. That morning we made it to the bank to refresh ourselves in a village. We then planned to canoe a little further to examine the life in the river and the more forested parts that lay to the east. Just as we were getting ready for the canoeing, one of our Ghanaian companions came up to us saying that he had some news of significance. A mlecca-preta-ghoṣaka from Switzerland had gone with a couple of African assistants to fish. They saw a baby hippo and were thinking of taking it back as bush-meat for a feast. But just then they were attacked by the mother hippo which knocked down the missionary and bit through his sternum sending him along to join his kīlita-preta. One of his assistants suffered a bite to his leg but somehow made it alive. So our local companion was concerned about our going ahead with the canoeing foray since the irate hippo had been sighted along with many others just a little ahead on river where we had intended to canoe. One of our companions, a practitioner of a local syncretic offshoot of the deva-dharma centered on Rudra and Dattātreya suggested to us that we put back our canoes on the barge and catch up with it the next day downstream. He instead suggested that we take the land route through the dense forest on the banks where the hippos were unlikely to cause trouble. He also hoped to introduce us to the big man of a tribe that practiced a west African religion in which the local deity had been syncretized with Śrī.

As we began our land trek with two of our local companions (the remaining four went with the barge) through the dense forest we encountered many birds and plants of interest. By late afternoon we reached the village of the traditional religionists. There we learned of their worship of a water-cycle deity who conceptually maps on to the Sarasvatī-like deities in the IE world. But they had syncretized her with Śrī, whose images they had obtained from Saindhava Hindus. After some familiarization and discussion the big man realized that we were unlike the mleccha anthropologist who had visited them earlier. Thereafter, impromptu he showed us the stambhana of a kukkuṭa by pointing his ritual knife at it. Varoli for some reason had an impulse to show her mantra-prowess by breaking his stambhana with a kaula Vināyaka-prayoga. The big man quickly realized what was happening and pointed his knife at Varoli to induce stambhana. Seeing her instantaneously succumb to it, I caused the big man stambhana using the veiled Vārāhī. Taking advantage of that my strī freed herself from his stambhana. The big man immediately recognized us as fellow prayogin-s and was pleased to talk about more weighty issues. He showed us a novel Voacanga plant and explained how it had been a potent force against the advance of the Abrahamistic memetic diseases in his tribe. Varoli informed me that well-studied Voacanga varieties contained several compounds of interest including the famed ibogaine. While they had been characterized before, she obtained good samples of this Voacanga for further studies on the pharmacology and biosynthesis of those alkaloids which remained poorly understood – it was promising as it appeared to be a novel Voacanga that had not been investigated thoroughly before. After the big man felt more comfortable with us, he revealed yet another plant of interest: A novel variety of Tabernaemontana with interesting pot-shaped fruits. It was clearly distinct from the Hindu version, which is used in preparations along with the mysterious lakṣmaṇā and nāgakesara plants in the māheśvara-vaśīkaraṇa-prayoga and attainment of the state of universal benevolence (sarva-priya-darśanaḥ) as per the Kākacaṇḍīśvara Tantra. Subsequently Varoli and I also discussed the possibility that the nandyāvarta (endless knot) was an imagery emerging from the hallucinations caused by the Hindu versions. In any case the big man of the tribe was kind enough to give us a good sample of this plant including its seeds that could be used for further studies.

The next day the barge arrived as stated but we were up for more trouble. About quarter of an hour after we got going the engine developed some problems and the handyman declared that it might take a day to fix. Our local companions suggested that we could canoe ahead towards the lake and catch up with the barge downstream. We took this up and jumped on to our canoes. Our party of two canoes was joined by another canoe with two mleccha adventurers and their guides. Close to noon the canoe with the mleccha-s was just 35 meters downstream of us on the river when one of them leaned towards what looked like a calm river to take a photo. Even as he did so we saw a huge splash in the water and he was seized by a giant niloticus crocodile and pulled into the water. Before we could even realize what was underway we saw two more crocs join in a death roll to rend apart the mleccha adventurer. I looked at Varoli and she appeared supremely calm – that reminded me that she was after all one of the caturbhaginī. With this incident we had to veer to the northern shore to help the stricken party. We parked the canoes in a place where crocodiles were unlikely to come to bask and the surviving mleccha and a subset of the locals decided to wait till a larger boat arrived with some assistance to take the mleccha back to a safe place. We waited along with them for some time to make sure that they will get the necessary help. It was clear by then that there was no chance of recovering anything of the mleccha who had become the food of the crocodile. Our local companions informed us that a big male crocodile had been machine-gunned but it managed to survive the wounds and since then routinely took revenge by attacking humans whenever he got the chance. They were sure that it was this guy who had eaten the mleccha. I was not convinced with this revenge theory. But in response they regaled with tales of crocs to drive home this point: from the great croc Gustave, which had lived in the other side of the vast African continent and was reputed to have killed at least 300 humans and an adult hippo, to another 7 meter giant in the Niger river. They pointed to us these crocs did not only kill to eat but also drowned some of their victims without eating them, thereby presenting support for their revenge hypothesis. Varoli and I said to ourselves that as man is wickedest of all animals, the long presence of our kind in Africa had only allowed the animals capable of coping with us to survive – be it the hippo or the crocodile – without that ferocity they would not be still around with man. We then thought how it might have been for our ancestors in the company of the now gone Rimasuchus.

While the party waited for the boat, we set out with two our companions to meet the medicine man of a traditional tribe. After a couple of hours of trekking we reached his habitation in the forest. He was at first taciturn but after our companions assured him of our intentions he seemed rather forthcoming and allowed us to accompany him on his collecting foray, which was to include material for the ceremony that they were to perform later that night. Two plants of great interest were collected by him. One was a Pancratium species, which he declared to be a very toxic plant that was used for killing or making the victim mad. The other was a Caesalpinia species whose flowers and seeds he said were used to see ghosts. Then he collected a spiny looking mushroom of the genus Lycoperdon, which he said was to see ancestors come and talk to you. We too obtained samples of all these. Unfortunately, we could not stay on for his ceremony as there was the report of a male leopard on the prowl on our path back and we had to make it back in time to our party. Nevertheless, we made extensive notes of the medicine man’s accounts of these plants. Thus, we saw first hand, contrary to certain claims, that Africa is likely to possess a rich tradition of psychoactive plants, even if it were not in the same league as central and south America.

While we thought we had already had our share of adventures, it was not the end. The next day we started canoeing to catch up with the barge when our canoe suddenly ran up against a sunken tree. At that point Varoli’s paddle got entangled in submerged vegetation and she was thrown out into the raging waters. She was washed out into the river for over 80 meters by the current but she somehow found her bearings and recovering the paddle started swimming back toward the boat even as we moved as fast as we could to approach her. Just then three crocs swam up towards her. To my horror though our companions had their spears they just seemed as though paralyzed. Varoli swam moving the paddle in a certain pattern even as the crocs swam for a while on either side of her and then retreated. By then she made it back and I hauled her back into the boat but was too shocked for any words. But she reminded me that she was one of the caturbhaginī – what surer evidence could I have that dear Varoli of bright eyes was indeed a natural siddhā of those 5 mantra-s than this immunity to crocs? The mantra ‘śiṃśumārā ajagarāḥ purīkayā jaṣā matsyā rajasā yebhyo asyasi deva tuṃburo rudra jalāṣa-bheṣaja |‘ came to my mind, and I beheld the fourth suchian face…”

After Varoli and Mitrayu had finished their narrative the rest remained silent for sometime taking in the adventure they had had in Sthūladvīpa. Jhilleeka: “We all know when any one of us deploys the makaramukha. When I knew someone had deployed I was just headed for the defense of my dissertation. So I called Lootika as soon as it was over and the first thing I asked was who deployed it. She thought that I had deployed it because of a irate committee member trying to give me trouble in course of the defense, but she did have her doubts for it would be surprising if I had used mantra-s for such commonplace secular issues. That’s when it hit us that it was you.”

The conversation eventually shifted to the plants they had obtained. Indrasena: “When we were in Bali a mantravādin showed us a certain variety of Copelandia mushroom that he used to visualize the Rudra-s. A milder version was incorporated into a dośā and eaten by people before a dance. Vrishchika had obtained samples of those with the intention of giving it to you Varoli. I don’t know if they reached safely.”

Varoli: “I do have them in the deep freeze. I have finally got two students who will be devoted the characterization and synthesis of all this stuff. So we should hopefully have something exciting in the near future.”
Somakhya: “In that case don’t forget the Salvia that I obtained from the forests of Uttarakhanda. But I hope your sister passed them on to you.”
Varoli: “Yes I do have that too. Lootika actually managed to grow some of that and gave me bunch of whole sage plants.”
Lootika: “bhārgava, was there not some story about that Salvia?”
Somakhya: “I asked a yogin who had some siddhi-s and practiced oṣadhi-prayoga-s if he knew the Sanskrit name of this sage. He said it was the hāsyaparṇi and said that upon taking it by the appropriate mode one laughs uncontrollably for a while and then has deep insight into himself. He then quoted Udīcya Śyāmilaka to bring home the point as to why that laughter is good:
na prāpnuvanti yatayo ruditena mokṣaṃ
svargāyatiṃ na parihāsakathā ruṇaddhi |
tasmāt pratīta-manasā hasitavyam eva
vṛttiṃ budhena khalu kaurukucīṃ vihāya ||

yati-s do not attain mokṣa by crying,
comedies do not block the ascent to svarga,
therefore with cheerful mind ought to laugh
the wise one, verily having given up bad ways.

Perhaps such a plant played a role in the laughing rituals of the pāśupata-s!
Indrasena: “May be. One gets a sense of that persisting in the expressions of the Kashmirian śaiva yogin Utpaladeva.”

Vrishchika: “Listen, regarding our psychedelics I believe we shall have a good chance to do some interesting pharmacology and biology that has not been done before. There is this guy Vardhanga, who has set up a lab in our med-school and has specialized in growing organs in culture. He has been rather successful in growing little human brains with both neurons and glia in the lab and they mimic the neural organization of real brains to different degrees. I have been proposing to use those cultured brainlets to test out responses to our various compounds, provided Varoli and her students are able to synthesize them. My group could initiate the process with some known substances to standardize various procedures and measurements before we get to the new substances.”

The rest agreed that it sounded like an interesting idea to pursue.
Mitrayu: “Good luck with your ventures guys. Now with Sthūladvīpa behind us I need to return to the tholins on Pluto and Ixion”
Somakhya: “Good luck with that hopefully we would hear more of that the next time we meet.”

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It was a dim autumn evening. The bustling city streets were a little quiet that night as the cold had suddenly set in. Vidrum and Kalakausha were returning after a delightful dinner at a restaurant. Kalakausha barely concealing her excitement said: “Now for something really thrilling! We need a quite secluded place.”
Vidrum: “Calm down, let us go to my house – best place for anything like that.”
Kalakausha: “Any chance Gardabh or Mahish might drop by?”
Vidrum: “Don’t worry. They would call if they want to come and it is too late for that!”

Back at Vidrum’s house he set up the cushions in a comfortable, dim-lit and quite room at the back of his house. The room had large glass window panes that separated them from the cold silent night outside but let the moonlight stream in. It also lit up the tangle of trees that lay to the back of Vidrum’s house separating it from the cemetery wall. The dim lamp shed an amber aura around the room and Vidrum lit a couple of dhūpa-daṇḍa-s to enhance the olfactory experience. He brought two ornate-looking cups with a cast-iron teapot and placed them on the low table beside the cushions. Vidrum: “Do you think caffeine could do any harm?” Kalakausha: “My results suggest it should be totally fine.” Then he and Kalakausha sat for sometime holding each others hands and taking in the ambiance. Kalakausha approved of it and taking up her bag brought out a multicolored bong. She then brought out a couple tubes and added them to the bong’s cup saying: “That should be it. You go first and I’ll follow.” Vidrum inhaled the substance from the mouth of the bong and then passed it to Kalakausha who did the same. They held each others hands tightly even as they felt like they had left the world.

Continued…

A version of this article was originally published on IndiaFacts

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With the river Sarasvati going dry the plains watered by the Gaṅgā became the focus of civilization in India. This civilizational phenomenon is philologically mirrored in Hindu tradition with the Gaṅgā and cities along it course gaining prominence in the late Vedic period. The great historical empires that brought about the multi-step unification of India can all be seen as having their “birth” on the banks of the Gaṅgā. So much so that even in deep south India the conqueror Rājarāja of the Coĺa clan established a town to commemorate his bringing of water from the Gaṅgā in course of his conquests that reached the Gangetic plains. Indeed, the Gaṅgā is typically associated with everything pure and auspicious in Hindu tradition.

However, we shall note one interesting departure from this where Gaṅgā is presented as a negative example. We see this in the Nītiśataka, one of the triad of 100 verse-collections, composed by Bhartṛhari, a personage who is the locus of many a colorful legend in Hindu tradition. The other two of the triad being the Śṛṅgāraśataka and the Vairāgyaśataka, which respectively cover the opposites of eroticism and asceticism respectively. The we are talking about is:

śiraḥ śārvaṃ svargāt *[patati śirasas tat kṣitidharaṃ]
mahīdhrād uttuṅgād avanim avaneś ca+api jaladhim |
adho ‘dho gaṅgeyaṃ padam upagatā stokam atha vā
viveka-bhraṣṭānāṃ bhavati vinipātaḥ śatamukhaḥ || (Nītiśataka 10)

alternative reading *[patati śirasas tat kṣitidharaṃ]

śiraḥ= head (nominative, neuter singular); śārvaṃ= of Śarva, i.e. of god Rudra; svargāt= from the heavens; patati= she falls; śirasaḥ+tat= from that head (ablative, neuter singular); kṣitidharaṃ= the bearer of the earth, i.e. the mountain range, the Himalayas; mahīdhrād= from the mountain (ablative masculine singular); uttuṅgād= high (adjective); avanim= plains (accusative, feminine singular) avaneḥ= from the plains (ablative, feminine singular) ca+api= and then; jaladhim= ocean (accusative, masculine singular); adhaḥ+adhaḥ= lower and lower; gaṅgā iyaṃ= this Gaṅgā (nominative, feminine singular); padam= rank/status (nominative, neuter singular); upagatā= undergone/attained; stokam= gradually; atha vā= or so; viveka-bhraṣṭānāṃ= those who have lost discernment (genitive, masculine plural); bhavati= it becomes; vinipātaḥ= fall (nominative, masculine singular); śatamukhaḥ= hundred-faced (nominative, masculine singular) ||

She falls from the heavens to Śarva’s head, from his head to the Himalayas,
from the Himalayan heights to the plains, and then from the plains to the ocean;
thus Gaṅgā has gradually attained a lower and lower status;
even so the fall of those deprived of discernment is hundredfold.

Here the descent of Gaṅgā from the heavens all the way to the ocean is presented as mimicking the manifold fall of those who have lost their discernment. Sadly, the Gaṅgā we see today literally gets worse in course of its descent: from its pristine glacial origins the river is serially polluted by everything from corpses to industrial effluents as it passes through the civilizational centers on its mid-course to its delta in the Vaṅga country. This grimly polluted Gaṅgā of today is truly apposite to old Bhartṛhari’s metaphor.

We would even go as far as to say that this despoiled Gaṅgā is a key manifestation of the manifold dissipations of the Hindus arising from the loss of discernment, which was once abundant in the founders of their nation. Sacred geography is an important aspect of a heathen civilization. Hindus as the most expansive heathens in the modern world should be taking the lead in preserving the basis of what makes a particular geography sacred. Yet, barring few bright spots like the Prabhughat cleaning drive [Footnote 1], what we are faced with most commonly is not just a dreadful neglect but even its willful desecration of sacred geography.

On another front Hindus face the possibility of being consigned to perdition due to their rank inability to wield nīti (politics) to their advantage. While analysts have expended lot of ink on the ten disastrous years of UPA rule, we would say that this is in no small measure a manifestation of viveka-kṣayaḥ of the Hindus. If the UPA debacle were not enough for the macrocosm of India the microcosm of Delhi showed us the same lack of discernment yet again by choosing Kejriwal and his henchmen as their rulers.

But the lack of discernment among the Hindus is nowhere more apparent than in the matter which can be termed as “self versus nonself” discrimination. Key to survival of a nation is its ability to define itself in a sturdy fashion, and examination of the Hindu responses suggests that they have been struggling with this. Sometimes we see Hindus placing emphasis on autochthonism, which in certain cases extends to include racial or genetic identity. Other times we see them mouthing the famous adage “vasudhaiva kuṭuṃbakam (the world is one family)”, without realizing that early Hindu tradition frequently recorded this statement as a negative example [Footnote 2]. Irrespective of their intrinsic merit, neither of these models of identity provide for robust discernment of what is self and what is non-self. In fact both models open the door for the invasive Abrahamisms and their secular derivatives such as leftism and liberalism. It hardly needs elaboration that giving these ideologies the proverbial inch will result in them grabbing an ell and much more at the expense of the Hindu. Thus, even as the immune system of an organism has manifold receptors to distinguish invasive material from self-substances, we need develop the civilizational apparatus that can finely discriminate that which can be accommodated within our heathen framework from that which cannot be.

Hence, if we intend to survive we need to collectively awaken to the big “if” in the statement of Monier-Williams, however harsh it might feel: “The knowledge of human nature displayed by the [Hindu] authors, the shrewd advice they often give, and the censure they pass on human frailties – often in pointed, vigorous, and epigrammatic language – attest to an amount of wisdom which, if it had been exhibited in practice, would have raised the Hindus to a high position among the nations of the earth. [emphasis mine].”

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Footnote 1: http://swarajyamag.com/lite/video-temsutula-imsong-on-cleaning-banaras-and-india/

Footnote 2: For a detailed discussion of the same see: http://bharatendu.com/2008/08/29/the-hoax-called-vasudhaiva-kutumbakam-1-hitopadesha/ by Sarvesh Tiwari.

The exam to qualify for pre-university college was just over and a long vacation lay ahead. Vidrum was drained by the huge mental effort he had put into the exams to earn a seat at a respectable college. It was the year Meghana had died. The tense competition, which characterized these exams, had kept Vidrum’s thoughts away from that event. Now that the exams were over, he wanted a clean break from all academic issues but two days into his vacation he felt his social life to be rather empty without his female companion. Sorely afflicted by this vacuum he paid a visit to his friend Somakhya. For a few minutes Somakhya patiently heard out Vidrum’s woes. Somakhya then said: “As the Tathāgata had said in the past, life is full of sorrow. What might bring pleasure or sorrow are almost as if two sides of the same coin – be it that which comes from women, oṣadhi-s or food. We have little control over what might come our way and how long they may stay with us. Indeed, all we can say is that the great Indra keeps all good things apart from each other. I sometimes feel there is indeed something like a genius of locus. You can either counter it with mantra-s or else you may try to throw off its grip by going elsewhere. May be you should go to some place away from our city to do something interesting.”

But Vidrum was worried about the next hurdle that lay on his educational track. He said: “Somakhya, I wish to enter a good university to study medicine, so would it not be prudent that I enroll in preparatory classes over the long vacations.” Somakhya: “Well if that is what you want to do, so be it. But there is ample time for such preparation, and any quest for knowledge merely for an upādi without a real interest in it will only result in you forgetting it pretty soon. So what is the use starting right now – it may not even stay in your mind till when college actually starts. So take a break, reflect about life in silence, and you might re-discover your lost touch.” It struck Vidrum that after all Somakhya’s suggestion might not be a bad one and he went away to stay with his maternal grandparents for a month. He journeyed by train and bus to their village which lay beyond the southern border of the province in which he stayed. He spent two to three days chatting with his kinsfolk and wandering around the lanes of the village chatting with other locals and drinking freshly tapped palm sap. His grandfather had told him of the existence of three huge caves that lay just beyond a gentle slope of fields that stretched out to the south of the village. His grandfather had warned him that the caves were a place of great danger and mystery and that it was better not to stray into them.

That hot afternoon under the shade of a huge tamarind tree Vidrum sat sipping palm sap along with a villager. The two soon got chatting. Vidrum asked him about the caves and the villager narrated a peculiar tale:
“Almost a millennium ago there lived a brave warlord by name the of śrī Bhetala Nayadu, who was the master of all the villages in this region. He had built a shrine to the 1000-eyed vajra-wielding goddess (ĀKHAṆḌALĀ DEVĪ), who was widely worshiped by these warrior nāyaka-s, their men, and the rakṣaka-s of the villages. At that time it is said that one of the caves was occupied by a powerful ghost going by the name DAṆḌALŪMA. This ghost is said to have terrorized the sheep of shepherds who grazed their flock near the caves. Many mantravādins are said to have tried to capture Daṇḍalūma but failed to do so. Hence, śrī Bhetala Nayadu, to pacify the ghost, instituted an annual bali and installed a balipīṭha for that purpose. In any case, I believe nobody grazes in the cool shadow of the outcrops beside the caves since then.

Now, some years ago there was a phase of bad south-west monsoons [which Vidrum realized was due to the El Niño oscillation] and that village which lies to the south, beyond the yonder caves, having poorer irrigation than ours, found itself in dire straits. It had a strongman, Chevi Reddi, who was then visited by a white man from America. Under his ministrations the strongman converted to the śavamata, who in turn ensured that many in the village became kīlita-śavopāsakas. He also seems to have given Chevi Reddi a new idea for livelihood – quarrying the rocky outcrops around the caves for limestone. After his conversion, now going by the name Chevi Jefferson Reddi, the strongman demolished the temple of the 1000-eyed goddess and the balipīṭha of Daṇḍalūma. We were enraged because we believed that the goddess had kept us safe from all manner of calamities for a nearly a 1000 years. Moreover, if the wrath of the ghost Daṇḍalūma was unleashed then there was no telling as to what might happen. This resulted in an armed confrontation between our village and that of CJR. But CJR’s men were better armed and they dynamited the pañcāyata hall of our village and that more or less forced us into submission. However, praise be to the deva-s, as they came to our aid! One day we heard an enormous noise, as though the mighty 1000-eyed goddess had hurled a great stone from the height of heaven. We learned that that even as CJRs men were laying the fuse cord their explosive went off suddenly and resulted in that thunderous clap that killed twenty of the quarrymen and busted two of their trucks. A fortnight later, CJR and his American missionary backer were out examining the site of the debacle, when a giant rock loosening itself from an elevation in the quarry came rolling down smashing into them. Thus, CJR and the American were taken away for their appointment with the stern-faced Citragupta and now indeed are doing time in raurava. Everyone in both this and that village saw this as a divine sign and decided to stay away from the both the śavamata and those caves, where they feared Daṇḍalūma was on the prowl.”

Vidrum felt rather excited hearing this tale. He thought to himself: “If men are scared away by the good old ghost Daṇḍalūma then the caves must really be safe for exploration, for after all man is the most wicked and dangerous of all animals.” So the next day he decided to explore the caves; being a great rock climber he, feared not falling boulders and treacherous outcrops. However, knowing that harm could always come ones way, he armed himself with a knife and a billhook, and set out for the caves on his grandfather’s bike after an early lunch. Having reached as far as he could by bike, he stopped noting a rocky path ahead beset with talus from the erstwhile mining operations of CJR, which the villager had talked about. He tethered his bike to a neem tree, locked it, and proceeded to the climb up the slope leading to the cave mouths. He noticed three large cave mouths, two situated at a higher elevation and one opening at a downward slope from the eminence where he stood. The latter cave seemed better lit and spacious so Vidrum decided to march into it. Before doing so he looked around surveying the lay of the land. The afternoon air was utterly still and there was hardly any noise beyond the background buzz of various insects broken by the occasional call of a bird. Indeed it looked as though Daṇḍalūma had succeeded in thoroughly eliminating any human presence from that place. Vidrum then surveyed the overhangs for any dangerous looking rocks that might come crashing down and having ascertained that the path to the cave he had chosen was safe he boldly strode in.

His initial impression was one of an anticlimax – he saw a few low-rising stalagmites forming some kind of obstacle to the inner chamber. He quickly got past them and saw a path that stank of bat dung which formed a visible layer on all surfaces. But soon the the narrow path hit a raised altar-like surface, which it at its far end dipped into a dimly lit chamber that seemed to go on endlessly into the utter blackness. He switched on the the torch he had got along and found that it shone as if illuminating the never-ending maw of the great dragon Surasā, with stalagmites and stalactites sporadically lining the floor and roof, as though they were her teeth. “This is exciting” he remarked to himself and with a perceptible quiver running through his body he pressed on. He got on to the altar-like eminence and crossed it to reach the great chamber that seemed to go on and on into a lightless realm. A few steps into the chamber he saw a white object jutting out from near the foot of a stalagmite in the dim light. Shining his torch for a better look he found that it was a strange jaw with several sharp curved teeth. Vidrum remarked to himself: “This must be a dinosaur’s jaw. What a find! May be I could sell it and make some money.” So used his billhook to dig up and carefully extract the jaw. Having placed it in his backpack, he shone his torch again and noticed that the sand around the jaw contained some minute white oddly shaped bone-like particles. He scooped a few of those and placed them in a container in his bag.

Then Vidrum arose, and wondering whether to explore the chamber further or retrace his steps, he shone his torch on a large stalagmitic eminence to the side of the chamber. So utterly unexpected a sight gleamed in the circle of light that for moment he was convinced that it was an apparition. But after standing rooted and gazing at it for few seconds he realized that it was indeed the real thing – a human skeleton with its neck arched backwards lay propped up against the stalagmitic eminence as though it was frozen in the position assumed at death. Suddenly, the sense of being close to Vaivasvata seized him: a vague sense of dread of being led to the desk of Citragupta at the end of the great tunnel came upon Vidrum. Just then, an old family tale suddenly flashed in his mind further amplifying this feeling into positive fear. But Vidrum was not one who lost his presence of mind easily; briefly regaining his composure he took a couple of photos of the spectacle that confronted him and then hurriedly retraced his steps and returned to his bike to ride back home.

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Despite the unforeseen encounter in the cave, on the whole Vidrum felt enlivened by his break and returned to his city carrying his specimens from the cave thinking them to be precious dinosaur bones. He checked the local news and saw that the fair on the grounds of the CAṆḌIKĀ temple had started the previous day. He decided to visit the fair that evening, hoping that he might be able to buy something interesting. As he wandered around he saw the stall, which had been introduced to him by Sharvamanyu that had clandestinely sold knives in the previous years. He inquired if they might have gravity knives and soon found himself buying a wonderful 9-incher with a good solid wood-fronted handle. Vidrum was beside himself with joy over his purchase but knew that he should not handle it in the open as it was a potentially illegal object in public places; so he carefully slipped it into his bag and wandered a little more among the stalls. Then a curious stall caught his eye, which was manned by an Iranian Asura-worshiper, and sold magic tricks. Just outside the shop he saw a couple of activists from the deva-unmūlana-samiti staging a protest and distributing pamphlets. Vidrum collected a pamphlet from the enthusiastic female activist and proceeded right to the stall. There a curious planchette with pictures of Iranian deities and demons caught his eye and he purchased the same. As he headed out, the activists angrily asked if he had not read their pamphlet. Vidrum merely smiled at them and went his way. Later that evening he called Somakhya and said: “I am finally back and have a lot of interesting things to talk about – things that will make your eyes pop out.”
Somakhya: “Sounds like your trip has done you good.”
V: “By the way, you are the only one who might not consider me crazy: I have bought this really nice-looking Iranian planchette and we should try it out as soon as possible.”
S: “Why not tomorrow evening; may be should do so in the courtyard of the Sarasvatī temple in the cemetery.”
V: “May be you should call pretty Lootika too. She may also be interested in seeing what I have got.”
S: “She has also just returned from her vacation travel and has been wanting to talk to me. So let’s all try to meet tomorrow evening.”

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Early that evening Lootika and her sister Vrishchika came to Somakhya’s house racing on their bikes. Lootika was holding her spectacles in one had and holding something tight in the other with tears streaming down one of her eyes. Panting, she handed what was in her closed fist to Somakhya and said: “O vipra what is this insect? It almost blinded me by getting between my spectacles and eye.” Somakhya took a close look and remarked: “O jālayuvatī, hope your eye is alright? This beast is a fly, a species of Dacus.” Vrishchika peering closely at it remarked: “How remarkable! It so closely resembles a wasp: much like a follower of the pretonmāda might try to wear the appearances of a devayājin!” Lootika smiled at her sister and said: “Indeed, although in this case the insect has evolved to appear more threatening than it really is. It looks like the wasp Ropalidia which can give a nasty sting. The modern śavamata in contrast tries to conceal its real evil by camouflage.”
Vrischika: “Ah! that is an interesting inversion! Do you know of a biological analog of the modern śavamata?”
Somakhya: “The blue butterfly Maculinea is a particularly interesting example! It lays its eggs on certain plants, and the caterpillars feed on it for three instars. After molting into the fourth instar it drops down and ant species of the Myrmica genus might encounter it. The ants then take the caterpillars into their nest as they smell just like the ant larvae. Once inside they may feed on the ant’s own larvae. Or they may make sounds similar to that of the ant queen and the workers would come up to them and feed them. Thus, they might live for an year or two inside the ant nest, growing almost double in size and finally pupate. The pupa too makes sounds like the queen and might have their smell; so the ants leave it alone, only to for it to finally eclose and fly away as a butterfly.”
Lootika: “Those butterflies are fascinating: a true genetic analog of the pretamata! Then there are also the Microdon flies which use a similar strategy to invade Formica ant nests and feed of them. However, they seem to spread very little and are rather localized…”
Somakhya: “Indeed, because they have high specificity for the species and even local family groups which they can invade; thus unlike the butterfly they do not spread widely: the later is thus closer to the invasive success of the śavamata.”
Lootika: “Perhaps, the butterfly evolved out of a similar strategy as the coming of the śavamata to our parts of the world. Maculinea belongs to a larger family of butterflies known as the Lycaenids. Many of these form mutualistic associations, with the caterpillars providing nutrition to the ants and the ants in return providing protection. From this ancestral condition some butterflies evolved to become invasive parasites of the ants.”
Vrishchika: “That makes a good analog to the pretamata. After all it came to Bhārata with mleccha traders who would engage in a mutualistic relationship with the local trading communities. They might offer protection to these local traders with their gunships and artillery against the earlier predator, the rākṣasamata. From such a base position we now see them morphed into the deadly parasites that they are.”

Somakhya: “So what about your family vacation? You said you had some interesting things to say.”
Lootika: “Not bad at all. We successfully performed the astra-vrata by climbing the Triśūla-parvata with a 10 kg trident with all our names inscribed on it and planted it atop the massif. Hope The god does not shoot his darts at us.”
Vrishchika: “We then did a little trekking around the mountain of the Five Caves. There Jhilleeka found this peculiar microlith.” Pulling out her phone Vrishchika showed an image of it to Somakhya.
Lootika: “Varoli, who was with her when she found it, quickly recognized it to be made from porcelain, perhaps like what they use for power lines. We were mystified who ever made this microlith from an insulator: a rather incongruous combination of stone age and electrical age technology!”
Somakhya: “Well, that is interesting. However, in the region of the Five Caves there were niṣāda-s who had apparently not gone past the stone age until recently. Hence, when they would have encountered such insulators from the power lines from near the railway tracks they might have simply seen it as excellent raw material for their microlithic technology.”

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Even as they were chatting thus, Vidrum arrived and he had a load of things to show and tell. After quickly summarizing his visit he excitedly got into his dinosaur jaw and with much drama he pulled out the mandible from the bag in which he had placed it. But to his annoyance, his precious jaw was met with much laughter from Somakhya and Lootika. Making his irritation apparent Vidrum asked: “Why the hell should that be so funny to you guys!” Somakhya and Lootika smiling at each said: “That jaw which you have is indeed beautiful and even perhaps significant but it is not a dinosaur. Rather, it is that of a decent-sized varanid lizard – a godha like the one the Tathāgata claimed to have incarnated as.” Vidrum felt a deep disappointment and dejectedly asked it they really meant it. They informed him that they were well-conversant with archosaurian anatomy and explained how it simply could not be one and was doubtless from a long dead lizard. However, they consoled him: “If you let us study this more closely we might have a much needed record of a fossil varanid from India.” Vidrum then said that he had also found some strange white, oddly shaped minute objects in the vicinity of the jaw and showed those to his friends. Somakhya quickly recognized them to be the vermiform dermal bones of a varanid and remarked: “Those indeed confirm your animal to be a varanid!”

By now Vidrum was feeling the whole cave adventure to be a bit deflating and without proceeding further with his narration decided to show them his gravity knife. Somakhya and the girls tried it out a few times even as Vidrum told them that it certainly did not feel Chinese. They agreed and remarked that this was one example showcasing the ability of bhārata-s to make good stuff. Then he pulled out his Parsi planchette and said they should get moving to ply it. Having examined it closely and praised its workmanship, the four of them left for the environs of the Sarasvatī temple. As they were on the way to the temple Vidrum showed his friends the pamphlet he had been given by the activist of the deva-unmūlana-samiti. Some fine print on it caught Somakhya’s eye: “Hey! Look down here it says: Brought to you by the James Lawrence Skeptic Foundation. I am sure these activists are no volunteers but getting paid subversionists for this mleccha organization.” Vidrum: “Ah! that explains how they could afford such good paper. Now look here is a QR code; let’s check it out.” Vidrum showed the webpage he had pulled up to the three. There was a display with images of GAṆEŚA and KUMĀRA with the legend: “Do you really think it is biologically possible for a man to get an elephant’s head via plastic surgery or have six heads and twelve hands? We call these things teratological monsters.”
Lootika: “It almost seems these skeptics are in league with the pretaghoṣaka-s, much like the mleccha-marūnmattābhisaṅgati that our Hindus are generally ignorant about.”

In the meantime they reached the premises of the temple. Having worshiped the deity enshrined therein, and having smeared the tilaka on their foreheads, they set up the planchette. The remaining three told Vidrum that since it was his board he should have the honor of being the first to think of the dead individual whose bhūta they were going to summon. Having uttered the suitable incantations to summon the bhūta, the four placed their fingers on the brass disc and let it wander around among the letters. First, they asked it its name. The disc indicated the answer as “Kuryūma”. Then they asked how he had died? The answer came back as: “kiyaṅga sulavyama”. Then Vidrum asked where he had lived when alive. The answer was: “ḍaṃ daṃ doṇka”. Then Vidrum put off by the apparently crazy answers tested it by asking the bhūta to state what Vidrum’s favorite dish was. It replied “kustuṃbi cuṭṭu ceṇṭu”. Exasperated by these undecipherable words. Vidrum angrily asked if he might ever meet Meghana’s bhūta. The answer came back as: “ā3mu”. He hastily shouted: “suprasanno bhava suprasanno bhava priya-prete gaccha gaccha |” A cool evening breeze wafted through and the four were quiet for a moment. Vidrum finally broke the silence and with a tinge of indignation: “I am sure you guys were pushing the disc to make fun of me. What nonsensical stuff was that?” Lootika: “Hey, as you may have seen I kept my eyes closed during the entire process to be objective about this whole thing.”
Vidrum: “So it was either of you: Somakhya or Vrishchika!”
Somakhya: “See, if I was pushing it I would have made it look like Subhas Chandra Bose-jī’s bhūta. I would have thought he was your hero and that you might want to hear from him.”
Vidrum: “You think you are being funny?”
Somakhya: “Serious. Or was it supposed to be Tatya Tope-jī?”
Vrishchika: “Before you blame me, let me tell you this was a success. He was speaking in an extinct language and that is why it sounded like gibberish to us. He might have been a prehistoric fellow.”
Vidrum’s face turned ghastly pale: “Vrishchika, you know what, you are probably bang on target even if that was meant as a joke!”
Vrishchika: “Now see, I could make out that the gibberish still sounded linguistically syntactical. So should I conclude that it was you who was pushing the disc to make make up this prehistoric language?”
Vidrum: “No no! You guys never let me complete the story of my adventure at the caves by poking fun at me for my beautiful Varanus bones. If you had let me do so you will see how all this fits.”

The three asked him to continue saying that they were most eager to listen to his tale. Vidrum continued his narration by reiterating the tale of Daṇḍalūma, and then showing them pictures he had taken of the environs of the cave and the descent into the one he had chosen. Finally, Vidrum capped his tale by dramatically revealing the picture of the human skeleton he had encountered. Even as his friends were taking in the image, he slowly remarked: “You see it? That was the person whose bhūta I thought of to be summoned here.” His friends stared at it wide-eyed and then magnified the picture to take a closer look. Vrishchika almost breathlessly yelled: “See the supraorbital torus – that seems like a pretty archaic Homo. So he was a prehistoric fellow after all…” Lootika taking a hard look at the image remarked: “But then look at the mandible it has a prominent mental projection unlike any archaic Homo. Moreover the surface finish of the bone looks sub-fossil rather than genuinely fossilized suggesting a more recent age for this skeleton.”
Somakhya: “That seems right. This fellow is likely to have been from very old times but he is not a fossil man. He is probably anatomically modern Homo sapiens with some definitive archaic admixture as they have observed in Africa and supposedly seen to a degree in early Australian cranial specimens. Remember one of the few archaic crania we have from Bhārata shows that supraorbital torus, which might have persisted upon admixture with anatomical modern H.sapiens streaming in from Africa.”

Vidrum then wondered what the cause of his death might have been. Somakhya looked closely at the skeleton and then at some of the other pictures and turned to Lootika and asked: “Imagine you were a detective; what would you think to be the cause of death?” Lootika and Vrishchika looked at the skeleton again and again kept raking their heads. Finally, Lootika remarked: “His death seems to have occurred in situ and his corpse was not transported by the action of water or by a cat, a bear or hyaenas.”
Somakhya: “That’s right. But look more closely; what is so peculiar about the posture of death?”
Lootika: “He seems to have died with his neck arched backwards and that posture has been captured by the support of the stalagmite against which he was leaning. Could that be some kind of neurological effect? The rest of his anatomy suggests a fairly robust adult man. Why would he suddenly die like this?”
Vrishchika pointing to a few peculiar protuberances on the hand and shoulder bones said: “Do you think that those strange outgrowths on the bone are exostoses? I remember our father describing something like that to us sometime back.”
Somakhya: “Excellent, I think both of you have made great observations, now look at Vidrum’s other pictures and see if you could arrive at the cause?”

Lootika stared at them for sometime and remarked that she was still not able to decipher the cause. Somakhya with a grin pointed in the pictures to a plant, which was abundantly growing in the environs of the caves.
Lootika: “Its violet bilaterally symmetric flowers suggest a legume – seems like a little chickpea to me.”
Somakhya: “So what would that mean?”
Lootika felt a sudden connection fire in her brain: “Why? That must be the viṣacaṇaka. I recall reading in the Bhīmasena-vinoda: māhaviṣaḥ pittaghno vātavardhako gaṇḍū-vikṛtin peśy ākṣepakaḥ | So he somehow ended up consuming a lot of those viṣacaṇaka-s and dying from the effects of its toxin.”
Vrishchika: “That sounds rather remarkable: what is the toxin in that innocuous-looking chickpea?”
Somakhya: “The exostoses and the cervical curvature and the indicate that one of the toxins of this legume is 3-Aminopropanenitrile. I am also aware that it contains γ-glutamyl-β-cyanoalanine, which contributes to part of the toxicity. I believe there are one or more toxic amino acids/dipeptides in those beans, which together have contributed to the end of śrī Kuryūma. Perhaps he was cut off from his tribe for some reason and found shelter in that cave but failed to realized that the chickpea-lookalikes he was eating would do him in!”

Vidrum: “That’s really amazing. I must tell you a story that might corroborate your hypothesis! The reason I left that cave was not the fear of the skeleton but the vague dread that came to me from the recollection of that story.”
Somakhya: “Pray tell us more; we are all ears”
Vidrum: “This is a family story I heard from my maternal grandfather. Long, long ago, when the English tyrants lorded over our lands they caused and aggravated famines throughout the countryside. My lineal ancestor and his brother lived in the same village near the caves, which was at that time afflicted by famine. The English claimed to give relief by giving the flour made from a certain bean. But then many people died from subsisting off that flour. There was a special way of cooking it by thoroughly mixing it with the powder of a sarasaparilla’s tuber. By that means my folks apparently survived, and I can vouch that it is even quite delectable to the tongue. However, this secret was only known to my ancestress, who had became pregnant with my next-in-line ancestor. Hence, her husband went to deposit her at her parental home for the pregnancy. Thereafter, he was away, may be for a few months, doing a round of various holy kṣetra-s. At that time his brother’s wife used the flour without the stated treatment with the sarasaparilla. When my ancestor returned to his home he found, to his horror, that the rest of his family were afflicted by a strange disease – some were paralyzed and some of had their necks arched backwards and most of them are said to have eventually died. He is said to have dreamed that the great ghost Daṇḍalūma was seizing them. In fear he fled the village to live with a cousin when my ancestress told him that rather than Daṇḍalūma they had probably not dealt with the bean appropriately. Armed with this knowledge they survived but I believe the fear of the genius of that locus still persisted and that is what I experienced in the cave.”

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Some legume toxins studied by Somakhya and the bhaginyaḥ

Years later, there was a family reunion at the house of Vrishchika and Indrasena. Having set the kids up to play with their youngest aunt Jhilleeka, the rest engaged in what for them was a most absorbing discussion: the biology, chemistry and pharmacology of some non-ribosomally synthesized peptides. Varoli describing a side-study of hers remarked that she had looked into an interesting dipeptide biosynthesis pathway, which used a papain-like peptidase to catalyze the formation of dipeptides using the glutamate of glutathione and certain unusual non-proteinic amino acids via a transpeptidase reaction. As she was describing the amino acids in her γ-glutamyl-dipeptides she remarked that she found the secondary amino acid, azetidine 2-carboxylic acid to be particularly interesting in terms of its biosynthesis. Varoli then turned to Lootika and said: “In addition to β-cyanoalanine, it is pretty abundant in the viṣacaṇaka bean that you had asked me to look at. I even sent some to Vrishchika to have its toxicity tested”. Vrishchika: “Yes, I forgot to tell you that my toxicologist did do some tests on it and found it to have devastating effects on connective tissue by disrupting collagen production.”
Somakhya high-fiving with Lootika remarked: “That is likely to be the other toxin I was suspecting in those beans. It must be taking the place of proline being sort of a square version of it. That probably explains its effect on collagen and certainly contributed to the end of the archaic-looking fellow in the cave and the havoc in our old friend Vidrum’s village.”

On pauṣa kṛṣṇapakṣa 11, kali 5115 (16th Jan 2015) around 8.10 PM, braving the cold of the height of winter (felt like -5°C) we caught sight of śvetaketu in the constellation of Taurus near the 6 mothers of our patron deity. It was a dhūmagola around the magnitude of 4.3 and clearly visible through our binoculars (20X70) and was about barely visible to naked eye close to the limiting magnitude from our bad observing site. It had a faint tail that was hardly discernible from our site via our instrument. Nevertheless we would place it as one of the brighter and memorable comets of our life. It could be located fairly easily by using the Kṛttikāḥ as the signpost. Thus, it was like a Skanda-graha coursing through the welkin. Indeed, the ancient jaina-s imagined Skanda as a comet emerging from the Kṛttikāḥ and coursing to Bhāratavarṣa to take the embryo of the future tīrthaṃkara the nagna to place him in a kṣatriya womb after removing all the brāhmaṇa molecules from his body and replacing them with clean ones [Indeed the brāhmaṇa hatred of the nagna-s began early!].

Orbit of Comet Lovejoy, C/2014 Q2

Update: On pauṣa kṛṣṇapakṣa 13, kali 5115 (18th Jan 2015) a new observation was made. The comet had cleared moved from Taurus into Aries. Much of the day there was heavy cloud cover and rain which suddenly cleared in the evening leaving behind excellent skies. The comet was more easily seen with naked eye on this day. It appeared to be at the same brightness with a faint hint of a tail in the direction of the Pleiades.

Below is a more zoomed out view of its orbit which gives a feel for the enormity of the distance of the Oort’s cloud, where comets originate, from the planets and the Kuiper belt objects like Pluto, Eris and Makemake with their highly inclined orbits.

After 1370 CE the power of the Qubilaid Mongols declined precipitously leaving Mongolia in chaos, with several contenders jostling for supremacy but none gaining any ground. As they were fighting each other, the Kirghiz lord Ugechi routed the Qubilaid Khan Elbek and killed him in a battle in 1399 CE. He then declared himself the overlord of the Mongols. The resurgent nationalist Han under the aggressive Ming ruler Yung Lo harbored a deep resentment against the Qubilaids for their conquest of the Hans. Seeing an opportunity to end the Qubilaids once and for all he sent an emissary to immediately recognize Ugechi as the supreme ruler. However, around the same time, (i.e. towards the end of the 1300s) a new Mongol confederation of tribes, the Oirat arose in Western Mongolia under their leader Mahamu. He formed an alliance with the chief of the Mongolized Arans (Alan; Airya>Ara), who were late-surviving steppe Iranians who had been close to the Qubilaids. Initially, they acted as though restoring Qubilaid power by overthrowing Ugechi and killing him. However, Mahamu subsequently grew in ambition. Hence, he sent an emissary of peace to the Ming to secure his southern underbelly. The Ming who were keen to get eliminate the Chingizids once and for all, agreed for peace with Mahamu and urged him to destroy his erstwhile overlords. Mahamu quickly exploited to this lull to conquer most of the territory from the western shores of the Baikal to the Irtysh river. Indeed, the Chingizids of the Qubilaid line might have waned into anonymity had they found a new leader in the form of the direct descendent of Qubilai Khan, Puṇyaśrī Oljei Temür. On one hand Puṇyaśrī was a learned Sanskritist, with literary interests going beyond the vajrayāṇa tantra-s and encompassing the works of Daṇḍin and Bhojadeva Paramāra. On the other he was a vigorous warrior who started rebuilding the Mongol army and drew back the Arans to his side. He repulsed the Ming thrusts into Mongolia and struck out at the Chinese forces in several encounters to the south. However, in 1411 CE, the Ming ruler Yung Lo personally lead a gigantic Chinese army northwards with the express objective of exterminating the Chingizid Mongols. As Puṇyaśrī was being pinned down the by this Chinese assault, his coethnic Mahamu launched a surprise attack on him seized the kingship of Mongolia. Yung Lo alarmed at Mahamu’s rise turned his massive Chinese force across the Gobi against him. However, this was a bad move on his part for it allowed Mahamu to cut off his supplies and ambush his forces inflict heavy losses on the Chinese.

Taking advantage of this situation, Puṇyaśrī restored himself as the lord of Mongolia and resumed the war with the Chinese to take Gansu and Ningxia from them. Yung Lo finally retaliated in 1423 CE by launching a counter-attack on Mongolia. Puṇyaśrī used a similar strategy as Mahamu to draw him across the Gobi and ambush him, forcing the Chinese to retreat without any gains. However, his triumph was short lived for in 1424 CE the Arans and Puṇyaśrī had a falling out and the latter was killed in the conflict. Then Mahamu’s son Toghon Temür, who had succeeded his father, fell upon the Arans and routed them. They fled eastwards to Manchuria where they joined the horde of Adai the descendant of Qasar, the brother of Chingiz Khan, who made an attempt to establish himself as the lord of the Mongols. Adai defeated both the Chinese army sent against him and Toghon Temür to briefly establish himself as lord of Mongolia in 1425 CE, for the first time under a Qasarid emperor. But Toghon Temür patiently rebuilt his army and in 1428 CE and consolidated his power to the west by attacking Vais Khan, the Chagadaid ruler who wanted to wage a Jihad on the heathen Mongols. He routed Vais Khan in multiple battles and seized the Turfan basin from him. Having thus created strategic depth for himself in 1436CE he finally launched a major attack on Adai and slew him in a great battle for Mongolia.

Thus, Toghon Temür became the emperor of Mongolia by 1438CE and at his death passed his incipient empire on to his son Esen Taiji. On coming to power Esen started on an ambitious program of restoring unified heathen Mongol power. He began with a series of campaigns against the Mohammedan Chagadaids and brought them down in a battle fought on the shores of the Balkash. In the process he seized the Chagadaid princess Makhtum Khanim and made several renounce Mohammedanism. Esen Taiji then rapidly moved east to conquer the Hami oasis and in 1445 CE opened hostilities with the Ming and conquered Jehol from them. Esen then asked the Ming emperor to send his sister as his wife but was refused. He retaliated with a fierce attack on Tatung. The enraged young Ming emperor Zhu Qizhen (Zhengtong) marched against the Mongols with a large army directed by the castrato Wang Zhen. The Chinese decided to launch a counter-punch by invading Mongolia from the Southeast. Esen took a leaf of Chingiz Khan’s book and by means of swift secret marches intercepted the vast Chinese army unexpectedly as they were passing through the Chahar province. In an epic battle that took place at Tumu (near Suanhwa) in 1449 CE, Esen’s forces annihilated the Chinese army, killing over 100,000 of their men. Encircled by the Mongols, the Ming emperor Zhu Qizhen was taken captive. Three months later Esen Taiji marched against Beijing but lacking the genius of the great Chingiz Khan failed to take the city and running out of fodder for this horses returned to his territory with his royal prisoner. Unable to take the Ming capital he released his prisoner in 1450 CE and concluded a peace agreement with the Chinese. He then turned his attention west to conquer the ulus of the Chagadaid Toqtoa-buga and slew him.

Amasanji Taiji succeeded his father Esen in 1456 CE. His father, like other religiously liberal heathen Mongol rulers of the past, had allowed a few mullahs to settle in his territory. They were secretly instigated by the Mohammedan Chagadaid princesses whom they had captured to convert two royal Oirat Mongols to Mohammedanism as Ibrahim Ong and Ilyas Ong. These two established communication with the Chagadaid Khan Yunus and together started importing mullahs to conduct extensive missionary activity inside the Oirat Mongol empire. Together with the mullahs, Chagadaid backers and the new converts, Ibrahim and Ilyas initiated a Jihad against the heathen Mongols. Amasanji woke up to the threat as the rioters were approaching his camp. Realizing the great threat the Mongols faced he decisively retaliated by slaughtering the ghāzis in his kingdom. However, Ibrahim and Ilyas managed to escape to China with Ming assistance. Around 1460CE, Amasanji moved west to tackle the Mohammedan threat by invading the Chagadai ulus of Mogholistan and overthrowing Khan Yunus. He then moved against the Khan Abu’l Khair who sought to unify the Chagadais and the Jochids in an Islamic alliance against the heathen Mongols. Abu’l Khair drunk with his string of successes arrogantly asked them submit to the banner of Islam. In 1457CE Amasanji launched a surprise attack with 65,000 men against the Blue Horde. Abu’l Khair seeing them take the towns along the north bank of Syr Darya marched to meet them. In battle that ensued the Army of Islam led by Abu’l Khair was smashed to bits upon encirclement by Amasanji. Khan Abu’l Khair barely escaped with his life. This was the highpoint of the Oirat Mongol empire which remained a great power till 1490CE. But at that point a remarkable Chingizid princess, Mandughai, who was seen by some as a reincarnation of Chingiz Khan’s mother Hoelun, restored Chingizid power by overthrowing the Oirats in 1491CE. But in the west, in Kalmykia, the Oirat Mongols still held sway and relentlessly fought of the Army of Islam inspired by the example of their great leader Amasanji Taiji. Thus, in 1555CE they retaliated against the entry of Mohammedan marauders and missionaries into their territory by comprehensively crushing an triple Islamic alliance of Shaybanids, Kirghiz and Khazak hordes led by khans like Tawakkul and Nauruz Ahmed. Thus, to this date their territory remains the only island of the bauddha-dharma in Russia.

In addition to the survival of heathen traditions, the rise of Oirat power was also marked by the crystallization of a distinctive Mongol epic or tuuli known as Jangar. The epic has been preserved primarily as an oral tradition until it was printed in the last 30 years in Mongolia, but it is very hard to access these texts. More recently, the Mongol scholar Chogjin and Mark Bender have provided fragments of this epic in translation. Since it was a taboo to know the whole epic by heart most reciters know only a few cantos though some know very many. The full complexity of this epic is hardly known outside of greater Mongolia and there might be less than 100 people in these lands alive today who might know the recitation of even parts. The epic is usually recited to the accompaniment of the morin huur, tob-shur and pipa (stringed instruments). The general belief is that Jangar is mythological. A similar claim has been made for the other Tibeto-Mongol epic, the gigantic Geser Khan. However, some western scholars have held that the etymology of Geser being derived from Caesar was a mythologization of either Julius Caesar or Octavian Augutus. However, more likely, is the case that there was a historical element inspired by the Khan Su-lu of the Tuergish Turks with additional elements perhaps drawn from the later Uighur Khans. Likewise the demons or ogres of the Geser Khan epic might have some inspiration from the Arabs, like the Meccan demons in Indian tradition. In the same vein, it is possible that the crystallization of the Jangar epic might have been influenced by the heroic deeds of Esen Taiji and Amasanji Taiji. In this regard it might be noted that the Kirghiz epic Manas was also probably developed upon a historical foundation of the heathen Kirghiz Khan who conquered the Uighurs to take over the empire of Mongolia. In more general terms the study of these Central Asian epics might lend us some understanding of how much historicity might exist in the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata.

Canto-1
In that ancient golden age,
The time of carrying forth the power of Buddha
Was born the orphan Jangar,
At the place called Bomba.

Jangar, a descendant of Tahijolai Khan,
The grandson of Tangsug Bomba Khan,
And son of Ujung Aldar Kan.

When Jangar was just two years old,
An ogre invaded his motherland,
And Jangar was orphaned,
Experiencing the bitterness of life.

When Jangar was just three years old,
The horse Aranjal was only four years old,
The little warrior perched atop the wonder steed
Broke apart three great battle formations,
Conquering the most evil ogre, Goljin.

When Jangar was just four,
He broke apart four great battle formations,
causing that yellow monster, Duleidung,
To give up evil ways for good.

When Jangar was just five years old,
he capture the five monster of the Tahai region,
Ensuring that they would never again do evil.

And when he was just five years old,
He was captured by the wrestler Mongon Sigsirge,
The orphan becoming a captive of the strongman.

When Jangar was just six years old,
He destroyed six great battle formations,
Breaking to bits countless swords and spears,
Facing down the eminent Altan Qegeji..

Altan Qegeji’s palace
Was pretty as a picture;
Under Jangar’s command,
He took a seat at Jangar’s right hand.

When the orphan Jangar was just seven,
He conquered seven countries in the east;
The hero’s name spread in the four directions,
Known to everyone under the heavens.

When Jangar’s steed Aranjal,
Speedily galloped along,
When Jangar’s long golden lance,
Was sharp beyond compare,
Jangar displayed his heroism.

In the springtime of his youth,
He refused the daughters of the 49 surrounding khans in the region;
From the southeast,
He chose the daughter of Nomintegus Khan as wife.

The horses raised by Jangar
Were fast beyond compare;
Jangar’s conscripts
Were all warriors beyond compare;
The lands of the 42 surrounding khans,
were each enfeoffed to the glorious Jangar.

Jangar’s place, Bomba,
was a paradise on earth;
The people there were always young;
Always looking as if they were youths of 25,
They never looked old and never died.

In Jangar’s happy land,
it is always springtime.
There are now parching droughts,
There are no bone-chilling cold spells;
Fresh breezes softly sing,
Precious mist descends on the hills;
Flowers blossom everywhere,
And the grasses flourish.

Jangar’s happy land
Is vast beyond compare;
Fast steeds can run for five months,
Yet still not reach the borders;
Here the five million blessed subjects
Can live rich and fulfilling lives.

Elegant peaks, white-capped and loft, touch the skies,
Shimmering under the golden sun.
From the great, green lake Sirato Dalai,
Rivers issue both north and south,
Rippling day and night like laughter,
Enlivening the rich verdure.

Jangar drinks the waters of the Huiten River,
So clear and sweet, bubbling on its way,
Never stopping, no matter the season.

The master of Bomba,
Once the orphan Jangar,
Has supreme power,
Bringing fortune to his people;
The hero’s deeds shine among the people,
The hero’s beautiful name is known everywhere.

Continued…

We have spent most of our adult life in a world connected by the internet. It offers a few opportunities, which were largely absent in the world before it, though it must be emphasized that these come with major downsides: 1) It allows relatively impersonal interaction with people, which removes the complicating issues of real-life interpersonal dynamics. 2) It allows connecting and observing a wider range of personalities than in real life. On the downside it also results in encounters with a greater range of evil-doers and criminals than one would like to encounter. In this regard the development of social media has, in particular, facilitated observation of a larger sampling of humanity than would be possible in real life except for the most socially involved. The down-side is there might be bias because not all types (perhaps very wisely) bloviate on the internet. Indeed some of our good real life friends, unlike our own foolish selves, keep a low profile on the internet. 3) It allows a wider dissemination of discoveries and ideas, which was otherwise not be possible at all.

An offshoot of our many years on the internet has been the data it is has provided to understand the macrocosm of the modern Indian state via the microcosm of Indians (in particular Hindus) on social media. We list a few observations below that have come our way because they have graphically illustrated to us that the Hindus are rather prone to repeating the same errors they have committed in the past millennium since the “wondrous deeds of Mahmud of Ghazna caused the Hindus to scatter like atoms”. Indeed, even as we write these words we are close to the 1000th anniversary of the one bright spot in that litany of defeat to the marūnmāda, i.e. the repulsing of Mahmud Ghaznavi in Kashmir by the Lohara-s lead by Saṃgrāmarāja. It is indeed sad that the BJP government, the so called Hindu party of India, is doing nothing to commemorate the 1000th anniversary period of the events (of course as a negative but educational example and also as a celebration of the heroism of the last Hindu kings of the Punjab) that were to signal the near extinction of the Hindus.

• Hindus can be easily subverted by their Abrahamistic enemies: We have seen this happen on message board-type social media. A friend alerted us to such goings-on on Bhārata-rakṣaka, an internet message board that supposedly caters to the community interested in discussing Indian defense issues. We joined it to check out what our friend had alluded to, and were able to confirm for ourselves that it was indeed the case. A minority of Christian and Mohammedan elements on the message board were able suppress the expression of the factual history of Hindus and prevent them from actually discussing scenarios conducive to the defense of the Hindu nation. The large majority of Hindus in this stood like sheep before these wolfish Abrahamists, while yet other Hindus actively fostered policies to further the cause of the Abrahamists and cause harm to the Hindus. The latter claimed to be acting to uphold what in Indian circles goes by the peculiar name of “secularism”, without realizing that it is only a mechanism of subterfuge of the Abrahamists.

• Hindus long for that imaginary Mohammedan or Christian friend: This is a corollary to the above observation and was rampant on Bhārata-rakṣaka, where many Hindus were falling head-over-heels to curry favors with a Mohammedan or Christian while abusing and endangering their own kind. Little did they realize that those Abrahamists ultimately were undermining the Hindu cause by effectively using these friendship-seeking Hindus to bury the dagger into their coreligionists. This is also widely observed on Twitter. Here, there are some Mohammedans who pose as “atheists” and have acquired such a Hindu fan-club that the latter vie with each other to please those despicable louts. But as we have said before regarding the mleccha atheists (i.e. adherents of the cult of New Atheism), these Mohammedans are no friends of the Hindus. Indeed, marūnmāda itself can be seen as precursor of their atheism, for it mirrors their visceral hate for complex rituals, idols and other imagery, and asserts a truth-claim stemming from the Mosaic distinction that all else is false but for their cult. These Mohammedan atheists have merely transferred their allegiance from the ekarākṣasa to what they believe to be “scientific temper”. Thus, their hatred is quickly unmasked the moment they encounter a Hindu, who is firmly grounded in his tradition, has knowledge of the human ape, and is unaffected by the facade of needing to be modern.

• Hindus as idiots: Sadly, the internet furnishes rather many examples of what several white indologists have often often privately held regarding the Hindus, i.e. they are idiots or a cul de sac incapable of much original thinking. Such are abundantly seen on Twitter and formerly in a mailing list known as the Indian Civilization Mailing List (ICML). On Twitter they assume many forms, including sometimes as professional trolls. One sure shot way of getting them to pop up is to post something on the entry of Arya-s into the Indian subcontinent (aka the Aryan Invasion Theory). The detritus from the abysmal depths, which modern Hindu logic can scrape up, leaves you wondering where all the discernment and common sense of the teachings of Viṣṇugupta and Viṣṇuśarman have gone. There are even types who might boldly inform you that linguistics is not a science and yet others that genetics is not a science. This was indeed rather prevalent on the ICML, which ultimately resulted in Hindus being unable to establish a forum for scholarly discussion of their own past. The main reason was the boorish idiots plastering the place with profuse effusions from their ball-point ball-bearing-sized encephalizations, thereby exterminating any meaningful intellectual conversation. Again, the Hindus with rare exceptions watched like dummies even as the forum filled up like an anaerobic septic tank.

• Hindus open to subversion: If what was seen on the so-called Bhārata-rakṣaka forum was subversion by a minority faction Abrahamists aided by their fawning, “I-am-so-secular” Hindu friends, we can have the Hindus themselves volunteering to do it.

An example of such became apparent in the form a magazine named Swarajya, which was recently resurrected. It claims to position itself as: “A big tent for liberal right of centre discourse that reaches out, engages and caters to the new India”. Thus, it is a venue for something called the “liberal right” voice, which had apparently been previously suppressed in India. Right here we may note a potentially problematic issue: both the terms “liberal” and “right” are apposite for mleccha polities with their Abrahamistic under-girding. They make little sense in India, which at its heart is essentially an expression of the Hindu civilization [The Islamic and Christian components thereof are predatory overlays imposed on the Hindus along with some subverted hybrids like modern uṣṇīṣamoha. Its pre-Aryan tribal component is typologically related to the Indo-Aryan Hindu system in being sister heathen cultures]. In the Abrahamistic world “liberal right” is indeed an oxymoron. But it exists in the Indian parlance, just like secularism, because the Hindus have mapped semantics of these loaded mleccha terms unthinkingly to describe their own preferred position.

Perusing the free content of the magazine, to which even some of our discerning and firmly Hindu acquaintances contribute, we observe that a strand of it indeed gives expression to contemporary Hindu thought. There are, however, authors writing there who are really not allied to the Hindus and could be even inimical to the true rise of the Hindus, in the form of the free-market votaries, who keep insisting that Ha Joon Chang’s proverbial ladder has not been kicked away. Then there are those whom we would classify as the “neutrals”, i.e. those who want to appear genuinely at some political mid-point or “viśuvān”. But the positions they take are ultimately harmful to the Hindus [Footnote 1]. Finally, there are people in positions of power in that magazine who write stuff, which clearly suggests that they are damaging to Hindu interests and could serve as conduits for subversion. Indeed, what can you expect of a man who terms Ramachandra Guha (a well-known enemy of the Hindu cause) his friend. It is such types which can allow the entry into the arena of mleccha plants, even as the Fellowship of the Broom and before that the Italian barmaid was foisted upon the Hindus who indeed have acted like idiots in allowing them to triumph.

In the Veda the ṛṣi Vāmadeva Gautama said:
uta tyā sadya āryā sarayor indra pārataḥ | arṇā-citrarathāvadhīḥ ||
Though arṇa and citraratha were ārya-s, Indra mercilessly slew them beyond the Sarayu river just as he had slain the dasyu-s. Thus, we have people in our own pakṣa who need to be dealt with like those rogue ārya-s.

To end this note we shall provide a nugget from a member of the “liberal right” community which illustrates why New India should not substitute translations for actual readings from the foundational text of our civilization. In an article therein we are (mis)informed:
“In Vedic times, the usage of leech was so widespread that it has become the symbolic representation of medical profession itself. A famous verse in Rg speaks of a bard’s father as a “leech”, meaning he was a physician. At one place where Rudra, instead of the usual twin gods Ashwins, is projected as the god of healing, he is said to have leech in his hands.”

First, it is clear that the author has never studied the RV seriously. The sūkta he is talking about is RV9.112. A translation by the Englishman Griffith renders the word bhiṣak in the sūkta as leech, which was an old word for the physician. Now bhiṣak means physician coming from proto-IndoIranian and not the annelid leech. So in attempting to find leech therapy in this Ṛgvedic verse the author has fallen for a simple misunderstanding of an old translation. Second, Rudra is not presented as the healer *in place of the* usual Aśvinau. He is always the god of healing and a prominent one at that. Moreover, his jalāṣa-bheṣaja is not jalauka, the leech.

This exercise was not to nitpick. Rather it was to show how claiming modernity cannot be a substitute for actual textual study, which was the domain of the brāhmaṇa, who is hated by the author of the above-referred article, as was made clear by him in the declining days of the ICML.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Footnote 1: Appended below is a response we wrote to one of these “neutral” authors on the Swarajya magazine. Our original comment on Twitter was:

“According to writer it would seem a good thing that “RW” outgrows Hindutva: http://swarajyamag.com/editors-pick/rajaji-beyond-market-and-state/
Another case of disarming immunity of H”

The article features the following elements:

“Add to this the fact that the elections have been won on the basis of Hindutva-centric historic claims, anxieties and paranoias—and the Right has had its ideological platforms cut out.”

“To this end, the Right has begun to restate its philosophic orientation in a new language that goes beyond the Hindutva rhetoric. Some might dismiss this as dressed-up Hindu chauvinism, but to do so would be to acutely misread the moment.”

“But lest he be reduced to an unimaginative Hindutva-type, Modi’s speech ended, to the surprise of many watchers, by asking if there was a Hindu garibi or a Muslim garibi.”

“When Modi or Raje begin to put the Hindutva message of the RSS/VHP kind of social conservatism on the back-burner, and make a case for a political vision different from that of Nehruvian legatees, they are articulating a political discourse that seeks to see past the concerns of history that had been important to the growth of the BJP.”

“To dismiss the Indian Right as merely some version of Hindutva and thus merely as regurgitators of historical concerns is to miss the larger transformation in play.”

On the basis of the above quotes and the overall tenor of the article, I conclude that the writer essentially sees Hindutva as a piece of rhetorical baggage that is best shed by the Hindus. This is the line of reasoning I am fundamentally opposed to, and also see as being potentially dangerous for the well-being of the Hindu people in the long run. In contrast to the writer, I do not see Hindutva as being a rhetorical device of the BJP or the Sangh Parivar; rather, I see it as an upwelling of the inner civilizational spirit of the Hindus, however imperfect its current expressions might be. Importantly, Hindutva, or the open and unapologetic expression Hindu-ness, along with the necessary aggression to counter the foes of Hindu civilization, is not just the defining feature of the Hindu nation, but also the foundation of its immunity against attacks. As my vision of the Indian Nation is a Hindu State as opposed to a secular one (i.e., the latter is one that does not openly describe itself as Hindu and does not act first and foremost in Hindu self-interest), I see Hindutva as its very fundament. Hence, I see any attempt to redefine the vision of the government/state away from Hindutva as potentially deleterious to the Indian Nation. To lend a comparison, I see such a redefinition as backed by this article as being similar to the redefinition of Sanātana-dharma by the tathāgata that led to the subversion of the Sanātana-dharma upheld by the āstika-s: the results were not pretty for the Sanātana-dharma.

Moreover, the overall tenor of the article internalizes Western categories founded on Abrahamism. Thus, it creates a projection of Hindu thought on a single axis:
conservative<—>liberal.
Such a projection fails to capture the components of sizable magnitude along other dimensions, which are necessary to properly describe Hindu socio-religio-political thought. Thus, this uni-axial reduction is not a useful descriptive model for Hindus to adopt.

This is an updated version of our earlier study: published first at IndiaFacts
Research by Orlove, Cane and Chiang on the native weather forecasters in mountains of Peru and Bolivia has brought to light an interesting tidbit of traditional knowledge [Footnote 1]. The traditional crop of these regions is the potato, from where it has spread the world over to become a major source of nutrition, a delight to the tongue, and, more perversely, a cause of obesity and related troubles among the well-fed. However, to farmers in this region a successful potato crop is crucial for their sustenance. Hence, these farmers forecast the auspicious time for planting potatoes by means of a unusual meteorological/astronomical observation. For a week around the summer solstice they start intently observing the skies. At midnight they climb up to the peaks and start observing the Pleiades (M45 open cluster; Sanskrit: Kṛttikāḥ) a few hours before dawn, noting the apparent brightness and “sizes” of the stars in the cluster. Dimmer the Pleiades the less will be the rain in the area during winter. Hence, if the forecast is dry then the farmers delay planting their potatoes to reduce losses. The fluctuation in local rainfall is attributable to El Niño Southern Oscillation, a meteorological phenomenon associated with a cyclical pattern of warm and cold temperatures in the tropical Pacific. What the researchers found was that if an El Niño phase with low rainfall was to happen later in winter then it was accompanied by high cirrus clouds in the earlier summer. This in turn caused a dimming of the Pleiades when observed around the summer solstice. This use of the Pleiades as meteorological predictor is an interesting twist to its more general use, in many ancient traditions, as a calendrical marker to determine various seasonal phenomena and agricultural activities.

This research leads us to a new insight regarding the basis for an ancient tradition recorded in the Veda of the Atharvāṅgirasa-s in a ritual incantation known as the śakadhūma sūktaṃ, which to date has been poorly understood. In the vulgate Atharvaveda (AV) text (considered to be the Śaunaka śākhā ) the sūktaṃ occurs as 6.128, while in AV Paippalāda śākhā (AV-P) the relevant mantra-s are AV-P 19.24.16-19. The Paippalāda version is also appended at the end of the Nakṣatra-kalpa (AV-pariśiṣṭa-1) under the title: “kṛttikā-rohiṇī-madhye paippalādā mantrāḥ”. In both texts there are 4 ṛk-s, though they differ somewhat between them. The Kṛttikā-s (Pleiades) have been known in Vedic tradition to possess watery names, which are individually spelled out in the Yajurveda for oblations made during the ritual known as the Nakṣatreṣṭi: Ambā (watery), Dulā (shimmering), Nitatnī (showering), Abhrayantī (clouding), Meghayantī (clouding) [Stanayantī, i.e. thundering in the Maitrāyaṇīya saṃhitā], Varṣayantī (raining) and Cupuṇīkā (bubbling). It has long been suspected that these names are indicative of their connection with the arrival of monsoons. But were the Pleiades specifically used in weather prognostication in Hindu tradition? Here is where the evidence from the śakadhūma sūktaṃ comes in. The word śakadhūma is interpreted as smoke (dhūma) from a dung-pat (śaka) fire. But paradoxically we find the AV tradition remembering shakadhUma as a weather-predictor. Indeed, this is how the late medieval Atharvavedins seem to have understood the word in ritual context as indicated in their paddhati-s. The word has also been rendered as a human weatherman by modern white translators such as Whitney and Bloomfield.

However, an examination of the word shows that the AV tradition originally hardly implied an earthly weatherman in the term śakadhūma. The sūktaṃ it self opens by explicitly mentioning śakadhūma as being made the king of the nakṣatra-s (AV-vulgate: “śakadhūmaṃ nakṣatrāṇi yad rājānam akurvata |” AV-P: “yad rājānaṃ śakadhūmaṃ nakṣatrāṇy akṛṇvata |”). The purpose of him being chosen as the king was to ensure prognostication of fair weather (“bhadrāham asmai prāyachan”). The presence of the Paippalāda form of the text in the Nakṣatra-kalpa, a text with a slant towards prognostication, also reiterates the close connection of the weather-predictor śakadhūma with the nakṣatras. Realizing that a celestial entity is implied, some people have interpreted śakadhūma to mean the moon (as rājā of the nakṣatra-s) or the Milky Way (due to the “smoky” allegory). However, in no Hindu text known to date the term śakadhūma has been used to describe the moon, nor is the Milky Way ever described as the leader of nakṣatra-s. The original meaning of śakadhūma becomes clear from the ṛk found only in the AV-P version:
“yad āhuś śakadhūmaṃ mahānakṣatrāṇāṃ prathamajaṃ jyotir agre |
tan nas satīṃ madhumatīṃ kṛṇotu rayiṃ ca sarvavīraṃ ni yacchatām ||”
Here śakadhūma is plainly termed the first born of the great nakṣatra-s and as being at forefront of the celestial lights. This shows that śakadhūma was a constellation and the first in the list. In the AV nakṣatra sūktaṃ (AV-vulgate 19.7.2) the first in the list is Kṛttikā. The AV Nakṣatra-kalpa also explicitly states that Kṛttikā is the first of the nakṣatra-s with whom Agni blazes forth: “sa nakṣatrāṇāṃ prathamena pāvakaḥ kṛttikābhir jvalano no ‘nuśāmyatām |”.
So it is likely that the nakṣatra implied by śakadhūma was none other than Kṛttikā. This is further confirmed by Charpentier’s finding that in the medieval deśa-bhāṣā lexicon of the Jaina polymath Hemacandra-sūrī (the Deśī-nāma-mālā) he gives dhūma as a synonym for Kṛttikā: dhūmad-dhaya-mahisīo kṛttikāḥ | DN-5.63

This leads to one other reference to śakadhūma which is found in the great brahmodaya sūktaṃ in the Ṛgveda (RV 1.164):
“śaka-mayaṃ dhūmam ārād apaśyaṃ viṣūvatā para enāvareṇa |
ukṣāṇaṃ pṛśnim apacanta vīrās tāni dharmāṇi prathamāny āsan || (RV 1.164.43)”

Based on its deployment in the pravargya ritual some have commented that the śaka-dhūma here refers to the smoke from the fire on which the mahāvīra pot is being fumigated. This external interpretation is of course for the “un-enlightened”, for the rahasya-s are concealed beneath the ritual actions described in the mantra. That is exactly what this whole sūktaṃ is about – rahasya-s, including several astronomical ones. This becomes very clear from use of a technical astronomical term – viṣūvat. In Hindu tradition viṣūvat meant equinox [Footnote 2] and in this context clearly means the vernal equinox which formed one of the central days of the yearly sattra. Thus, the ṛk means:
“From far I saw the śaka-dhūma at the equinoctial point further off from this lower one.
The heroes cooked the speckled bullock; these were the first stations.”
Here, the constellation at the vernal equinox (viṣūvān) is being described as śakadhūma. The lower one, the speckled bullock, the first (previous) stations appear to stand for Taurus. Taurus being the prior station stands for the position where the equinox lay prior to śakadhūma, which is being described as currently being at the viśuvān [Footnote 3]. Here too śakadhūma implies the Pleiades. This would also suggest that the brahmodaya belongs to the same period as the core AV composition during which the Pleiades lay at the vernal equinox. Not surprisingly, a variant of RV 1.164 also occurs in the AV-vulgate as sūktaṃ 19.10

Finally it leads to the issue why the name śakadhūma for the Pleiades?
In the AV context the term śakadhūma is specifically applied in the context of predicting good weather. With high cirrus clouds it is quite likely that the Pleiades appeared as a smoky patch in the sky, which was then used for weather prognostication. Under this interpretation the AV śakadhūma tradition is likely to be the earliest surviving record of weather prognostication based on the appearance of the Pleiades. Now, given the South American tradition we suspect that indeed a smoky Pleiades was also, a prognosticator in India. Unfortunately, the original AV tradition is completely dead, hence only experimental verification can test the effectiveness of the method.

While the original AV tradition does not survive, we know from the much later meteorological traditions recorded in the Kṛṣi-parāśara (KP), a Hindu manual on farming, that knowledge derived from such observations did survive in some form. For example, the KP23 gives a rough formula to determine the nature of the El Niño effects. KP24-25 describes clouds associated with the cycle and mentions the puṣkara (cirrus) clouds that appear to prognosticate droughts. KP33 indicates that the predictions were refined using wind-vanes to measure wind direction/speed and predict rain several months later.

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Footnotes
Footnote 1: An account of Orlove, Cane and Chiang’ work:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/StarsCloudsCrops/

Footnote 2: In his Kārikā on Īśvara-pratyabhijñā the Kashmirian tāntrika, Utpala-deva, makes the following statement:
prāṇa-apāna-mayaḥ prāṇaḥ pratyekaṃ sūpta-jāgratoḥ |
tac-ched-ātmā samāna-akhyaḥ sauṣupta viṣuvatsv-iva ||
The metabolism in both the sleeping and waking states is comprised of prāṇa and apāna processes. Both are suspended in the deep sleep state when the samāna process functions, like what happens on the equinox.

Here the word viṣuvan (equinox) is used metaphorically to explain that state of equality or balance (samāna) when the prāṇa and apāna are suspended in the deep sleep state.

Footnote 3: The memory of older equinoctial positions in Taurus and beyond where first proposed by the great patriot Lokamanya Tilak in his work: “The Orion or the antiquity of the Vedas”.

Also see this

It was a late Friday afternoon and Vidrum had returned home early from the hospital. He spent some time in his garden making a ball from the paste of rain-tree pods, a messy but immensely meditative activity, which his friend Somakhya had introduced him to. Having completed the ball he glanced at its rotundity with an inner feeling of accomplishment and pride. Then placing it to dry in the path of the rays of the setting sun, he went back into his home to clean his hands. Thereafter he sat in his study, browsing the journals he checked every week. He downloaded a few articles for later reading and went on to check the scores of a one-day match that was going on. Ensnared by the interestingly poised game, he kept watching for some time, till he suddenly realized that the time of arrival of his visitors was drawing close. He got up hurriedly, tidied his study and hall, and checked with his caterer to ensure that dinner will arrive on time. Keeping an eye on the match, he basked in the pleasant warmth of the excitement and expectation he felt regarding these relatively rare social occasions that punctuated his otherwise monotonous existence. As he waited he wondered if he might ever experience the state his friend Somakhya had talked about: “True pleasurable experience does not always need an external, palpable object. It can arise from reflection, manipulation and realization of objects that purely lie in the mind or a computing device. After all even with Lootika of pretty smiles, the ullāsa of maithuna lasts for only a small fraction for our total existence. But our more continuous pleasures are not from externals but from the resonance we feel from the contemplation on inner objects.”

Soon he heard his bell ring and he went to the door to let in his visitors, Vrishchika and Indrasena. Even as they came in, Vidrum asked Vrishchika: “Where you able to figure out what was the deal with that patient #49?” Vrishchika: “Bad news, he died couple of hours ago. The autopsy has been arranged and we will know more soon but the preliminary indications are that it was Nocardia.” Vidrum: “What? Nocardia!” Vrishchika: “Indeed! We should have called that out earlier: It was a pretty gruesome end for the guy.” Indrasena was by now accustomed to his wife’s propensity for lapsing into talking morbidity whenever she was with her father or ran into others of her ilk. He had gone through it all in course of dinners at his in-laws place, where the forbidding descriptions of human taphonomy and pathologies ranging from those caused by Actinomadura to Malassezia had often ruined his bowl of hintāla pāsaya. He would say to himself that it was perhaps training to be a mahāvratin but today he did not hold back and said: “Hopefully you guys won’t continue this over dinner.” Vrishchika putting her hand around Indrasena’s shoulder: “No, then we will talk of something interesting to you, that gargantuan wonder of a protein from Nocardia!” Indrasena chuckled – “Ah that one” – and realizing that all this talk probably had a cathartic effect on his wife left her to it and silently picked up a magazine that lay on Vidrum’s coffee table.

The magazine went by the name “Svatantratā” and was produced by the federation of right-wing think-tanks. As he leafed through it an article by Dr. Ahmed al-Zaman and Prof. Adityo Sen caught his eye. It was titled: “triśūla-dīkṣa to nālīka-dīkṣa: down the slippery path”. Therein he read:
“We stand with the right-wing in their call for making economic progress and women’s rights a priority. They certainly need to sternly objurgate their obscurantist fellow travelers from the Deva-dharma-dala with regard to the push for making fire-arms more widely available. While their earlier triśūla-dīkṣa was a condemnable move, the chances of large-scale, serious injury to life and property from the short-handled tridents was limited. However, this new nālīka-dīkṣa movement has the potential to unleash immense danger to human life in India. We would soon see our homes, schools and work-places turn red with every petty squabble being settled via the business-end of a smoking barrel. Moreover, these obscurantist elements of the D-cubed would threaten the very lives of minorities in India if the nālīka-dīkṣa is not nipped in the bud…

Moreover, D-cubed spokesman Ravi Madhav Pandit’s call for Hindu-only housing and turning women into mindless baby-popping machines reeks of unspeakable retrogression. It not only threatens to shred the secular fabric of our nation but also endangers the lives of our women. Hence, going forward, we call upon our friends from the right-wing to come out explicitly in condemning the regressive attitudes and activities of the Hindutva Brigade. Let the peace-loving Hindus make it clear that they are Hindu and not Hindutvādin, thereby sending a strong message to both the D-cubed and the minorities that they reject the atmosphere of fear and violence.”

By the time Indrasena snapped out of the magazine Vrishchika and Vidrum had exhausted their share of morbidity for the day. The conversation moved to brighter matters and eventually segued into dinner.

◊◊◊◊

As they were chatting after dinner, Vidrum remarked: “I have been sitting in on the advanced course you two put together with the forensics experts. It is really great – Indrasena, your former student Devarshabha is doing a great job in explaining the genes to phenotypes stuff.”
Indrasena: “Glad to hear that. Which reminds me that I should try to finish up one of the papers on the work with him and Lootika.”
Vidrum: “I found an old skeleton in the storage of the trauma lab and brought it for the course. The guys have now completed a reconstruction of the deceased individual. It was just stupendous to see how from the skeleton we went all the way to piecing together the individual in life: his eye color, his hair-type, if his skin was prone to dryness or not and many other things – all of it came out so clearly.” Vidrum then sauntered to the drawer beneath his desk and brought a 3D printout of the individual’s skull and his reconstructed face. Vidrum: “They found a SNP in his Pax6 gene that was deemed informative.”
Indrasena: “Yes, this is a dominant one, likely he had one eye smaller than the other one.”
Vidrum: “Indeed, see that is how they have reconstructed it.”
Glancing at the report Indrasena further added: “Seems like he had potential to have had an IQ of around 140 and look at this. These alleles associated with his olfactory receptors suggest he would have been of a conservative type in his political leanings.”
Vrishchika: “Look at his skull – he seems to have suffered a massive trauma to his parietal lobe!”
Vidrum: “Yes, it appears his head was struck by a sword. We also noted the sectioning of one of his cervicals by the same instrument. Ain’t that sort of odd – this skeleton is of relatively recent provenance – how come we are seeing a fatal sword injury?”
Vrishchika: “Well, we would possibly never know for that skeleton was lying in the closet with not a smidgen of documentation to go with it. Did anyone check if there were any police records?”
Vidrum: “I do not know. But hey you guys are real vipra-s, somayājin-s or whatever you all are supposed to be. Are you all not the kind who are supposed to know all kinds of secret magic. May be you could find out? May be you all have some trick up your sleeve like that skull-tapping brāhmaṇa Vaṅgīśa one of you guys told me about.”
Indrasena: “All that is stuff from legend. Why not be happy with how much we have been able to glean using our knowledge of genetics.”
Vidrum persisted: “That is alright, we know how he lived but we would also want to know how he died. Indrasena I am sure you know more than what you show.”
Vrishchika: “Would you be willing to bear the force of śrī Kubera’s agent?”
Indrasena: “Let us not even go there.”
Vidrum: “I am ready for it. Vrishchika, do you think I have forgotten about your gang trying out your prayoga-s in the cemetery? Indrasena, I am pretty sure if Vrishchika has married you must be quite bit of wizard in these issues yourself.”
Indrasena: “Since you so blithely persist I think we must give you a taste of Vaiśravaṇa’s agents. Sit down, relax, and close you eyes.”

Indrasena thought of the words of Somakhya when he had revealed to him the Kauberī-pārṣadī-vidyā [Footnote 1] and deployed it. Vidrum instantaneously dropped as though dead on his carpet and lay sprawled like a copper-hoard anthropomorph. He started saying: “I am valśa. I am valśa”.

◊◊◊◊

The triangle of the Swan, the Eagle and the bright-eyed vulture had mounted the inky heavens. Seeing that it was late valsha decided to lay himself to rest on his litter. His body was racked with all manner of aches. The day that followed was not one to worry much about, so he unhurriedly lapsed into the hypnogogic state. Most unexpectedly a beautiful woman appeared before him. She was not anyone whom he had ever seen in wakeful life. Nor had anyone like her every manifested in a dream nor in hypnogogia before. She had long flowing black tresses in dense masses like the great bee-hive on the vast ashvattha tree near the pāṣaṇḍa-gṛha. Her eyes had a sparkle to them like heads of the asterism of the Twins. Her body was slim and shapely and wonderfully sculpted with breasts like the vessels that lustrate viṣṇupatnī. But she had upward pointed ears like that of a shepherd dog. valśa was even more surprised when he heard her speak – it was in the gīrvāṇa bhāṣā. valsha realized that in this tongue even the mundane sounded poetic. She introduced herself: “aham asmi pāṣupatānāṃ pātāla-rudrasya gahvare vāsā kukkuravati । asau gahvarasya samīpe eka uddhataḥ kedāro ‘sti । asmin kedāre viśālo vaṭa-vṛkṣo’sti । tasyādho’sti mama pīṭhikā ।” Hearing her he wondered if she was a yakṣiṇī or a piśācī or perhaps a shape-shifting rākṣasī. Neither her name nor her form was like any yakṣiṇī or apsaras he had encountered before. Finally she directed him: “śayāyā uttiṣṭha, etasmin caṣake saṃnihitaṃ rasaṃ piba, mama aṅgulyā mandaṃ cumba, mama upānahau gāḍhaṃ gṛhṇa! tvayā saha akāśe uḍḍayiṣyamy ahaṃ hā hā! paśya paśya! prakṛtes sarvānāṃ niyamānāṃ ati-laṅghanaṃ kariṣyāmi । mama patham na jñātuṃ śaknoṣi ।”

She flew carrying valsha at a dizzying pace. Finally they landed in a place that looked strangely familiar to valśa; yet he was unable to precisely identify it. It was a school building with an adjacent ground that looked like a rat-nibbled roṭikā. In the mid-1930s the Vatican had financed a bunch of German missionaries to go forth to the holy land of bhāratavarṣa and convert the heathens. Uwe Christian led the operation with his fellows brothers and fathers. He was also a double agent, working for Das dritte Reich. He tried hard to entice some brāhmaṇa-s to the fold of the preta, hoping that if he converted the brāhmaṇa-s then he would gain easy control over the “superstitious lay”. With this intention he started a school named after one of the many dead pretācarin-s, who had been proclaimed to be a saint by the Vatican rulers due to performance of an even lamer miracle than those that the unwashed Hindus were supposed to believe in. In this school he offered a proper western education that brāhmaṇa parents were supposed to seek like a good bride for their dear sons. In 1958 Christian was assassinated by an Israeli letter bomb. Shortly thereafter his school was bought by a Portuguese missionary group from Goa, who continued their operations in the service of the long decomposed corpse of Nazareth. But not long after that Goa was finally reconquered by the Hindus restoring the continuity of peninsular Bhāratavarṣa, whose coastline their old poet kālidāsa had likened to a drawn bowstring. With that the school and the associated church declined into disuse. A few years later in a great monsoon storm the spire of the church was knocked down reminding the Hindus of might of the devaheti that strikes from above. The people in that part of the city were growing prosperous again after the dismal years that followed independence and felt the need for more schools for their children. So they decided to use the old school’s infrastructure for a new one. Having renovated it, they reinitiated education in those premises in the form of a secular institution.

There, in the 9th class were studying students who went by the names saṃpadā durnāmikā, satyo daridrasaṃdhaḥ, harir babhruḥ and mahāmada aghomado marusaṃbhavaḥ. At that point kukkuravati briefly possessed their teacher. Their teacher then addressed the class indicating the topic for a small essay: “rāṣṭrīya dhvajasya pradhanaṃ arthavattvaṃ kiṃ?”
Then valśa and kukkuravati unseen by the rest went to look at what those four students wrote.

saṃpadā durnāmikā wrote: The national flag is symbol of India’s freedom. The length of the flag is 1.5 times that of its width. It is to be respected by all and never hoisted in peoples homes. No one should trod on it, burn it or defile it in any other way. It should be made by hand using cloth spun by the Gandhian wheel. If it is made using any other material then the person is liable to be interred in a jail for 3 years [Pointing to this sentence kukkuravati laughed and tapped valśa on his shoulder. valśa wondered if that was the real fate that awaited him for having flown a paper flag on some national day! saṃpadā saw no one but heard the laugh of a woman. She wondered “who that could be? May be it is my mind saying all this is so funny”]. A real Indian flag is only to be made in the state of Karṇāṭaka. People have to stand erect and sing the national anthem composed by śrī ravīndranātha when the flag is being hoisted.

satyo daridrasaṃdhaḥ wrote: The flag was made by some Telugu guy [He had forgotten the guy’s name. So he made it up: If there could be a Gandhi of the frontier in Afghanistan, why could we not have yet another Gandhi in Andhra. So let us call him the Andhra Gandhi]. At first B.G. Tilak had suggested a saffron flag with the picture of gaNesha. Aurobindo and Vankimchandra wanted the image to be that of a fierce Kālī with an upraised scimitar. Some other Hindu leaders wanted a cow on it. But the secularists wanted none of this. Eventually a flag was made to incorporate Gandhi’s wheel, a sign that the technology invented in the Indus valley civilization was still in unmodified use, the saffron color of the Hindus, the green color of the Mohammedans and the white for whatever other religions existed in the land.

mahāmada aghomado marusaṃbhavaḥ wrote: [Hearing the topic of the essay he had an angry flash back: A while back along with the rest of his male classmates he had enrolled in the National Cadet Corps, hoping to have some fun in the wild. On a certain national day he assembled with the rest of the cadets for a parade after which they were to have an excursion into the wild. Their leader regaled them with a tale from the past to boost their national sense. He spoke of the great invasion launched by the marūnmatta-s from the neighboring country into the fertile lands of the pañcanada. Facing fierce resistance from the Hindu forces they decided to deploy an elite force of airborne commandos behind the Hindu lines. In this great saṃgrāma even the NCCs had been meagerly armed and called up to do their duty for the defense of bhāratavarṣa. Their leader who was giving the speech was one of the cadets called for this action. He was armed with a mere WW2 era rifle and a knife but was brimming with courage to face the ākrānta-s. The famed marūnmatta paratroopers were finally dropped by their aircraft and they floated down from the realm of the great, pitiless vāyu who was praised in the days of yore by abhipratāriṇa kākṣasenī in the same lands. In their minds they were thinking that each one of them, supposedly tall, fair, ram-gulping central Asian warriors, were capable of slaughtering at least ten short, dark, taṇḍulāmbu sipping hīndūka-s in one go. But they were in for a rude surprise. Upon landing, the mere NCCs aided by local farmers armed with just daṇḍa-s and curikā-s made short work of the vaunted warriors of the old mahāmado marusaṃbhavaḥ and sent to them to meet their legendary 72 girls and 28 boys. Then the NCC leader said they were going to hoist the national flag and in a ritual imitating the ways of the English during their occupation of the country shouted: “Raising pole! By order of height! Eee-rect!” Then the tricolored dhvaja went up even as the cadets stood taut and serenaded it with the anthem composed by the vaṅga poet ravīndra. But the mahāmada was already blazing with anger of the tale of the rout of his coreligionists that the leader had narrated and instead muttered the cry asserting ekarākṣasatvaṃ and AoA. The bewitching kukkuravati made his mind readable as print on paper and saying “paśya valśa! vastuto rāṣṭrīya dhvajasyocchrayeṇa asya marūnmattasya dhvajabhaṅga āsīt |”, she gave a canine bark. mahāmada wondered; “what is that noise of a dirty cur; may all of them be killed. Truly, those infidels praising their flag sounded like one”. With that he came out of his reverie and realized he had to write something about the flag.]

The primary significance of the national flag is it being a visible symbol of the oppression of minorities. At one point our just rulers like Alla-ad-din and Awrangzeb had brought this whole land under our rule. Hence, it belongs to us rightfully. But these infidels overthrew our great Silsila-e-Khandan-Timuriya and now trod over us building gold-decked idol-houses, with all their inequality towards the poor, in places where the muezzin’s cry rang out asserting that all are equal before God. That flag has their orange right on top and our green right at the bottom. With them riding roughshod with the wheel on it symbolizing them crushing us beneath it into undignified poverty. Truly one day as prophesied by the brilliant Karl Marx the class struggle will take place and we the oppressed will overthrow these infidel oppressors.

harir babhruḥ wrote: The wheel was what made the Indo-Europeans. It was by the wheel the Arya-s attained sovereignty. Hence, they celebrated it in their ritual known as the vājapeya by which the king announced his sovereignty. It was the symbol of power that lasts through the cycles of time. Hence, it is held in the hand of the great god of time, the triple-striding viṣṇu; likewise it adorns the king whose might earns him a place in history – the cakravartin. It was indeed seen as the symbol of the great cakravartin-s of history who unified bhārata, like Candragupta Maurya or Candragupta Vikramāditya. Hence, it is indeed fitting that it sits in the middle of the flag, representing the ancient roots and latent power of the nation, which becomes manifest when unified and led by a cakravartin. The saffron band is the traditional color of the Hindu flag, which fluttered when clashing with the armies of Islam and Isa. The green represents the pasture on which the ratha-cakra first rolled forth and the cultivated field where the plow was first plied. Thus, it represents our deep roots in pastoralism and agriculture. Truly our flag is deep with meaning and connected to our ancient roots like none other.

kukkuravati howled like a bitch and said: “sa dṛḍho rāṣṭra-uttambhī kiṃ tu tasya pāṇau śuṣmi śastraṃ nāsti । etataḥ kāraṇāt sa vaṅga-deśīyānāṃ hindūkānāṃ samūha iva mṛtyum āpsyati | valśa wondered what that meant but he did not have to wait long to find out.

School was over; hari and satya walked towards their home via a forested patch that covered a basaltic elevation. In front of them at some distance walked aghomada. Unexpectedly, a pangolin scurried across their path as they were in the midst of the thick forest path. Seeing it aghomada excitedly ran after it to kill it with his upraised hockey-stick. However, before he could strike hari and satya raced up to him with their own hockey-sticks and prevented him from killing it. Then they caught him and dragged him to the forest officer’s quarters and delivered him to the rangers. The forest officer on noting his name feared that it might blow up into a communal issue and let him go with a lecture. The next day when hari and satya were walking back the same way, they were suddenly ambushed in the forest by aghomada and his friends who were armed with swords. Their hockey-sticks were not sufficient to hold out against this marūnmatta gang whose members belonged to an organization known as the Peoples-Progressive-Assembly. Before they could escape, the PPA men cornered hari and struck him two blows. One on his head and another slicing through his neck. Then satya fell to another blow and they left him there taking him to be dead. Luckily for him, he was soon sighted and rescued by a forest ranger. The aghomada and his friends quickly ran to the tank of the vināyaka temple that lay just beyond the forest patch, washed their swords, and made away. valśa was shaken by what he saw. kukkuravati said to him: “triśūla-saṃkhyā-mānuṣa-yugānantaraṃ kṛṣṇa-śilā-nāma-nagare so’ghomadas tava jīvane luṇṭhanāya veṣṭā । ”

With a violent jolt Vidrum snapped out of his possession yelling: “I am Vidrum not valśa”.

◊◊◊◊

Vidrum: “That aghomada looked familiar. Who was he?”
Indrasena: “Did you not read that Svatantrā magazine on your table?”
Vidrum: “Why? It just came in today and am yet to look at it in detail.”
Indrasena: “Certainly do so!”
Vrishchika: “Vidrum, thank you for the wonderful dinner and we are sorry you were hit by much more than you asked for. But this might help you bring some things to a closure.”
Indrasena: “Yes, it may be rough but don’t worry we will be there for you. Thank you indeed for the great evening. I think we better be going – though our kid won’t mind spending all night with his cousins, I am sure they are causing Somakhya and Lootika a lot a of trouble!”

◊◊◊◊

Vrishchika and Indrasena were at Somakhya and Lootika’s place to finish up the paper on the gargantuan Nocardia protein and its relatives from other actinobacteria. They were taking a break in the writing when Lootika checking the news remarked: “Vrishchika, It appears like you will be seeing your colleague Dr. Ahmed al-Zaman again.”
Vrishchika: “What? How could that be I thought he was all set to play out a long innings behind the bars!”
Indrasena: “I am sure Vidrum would be disappointed to hear that.”
Somakhya: “Not just that; Vidrum’s life itself is in danger if the senior surgeon were to return to our city, which he well might.”
Lootika: “What is deal with him and Vidrum? The news article says he was arrested on espionage charges.”
Vrishchika: “There is probably much more than just espionage charges. He was the one who killed your classmate Meghana.”
Lootika: “Really?”

Somakhya: “As you may remember our friend Vidrum was emotionally entangled with Meghana. But she had was subsequently seduced by the much older al-Zaman when Vidrum was still a student at med-school and was drawn away from him. Some time later she was mysteriously found dead with her throat slit at the Madanamañjuka-udyāna. The cops had questioned Vidrum and al-Zaman then. Vidrum had a good alibi and the DNA evidence was in his favor. Though the DNA evidence clearly implicated Dr. al-Zaman, he was almost immediately released and the cops made an about-turn on the matter. Dr. al-Zaman is member of the PPA, which as you are aware passes off as an organization of progressives, while in reality it is a well-trained ghāzi force. He is probably a double agent at the hub of the mleccha-marūnmattābhisaṃdhi.”

Indrasena: “I believe we clued Vidrum on al-Zaman’s case with our kauberī prayoga. Vrishchika the aghomada whom he encountered in the āveśa was none other than the surgeon in his earlier days.”
Vrishchika: “Indeed – Vidrum had not believed that al-Zaman was behind the murder of his friend. But piqued by his experience, he went back to the records and found that the police commissioner at that time was śrī Kurmure, whom you might might vaguely remember as being big on Hindu terror.” Lootika: “Ha! He was the guy who called the PPA a character-building organization, which will be the beacon of secularism in the nation.”

Vrishchika: “Yes, śrī Kurmure was the one who absolved al-Zaman. However, now we have a patriotic commissioner who had been picked by none other than the national security adviser śrī Uniyal, who himself has some intelligence background. As the commissioner’s son is Vidrum’s patient, he was able use that connection to put the cops back on al-Zaman’s scent. While they could not conclusively close the Meghana case as śrī Kurmure had destroyed all the evidence, some new stuff came up. One day al-Zaman walked into my office and asked help with a project he was doing that was funded by the Tīrtha Foundation. I politely refused citing my genuinely packed schedule. I slipped this information to Vidrum, as Indrasena had informed me that the Tīrtha Foundation is a front end of a mleccha funding agency, which funds anti-national individuals and organizations to cause subversion in Bhārata. The cops latching on to it were able figure out that using hardware and software from the foundation al-Zaman had opened a very sophisticated backdoor on all our hospital computers. Incidentally, our little sis Jhilleeka gave me the means of stymieing it and protecting myself. They finally arrested al-Zaman on the charges of trying to relay health information of the governor to the mleccha-s. They were also able to obtain some data on his links to the Khalifa to whom he was poised to send a bottle of dimethylmercury.”
Somakhya: “We need to be absolutely beware of that dimethylmercury when Dr. al-Zaman resurfaces.”

Vrishchika: “Shortly after his arrest there were aggressive protests by the Mārjanidhvaja-dala along with the PPA volunteers outside our hospital. I recall moving my stambhaka-śaṅku from my backpack to my mekhalā that day.”
Indrasena: “Remember the regular articles in the newspapers and that Svatantratā journal decrying Dr. al-Zaman’s arrest as an appalling failure of justice and deliberate targeting of minorities?”
Vrishchika: “Not only that, while in jail, he was awarded the Edmond Glympton Global Initiative prize and the mleccha physicians’ council prize for his selfless service.”
Lootika: “Listen to this.” She then read from the news item: “In passing his judgment overturning the high court conviction the Chief Justice Mashanand Kukroo said that by arresting a blameless surgeon with a brilliant record on the slimmest evidence the government was sending an unacceptable message to the minorities. Such actions threatened to create an atmosphere of fear, which might then be exploited for political gains. By this judgment he hoped to stall the downward slide of the Indian polity towards the divisive Hindu nationalist agenda.” She continued: “Now in other news we have: Ramesh Pandeya and svāmin Kalananda to remain in jail for Islampur riots. Then there is this one: Pictures in temple vandalized…”
Indrasena: “All this with what people call a Hindu government in power and both the rākṣasonmatta-s and pretonmatta-s clearly stating their intentions.”

Somakhya: “Lootika, do you have a transcript of Varoli’s infamous speech at the right-wing think-tank”
Lootika: “Yes; Varoli was asked by one of her right-wing colleagues to speak at one of those Svatantratā think-tanks known as “India-Future”. It resulted in her being unceremoniously shunted off the stage and the question-answer session being called off. I’ll send the transcript of her speech around to you all.”

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The transcript of Varoli’s talk:
Hindus should realize they stand at a critical fork in the road of their history. Their linguistic and cultural cousins the Greeks, the Romans and the Iranians have all been consigned to perdition and their intellectual treasures and achievements are now being enjoyed by their Abrahamistic destroyers. We survived only because they lay ahead of us in the path of the hurricanes of Abrahamism. Now that they are gone the storm has begun blowing into our lands. Imagine the fate of the Gangetic Doab without the Himalayas to stanch the howl of Boreas from the Altaic heartland.

Let us face it, our situation is not good. Why is this the case? I am trained as both a chemist and a molecular biologist. Hence, I can tell you with some certainty that the biochemist who has done things the hard way achieves greater success when the real challenges hit her than one who has merely learned to do things as per the protocol accompanying a commercial kit. You might also agree with me that you would prefer to have a physician who has high tally in terms of the number of humans he has closely observed, dead or alive, than one who merely reads the diagnosis from the results of the tests. Likewise, only when you have real hands-on experience with your tradition and it’s significance, you are better equipped to adapt allo-cultural elements for your own effective use. In the old days at the height of Hindu power we were good at it. But when Hindu power was blasted away by the unmadita-s we lost not only the link to our own culture but with it the ability of our ancestors at allo-cultural adaptation. Thus, when by some luck the mleccha tyrants left our land due their hammering at the hands of the Germans and the Japanese, we adopted democracy without the proper wherewithal to handle this allo-cultural construct – it had no connection to our endogenous democracy enshrined in the śruti of the Bhṛgu-s and Añgirasa-s. Our ignorant peoples prided themselves over their success with this construct without realizing that it would bring their ruin unless they outlawed the preta-rākṣasa-mārgau. This negative externality was seen only be few of the Hindu leaders of the independence movement and was completely masked from public sight by the action of the men planted by the vengeful mleccha-s as they left our nation.

Since we had no hands-on experience with creating “systems-robustness” for the negative externalities of democracy, it has become a potent tool for the mleccha-s, aided by the marūnmatta-s, to get us to join the earlier-named civilizations. This will be felt even more as the Hindus decline in numbers and the Abrahamist occupy that space. I know many of you all, unlike me, like to call yourselves cultural Hindus and the like, distancing yourselves from the practice of the religion. By this you are only endangering the existence of your posterity even more. Hence, I posit that rather than patting ourselves on our backs and serenading our democracy, we resort to some really radical questioning. How many here would like to ask questions such as: Is democracy as it is practiced really doing us good? Are there religions that need to be outlawed in order to make it work? Is power of the people a good thing when the people are zombies? I know each of you all here are great analysts of politics and the media in the nation but have you asked if that nuanced dissection is of any avail when the whole structure has a foundation in quick-sand

If you think all this was radical, have you given thought to the actions of the judiciary? You know well that the judiciary plays a key role in this type of democratic set up. But is there not a logical paradox in a judiciary that places itself above the law itself? Especially so when there is really no one to check the integrity and patriotism of the judiciary. When you think more closely of this you will realize why I insist that no one other than a practicing Hindu well-versed in mīmāṃsa and nyāya should occupy a judicial position. The rāṣṭra is taken one step closer to the cremation ground when you appoint an Abrahamist as a judge at any level in the nation.

Since I would rather not relive Hypatia’s experience, I would like to suggest to you all that instead of delicately measuring our position on the left-right spectrum we start preparations to strike first and strike hard against our foes. This is what our tradition says – when the ātatāyin has come before us it is incumbent on us to dispatch him for an appointment with Citragupta.

indro viśvasya rājatoṃ ।
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Footnote 1: The Bhṛgu-s of yore had invoked Agni who dwells within water. That mighty deva who bears the oblations appeared at their ritual, and he transmogrified into a dreadful archer. This god was the terrible sharva with many death-dealing shafts; hence, they called out to him: “śivo bhava tuṃburo rudra jalāṣa-bheṣaja”. Then sa devaḥ emitted a mighty being known as the yakṣa-pati Kubera who appeared before them holding an axe and a mongoose. The Bhṛgu-s extolled him and offered him a caru. Then the mighty yakṣa revealed to them the secret vidyā-s which generations of Bhṛgu-s had built upon. It was those vidyā-s that Somakhya and transmitted to Indrasena in the mysterious shrine housing Mahādeva, Kubera, Skanda and Viśākha. Now he was a siddha in them like the legendary Naravāhanadatta.

When we were young, the normally taciturn vaiśya-jyotiṣa once asked us to participate in a peculiar weekly assembly of amateur astronomers that was apparently inspired by none other than the great Lokamānya Ṭilak and was housed in a memorial of his. Other than the vaiśya-jyotiṣa, his vaiśya sidekick, originally from the grocer community, and I, the rest of the participants in that assembly were stuffy, elderly Mahārāṣṭrī gentlemen who almost appeared as though they had jumped right out of Ṭilak’s era. They were amateur jyotiṣa-s whose primary interests lay in our solar system, with some passing interest in the older Hindu astronomy of Sūryasiddhānta, Varāhamihira, Āryabhaṭṭa. They discussed these matters a sauntering pace even as they viewed both me and the two vaiśya-s with a bit of quizzical but perplexed attitude. They wondered why we respectively interested ourselves so much in variable stars and globular clusters. When I told them of my sighting of BH Crucis near its maximum through my homemade telescope they all wondered with a slight murmur as to why such an out of the way star might seem interesting. One of them then slowly remarked that sighting omicron Ceti reach its maximum was sufficient for him. We would not disagree that it was a great sight. However, our main purpose of attending that assembly was because it was the only place where we could access the vanishingly rare copies of the astronomy magazine, the Sky and Telescope. It would be passed around the table in the cavernous little room where we assembled and we would each take a look at, with older copies available for borrowing. Beyond that the only memorable things about these meetings were the discussions we had on occasions on whether Sirius was once red, the star map of the Sūryasiddhānta, and the visits by noted astronomers from abroad which the old Mahārāṣṭrī gentlemen somehow managed to organize.

It was there that we learned, via Sky and Telescope, of the three volume work of Robert Burnham, “Burnham’s celestial handbook: an observer’s guide to the universe beyond the solar system”. Eventually, the assembly purchased those volumes at great expense and difficulty for Hindus were a poor people shorn of their wealth by the barbarous mleccha-s. It used to be kept under double-lock and keys, and could be accessed only if the secretary and treasurer both put in their keys to open the cabinet in which it was safely stowed away. Despite all this ado, its primary readers were the vaiśya’s lackey and I; the vaiśya-jyotiṣa himself had procured his own copy by virtue of his enormous riches as would befit a Lāṭānarta merchant. We found something very deep about Burnham’s mahāsaṃhitā: It was like no other text we had ever seen and after all these years still regard it as having a near magical quality. While we merely possessed a homemade 75mm refractor and a 50 mm Russian refractor with spectacular optics (the Rus made some great stuff then, which we never get anymore among the mleccha-s for all their technological prowess), Burnham spurred us to explore the utter limits of our instruments – can there ever be a feeling like being under pitā dyauḥ peering into the depths of the universe? That connection to the depths of the universe comes out brilliantly in Burnham’s work. Over the years, living in a place where our glimpses of the sky have become very few and far between due to cold and pollution, some of that connection from the long past days has receded into the background. But recently our friend pointed us to Burnham’s self interview, which prodded us to write something about the thoughts arising from reading the mysterious author’s thoughts beyond those found in his mahāsaṃhitā.

We learned that Burnham’s life began much like the comet he discovered with his own home-made telescope, which led him to a position at the Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory without any formal higher education. For years he lived the life of the reclusive self-made scientist operating a home-lab. Once that position was closed he was offered a janitor’s job at the same place, which he refused. His life had an unfortunate conclusion. Though a military veteran on losing his position at the observatory he lived a destitute life selling his own paintings in a park for a living. Unable to afford medical treatment he died at the age of 61 in 1993 from various dreadful ailments which had caught up with him. When he was a poor peddler of paintings in the park, astronomers did not even believe that he was the same Burnham of the handbook fame if mentioned that fact to them. Thus, even as his book was becoming a household name among amateur astronomers he dropped into anonymity and then died. His case is an example of how many great contributors to human expression are often ignored by society to die unsung in the dumpster, especially if they take an unconventional path that does not receive institutional recognition. This is particularly so in certain nations like the USA where medical care is difficult for the man of average means and typically of low-quality except for the very well-endowed or connected. Below we cull some of the interesting points from his interview with occasional remarks of ours indicated by bullet points.

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Interviewer: Your Handbook demonstrates that philosophy very clearly, I think. A number of readers have commented on the amount of space you devote to ancient mythology, Chinese poetry, oriental folklore, Roman coins — things like that. If you had omitted all this, do you think you might have reduced the book to a more practical size?

Not by very much. None of this adds that much to the page count. And I think it gives the work a certain sort of unique personality.

● Burnham was an example of what you don’t encounter that often in science these days: A sort of an all-rounder with wide cultural and historical interests.

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Interviewer: Do you feel the same about interstellar communication?

We may eventually exchange messages with inhabitants of nearby star systems; Tau Ceti, for example, if it has inhabited planets. But anything vastly more remote than that doesn’t look very practical. It isn’t communication if the answer to your message won’t arrive until a few centuries after your entire civilization has become extinct.

Interviewer: So you don’t believe that man will ever achieve the conquest of space?

That phrase is really one of the silliest ever invented. Here are two ants – perched on a leaf in the middle of the Amazon, and after enormous effort and incredible expense they finally manage to get across to the next leaf. So they claim they’ve “conquered the forest.”

● He had a particularly dim view of the physical conquest of deep space. We may view this in light of some recent discoveries: 1) Earth-like planets have been discovered around ancient stars suggesting that they formed much earlier than expected. 2) They appear to be more common than has been previously expected

Hence, Fermi’s paradox seems to be a reality: “Why have we not heard from or been visited by aliens yet?” This appears to be one of the fundamental lessons we are in the process of learning from Kepler and other exo-planet discoveries. We speculate in light of these observations affirming Fermi’s paradox that technology is fundamentally maladaptive. The kind of advanced technological existence needed to achieve moderately fast space travel most likely comes at the cost of fertility of the (super)organism, which generates such technology. Hence, such systems necessarily collapse before escaping the home star successfully. Moreover such (super)organisms are likely to be infected memetically by memoviruses, like the religions of peace and love, which enhance relative fertility of anti-technological groups hastening the collapse of technological civilization to a lower level that can never escape the home star. Thus, astronomy appears to have given us an important glimpse of the possibility that the technological overdrive we are pursuing might not be a stable strategy at all and sooner or later a collapse is eminent. On the other hand we posit that the societies of social insects re fundamentally more stable and there will a convergence towards such planet-bound social structures. In contrast, based on our empirical genomic studies we have held that real intra-stellar travel is done by structurally less differentiated life in the form of bacteria and archaea like entities.

Burnham should have lived to see this age of discovery in astronomy that has come for the first time since the great leap of Herschel and his contemporaries. This is due to great technological achievement on part of the United States. Our knowledge is likely to advance even more for a while as much greater successors of the Kepler mission are launched. We may even detect the chemical signatures indicating the existence of exo-life in the coming years, but that is different from the actual contact with the aliens, which should have happened. However, we suspect this will be very ironic in a sense because it might ultimately inform us clearly about the limits of our technology. Hence, finding some convergences with the thoughts of Burnham in this regard is interesting.

Just as we were deciding to make this note public, an interlocutor on Twitter brought back thoughts regarding the German intellectual Oswald Spengler. We recalled that the last two chapters of the mahāsaṃhitā have thoughts therein which seem to echo with the sentiment raised above. It would be too much to unpack all of it here. But it would suffice to say that it Hindus would be benefited if one among them takes up the task writing a narrative of this order from the Hindu perspective [Footnote 1]. It would obviously differ in words from that of Spengler but there might be some conclusions that ultimately converge. For now we will leave the reader with that concluding quote from Spengler, which we could immediately recognize as one of a realized man:

“Money is overthrown and abolished only by blood. Life is alpha and omega, the cosmic onflow in microcosmic form. It is the fact of facts within the world-as-history. Before the irresistible rhythm of the generation-sequence, everything built up by the waking-consciousness in its intellectual world vanishes at the last. Ever in History it is life and life only — race-quality, the triumph of the will-to-power — and not the victory of truths, discoveries, or money that signifies. World-history is the world court, and it has ever decided in favour of the stronger, fuller, and more self-assured life —decreed to it, namely, the right to exist, regardless of whether its right would hold before a tribunal of waking-consciousness. Always it has sacrificed truth and justice to might and race, and passed doom of death upon men and peoples in whom truth was more than deeds, and justice than power. And so the drama of a high Culture — that wondrous world of deities, arts, thoughts, battles, cities — closes with the return of the pristine facts of the blood eternal that is one and the same as the ever-circling cosmic flow.”

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Interviewer: Probably because the organized religions have made the whole idea so…

Cranky? Primitive? Yes. Well, that’s the old “guilt-by-association” syndrome again. A lot of scientists won’t touch ESP research for the same reason. They don’t want to be identified with cranks. But this situation is chiefly limited to the western cultures. Consider the difference in artistic traditions, for example. Suppose an American or European collector offers to show you a “religious” picture. You know what you will see. A Madonna. A nativity scene. A crucifixion. The martyrdom of some saint, perhaps. Always a conventionally religious theme. Now, let a cultivated Chinese gentleman show you his religious picture. High peaks looming though mist. A gnarled pine tree on a windy cliff. A mountain chasm at dawn. Yes, there may be a hermit or a holy man somewhere in all this, but you have to really hunt for him. Where’s the religion? Well, the oriental is experiencing the presence of the intelligence of the universe. In the world of nature.

Interviewer: Religious leaders claim to have a divine revelation which cannot be questioned.

Yes. But if neither reason nor science nor evidence nor human testimony can be trusted, how can you possibly know you have a divine revelation? Since you admit you are fallible human being, how can you be sure that you would recognize a divine revelation if you saw one? That’s a pretty arrogant claim to make, isn’t it?

Interviewer: Religious authorities will say that the whole history of the last two thousand years proves the truth of their claims.

Oh sure. The Inquisition, for example? The witchcraft mania? Centuries of cruel persecutions and intolerance and bigotry? How does it happen that this divinely revealed faith has by far the worst history of any of the great religions of the world, and has everywhere been the major cause of barbarism, strife and war? The whole history of Christian Europe reads like one long nightmare. Well, let’s suppose that none of these things had ever happened. Let’s close our eyes and pretend that the history of religion in the western world was all perfect sweetness and light, as many simple folk fondly imagine. The validity of their claims would still depend upon human reasoning. All theological statements are human statements; all theological writings are human writings; all religious concepts were developed by human beings. Obviously. There are people who imagine that they have something more, since their whole creed depends upon that idea. And where do they go to prove this? Right back to human reasoning! You can find entire books – hundreds of them – devoted to proving some theological doctrine or other. Using step by step human logic.

● It appears that Burnham had seen through the nature of the preta-mata. Indeed, elsewhere he mentions a certain attraction towards flavors of the Dao and the Tathāgata cults. However, it is unlikely he had any close understanding of these systems. This brings us to a more general issue of westerners who have outgrown the preta-mata . They typically come in a few standard flavors: 1) Those who have realized its futility but have limited horizons hence continue to remain within it in some non-practicing sense. They might term themselves as being non-practicing but having belief in its values. They resemble the common urban Hindu of India who has become deracinated and has never studied any śāstra that matters. 2) They see through the evils of the preta-mata but believe that all religiosity is the same as that of eka-rākṣasa-vāda. They bother not to more closely analyze the differences between systems or the biological foundations of the phenomenon of religion in apes. Hence, they become the kind who are well-known as the new atheists. But as we have discussed before they are, sometimes perhaps unwittingly, a mirror image of the eka-rākṣasa-vāda having arisen from societies infused with this ideology. They have imitators among the Hindus but this is again a reflection of Hindu deracination with resultant replacement of their endogenous memes with western ones. Thus, they react just like the mleccha-s though it is not relevant to their situation. 3) Those like Burnham who have outgrown it, understand the spirit of the alternatives, and even feel attracted towards them. However, they usually can never complete the circle because of incomplete understanding of the alternatives. Indeed, as we had discussed before, the Eklund survey suggested that many mleccha scientists, who describe themselves as atheists, might have an incipient potential in this direction. 4) Those who do adopt the alternatives whole scale irrespective of their actual understanding of it. These are the western converts to nāstika or āstika or other heathen systems. However, despite their conversion, they might retain the structures of their old eka-rākṣasa-vāda; thus, upon conversion they merely transfer their allegiance to the heathen systems and operate within it. For example, Devakīputra might replace the preta but they approach him similarly. Hence, they might also translate their confusions from the past to their interpretation of the heathen system. Thus, we have seen some western worshipers of Devakīputra become the spokesmen for Hindu intelligent design and anti-evolutionism. This too might be taken up by born Hindus due to their deracination. Thus, we have seen a pamphlet made by a well-known internet Hindu activist with some trite anti-evolutionist vociferations which are drawn from their western counterparts.

In the end, many mleccha-s adopting alternative systems face the issue of those systems ultimately “belonging” to alien cultures – a cultural difference exacerbated by the eka-rākṣasa-vāda. These, clash with a sense of superiority rooted in their psyche (even if subcurrent) coming from the influence of version 2 and 3 of eka-rākṣasa-vāda – a drive to save others even if it might mean killing them. This, along with political pressures of the mleccha lands can ultimately lead to the famous Malhotran U-turn in many.

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Footnote 1: The following is quite possibly a statement ensuing from false pride: We have long fancied ourselves as being able to do this in principle due to our penetration of certain domains of knowledge and things which we see clearly in our mind’s eye. However, as the realities of life impinge on you, the realization dawns that such a feat is likely to be out of reach for it is almost as if the gods come in the way when the mere martya has apprehended certain things. Surely there were many Khans on the steppes who never became Chingiz Khan. Such are the times when you wish for a capable successor to whom you can transmit your vidyā-s in toto, as Mahārāṇā Pratāpa wished there was no gap between him and Mahārāṇā Saṃgā.

Updated version of article published originally at IndiaFacts

In Hindu tradition there is a clear demarcation of at least three distinct classes of ritual observances: 1) The most conservative of these are the śrauta rituals that deviate little from their Vedic prototype specified in the texts known as the brahmaṇa-s and śrauta sūtra-s. 2) The next are the gṛhya or domestic rituals, which are associated with the major events in an individual’s life such as birth, naming, studentship, marriage, setting up of a household, and death. These show a conservative core going back to the earliest Vedic age or earlier, specified in texts known as the gṛhya sūtra-s, along with later accretions coming from texts known as the purāṇa-s, local customs and sectarian traditions. 3) Finally, we have the festive observances, which are followed by the whole of Hindu society including the lay people. Examples of these include Indradhvaja, Dīpāvalī, Holākā (commonly called Holi in Northern parts of India) and vasanta-pañcamī.

Of the three, the śrauta rituals are practiced by very few people today and are largely unknown to the modern lay Hindus even though the foundations of their dharma lie in these rituals. The gṛhya traditions are somewhat more widely known, though they too are declining among the Hindus of urban India. In contrast, the festive observances are still widely known and practiced. However, unlike the śrauta and gṛhya rituals the festive observance are much less tethered to the canonical texts and are greatly prone to local variations. Indeed, this distinction is clearly recognized by the great theorists of ritual in Hindu tradition, i.e. the commentators of the mīmāṃsa system, who explicitly distinguish these festivals from the rituals ordained by the words of the Veda. Nevertheless, these festivals are likely to have been of great antiquity in the Indo-Aryan world because at least some of them correspond to festivals of comparable intent observed elsewhere in the Indo-European world. The earliest references to these festivals are seen in the sūtra-s of the 18th pariśiṣṭha of the Atharvaveda (the Utsava-sūtrāṇi), which provides a list of such observances that are to be supported by the state.

We believe it is important that the history of these rituals be closely studied as it provides clues to understand our past and the role they played in the well-being of the people. Indeed, it was for this reason the great king Bhojadeva Paramāra paid great attention to their description and observance. Two centuries later these observances were studied and described at length by the great encyclopedist Hemādri in his Caturvarga-cintāmaṇi. Unfortunately, the loss of Hindu power to Islam and Christianity resulted in the memory of the old practices being forgotten to a great degree. In our times the systematic study of the early lay or social observances of Bhārata was done by the great Sanskritist V. Raghavan. His work was published with assistance of his successor S.Janaki because of his death before it saw print. Our intention here is to merely revive the study of these observances with an examination of the early history of Holākā. We must stress what we present here is largely indebted to Raghavan’s work along with some additional observations.

The earliest mention of Holākā is in the 18th pariśiṣṭha of the Atharvaveda in the form a brief sūtra:
atha phālgunyāṃ paurṇamāsyāṃ rātrau Holākā || AV 18.12.1
Now on the night of the phālguni full moon is Holākā.

This continues to be its date of observance to the current day. The verse of the Gāthasaptaśati of the Andhra king Hāla refers to getting “dirty” in the phālguṇi festival:
phālgunotsava-nirdoṣaṃ kenāpi kardama prasādhanaṃ dattam |
stana-kalaśa-mukha-praluṭhat sveda-dhautam kimiti dhāvayasi || 37/4.69 (provided in Sanskrit for easier understanding)

[The man addressing his female friend says]:
In the phālguṇi festival someone innocently colored you by throwing dust,
Why are you trying to wash that away, when it has been washed,
by the sweat flowing off the nipples of your pitcher-like breasts?

The preparation of powder for throwing in the festival is also alluded to in the same context in the Gāthasaptaśati
mukha-puṇḍarīkac-chāyāyāṃ saṃsthitau paśyata rājahaṃsāviva |
kṣaṇa-piṣṭa-kuṭṭanocchalita-dhūli-dhavalau stanau vahati || 39/6.24

Look! Sitting in the shadow of the lotus which is her face,
dusted by the powder thrown up as she grinds for the festival,
are her two fair breasts sitting like a pair of royal swans.

Not unexpectedly, such frolicking in the festival could have negative consequences. Indeed, a Mahārāṣṭrī Prākṛta gātha attributed to the same work of the Andhra monarch preserved only in the Telugu country sarcastically states:
khaṇa-piṭṭha-dhūsara-tthaṇi mahu-maataṃb-acchi kuvala-ābharaṇe |
kaṇṇa-gaa-cūa-maṃjari putti tue maṃḍio gāmo || 38/8.26

With breasts colored by the festival’s powder,
eyes showing intoxication by liquor,
with a lotus as ornament and mango shoot behind the ear,
you are, girl, a real honor to our village!

Thus, one may say that by the beginning of the Common Era when the Andhra-s held sway, the key elements which define Holākā were already in place: the color play and the drunken revelry. These are mentioned in authoritative medieval digests on festivals which collect material from earlier texts. For instance, the Varṣakṛtyā-dīpikā says that the people smear themselves with ashes from a bonfire (see below) and color powders and prance about like piśāca-s on the streets (grāma-mārge krīḍitavyaṃ piśācavat).These are features of the festival that persist to the current day.

However, these are not the only elements that characterize the festival. Hemādri in his account of the Holākā festival provides information from the now lost account of the Bhaviṣyottara purāṇa. This records an interesting tale that is not widely known among modern Hindus:
“When Raghu was the emperor of the Ikṣavāku-s at Ayodhyā, the lord of Lankā was a Rākṣasa known as Mālin. His daughter was a Rākṣasī known as Ḍheṇḍhā (In some texts Ḍhuṇḍhā). She attacked the city of Ayodhyā and wrought much havoc by slaying the children in the city. Raghu advised by his preceptor Vasiṣṭha asked the people, particularly the youngsters, to gather cow dung, leaves and logs, and place them at the center of a decorated enclosure. They then set these afire and went around the pyre shouting, singing and calling out obscene words including the names of male and female genitalia in deśa-bhāṣā-s. Then they clapped their hands, made a noise by striking their open palm against the open mouth (bom-bomkāra) and shouted out the words aḍāḍā and śītoṣṇa. Surprised by the obscene language Ḍheṇḍhā started running and fell into the pyre and was burnt to death.”

In this account aḍāḍā is described as the mantra of Holākā by which the Rākṣasī is driven away and the fire is said to be the homa in which this mantra is practiced to bring welfare to the settlement.

Several variants of this basic form of the festival are seen in medieval manuals for festivals. The Jyotir-nibandha specifies that the fire for the Holākā pyre should be brought by children from the house of a caṇḍāla woman who has just given birth. It mentions an effigy of Ḍheṇḍhā along with a five-colored flag being set up for burning. The Puruṣārtha-cintāmaṇi additionally specifies a cattle race at midday for the Holākā festival. A paddhati from the Tamil country specifies that scorpions, snakes and centipedes are made out of molasses and thrown into the Ḍheṇḍhā pyre.

The legend of Ḍheṇḍhā has been recycled into two vaiṣṇava narratives which are more popular today: 1) She is known as Holikā, the sister of Hiraṇyakaśipu, who loses her invulnerability to fire and perishes in an attempt to burn her nephew the daitya Prahrāda. 2) The Holākā fire is supposed to commemorate the killing of the rākṣasī Pūtanā by Kṛṣṇa Devakīputra – Pūtanā was originally a fierce kaumāra goddess who was completely demonized in the vaiṣṇava narrative.

The common element in all these narratives is the protection of children from harm. Indeed the kaumāra goddess Pūtanā is described as being a deity of pediatric illnesses, from which she provides relief upon being given ritual fire offerings and bali. The junction period between winter and summer in India is marked by several illness that afflict children. This might indeed have been the rationale behind this facet of Holākā. Likewise, in rural India, the coming of summer heralded the emergence of scorpions, centipedes and snakes from hibernation. This appears to have found expression in the ritual offering of images of these animals in the Holākā fire.

Unlike the vaiṣṇava-s, the śākta-s gives a positive color to the narrative of Holikā, wherein she is described as an incarnation or emanation of Caṇḍikā, who fought a great battle with a daitya known as Vīrasena, and slew him on this day. Thus, it is his effigy which is burned accompanied by the worship of Holikā devī, followed by the śākta observance of the Vasanta-navarātrī. Thus, it is symmetrically placed in the calender with respect to the exploits of the great trans-functional goddess celebrated in the autumnal navarātrī. This account is elaborated in an eastern text known as the Holikāmāhātmyam.

Thus, multiple elements have been melded together into the Holākā festival. Of these the element involving the color play and obscenity probably relate to it being an ancient festival of love. Indeed, an aspect of this is obliquely recorded in the Nārada-purāṇa by noting that it marks the burning of Kāma by Rudra – a feature which survives to the current date in the form of the green twig representing Kāma being placed in the Holākā bonfire. In certain accounts the people from the Ārya varṇa-s freely touched people from lower jāti-s on this occasion, and this action was supposed to help provide immunity from diseases. Thus, the festival might have additionally had an angle of establishing social cohesion.

Finally, right from the first few centuries of the Common Era, as indicated by the great mīmāṃsa commentator Śabharasvāmin, Holākā appeared to have had a patchy, regional pattern of observance. According to him it was observed only by easterners. Such a regionally restricted pattern is observed even today with the festival lacking prominence in much of the peninsular south. This is paradoxical because it appears to be an early festival alongside the ancient Indradhvaja and Dīpāvalī. Moreover, it is attested in texts from all over India including places like Kumbhaghoṇa in Tamil Nad where the festival in no longer observed. One possible explanation for this is that frivolous and obscene facets of the festival have resulted in being ignored in several parts of the nation [Footnote 1]. On the other hand in other places it was “domesticated” to a degree and continued to be observed. However, in very recent times it seems to be resurgent in several places where it was previously not observed. Hence, it is possible that it can be used as a means to counter imported western observances that serve as conduits for Abrahamistic memes.

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Footnote 1: In dhammapada 2.4 the buddha Gautama criticizes the festival celebrated in Śrāvastī as one of fools making particular reference to the coarse language being used in the celebrations.