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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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!”

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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.

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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.

A version of this article was published first at India Facts

There is a persistent motif of the deva Rudra (Śiva) being originally refused ritual offerings of the yajña to which the other deva-s were entitled. Rudra eventually acquires his share of the offering, often via a violent confrontation with the other deva-s. One version of this legend, first seen in the Brāhmaṇa texts like the Gopatha Brāhmaṇa of the Atharvaveda, has Rudra destroy the ritual of Prajāpati and injure several of the deva-s upon being excluded from the ritual offering (Gopatha Uttarabrāhmaṇa 2-4). In parallel in other Brāhmaṇa texts there are other narratives of the confrontation between the progenitor deva Prajāpati and Rudra. One of these involves the slaying of Prajāpati by Rudra for the former’s act of incest with his own daughter. An allusion to this legend is found in the Ṛgveda itself where the deva-s are said to call upon Rudra to enforce natural law by preventing the incest of Prajāpati (RV 10.61.7). This is an astronomical legend that preserves memory of the ancient movement of the equinoctical colure towards Rohiṇī ( the daughter of Prajāpati i.e. the orange star Alderbaran). In the sky the slain Prajāpati is represented by the constellation of Mṛgaśiras (Orion), his semen by the Milky Way, Rudra by Ārdra (Sirius) the brightest star in the sky (in apparent terms). The Invaka-s, three bright stars in a straight line (the belt of Orion), are said to represent the arrow of Rudra that pierced Prajāpati [Footnote 1].

By the time of the Mahabhārata the old legends underwent diversification and recombination. One version in the is closer to the Vedic version in the Gopatha Brāhmaṇa another one is closer to those found in the Purāṇa-s. A version generally sharing elements with those found in the Mahabhārata also forms the foundation of the narrative regarding the origin of diseases from the wrath of Rudra in the Hindu medical Saṃhitā-s like those of Caraka. In the Purāṇa-s various versions of these legends emerge as products of a complex evolutionary process. This resulted in a “standard” version of the legend that is well-known to Hindus today. This combines four basic elements: 1) The suicide of Sati, the wife of Rudra in response to him being insulted by the Prajāpati at the ritual; 2) the retaliatory destruction of the ritual of Prajāpati by Rudra’s agents like Vīrabhadra; 3) an attack on the remaining deva-s and devī-s by Rudra’s agents resulting in serious injury to them; 4) the slaying of Prajāpati Dakṣa himself Rudra or his agents.

The exclusion of Rudra, the destruction of the divine yajña by him, and his subsequent accommodation have been interpreted by some as evidence for Rudra being an outsider to the Vedic religion and being acquired from a non-Aryan source. We hold that this idea is rather untenable. The Vedic religion keeping with the ancestral Indo-European religion had different domains for different gods, and Rudra was by definition a god associated with the dreadful aspects of existence that are placed to exterior to the cocoon of civilization. His exclusion merely reflects his belonging to that realm. His eventual inclusion is an explanation for how the Vedic ritual can make such dangers of the world exterior to civilization beneficent (śiva) to those inside it. Thus, Rudra is regent of disease and toxins, but at the same time he is also the regent of medicines.

That this nature of Rudra was an integral aspect of the Vedic religion is supported by the fact cognates might be found in other branches of Indo-European:
1) In the Greek Apollo is the cognate deity of Rudra. He is called both Loimios, i.e. the bringer of plague and Paion i.e. the healer. He is also invoked as Apotropaios meaning one who is called upon to averts the harm that he can inflict. This is reminiscent of the Vedic mantra: “rudrasya hetiḥ pari vo vṛṇaktu | (May Rudra’s missile be averted)”. Apollo is a fierce god who is the slayer of many demonic entities even as Rudra is the slayer of many Dānava-s and Daitya-s. Finally, in the Homeric hymn to Apollo he is explicitly mentioned as being feared by the other gods as he approaches Olympos (the Greek svarga) with his bow and shining weapons – a clear parallel to the Vedic situation with Rudra:

I will remember and not be forgetful of the archer Apollo,
who by the gods is dreaded within Zeus’ house as he enters.
Straightaway all of them leap to their feet as he nearer approaches,
Out of their seats, so soon as his shining weapons he levels.
(Homeric hymn to Apollo 1-4; translated by WC Lawton)

2) In Germanic tradition Odin is the cognate of Rudra. In what survives of Northern Germanic legend there is an allusion to Odin being the god of the criminals or the outlaws. Likewise, in the long collection of mantra-s to Rudra known as the Śatarudrīya from the Yajurveda we see him being described as manifesting as various criminals. In the Germanic tradition preserved in Denmark there a specific allusion to a tale where the other gods kept Odin out of the realm of the gods for ten years so that they may not be tarnished by his “dangerous” connections.

Given this brief background we shall consider in greater detail a less-known version of the encounter of Rudra with the deva-s and his eventual acceptance as the great god from the Kaṭha branch of the Yajurveda. The Kaṭha school of the Yajurveda was once widely practiced in Kashmir and hills of the Panjab/Himachal Pradesh. It is today sadly all but extinct due to the depredations of the Mohammedans in those regions. The text in concern comes from the Āraṇyaka of the Kaṭha-s, which is rather distinct in parts from its cognate of the widely practiced Taittirīya school:

devā vai rudraṃ svargaṃ lokaṃ gataṃ na vyajānann ādityavarṇaṃ carantan | te .abruvan ko .asīti ? ahaṃ rudro .aham indro .aham ādityo .ahaṃ sarvasyāvayā haraso divyasyeti | te .abruvan nirbhajāmainam iti | tān ruvann abhyavadata | tān prādhrajat | te .abruvan bhavān sarvam iti | yad ruvann abhyavadat tad rudrasya rudratvam | yad bhavān iti tad bhavasya bhavatvam | yat sarvam iti tac charvasya śarvatvam | sa śivo .abhavat tac chivasya śivatvam | tebhyo .amṛḍata tan mṛḍasya mṛḍatvam| taṃ devā abruvan bhavasya bhūtasya bhavyasyādhipatyam iti | sarvasyādhipatyaṃ yajamānaṃ gamayati || KA 2.100

Indeed the deva-s did not recognize Rudra who had entered the heavenly world wandering in with a solar luster. They said: “Who are you?”. [He replied]: “I am Rudra, I am Indra, I am the Āditya, I am the arrival of all the divine luster. They [i.e. other deva-s] said: We shall not offer a share to this one [i.e. Rudra]. Roaring he [Rudra] yelled at them. He rushed at them. They [the other deva-s] said: “Sir, you are all of this”. Because roaring he yelled at them that is Rudra’s fierceness (rudratvam). Because they called him sir (bhavān) that is Bhava’s lordship over existence. Because they said you are all this that revealed Śarva’s [prowess] as an archer. Because he then became favorable that is Śiva’s benevolence. Because he became kind to them [the other deva-s] that is Mṛḍa’s compassion. The deva-s said to him: “The overlordship of the present, the past and the future [is yours]. [If he knows this while performing the ritual, i.e. offering the portion for Rudra] it leads the ritualist to lordship over all.

In this Āraṇyaka section Rudra is given five names. In this it departs from the narratives in the Kauśītaki and Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa-s, where Prajāpati afraid of Rudra’s wrath confers eight and nine names respectively on him. Some of these names correspond to the five names given in the Kaṭha tradition. The ninth name in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, Kumāra, is taken to be that of Rudra’s son. The five names are explained by some followers of the Kaṭha tradition as corresponding to the five faces of Rudra whose mantra-s are found in the terminal section of the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka. Thus, we have:

Rudra : Tatpuruṣa (the eastern face associated with the aquiline deity Garuḍa)
Bhava: Sadyojāta (The western face associated the ghostly hosts of Rudra)
Śarva: Aghora (The southern face associated with the terrifying Bhairava-s)
Mṛḍa: Vāmadeva (The northern face associated with the goddess Umā or the Śakti of Rudra)
Śiva: Iśāna (The upward face associated with the Sadāśiva or the benign form of the god)

This narrative from the Kaṭha Āraṇyaka provides clues regarding the origin of frame-narrative of a key early śaiva upaniṣad, the Atharvaśiras. Three śaiva upaniṣad-s can be considered early with their probable temporal order being: 1) Nīlarudra which is associated with the Paippalāda school of the Atharvaveda; 2) Śvetāśvatara which is associated with the Taittirīya (or perhaps originally Caraka) school of the Kṛṣṇa-Yajurveda; 3) Atharvaśiras which is associated with the Atharvaveda, though its śakha affiliation remains unknown. It survives today as four parallel recensions which share a similar frame narrative. The first two of these upaniṣad-s contain mantra-s from their respective Vedic Saṃhitā-s that are used in the rituals for Rudra. Of them, the Śvetāśvatara, presents one of the earliest extant teachings of yoga. Atharvaśiras also presents an important early teaching of meditative yoga. Together these form the root of the later śaiva yoga practices, which appear serially in traditions known as the atimārga starting with the Pāśupata sūtra-s and the mantra-mārga, which is expounded in the numerous śaiva tantra-s of various streams.

The Atharvaśiras opens thus (while the 3 recensions are similar in this regard; I am using the one I follow in my practice):
devā ha vai svargalokam āyaṃs te rudram apṛcchan ko bhavān iti |
The deva-s indeed went to the heavenly world and they asked Rudra: “Sir, who are you?”

so .abravīd aham ekaḥ prathamam āsīd vartāmi ca bhaviṣyāmi ca nānyaḥ kaścin matto vyatirikta iti |
He [Rudra] replied: “I am the sole and primal one who ever was, is, and will be; there is nothing else other than mine.

The text thus parallels the Kaṭha Āraṇyaka but inverts the initial encounter between Rudra and the other deva-s with the other deva-s being the one going to the svarga to see Rudra and Rudra being the one who declares himself as encompassing the three stages of time. The text then continues to identify Rudra with various entities such as the directions, the Veda-s, the ritual fires, cows, and the essences of various entities like the ritual offerings, dharma, natural truth and the like. Then Rudra is said to vanish from the sight of the other deva-s and they are described as praising him identifying him with each of the deva-s. Thereafter, Rudra is connected with the essence of the insight attained upon drinking Soma in the ritual. It uses the following mantra, which is derived version of a ṛk recited by the ritualist upon drinking Soma:

apāma somam amṛtā abhūmāganma jyotir avidāma devān | kiṃ nūnam asmān kṛṇavad arātiḥ | kim u dhūrtir amṛta martyasya soma-sūryapurastāt sūkṣmaḥ puruṣaḥ |
(Note the aorist (luṅ) 1st person plural forms of verbs are used, e.g. apāma for pā= drink, implying context of the recently completed ritual libation)
We have drunk Soma, we have become immortal, we have attained the light, we have seen the deva-s. What indeed can the evil-doers do to us? What is the mortal’s roguishness to the immortal – [such is the power stemming from] the subtle being who existed before the sun and moon (i.e. Rudra).

Thereafter the Atharvaśiras narrates several functions of Rudra and the epithets corresponding to them and finally gives the teaching of meditative yoga and the teaching of the śaiva ritual action of smearing oneself with ash.

The Vedic accounts, including the one in the Kaṭha Āraṇyaka, are used to illustrate a ritual point or special “insight” by knowing which the ritualist is able to attain success or power. We see that this ancestral frame work is used in the Atharvaśiras to present central śaiva teachings: 1) the primacy of Rudra; 2) the universal nature of Rudra; 3) finally the method of yoga. In the Kaṭha Āraṇyaka we already see elements relating to the first two of these points and these are used as is or expanded upon in the upaniṣad. Where the upaniṣad reconfigures matters is relates to yoga. Both the Āraṇyaka and the upaniṣad presents the knowledge of the nature of Rudra as the means of achieving power via the ritual (the latter accepts the attainment of such power upon performing the soma rite via the grace of Rudra). However, it additionally presents yoga as the means to an insight that releases one from a certain bondage that is characterized as the being similar to the bondage of a domestic animal (the paśu-pāśa). It is this freeing insight that came to be key concern of subsequent śaiva tradition. At the same time it should be emphasized that even later śaiva tradition did not lose sight of the acquisition of power either. Thus, via the Kaṭha Āraṇyaka we can trace how the old encounter of Rudra with the other deva-s evolved into the frame in which śaiva teaching was presented.

::::::::::::::::::::::::
Footnote 1: As the great patriot Lokamanya Tilak pointed out the three Invaka stars also represent the belt/girdle or upavīta of Prajāpati. Indeed, even to this date when observers of Vedic tradition change their upavīta-s they use a mantra in which the girdle of Prajāpati at the head of the ecliptic path of Nakṣatra-s is invoked.

A rambling talk we had given on the śaiva tradition. Talking is easier but less precise than writing. So please be aware of the insufficiency that goes with the domain of any talk while perusing this material.

Part 1 (introduction to mantra-s and pāśupata-s as a MP3 file): https://app.box.com/s/3wx313rfm8wijnpiv42f1q8r8z9zg2vu

Part 1, 1st addendum (early legends and iconography of Rudra): https://app.box.com/s/iqt7g7vye7c9z9tvb314swljh3um9eem

Part 1, 2nd addendum (deployment of rudra mantra-s in vaidika rituals; give a brief account of rājagavī-homa the animal sacrifice to rudra in the somayāga, the somārudrā ritual, the abhicāra ritual invoking rudra against enemy’s cattle, apotropaic rituals for protection again rudra’s attack (rudraḥ paśūn/prajāḥ śamāyeta), atharvavedīya mṛgāreṣṭi, and paippalāda tuṃburu-yāga): https://app.box.com/s/zg2v7zr3b36ckps4xo1i6fzavmzow8qb

continued…

Many turns of the sun ago, when we were still a kid in school, we had some classmates who had an unbridled admiration and enthusiasm for the Anglosphere and a rather deep-seated self-identification with it. While their English had little in it to commend itself, they felt more American than Indian. From New York to San Francisco they would know of all places great and small in the leader nation of the Anglosphere and imagine themselves as part of its existence – living out a vicarious American life via the medium of movies, cartoons, picture-books, and dime novels. We, in contrast, held the view that the Anglosphere was to be much feared and excluded from the cultural, politico-theoretical, and self-definitional landscape of the Hindu to the maximum extent possible. While not denying the fact that its language has become the dominant language of expression in the world, we believed it is should seen as a vyāvahārika bhāṣā rather than something more visceral, where one is more at home with Shakespeare or Twain rather than the itihāsa-purāṇa.

Some of our classmates came to adopt our views, albeit with a lack of self-study, much like several scientists these days find it expedient to copy our findings and pass them as their own without a deeper understanding. This latter set of classmates needed a strong pole of attraction to counter that of the Anglosphere, which they could not find in the Hindu dharma because of their deracination. Hence, over the matter of an year or two they gravitated towards the Rus. Similar was the situation of udraśmikeśa, that giant among men, who felt torn between his in absentia Americanness and his patriotic urges, which were placed in the Rus rather than his own nation. We had our own soft corner for the Rus because they provided us with unparalleled educational material in the sciences and mathematics, which the Anglosphere intentionally tried to keep out of the Hindu’s hands in India by virtue of its exorbitant pricing. But increasingly we realized that the Rus would be defeated by the Anglosphere and there was no point putting our lot with that of the Rus – it could sink us with them. We greatly feared this event because we realized that without the Rus weaponry the Hindus were pretty weak for we were rather incapable of making astra-s, nālikā-s, varma-ratha-s and vimāna-s for ourselves. At the same time, unlike our classmates, we feared that Hindus attaching themselves to the Anglosphere could do them even greater harm. Indeed, it came to pass and the Rus empire collapsed at the end of 1991.

While we survived the collapse of the Rus, we cannot be sure that we are doing too well for we are quite vulnerable to the Anglosphere and the marūnmattas, and they are going to get serious with us quite soon. Because have developed āṇavāstra-s they act as a deterrent for a direct strike on us. However, the ekarākṣasavādin-s have perfected the art of getting us by other means. It is against this background that the fall of the Rus interested us – the same methods which the mleccha-s perfected against the Rus are deployed against us. Seeing the fall of the Rus empire and the sneaking in of Yeltsin, we realized that the mlecchas had put in place long-term measures to completely finish off the Rus and make them geopolitically insignificant. When Putin revived the Rus, some said the Rus had found their feet again. But we felt that Putin might not be able to stem the slide. Rather, he would only incite the western mleccha-s headed by the Anglosphere to deploy the next round of action against the Rus. This indeed came in the form of Georgia and Ukraine. But Putin’s resolute action in both places minimized the damage. At least on the Georgian front the Rus seem to be making good advance. But we always suspected that a much older fault-line would be revived.

Rolling back the reel of history we may place ourselves in the 1800s. The English were at the height of their power. In 1814 they had burned down Washington DC sending the message to their American cousins as to who was the boss in the Anglosphere. In 1815 the English lead a mleccha alliance to rout the French and interred Napoleon in an island in the middle of the Atlantic. Between 1818-1821 they completed the conquest of India. Flushed with triumph they played their age old card of the śava-marūnmattābhisaṃdhi, which they had been doing from the days of Suleyman kānūni the Osman Sultan or Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty of Morocco. Now the English used the Osman Turks as a front end to limit Rus westward ambitions. As the Rus smashed the Turk navy at Sinop the English entered the war together with the French on the side of the Mohammedan Khalifa to attack the Rus. Several Rus towns in Crimea were taken by the English and French by the end of the war in 1856 despite strong action of the Rus generals. The Rus even eventually lost Russian America (Alaska) because they feared its conquest by the English in the aftermath of this war. However, the notable point in the war was that in total France lost much more men than the English and Austria also suffered major losses from the war despite its marginal involvement. This is something the Anglosphere perfected – their enthusiatic allies end up losing much more than themselves in any conflict which Anglosphere engineers. It also illustrated how the Anglosphere in particular and more generally the western mleccha-s could effectively use the marūnmatta-s to multiply the force against their rivals (Just as in India both the French and the English tried to use the Mohammedans as a glove to punch the Hindus). Reeling forward we come to 1939 when the wily English, who had built up Poland into considering itself bigger than its real strength, nudged Germany into war on the continent. The French hoped that the Turks might turn against Germany. Hence, they let things slide when the Turks held a false referendum in the French-controlled Hatay province of Syria and annexed it. Since then it has been an integral part of Turkey though claimed by Syria.

Against this backdrop we come to the current era. Seeing their action against the Rus as being inconclusive in Georgia and Ukraine due to Putin’s resolute action, the Anglosphere decided to up the ante. They had earlier facilitated the rise of the new Islamic Khalifa and other al Qaeda affiliates in Syria to overthrow al Assad probably to help their ally and civilizational guide the agravātula-s, and their dear friends from the hellhole of Saud. They hoped that the Rus fearing the loss of Syria, their conduit to West Asia, would intervene. Their objective was to catch the Rus in a quagmire with the marūnmatta-s and destroy them, even as they had done in the Afghan war. The Rus indeed responded and their swift action seemed to put both the Khalifa and other Mohammedan terrorists backed by the Anglosphere on the retreat. But the Anglosphere aided by the agravātula-s kept backing them hoping to make it hot for the Rus. First, we cannot put it above the Anglosphere that their devices ultimately helped the Khalifa’s forces to knock the Rus passenger jet out of the sky – it is interesting that they announced that the Khalifa had knocked out the Rus airplane even before the Rus themselves. Seeing that this was only increasing the Rus resolution to knock the wind out of the marūnmatta-s, they brought to play the Crimean war game yet again. Using Turkey as the front end they delivered a humiliating punch to the Rus by having the Turks down their Su-24 followed by jihād and A-O-A-yelling ghāzīs performing qatl of one of the Rus airmen. This was immediately followed by a downing of one of the Rus rescue helicopters with the help of their Turkoman terrorist allies and the killing of one more of their soldiers. This attack on the Rus was followed by the Anglosphere along with their vassals (the NATO) firmly backing the Turks against the Rus even as in the Crimean war. To add insult to injury, even as the Anglosphere and its vassals do to us when we are episodically slapped by the Mohammedans, they asked the Rus to show restraint. Thus, if Rus has to save face it will have to be able to fight the Anglosphere with its vassals. With this the Anglosphere has pulled off a big one against the Rus. We suspect that this move could well be the turning where the Rus are drawn into what the Anglosphere has been waiting for all this time – a situation where they could use marūnmatta-s and assorted vassals as a glove to punch the Rus into oblivion. Would this be the outcome? We feel this time it might not be so straightforward. Nor are things going to be easy for the Rus for they have not really proven themselves in offensive wars. The experiences of Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany have taught the Anglosphere that it is unwise to pursue to Rus into their backyard but drawing them into a distant conflict especially in the west Asian quarter could still prove a useful strategy to defeat them.

Why should we be bothered about all this? Let us not fool ourselves: the Anglosphere is the primary obstacle for the existence of an independent, expansive, powerful Hindu state. First and foremost, they have installed Mohammedan gloves in the form of the terrorist states of Pakistan and Bangladesh in the subcontinent to be used while punching us. Second, they send out and support kravyasādhaka-s to undermine Hindus within the boundaries of residual India. Third, they export bad ideas which befool Hindus and foment trouble in the Indian state via their first responders. Some of these are methods that they have perfected against the Rus in some form. It should be kept in mind that this is all just the beginning. The torrid time they are giving the Lāṭeśvara’s government is part of the Anglosphere’s action to prevent even a quarter resolute government from taking root in India. What they want is a mūḍha, like the substance-addled Rahula Mlecchikāputra, who can continue the tradition of the Indian Yeltsin, installed earlier in the form of the bald Sikh. We strongly suspect that in the coming days we will see the marūnmatta-s being deployed against against India. In the future if the Hindus perchance grew a spine and decided to put ekarākṣasavādin-s in place in Bhārata then we will have the Anglosphere come to their aid even as they are now standing behind Turkey.

In 527 CE Justinian became the emperor at Constantinople. He is remembered as saint in the orthodox church and is famed for his enforcing of the Nicean creed. He crushed other interpretations of the Christianity and rebuilt the famous church known as Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. He then took decisive moves to put an end to heathenism once and for all. He seized control of one of the last surviving centers of the Greek/Neoplatonic religion at Athens and forcible suppressed it. He provided muscle to John of Ephesus to convert thousands of heathens throughout Anatolia. After completing the conquest of North Africa he completely suppressed the worship of the Egyptian deity Amun Ra in the midst of the Libyan desert. He crushed the last remaining center of the worship of the goddess Isis in an island on the Nile. He sent missionaries to forcibly convert several Germanic peoples and set up institutional surveillance to check if anyone, including those in high office, practiced heathenism in private. Those who were found to do so were subject to persecutions till they became Christian. The younger Abrahamism turned on the older Abrahamism as Justinian even ordered the persecution of the Jews. Fostering Christianity abroad he sent missionaries from the church of Egypt to subvert the population by carrying out conversions in Iranian territory. He waged holy war on the Zoroastrian Iranians but was thoroughly defeated by them under the leadership of Shah Khosrau-I Anushiruwān. In addition to the Hagia Sophia, he made his mark on Constantinople as the prime nursing father of the Christian church by having a gigantic statue of himself erected therein in 543 CE. This statue showed Justinian riding a horse and holding a globe in his hand. This globe came to be the symbol of the name of Constantinople as the Red Apple.

A century and half later the Red Apple, the pride of the Christian world, was to be coveted by Christianity’s equally violent younger sister Mohammedanism. Mohammed the founder of the latter Abrahamism himself believed that some day his followers would take Constantinople. Soon enough in 650 CE the Mohammedans launched their first attack on the city. But it was to take them 13 attempts when finally the Osmans under Sultan Mehmed-II took in 1453 CE. Between the first Arab attack on the city and its final conquest in 1453 CE, the Mohammedans were not the only ones seeking to take the city. Between 860 to 941 CE the heathen Khaganate of the Rus made 3-4 attempts to take the city albeit without success. However, following this period they were converted to the orthodox flavor of Christianity, which resulted in them becoming coreligionists of the Byzantines, and they came to see the city as their own religious guide.

In 1451 CE the Mehmed, who had been underestimated by the western Christian powers, decided the fulfill the hope of the founder of Islam: “One day Constantinople will certainly be conquered. A good Amir al Momin and a good army will be able to accomplish this.” Before Mehmed his grandfather Sultan Bayezid-I had tried to take Constantinople after an eight year siege but just before he accomplished his objective, Islam being bloody within and without, he was struck in the rear by Amir Timur. Routed by Timur, Bayezid was taken prisoner and died in captivity. But the 20 year old Mehmed was not daunted by all this and started rigorous preparations to take the Red Apple. Having rapidly built multiple fortifications to secure his crossing of the Bosporus strait, in late 1452 CE he sent a ghāzī force under Turahan Pasha to fiercely attack the Greek territory of the Peloponnese to prevent any help from that quarter. Then the Sultan himself at the head of his Yenicheri forces (i.e. European boys captured early in their life and converted to Islam as the Sultan’s personal force) led the siege of the city from the landward side in 1453. His naval divisions surrounded to city except for the inlet of the sea, the Golden Horn. Here the Christians had set up a strong counter-naval chain preventing entry of the Turkic navy. The Sultan sent his admiral Suleyman Baltoghlu to probe this defense with his ships. The admiral conquered the islands in the Sea of Marmara and engaged the Christian ships on 20th April 1453 CE. In the naval battle that ensued the Moslems suffered heavy losses and four Christian ships broke the blockade and supplied the besieged city with grains.

The Sultan was in despair when his Sufi adviser Shaikh Akshamseddin sent him a message that he had heard from Allah that victory was at hand. The Sultan and his ghāzīs’ morale was raised and two days later the Sultan started rolling his ships by way of land from the north into the Golden Horn and a week later they were already in the inlet completing the encirclement of Constantinople. The Christians launched one last naval attack hoping to destroy these ships but the Mohammedans routed them this time around and sunk their ships. On the landward side the Sultan kept up the bombardment with his heavy artillery, including the over one ton bolides launched from a gigantic cannon cast by the renegade German-Hungarian engineer Urban. These assaults eventually breached the walls of the city and on May 29th 1453 CE three hours before dawn the Mohammedans launched an all out assault on the city in three waves. The third wave broke through the Christian defenses and Sultan leading the Yenicheri force charged into a gateway. Here the Christians launched a massed attack on the Sultan and his men. He fell back and bit and ordered fire from his heavily artillery. This broke up the Christian defense and smashed the gateway allowing the Moslems to pour in. Fierce fighting followed for a while in which the last Christian ruler of Constantinople was killed and his corpse never recovered.

The Mohammedan chronicler Tursun Bey gives a florid account of the last battle:
“Once the smoke of Greek fire and the soul of the Fire-worshipping prince had descended over the castle “as though a shadow (a quotation from the Qoran)” the import was manifest: the devout Sultan of good fortune had, as it were, “suspended the mountain (another Qoranic quotation)” over this people of polytheism and destruction like Allah himself. Thus, both from within and without, the cannons and muskets and falconets and small arrows and arrows and crossbows spewed and flung out a profusion of drops of Pharaonic-seeming perspiration as in the rains of April – like a messenger of the prayers of the Moslems – and a veritable precipitation and downpouring of calamities from the heavens as decreed by Allah. And, from the furthest reaches below to the topmost parts, and from the upper heights down to ground level, hand-to-hand combat and charging was being joined with a clashing and plunging of arms and hooked pikes and halbreds in the breaches amidst the ruin wrought by the cannon…” [From Osman’s Dream by Caroline Finkel]

It is rather remarkable to note that Moslems, despite fighting a sister Abrahamism, where still unable to outgrow their original imagery of the destruction of the fire-worshiping Iranians. The church of Hagia Sophia was promptly made into a masjid – verily even as the second Abrahmism had sown by destroying heathen temples to erect their churches they were now reaping with the third Abrahamism coming to return the favor to them. Shaikh Akshamseddin led the Mohammedans in their prayer at the newly acquired masjid. In the mean time the pious Shaikh claimed to have discovered the mazhār of the Arab Jihadist Ayub Ansari (a friend of Mohammad the founder of Islam) who had died in course of the attack on Constantinople in the 668 CE. The Turks took this to be a miracle and built a large dargah in his honor. Mehmed now taking on the title Fetih further rubbed in to Christians by adding a madrasah to the Hagia Sophia complex. He followed it up by converting five more churches to masjids and adding more madarasahs to the mix. The irony was complete when Mehmet took on the title Kayser-i Rum and demolished the gargantuan statue of Justinian – younger Abrahamism was only doing to the older, what it had done to the images of the heathens. This was one the high-points of Mohammedanism in the west – the Red Apple had finally been plucked and eaten by Allah’s marauders – now it was Istanbul rhyming with Islambol (i.e. full of Islam).

The Osman Khilafat has since ceased to exist but Istanbul remains in Turkish hands. But there was one power that did not let this possession go unchallenged. The vicissitudes of history eventually raised the successor state of the Khaganate of the Rus, the tsardom of Russia over the Osmans. The tsar of all Russias indeed shared a title with the Osman Sultans after the conquest of Constantinople – tsar and Kayser-i Rum. It was not just limited to that. As the most powerful force in the world of orthodox Christianity, Russia saw itself as a protector of the Church against Islam. In the 1850s the Russians had inflicted a heavy blow on the declining Osman power by smashing their fleet at Sinope. But the West in the form of the English and the French came to the aid of the Turks and helped inflict a blow on the Russians in the Crimean war. Thus they imposed a humiliating treaty on the Russians on account of which they could not have a fleet on the Black Sea. The Russian did not take this lying down. Aided by the diplomatic links to the Germanic power of Prussia the Russians worked on countering the west. The Prussians defeated the French, and the fellow Germanic Austrians and the Danes with the support of the Russians and unified the core Germania to form the new nation of Germany. Aided by Germany, the Russians cast off the humiliating treaty imposed on them. Finally, in 1877 to avenge Crimea the Russians attacked the Osman Turks. Now they were helped the freedom movements in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and were able to inflict heavy losses on the Moslems, acting as defenders of the church. In this war the Russians came within 20 km of Istanbul but failed to take it. However, they did gain territory and inflict a serious blow on the Osmans that was eventually to prove to be their undoing.

A lesson from all this for the Hindu is that Mohammedanism can be remarkably persistent in its goals of conquest. Hence, merely preventing conquest is not sufficient. Rather, completely rolling back Mohammedanism from reconquered lands is essential. The Russian hand in achieving this in Eastern Europe has been downplayed or in some cases outright denied in tellings of history by the Anglosphere and its vassals. In any case some of these lands in Eastern Europe have been left permanently scarred despite their liberation. However, a closer look shows that while the Europeans have regained some of these lands their hold on it might not be for ever and a new wave of Mohammedanism with new tactics might eventually succeed where even Suleyman failed.

There have been a whole lot of developments in ancient human genomics that have more or less solved key issues pertaining to the early Indo-European expansions. We would like to discuss these but then it would need a long article which we are not currently inclined to write because it would need enormous amount of data to be presented in an understandable form. Moreover, there are indications via various channels that, exciting as the current developments are, there are going to be new ones which will make things even clearer with respect to the Indian situation. Hence, we were somewhat disinclined to engage in any long writing on this topic. Nevertheless, we could not control our temptation to at least say a few words in this regard.

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We sat in front of Agni making the preliminary offering with the ancient mantra-s, where Agni is described as being that of Bhṛgu, Apnavāna, and Aurva, our illustrious ancestors. The observant individual would note, as we had done, that these mantra-s contain a key reference that gives the identity of the original homeland of the Indo-Iranians, and now likely all Indo-Europeans. We have never been to that place, but if one realizes those mantra-s of the Bhṛgu-s, or the Bharadvāja-s or the Vaiśvāmitra-s one immediately sees the land it corresponds to – the land where there is fire within water.

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About 21-22 years ago a strange, new aberration in Hindu thought came to our attention. The Out-of-India-theory (OIT), which posited that the Indo-Aryans were autochthons of the Indian subcontinent. At first we brushed it aside as being a mere fantasy of some ill-educated raconteurs, who might simultaneously see Tipoo Sultan as a freedom fighter. But as the 1990s came to an end the the 2000s began this stream of thinking became a dominant theme among the Hindus. So much so that most politically pro-Hindu individuals also tied themselves to some version of OIT. Across different fora you would see them thundering as though they were Parjanya: “The Aryan invasion is a myth.” They started seeing it as an instrument created by the English or more generally the Leukosphere to sow dissension among the autochthonous Hindus. We can provide a long list of prominent Hindus on the internet and associates of Hindus who were proponents of some form OIT: S. Talageri, S. Kak, N.S. Rajaram, V. Agrawal, B.B. Lal, S. Kalyanaraman, D. Frawley, R. Malhotra, M. Danino, K. Elst, N. Kazanas and so on.

However, only a few of those who took a stand against the Aryan invasion theory (AIT) ever had a clear idea of what form the alternative hypothesis, i.e. OIT was to take. If we ignore its more nonsensical manifestations that deny the Indo-European monophyly then we are left with few clear formulations. OIT’s basic form was explicitly spelled out by Frawley and Talageri. They held the view that the Indo-Europeans originated in India and expanded westwards and eastwards from India. Talageri equated the Indo-Europeans with the Vedic pañcajana: The Druhyu-s and the Anu-s formed the non-Indian branches of Indo-European, whereas the Turvaśa-s, the Yadu and the Pūru-s formed the Indo-Aryan branches. Of them he ascribed Vedic culture purely to the Pūru-s. Talageri’s confidence in his scheme was so high that he titled his book: “Rigveda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence”; i.e. final evidence for OIT – this was after genetics had prepared the coffin for OIT. By 2009 Kazanas had climbed down to propose more confused alternatives: he proposed either a “continuum” from the Pontic steppes to the Sapta-Sindhu in India or an invasion around 4500 BCE or before.

Even as OIT was making its way up in India, in the west we had another such theory, which was likewise rather contrary to the evidence – the Anatolian homeland theory. Spearheaded by archaeologist Renfrew, this hypothesis proposed that the Indo-Europeans originated in Anatolia and as the Neolithicization spread from Anatolia to Europe it carried the IE languages. In this hypothesis the first farmers who spread out from Anatolia to Europe were the bearers of the IE languages to Europe. Renfrew was vague about the Indian side of the problem. He initially proposed that like the farming wave from Anatolia to the west, there was a corresponding wave to the East that carried the Indo-Aryan and Iranian eastwards. He even posited that the Harappan civilization was founded by these farmers who bore the IA language to India. Then there were a series of papers published in high profile magazines applying methods from the study of molecular evolution, like construction of Bayesian phylogenies, to linguistic data to support Anatolianists’ contention. However, the use of rather flawed assumptions resulted these results being severely criticized. Eventually, at least some of the Anatolianists climbed down positing an Anatolian scenario only for the early phase and part of the European side of things, while for the east and the later phase they accept the standard model of dispersal of IE from the steppes.

To those who were not swayed by the delusions of the genie of OIT or Anatolianism these were largely sideshows that spiced dinner-time or late night chatting sessions. However, to us at least OIT was a matter of concern. It hit us that this was not the figment of some unerudite Hindus but a wrong idea of some potency that was seizing the brains of otherwise intelligent and discerning people – indeed, we have long observed that false ideas with a middle-level of complexity have a seductive effect on the minds of intelligent people (i.e. people with above-average IQ as a group). Parallel cases are Marxism, liberalism, and related ideas of occidental vintage, which are ultimately modernized derivatives of the older Abrahamisms (A testimony of the fact that high IQ does not translate to proper discernment). On one hand it was exposing the Hindus “as idiots”, a suspicion or a belief which some white indologists had privately harbored. On the other, it alarmed us that if Hindus were unable to understand a theory as AIT with a great weight of evidence behind it – if they failed to grasp something so clear-cut then what could one say of the complex droha-s the mlecchas were hatching on the Hindus.

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In 2004 Cordaux et al published a clear and simple article titled “Independent Origins of Indian Caste and Tribal Paternal Lineages” that put the genie of OIT firmly back in the bottle. Yet, the Hindus including Talageri went on as though nothing had happened. There were some issues with that old article and it was based only on Y-chromosome haplogroups, but the wealth of new data on the genome-scale that has emerged since has only gone on to confirm the AIT and provide several interesting new details. In the past two years a wealth of ancient DNA is literally making the skeletons, if not the pots, of the steppe culture cultures speak and they are telling us great stories. Much of this work is done from a Eurocentric viewpoint but it has tremendous implications for us because were are the “other branch of Indo-European”. So what has happened?

• First going really back in time for a global view outside Africa: Molecular evidence shows that modern humans coming out of Africa split up into multiple branches. These included –
(1)the ancestral “Eurasian branches” situated in inner Eurasia.
(2) the common ancestor of the Onge of the Andamans and the main-land proto-Indians (unfortunately called Ancestral South Indians by the researchers; ASI) which moved through India and into the far east.
(3) the branch leading to part of the ancestry of the Papuans and the Australian aborigines, which moved eastwards and mixed with the archaic Denisovans (the remaining part of Papuan-aborigine ancestry coming from the Onge-ASI branch). Between 45-36.2 thousand years before present (kyr BP) the split of the Western Eurasians and East Asians can be clearly discerned among the “Eurasian” branches. The Western Eurasians spread from Europe to Central Asia. A northern lineage known as the Ancient Northern Eurasians (ANE), which is a sister group of the Western Eurasian branch, is seen at least ~24 kyr BP in the form of the remains of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer MA1 from Siberia published by Raghavan et al. The ANE branch together with the major contribution of the East Asian branch and a smaller contribution from an Onge-like branch, constituted the ancestry of the Native Americans.

• What happened in the Holocene in western Eurasia? We see many differentiated populations in Western Eurasia by around 9-7 kyr BP, which include:
(1) cline of European hunter-gatherers – Western European hunter-gatherers (WHG) who sit at one end of the cline, followed by the Scandinavian hunter-gatherers from Scandinavia (SHG) and the eastern hunter-gatherers (EHG) from the Middle Volga region who sit at the other end of the cline. The EHG show clear evidence for a component of ancestry from the ANE. The report of a ~13.5 kyr BP WHG-like genome from young male with a Cro-magnon type morphology from Switzerland suggests that the hunter-gatherer cline had differentiated before that time.
(2) In Anatolia by around 9 Kyr BP we see the emergence of Neolithic farming and these constitute a group known as Early Farmers (EF).
(3) In the Caucasus, from at least as early as 13.3 to 9.7 kyr BP (i.e. late Paleolithic to Mesolithic) we have records of a hunter-gatherer population the Caucasian hunter-gatherer (CHG). The CHG forms a clade with EF rather than grouping with the members of the WHG-SHG-EHG cline.

• How did Neolithicization proceed in Western Eurasia? Around 8-7.5 kyr we see the Neolithicization of Europe with intrusive farmers entering and bringing about the transition from hunting and gathering to Neolithic agriculture. Ancient genomes of the early Neolithic farmers (8-7.5 kyr) from Europe group tightly with the EF from Anatolia suggesting that a front of farmers moved out from Neolithic Anatolia into Europe and replaced the older hunter-gatherer groups. The famous Iceman is once such EF. In the southern arc across the Mediterranean these intrusive farmers appear to have largely displaced the older groups in some places. These migrating EFs constitute the primary ancestry of the modern day populations like Sardinians, the Spanish, and Basque. They also moved northwards and westwards via the Danubian system into Hungary and Germany to overrun the hunter-gatherers. After the initial overwhelming of the hunter-gatherers it appears that they seem to have lingered on in marginal zones or also adopted farming and admixed with the intrusive EFs. Thus, through much of Europe from ~6-5 kyr BP (i.e. Middle Neolithic) we see the resurgence of WHG ancestry in the farmers. Thus they are now a mixed population with both hunter-gatherer and EF ancestry as evidenced by ancient genomes from Germany, Spain,Hungary and Sweden. Thus, ancient genomes have confirmed the early suspicion from archaeology that the Neolithicization of Europe was driven by the intrusion of EF from Anatolia. What it further clarified is that this process involved a massive replacement of hunter-gathers followed by resurgence of their ancestry resulting in an admixed European farming population by the middle-Neolithic.

• What happened in Eastern side? Starting at least around the transition between the late Neolithic and the beginning of the metal age around 7.2-6 kyr BP ancient genomes from the Middle Volga region (Samara) show that the EHG were beginning to undergo admixture with the CHG to give rise to an composite population. By the advent of the bronze age proper, a well-admixed population (~EHG (42-52%)-CHG(48-58%) is clearly in place in the entire arc to the north of the Black Sea and Caspian lake (Pontic steppes) all the way to the Middle Volga region as suggested by ancient genomes from ~5 kyr BP from Kalmykia and the Middle Volga region. This corresponds the archaeologically bronze age defined Yamnaya culture dated ~5.6-4.3 kyr BP. In the Middle Volga region the Yamnaya culture is succeeded by the archaeologically defined Poltavka culture (~4.9-4.2 kyr); the ancient genomes from Poltavka culture indicate that it had a genetic composition very close to the preceding Yamnaya in the region suggesting that there was no genetic transformation in course of this archaeological succession.

• The invasion of the Altai region of Asia from the Pontic steppes. Between 5.3-5 kyr BP the archaeological defined Afanasievo culture suddenly appears in the Altai and appears to show cultural links to the Yamnaya from the western steppes. Ancient genomes from the Afanasievo sites in the Altai show no links to the East Asia populations but are very close to the people from the Yamnaya sites. This suggests that the Afanasievo was founded by a massive invasion from the Pontic steppes across the steppes of Kazakhstan into the Altai.

• The invasion of Neolithic Europe from the Pontic steppes. Around ~4.9 kyr BP an archaeologically defined culture, the Corded Ware culture, appeared in central Europe. They were characterized by a pottery with a distinctive corded appearance and male graves with a battle axe. By the time the archaeological defined culture is last observed ~4.3 kyr BP it had reached the Atlantic shores of Europe and catalyzed a major cultural change across Europe as attested by archaeology. The recovery of ancient genomes from remains of Corded Ware people from Germany (~4.5 kyr BP) showed that they were specifically related to the Yamnaya populations with little local admixture from the original WHG and EF ancestry groups. The sudden appearance of Corded Ware with little initial admixture with the older groups is also paralleled by considerable disappearance of middle Neolithic European Y-chromosome and mitochondrial haplogroups suggesting a degree of population replacement. This showed that the entry of these people was most likely a massive invasion. The modern Europeans are are all admixtures of this Yamnaya derived population, at least in part via the Corded Ware people, with the early mixed population formed by the WHG and the EF.

In conclusion, these results show in a span of 500 years ~5.4-4.9 kyr BP the Yamnaya type people from the Pontic steppes launched at least two major invasions, first eastwards into the Altai and then westwards into Europe.

continued…

We are somewhat zealous in recycling unused bits of writing lending a certain pleonastic touch to the material presented here. We are placing herewith a bit of unused writing concerning the topic on which we have just written a note, namely the provenance of the Indo-Europeans and location of their original homeland – a problem which fascinates Indians and Europeans alike for the obvious parochial reasons. In the case of the Indians it is immensely important because it relates to very the origins of the Hindu religion including its heterodox offshoots. After all even the tathāgata termed his discovery as the Āryasaccāni. The Hindu religion in turn provides basis of their shared identity and the only non-trivial binding thread beyond peripherals like eating lentils, which holds the Indian state. It is the common foundation of the Hindu religion, which even today remains close to its Indo-European precursor, that unites the people of India. In the case of the Europeans there is a palpable identity crisis because of the two opposing and incompatible poles of their modern identity: The tension between Abrahamism, having it roots in West Asian cults centered on the neuro-atypical behaviors and experiences of the so called prophets of these cults on one pole, and the linguistic Indo-European identity on the other pole. Somewhere in the collective memory of the Europeans there still remains the vague knowledge that Abrahamism imposed itself via destruction of the old IE religions related to the Hindu religion. Thus, deep within the European psyche there is the conflict arising from the uncomfortable truth that they are almost like a host (the Indo-European linguistic framework) whose brain has been taken over by a parasite (Abrahamism) – a memetic equivalent of the Spinochordodes tellinii-bush cricket system.

Thus, barring a small minority in the European (Western) world who have come to the correct realization that the Hindus are a reflection of their past, a state they need to reacquire with humility, the rest experience a deep discomfort vis-a-vis the Hindus. Those closer to the Abrahamistic pole see the Hindus as unfinished agenda. They are baffled that, despite their vigorous efforts in putting the Greek, Roman, German, Lithuanian and Slavic religions beneath ground or in museums, a similar religion persists in India almost as though to mock them. Thus, following the foot-steps of their vandalistic predecessors they would like to do the same as they did to the IE religions of Europe to those of India for they are now automata under the parasite’s control. Those closer to the Indo-European linguistic pole, lacking the “soul” of an IE religion are seized with a sub-current sense of jealousy when faced with the Hindus. They wonder enviously how the Hindus could maintain the pristine IE tradition when they themselves have been shorn of it. They vent this jealousy in different ways: 1) by attempting to deny the deep IE origins/affinities of Hindus. 2) By presenting the IE features of Hindus as a mere facade which was acquired (memes only with little genetic transfer) from an ethnically purer strand of peoples closer to the Europeans. Both these responses may sometimes be accompanied by their playing up the concept of belonging to a superior biological stock than the Hindus (e.g. presenting higher IQ, white skin, greater physical strength, as evidence for this contention).

The Hindu response to this has been weak and in the recent years characterized by its own pathological delusion. In the years before independence from the tyrannical English rule they often tacitly accepted their ancient religio-linguistic ties to the Europeans but failed to study it on their own terms despite being the last IE civilization of note still alive. For example we could possible count on our digits the number of Hindus today who have made a deep study of the Iguvine Tablets, that remarkable document of IE tradition. After independence, there has been a slow internalization of the Western split-identity and the Hindus a slipped down further by idiotically seeking to mirror the same constructs, in their own misinformed way, within themselves. Thus, we find some of them denying that the common origin of IE languages and thundering on social media with heady brew of their ignorance. Others create a mirror image of the Western view, where they are the original holders of IE culture, which they then transferred (typically only memetically) to the west. Yet others deny the consequences of IE theory, which would entail movement of Indo-Europeans into India: this is because they have internalized the discomfort within the Europeans arising from their split identity. Thus, they think accepting the entry of IE people into India give the Hindus a split identity too. They are also unable to effectively counter the corollary to this line of thinking: if IE came from outside into the Indian subcontinent and we base our identity on it, should we not also accept the 2nd and 3rd Abrahamisms, which have come from outside into India as part of our socio-religio-linguistic fabric? In fact the latter is the line pushed by the enemies of the Hindus to procure the much-sought-after foothold for the parasites in the Indian system and the Hindus do not have any response to it beyond claiming autochthonism. Thorough understanding of this problem is important for the Hindu elite in formulating their defensive response against ongoing Western assault against their civilization. However, they have largely failed in this response due to a priori acceptance of Western categories, rather than formulate a heathen alternative, which analyzes the situation by uncompromisingly upholding the heathen structure of thought, which is what the Hindu religion is founded upon. Thus, we see Hindus talking of the “Anglo-Saxon” or “Caucasian” world view, when in reality what they are trying to apprehend is a Christian world view being broadcast by outer Anglo-Saxon or other leukospheric shells (overt or secularized and Trojan-horsed into India in the form of the English-inspired “rule of law”). What the Hindus fail to realize is that this Christian world view has little to do with what was actually the Anglo-Saxon world view. Those original Indo-European memes propagating among the old Anglii and Saxones have been cannibalized and extirpated by the Christian holy warriors. Thus, at home, the direct consequence of the Hindu elite’s internalization of the Western discourse and its blind imitation without even a speck of viveka has spawned the intellectually lazy and the empirically indefensible “Out of India hypothesis” (OIT). Effectively OIT will serve the foes as a means to make the the Hindu drop his axe on his on foot.

Thus, if we still have at least a crumb of robustness left in the next generation, the future vivekānvita Hindus might look back and realize how the OIT was yet another diversion arising from biting into a tasty-looking occidental bait – much like the Shinde and the Holkar’s blunders might look to us today.

It was probably one weekend after the tumultuous incidents concerning the gifts of Vidrum. Somakhya’s cousin Saumanasa and her husband Matidhvaja had visited him and Lootika. Saumanasa had spent a good deal of the time with Lootika in the kitchen learning various tricks from her. They had also spent some time talking about science and visiting the museums in the city. They had just left that morning and later in the afternoon Somakhya and Lootika had biked to the lakeside in woods in the vicinity to observe the Comb Ducks. Having chained their bikes to tree behind screening bushes they took up their gear and started climbing up the incline to reach their observation point that afforded a commanding view of the dinosaurs.

Lootika: “Oh Bhṛgu I wish life froze for ever like this.”
Somakhya smiled and said: “And Gautamī you are saying this? Are we not headed to see the Comb Ducks; would it not teach us of the ephemerality of all of this.”
Chuckling Lootika said: “buddhyā na jāyate sā cintā |indriyāṇām autrakoṣāt udeti, śāstra-gaṇḍānaṃ bhāṣaṇam iva, priyatama |”
Then she added: “kaṃ mantrapadaṃ pradhyāyase?”
Somakhya: “varārohe: īśānāso naro amartyenāstāvi jano divyo gayena |”
Lootika: “Ain’t it strange that our Gaya is amartya whereas that of the Iranians of Zarathustra is martya.”
Somakhya: “Good point. Have always wondered why Zarathustra had to invert even this one.”
Lootika: “Indeed, that too have Gayo Maretan created on the banks of the good river Daitya to be specifically slain by the daeva-s.”
Somakhya: “But there seems to be something he left alone. Our Gayo Amartya has a special link to the Marut-s. Their Gayo Maretan, while placed against the daeva-s, and in someways Zarathustra specifically implied those of the Rudriya class, is still associated with Sraosha, the cognate of our Skanda, the only deity of the Rudriya class left alone by the old camel.”
Lootika: “This seems like a much ignored facet of Indo-Iranian miscellany that we ought to explore in greater detail someday.”

They had reached their spot on the elevation and started surveying the bank of the lake below to catch sight of the Comb Ducks. They saw a prominent male duck strutting about the bank with a bevy of females all around him.

Lootika: “Talk of ignoring the pratyakṣa for the parokṣa: The amount of ink people have spent on things like theropod ornamentation, or for that matter the hadrosaurian equivalents, without bothering to look at the living theropods as this Comb Duck.”
Somakhya: “Indeed, that crest of his might have made Monolophosaurus or Guanlong proud”.

By then Lootika had taken in their social structure: “Somakhya, it looks as though he is monopolizing a large harem like tyrant Akbar.”
Somakhya: “It appears that it has taken him some effort to get there. That sulking male in the distance appears to have been trashed by him and the former’s females have been attached to his harem.”
Lootika: “That seems rather different the Steamer Ducks I saw while visiting dakṣiṇa-krauñca-dvīpa after graduating. There a male-female pair defends their territory against other such. But in the combat the male battles the male from the invading pair and the female battles the corresponding female. The male there has a bony knob on his wrist which allows him to use his wing as a club. We also witnessed a gory battle where one of the Steamers struck down another duck may be Shoveler with a blow from his club.”
Somakhya: “These Comb Ducks are not strictly harem-forming. They are more like human society. Some big men hold a harem, some are monogamous, while others have a different female each season… Ah it seems like we are going to catch some action.”

A male Combed Duck had flown into the big man’s territory and was attempting to rape one of the females in the harem. The holder of the harem flapped his wings exaggeratedly and vocalized. But the intrusive male continued with the rape. Flying up the lord of the harem landed beside the intruder and tried to strike him with his foot. Stopping his act the intruder returned the challenge by raising his wing deploying a knob on his wrist as a club.

Lootika: “Ah! Never knew even this guy wielded his wing as a club.”
Somakhya: “Yes, I was not aware of this too till I read about it in an old work of the paleontologist Lydekker. That’s why I started observing them more closely. Look…”
The harem-guarding male was clearly no slouch. He met the attacker’s wing with is own and the two sparred for some time using their wings as well as rising up assisted by their wings to deliver kicks. Finally, the defending male delivered blow on the neck of the intruder followed by a kick and a bite. Probably injured the intruder flew away in a haste.

Lootika: “That was dramatic. My second in terms of angry ducks, though we had seen the lapwing use its sharp wrist spur before.”
Somakhya: “A relative of these ducks,the Spur-winged Goose from Africa, has a sharp spur instead of the knob and uses it as a dagger in attacking and killing other birds of the same and different species.”
Lootika: “There we have an analog for the spike thumbed iguanodonts among these modern dinosaurs. ”

Just then a feral buffalo entered the quiet lake causing a bit of a stir. Somakhya: “What does that remind you of?”
Lootika: “We have been lucky in our sightings today:
“un madhva ūrmir vananā atiṣṭhipad
apo vasāno mahiṣo vi gāhate |”
[Indeed, the wave of honey has raised the desires, clothing himself with the waters the buffalo plunges into them.]

They hi-fived and then wandered into a deep and secluded spot in the woods, the entry to which few knew, and had some fun shooting targets for a while. As the sun was dipping towards the pascima-mayūkha they started walking back to their bikes. Lootika checked her phone and sending off a message said: “Saumanasa says that they have reached their place safely.”
Somakhya: “Good”.
Lootika: “You never said anything much of this cousin of yours beyond the fact she existed. You never tried to collaborate with her?”
Somakhya: “Why would I?”
Lootika: “Why not, she has become a superstar and seems to have won lot of yaśas.
Somakhya: “That would be like Arjuna seeking the gopāla-senā instead of Kṛṣṇa.”
Lootika smiled: “Why? You seem unimpressed but then we got along very well with them.”
Somakhya: “No doubt we had a good time and I do value Saumanasa as a relative, and as someone whom might further a fraction of my genes. But then, when I have Indrasena, you the descendant of Vāmadeva, and your formidable sisters, why would I seek her, be she a jāmi or an ajāmi, to collaborate. When it comes to karman one has to associate with people with viveka rather than just buddhi.”
Lootika: “Ouch! If I may comment on your kinswoman, I too perceived some jagged ends in her thought process.”
Somakhya: “How would you not jālikā? I overheard you last night in the kitchen telling her the tale of the four brāhmaṇa-s and the resurrection of the lion. That tale in itself would be diagnostic of an avivikti. And I guess you remember the discussion we had in the museum where we saw her, a superstar scientist, expressing doubt that the sauropods ever walked on land as adults.”
Lootika: “Yes that was funny. She and Matidhvaja even started doing calculations to show that the sacrum of the sauropod was too heavy for the legs! And by the way I did have some fun arguing with her about all kinds of things, including free-trade, openness in presenting unpublished research, attitudes towards mleccha-s, and all that.”

As they unchained their bikes and started on the way to their respective labs that conversation suddenly dropped off. Later that night on the way back home both were lost in thought about their respective investigations until they reached the market to pick up some vegetables and fruits. As they resumed their homeward ride Lootika broke the silence: “I was thinking about this issue of viveka and buddhi inspired by Saumanasa’s case, and it struck me how these things are actually distinct vectors. While people like the Americans became good at quantifying and testing for buddhi, they seem to have largely ignored viveka. I would think the difference between a Timur and Chingiz stemmed from the latter being endowed with a much greater reservoir of viveka.”
Somakhya: “Or closer to home both Śivājī and Śaṃbhūjī were endowed with great bravery and intelligence but the latter was an embodiment of aviveka. You may also remember our classmate from school days, Hemalinga, who despite his enormous endowment in mathematical capacity was rather incapable of discerning where his numeracy might be most useful.”
Lootika: “That indeed was a line of thought I had – we episodically see mathematicians act as though they can smash biological problems even as they have reduced redoubtable fortresses of physics with their fire power. But in reality they fail in a rather pedestrian fashion despite their superior buddhi. I would conjecture that this is due a certain autistic nature of their intelligence, which at the same time proves to be their advantage and failing.”
Somakhya: “One may postulate that there two poles here. The metaphorical pole and the literal pole. Many with high intelligence have tendency to be close to either pole. Those close to the literal pole tend to see things too literally to perceive subtle connections that accompany discernment. Those close to the metaphorical pole are literally swamped with metaphors; seeing a profusion of connections without being able to weed out the meaningless from the meaningful, they too tend to be low on viveka. Having high IQ and also being at the sweet spot between the poles does not seem to be a common trait in that already rarefied subset.”

By then they were home and continued their chatter seated on the mat in their fire-room.
Lootika: “I would say Hemalinga sat more on the neuro-typical side of the autistic spectrum, for I heard via Vrishchika that he is doing well as a gambler.”
Somakhya: “There seems to be a segment closer to the neuro-typical side, where one is not as unempathetically literal as on the far end, but still one tends to be more comfortable with well-defined parameters. These are whom I call the crackers. Hemalinga is a good example cracker. They are great at cracking already defined problems that have been laid out others – like exams, quizzes or for that matter gambling. They are not those who will create new question, which no one had thought about, and try to solve it thereafter – they are not very effective at creating new knowledge though they might be good at applying knowledge.”
Lootika: “This might also account for the relative failure of mathematicians in their invasions of biology as opposed to physics. In physics, the problems are already present in a well-defined mathematicized language into which they simply need to float in their artillery in the form of earlier mathematical developments in the abstract realm.”
Somakhya: “O Gautamī, more philosophically we could say that those who are further out on the mathematical spectrum are good with manipulating the crisp, ideal Platonic entities and discovering such in the realm of abstraction but not necessarily good at at recognizing and playing with their smudged out counterparts seen in real life.”

Lootika: “In terms of neural function could this be related to the quantitative and verbal IQ of the population not being exactly aligned vectors despite being positively correlated. Perhaps, this idea is supported by the observation that the angle between the QIQ and VIQ vectors seems to be different in different populations. Some researchers have previously pointed that the cīna-s, cīna-bhṛtya-s and sūryadhvaja-s have a pronounced angle between their QIQ and VIQ vectors, being more quantitative than verbal as a people.”
Somakhya: “Anecdotally this might seem even more exaggerated for the cīna-s and cīna-bhṛtya-s than for the sūryadhvaja-s, which in turn seems to reflect the knowledge-production trajectories of those prācya-s. Whereas the sūryadhvaja-s have exhibited remarkable originality in various spheres, the other two prācya-s have tended to be more of the cracker-type laboring effectively only when a new path has been shown to them, notwithstanding what the naked Needham might have built up for them.”

Lootika: “But then O Bhārgava, we are back to IQ; returning to where we started, is there not something in this regard that is not entirely capture by this whole IQ thing: The viveka-buddhi-viccheda?”
Somakhya: “Like the poles of the metaphorical and the literal there are other poles that define a space within which power of IQ can act. Another such dyad of poles is that of empiricism and derivationism. At the former pole is the person with a tendency to approach a problem by first accruing a body of actual observations on the problem either in a naturalistic context or via controlled experiments. At the latter pole is the person with a tendency to approach a problem by trying to derive a solution for it from first principles or a set of axioms.”
Lootika: “Saumanasa seems to be of the derivationist type placing much faith in derivation from first principles – like arguing that the adult sauropod could not be terrestrial. Or for that matter her arguments regarding why the failure to adopt free-trade was the cause of the failure of our people rather than the opposite.”
Somakhya: “One may discern different types of aviveka in this domain: 1) the failure to apply the appropriate axioms for the world in which they are operating – like assuming the triangles are on a plane when in reality they lie on a sphere. 2) faulty first principles. 3) Lack of sufficient knowledge; hence, they are only in possession of a limited or incomplete set of first principles. When your high intelligence is geared towards solving things from first principles rather than gathering all the useful data on the system at hand, then, I would postulate, that you develop a certain carelessness towards the first principles themselves.”
Lootika: “Here too one tends to have a sweet spot between the poles for the excessive empiricist would be paralyzed by the inability of knowing when to stop gathering data and start building a useful model. It seems to me that finding this sweet spot is hardly a trivial operation.”
Somakhya: “Hardly trivial indeed, but if we need an ideal we may turn to the great sage Pāṇini – he first went about data collection to the point he had good enough coverage in his gaṇapāṭha and then came up with an appropriate number of first principles of completely describe his data. With that we may lay down our sūtra-s in regard to this discussion, O Bārhadukthī: parokṣa-pratyakṣav ālocanādiniyama-vādav ityādi dvandvāni | anyatarasyātiśayenāvivekaḥ |

Lootika: “O kānta, to collect gaṇapāṭha-s one needs a proclivity for abhyāsa. Is it not sort of paradoxical that despite their buddhi the ādiniyamavādin-s might avoid doing so?”
Somakhya: “If I might go as far as to psychoanalyze them a bit, the ability to build models from ground up results in a certain assuredness in a buddhimat. Along with this their fast-working mind is also less inclined to pursue more laborious tasks because they see that as the thing for the less-endowed. After all even we give the less-endowed students, whom we might get saddled with, tasks of labor, the purpose of which they don’t fully grasp. Hence, it is not uncommon for a buddhimat to leap to making a model even before the data is all gathered. Thus, it is perhaps not a surprise to see many of them get ensnared in a certain class of constructs that are wrong but appear reasonable or perhaps even fancy to them.”
Lootika: “If one were to make a list of such ensnarements I would place in it Marxism, new atheism, liberalism, egalitarianism, metempsychoticism … and while we are perhaps rather removed from that science, I would say a sizable body of economic theorizing would slot right in here. Any more to add to the list?”
Somakhya: “Why not, Indian secularism, spiritualism sans religion, feminism, Aryan autochthonism, convergent evolution of P-loop NTPases or any other such group of proteins. I don’t know, the list certainly does not end there.”

Lootika: “All this still seems to be rational. Let’s not leave out yet another axis, which perhaps is poorly correlated with IQ but there nevertheless – the proclivity for belief. Once you are high on that axis you don’t need to have a reason to accept an ensnaring construct and your IQ won’t interfere either.”
Somakhya: “That’s why I said dvandvāni – this is one more of them. No doubt being high on both ādiniyamavāda and belief can be a veritable thermobaric blast. But all of us are perhaps at least a little influenced by are beliefs for if it was entirely bad that tendency should not have survived selection, rather it should have been rationalism all the way.”

Lootika: “ity alaṃ pravādena | Coming back to business, my student and I have successfully purified three of the deoxyribohydrolases, three REases, and four active TIR domains from bacteria that you had identified. We are all set to test your predictions starting tomorrow.”

Indrasena had arrived at the house of Somakhya and Lootika for learning mysterious matters of religion. Entering their fire-room he saw Somakhya seated beside the square altar on a mat of bovine skin and Lootika seated beside the circular altar on a similar skin with a yoktra girdle around her waist. Indrasena seating himself in the svastikāsana on a mat at the appropriate corner said: “Agnishad, the brāhmaṇa from Cerapada, was a notable somayājin. Having performed the agniṣṭoma he drank soma. But he apparently did not know the rahasya rituals. Hence, one day he was struck by the vajra of deva Rudra and was killed. I do not wish to go that way. O Somakhya and Lootika I seek the rahasya-s pertaining the mysterious rituals that you were to impart to me.”

Somakhya: “These rituals are indeed mysterious. We cannot claim by any means to have understood their mysteries in completeness. They certainly lie beyond the reach of the nominal brāhmaṇa, who has not penetrated the depths of the śruti or merely carries the śruti as a donkey carrying sandalwood. We, following the path of the great Atharvan-s who have gone before us to the realm of the frightful Yama, have grasped the merest tip of the iceberg of mysteries placed in the śruti by the ṛṣi-s of yore. You need not be told this O Indrasena, still let me repeat, such mysteries can only be understood by making the offerings in the realm that is known as Vivasvant’s seat. When the yajamāna-s make offerings without knowing Vivasvant’s seat he is exposed to the danger of becoming a samidh in the offering to Vivasvant’s black son before his time. Even if does know it, he remains in danger, for the darts of Paśupati are many. Now dear Lootika let us ensure that you are fit to be the mistress of the ritual mysteries in this instruction of our friend Indrasena: Expound the seat of Vivasvant.”

Lootika: “In the sūkta whose seer is unknown there is the triṣṭubh mantra:
yasmin devā vidathe mādayante
vivasvataḥ sadane dhārayante |
sūrye jyotir adadhur māsy aktūn
pari dyotaniṃ carato ajasrā ||
(In which ritual assembly the deva-s are exhilarated,
in the seat of Vivasvant they cause to uphold [the laws]
they placed the light in the sun and nights in the moon
the two move the splendor in cycles unceasingly.)

The deva-s uphold the vrata-s or the laws which govern all existence in the seat of Vivasvant. To the old ārya-s the glowing of the sun, the lunar phases, and the cyclic movement of the sun and the moon in the sky, were embodiments of these laws. That seat of Vivasvant is hence the universe. At its origin the deva-s manifested as those laws. But the seat of Vivasvant is also the ritual assembly where the deva-s are exhilarated with the offerings of the yajamāna. Thus, when the ritualist performs a ritual the ritual arena becomes an abstraction of the seat of Vivasvant.”

Somakhya: “Good, you are keeping with your founding father vipra Dīrghatamas Aucāthya. Indrasena would you back up Lootika’s statement that the deva-s are upholding the vrata-s?”

Indrasena: “An ancient āṅgirasa states:
yasyā devā upasthe
vratā viśve dhārayante |
sūryāmāsā dṛśe kam ||

(She in whose lap, deva-s
cause to uphold all laws,
for seeing the sun and moon.)

Here, we see a parallel to the mantra Lootika expounded and vrata is explicitly mentioned. Just as the seat of Vivasvant is the universe represented as the ritual arena, so also the lap of the goddess Pṛśni, the consort of Rudra and the mother of the Marut-s, is also a metaphor for the same, the female cognate of the same. Hence, Lootika was correct in supplying vrata-s in the previous mantra.”

Somakhya: “Good. With the knowledge of Vivasvant’s seat and its other cognates in place the ritualist must call upon Vivasvant so that he makes us fearless of the fears culminating in the approach of his son. So the ritualist utters the incantation:
vivasvān no abhyaṃ kṛṇotu |
(May Vivasvant make us fearless.)

Now Indrasena drink the soma from the graha and utter the mantra of the ‘avarodhana’ (the descending bridge) to protect yourself from Yama Vaivasvata and expound it.”

Indrasena: “The ṛṣi Kaśyapa, who was one of the first Soma ritualists, said in his mantra:
atra rājā vaivasvato yatrāvarodhanaṃ divaḥ |
yatrāmūr yahvatīr āpas tatra mām amṛtaṃ kṛdhī indrāyendo pari srava ||
(Here where Vaivasvata is king, there is a descending bridge from the heaven,
where the fresh, ever-flowing waters are, there make me immortal, may the Soma drop flow around for Indra!)

The bridge, which descends from the divine realm to that of Vaivasvata, should be seen as the stars in the region of the constellation of Orion, where the two dogs of Yama (Canis Major and Canis Minor) stand guard. The fresh ever-flowing waters there represent the Milky Way. The Indu in the ritual arena is the Ephedra juice but in the celestial realm is actually the moon, the celestial Soma. That is why the prefix pari is used with verb sru.”

Somakhya then continued: “You have mastered the rahasya of the avarodhana and thus protected yourself. The ritualist then needs to be mindful of the link to the seat of Vivasvant, which is like an umbilical cord connecting him during the ritual, where he experiences the presence of the deva-s. This has been laid out by the prince Parucchepa Daivodāsi in his mantra thusly:
astu śrauṣaṭ puro agnīṃ dhiyā dadha
ā nu tac chardho divyaṃ vṛṇīmaha indravāyū vṛṇīmahe |
yad dha krāṇā vivasvati nābhā saṃdāyi navyasī |
adha pra sū na upa yantu dhītayo devāṃ acchā na dhītayaḥ ||
(So be it, he shall hear! I place Agni in front through my mantra-thought,
Now here we choose the divine host (Marut-s); we chose Indra and Vayu.
When indeed we are swiftly linked to the nave in Vivasvant’s [seat],
then may our mantra-thoughts travel forth, as if the mantra-thoughts are going towards the deva-s.)

Note that the astu śrauṣaṭ is one of the five ritual calls that are said to constitute the ritual itself and also stand for the five animals the old ārya-s greatly valued. They are
o3 śrāvaya (Make the devatā hear)
astu śrauṣaṭ (So be it, he shall hear)
yaja (worship [the devatā])
ye3 yajāmahe (we are those who worship) [the devatā]
vau3ṣaṭ (May [Agni] bear the offering [to the deva-s]

Thus, having known this, at the seat of Vivasvant he invokes the fierce Indra the lord of the battle.”

Looking at fire at his altar Somakhya gave the call: “indram ā3 vaha |”
He then followed it with the ghee offering directly with the sruva: ye3 yajāmahe indraṃ svāhā| idam indrāya na mama |

Indrasena note that these svāhā offerings should be made with the devatā in the accusative case because the deity is the object of the verb yajāmahe.

Somakhya invoked Indra: “
yudhendro mahnā varivaś cakāra
devebhyaḥ satpatiś carṣaṇiprāḥ |
vivasvataḥ sadane asya tāni
viprā ukthebhiḥ kavayo gṛṇanti || śrau3ṣaṭ
(In battle through his greatness Indra had made the wide space for the deva-s,
he is the lord of all that exists, the leader of all the peoples.
At the seat of Vivasvant these [acts] of his
the vipra-s, the kavi-s recite with their chants.)”

Then he said: “With this mantra of the great ṛṣi Viśvāmitra we should invoke Indra, who through his great acts in battle made the universe that of the deva-s, and then with the name of Viṣṇu filling the sruk with the sruva make the offering.
ye3 yajāmahe
sasānātyāṃ uta sūryaṃ sasānendraḥ
sasāna purubhojasaṃ gām |
hiraṇyayam uta bhogaṃ sasāna hatvī
dasyūn prāryaṃ varṇam āvat || vau3ṣaṭ | idam indrāya na mama ||
(Indra won the horses, and also he gained the sun,
he gained the cow, the source of much food,
and also the wealth of gold he conquered;
Having slain the dasyu-s he aided the ārya color.)

Thus, we must worship Indra so that we are sthavira-s in the battle with the dasyu-s.”

Turning to Lootika, Somakhya called upon her: “aindryā gārhapatyam upatiṣṭhasva |”
Lootika then clarified this point to Indrasena: “Note the use of the verb upa-sthā in the ātmanepada. This has been specified by the sūtra: upān mantra-karaṇe | of sage Pāṇini. When the when prefix upa is used with verb sthā in the context of ritual to the deva-s then the verb takes the ātmanepada.

The Lootika continued with the invocation at her altar:
“ahastā yad apadī vardhata kṣāḥ śacībhir vedyānām |
Śuṣṇam pari pradakṣiṇid viśvāyave ni śiśnathaḥ || śrau3ṣaṭ
(When handless and footless the earth grew by her powers of wise means,
you went clockwise around Śuṣṇa and for all life [or for all the āyu-s ] you struck him down.)”

Then she made an offering with the juhū ladle into the fire at her altar:
ye yajāmahe
vy ānaḻ indraḥ pṛtanāḥ svojā āsmai yatante sakhyāya pūrvīḥ |
ā smā rathaṃ na pṛtanāsu tiṣṭha yam bhadrayā sumatyā codayāse || vau3ṣaṭ | idam indrāya na mama ||
(The most mighty indra has pierced the enemy ranks;
Many foremost [warriors] go to him for friendship.
[O Indra]mount your car as though for battle;
you drive forth for [bringing] fortune and favor.)

Then Somakhya stood up recited the praise of Indra:
“tvam āyasam prati vartayo gor
divo aśmānam upanītam ṛbhvā |
kutsāya yatra puruhūta vanvañ
chuṣṇam anantaiḥ pariyāsi vadhaiḥ ||+ oṃ
(You, the skillful one, spun away the metal stone of heaven led close to the cow;
when for Kutsa, O much invoked one, winning over Śuṣṇa you surrounded him with endless deadly missiles.)

purā yat sūras tamaso apītes
tam adrivaḥ phaligaṃ hetim asya |
Śuṣṇasya cit parihitaṃ yad ojo
divas pari sugrathitaṃ tad ādaḥ ||
(Before when the sun enters the darkness, hurl the missile at the cave, O one with the stones!
Indeed, the might of Śuṣṇa which surrounded him, that you tore off from the heaven [though] it was well-knotted around [it].

indro divaḥ pratimānam pṛthivyā
viśvā veda savanā hanti Śuṣṇam |
mahīṃ cid dyām ātanot sūryeṇa
cāskambha cit kambhanena skabhīyān ||+oṃ
(Indra is the image of heaven and earth,
he knows all the [Soma] pressings [and] slays Śuṣṇa,
indeed, earth and heaven he extended with the sun,
He verily held up the world by the world-axis, he is the primary world axis.)”

Indrasena: “There are many mysteries here that are not easily grasped.”
Somakhya: “That is true. Some of them lie beyond our reach because the original aindra religion of our ancestors has been fogged by the later dominance of the divergent sects. Yet,we must admire the great effort of prime minister Sāyaṇa who attempted to penetrate these mysteries as one of the first tasks when the nation of the Hindus was revived from the Śuṣṇa-like grip of the marūnmatta-s.”
Indrasena: “No doubt we must uphold the tradition of Śaunaka as that somapāyin who followed the deva-dharma from the Rāṣṭraka country had said to me when I was young. We must labor on with what survives, deprecating the kautsa ignorance that spread among the ritualists.”

Lootika: “The lesser mysteries are those of grammar. Indrasena, you might have noticed that the reduplicated perfect form of the verb skambh as being cāskambha. In every day language we use caskambha. This elongation of the first syllable in the śruti is accounted for by the great grammarian under the sūtra: ‘tujādīnām dīrgho ‘bhyāsasya |‘…”
Indrasena: “Yes. Another well-known example of that would be the perfect verb in: ‘sa dādhāra yaḥ pṛthivīṃ dyām uta |‘”
Lootika: “Correct. Further, because it is liṭ of skambh it refers to the ancient, unwitnessed past (i.e. parokṣe liṭ). Hence it refers to the time of the origin, when Indra made the universe expand. He is that which holds the boundaries of the universe wide apart; hence he is called the skabhīyān. Another grammatical point of note in this regard is the loss of the ‘s’ from the word skambhana in the śruti after the cit. Thus, we have cit kambhanena. Indra is also the model of the universe itself; hence, indro divaḥ pratimānam pṛthivyā.”
Indrasena: “Indeed, that is affirmed by ṛṣi Gṛtsamada: yo viśvasya pratimānam babhūva |
Somakhya: “Good. This, O Indrasena, is the rahasya the Atharvan is mindful off when he utters the incantation: oṃ bhūr bhuvaḥ suvar janad vṛdhat karad ruhan mahat tac cham om indravato havāmahe |

To continue on the matter of grammar that Lootika brought up, as a historical aside, it appears that the reduplicated liṭ was at best weak in the core Indo-European language. It appears to developed as an obligate form, which we see in our language, only in the group that includes Graeco-Armenian and Indo-Iranian. We suspect that this supports a Graeco-Armeno-Aryan clade in the ancestor of which this development occurred in the Caucasus region. Under this hypothesis the satem development happened after the Indo-Iranian split off and then moved in proximity to the clade Balto-Slavic to influence it.”

Indrasena: “The Graeco-Armeno-Aryan clade is also probably supported by the emergence of the prefix-augmented imperfects (laṅ) and aorists (luṅ) occurring along side the unaugmented forms resembling them.”

Somakhya: “I also tend to favor that view – the simultaneous occurrence of the augmented and unaugmented forms is likely to be a synapomorphy of the Graeco-Armeno-Aryan clade. However, the repeated loss of it, both on the Greek and our side warrants us to be a bit cautious. While we are talking about these forms you might have noted that prati vartayaḥ and vardhata in the deployed mantra-s, which are such unaugmented parasmai- and ātmane-pada formations.”

Lootika: “The grammar, with links to earlier IE clades, apart the semantics are where the greater mysteries lie. One mystery pertains to what the ‘growing of the of the Earth’ means?”
Somakhya: “The learned prime minister holds that it represents the growth of vegetation on the earth. Given that the dānava Śuṣṇa is said to be the demon of drought, when he enveloped the earth, the earth by her ‘wise means’ i.e. counter-māyā made the vegetation grow in spite of him. But there are many other mysteries that are much harder to unveil.”

Lootika: “What is the metal stone of the heaven, alluded to in multiple mantra-s? What is the cow which from which it was turned away? Why does Indra always have to go around or surround Śuṣṇa, as though circling the sacrificial animal, before killing him? What are the knots by which Śuṣṇa is well-tethered to the heavens?”

Indrasena: “These indeed seem rather mysterious when one compares it to the one good survival of the Śuṣṇa legend I am aware of from the brāhmaṇa portion of the Kāṭhaka-saṃhitā:
‘The deva-s and the asura-s were at war. But amṛta was with the asura-s, within Śuṣṇa. Whenever a deva would be killed he could not be revived. But when the deva-s killed an asura, Śuṣṇa would breath upon him with the amṛta and revive him. Indra realized that the amṛta was with the asura-s within Śuṣṇa. So Indra took the form of a ball of honey and placed himself on Śuṣṇa’s path. Śuṣṇa ate it up. Indra immediately became a golden eagle and seizing the amṛta flew out of Śuṣṇa’s mouth. Hence, the golden eagle is the mightiest of the birds because he is one form of Indra. He who knows this possesses the amṛtavidyā.’ There is some subliminal connection between this later reflex of the legend and the earlier ones in the ādiśruti. What could it be?”

Somakhya: “While not all the mysteries are clear to us it is indeed true that these legends have a connection. We posit that the Śuṣṇa cycle had many branches of which only one survives in any detail. There was an earthly version which was associated was probably associated with Śuṣṇa as the bringer of drought. There was a heavenly version, which took multiple forms itself: There are indirect allusions to Śuṣṇa’s serpentine nature, which might relate to him tying himself around the heavens (also perhaps supported by Eastern Iranic etymologies for snake). There is also a form of the legend where Indra is said to steal the wheel of the sun in the sky during the Śuṣṇa battle. E.g. ṛśi Agastya says:
muṣāya sūryaṃ kave
cakram īśāna ojasā |
vaha śuṣṇāya vadhaṃ
kutsaṃ vātasyāśvaiḥ ||
O kavi [Indra] steal the wheel, [i.e.] the sun,
he [Indra] who by his might is the overlord,
bear Kutsa with the horses of wind,
for the slaying of Śuṣṇa

There is the allusion to the sun about head into the darkness of the cave when Indra deploys his missiles. We propose that the cow from which Indra turns away the metal stone is again the sun. We do think these allusions are indeed related to the later reflex of the legend of the Kāṭhaka-s that you narrated. The ball of honey is the sun – a metaphor given the yellowness of honey. Hence, we posit that mysteries pf these legends of Śuṣṇa – the stealing of the sun-wheel, the stone of heaven approaching the sun, Śuṣṇa eating the honey ball, Indra slaying Śuṣṇa just as the sun was entering the darkness of the cave – are all associated with the phenomenon of the eclipse. I am sure you see the parallels to the even later reverberations of these through the sphere of legends.”

Indrasena: “How could one not? In the Viṣṇu cycle the serpentine Rāhu swallows the sun; He is one among the asura-s who held the amṛta in his mouth; he achieved it by deploying his māyā; the amṛta was stolen from the asura-s by Viṣṇu in his female form. Viṣṇu severs Rāhu’s head with the cakra. This parallels another legend in which Indra too wields the sun as his cakra to slay Vala; Gṛtsamada states:
avartayat sūryo na cakram
bhinad valam indro aṅgirasvān ||”
Lootika: “Thus, we can see many motifs come together in different ways. The eagle stealing the amṛta is of old Indo-European vintage. Moving further afield, the motif of stealing the āmṛta from asura-s reappears in the later legend of āṅgirasa Kaca stealing the saṃjīvanī from Uśanas Kāvya while being within him, having entered via his beer. The same Uśanas Kāvya is associated with the Śuṣṇa-hatya along with Kutsa Ārjuneya; in this legend perhaps the Kutsa is a heavenly figure rather than the āṅgirasa ṛṣi. And then perhaps Indra going around or encircling Śuṣṇa is an allusion to circlings of the heavenly bodies in course of the phenomena like eclipses.”

Somakhya: “Some of these are still at the edge of the veil; some mysteries still remain but mindful of the rahasya-s we do know we must thus perform the ritual to Maghavan.”

Somakhya’s and Lootika’s families were returning from a ritual at the less-known temple of the goddess Bhuvaneśvarī. They were there to worship a mysterious yantra, which is one of the rare examples of the depiction of a curve known as the astroid in Hindu tradition. On the way back Somakhya’s family was invited to for lunch at Lootika’s house. Lootika wanted Somakhya to show her how to construct the astroid used in the yantra without using one circle rolling inside another – the method used by the śaiva tāntrika-s of yore who composed the Bhuvaneśvarī lore. But before they could begin Somakhya was distracted by the lines Lootika was humming: “Hey, you seem to be humming a śūlajana-kāvya. That too a poem I was reading last night.”
Lootika: “What? I was reading the same last night too … talk of the Über-geist.”
Somakhya: “Why that poem?”

Lootika: “It is an interesting reason why I picked it up. I had gone to the university yesterday to do some experiments. There a professor asked me if I might be interested in studying some strange basal chordates, salps, which he had obtained from the sea. These salps with an interesting alternation of sexual and asexual cycles were described long ago by Adelbert von Chamisso in course of his explorations – one could after all call him a lesser von Humboldt. I recalled that there was a poem of his in the collection of śūlajana-kāvya that we have for reading. So on returning home I read it and was captivated by it. If there is a non-Aryan kāvya that has dhvani then then this one exemplar from the śūlajana-s.”

Somakhya: “dhvani … yes, that’s exactly what I feel with that padya. Our resonance reinforces that. The opening itself has a special quality to it. Read out the first verse Gautamī.”

Lootika picked up her book and read it out:
“Burg Niedeck ist im Elsaß der Sage wohlbekannt,
die Höhe, wo vorzeiten die Burg der Riesen stand;
sie selbst ist nun verfallen, die Stätte wüst und leer,
du fragest nach den Riesen, du findest sie nicht mehr.”
[The castle Niedeck is in Alsace, its saga is well-known,
On its heights, aforetime the castle of the giants stood,
it is now all ruined, the place itself is empty and bare,
if you ask regarding the giants, you find them no more.]

Lootika then continued: “Somakhya, this looks like a memory filtering down from the time before pan-Germania fell to the pretonmāda. The Riese seems like a remnant of the lore of the giants that was at the base of the northern Germanic genesis. In a sense the passing of the time of the giants is in built into the Germanic genesis with *Wodin, Wili and We, the first of the Æsir gods slaying the ancient giant Ymir and fashioning the world from his various parts even as in our tradition the world is fashioned from the parts of the puruṣa sacrificed by the deva-s or the slain aśvamedha horse. But what is the link between the jotunn of northern Germanic and the word Riese?

Somakhya: “Indeed this is a memory from prior to the coming of the Abe’ disease to these peoples. Jotunn is an interesting word. It appeared in early Niederdeutsch as Etennine meaning a giantess. It appears in the vāk of the kṛśajana-s as ettin all descending from proto-Germanic *etunaz. While the ettins of pan-Germania resemble the Titans of the yavana-s or the post-RV asura-s of our tradition very few know that their actual etymological cognate in our tradition are the attrin-s. These demons are only known to those who know the spells of our ancestors, the bhṛgu-s and aṅgiras-es. The Deutsch Riese seems to be a cognate of the northern Germanic risi of which one type was said to live on the high hills like in von Chamisso’s verse. He was accompanined by the troll girls Fenya and Menya, who may have even been his daughters. The people of the frigid northern Norway were said to have descended from the risi via a Viking warrior chief Halogi. The other risi, the sjórisar (sea risi-s), were Ægirt he god of the ocean, Ran the fierce goddess, and their nine daughters. When a viking drowned he was supposed become an offering for Ran.”

continued…

Vrishchika was taking a few days off to visit her parents’ town before proceeding with her fellowship. Lootika had nearly completed moving her lab to Somakhya’s institute. She was happy that they could finally be together for good again and decided to join Vrishchika in taking a few days off to see her folks. As Somakhya had to attend a meeting he was to join Lootika a week later. After reaching her birth town along with Vrishchika, she spent the days hanging around with her parents. The two sisters helped their mother a bit, and Vrishchika occasionally went with her father to the hospital or the med school for some time. One of the days Vrishchika brought home the skull of a man who had died unclaimed. As she recovered the skull from the skeletonizing center, she remembered their late lamented cat, which had died just before the time Lootika had left home. They had gotten it skeletonized by dermestid beetles in the medical school but had forgotten about it thereafter for both of them were very busy with their lives. So Vrishchika went to the storage and recovered the box wherein it lay. Coming home she exultantly showed the human skull to Lootika: “agrajā I guess this would be useful as a kapāla for our rituals. I understand that this unidentified young man died from a lightning strike while he was playing football on the ground near our old school.”
Lootika: “Dear anujā this is a wonderful catch. One man’s unexpected misfortune can be another’s fortune. This is exactly what we need for our secret tarpaṇa-s. It is certainly a better kapāla than the one of less certain provenance we obtained from the cemetery adjacent to Vidrum’s house. Would you mind if I ask you to give it to me whenever I and Somakhya might need it?”
Vrishchika: “Certainly not. If you wish you can keep it with yourself.”
Lootika: “No, No, it is your precious find. We’ll just borrow it whenever we need it.”

Then they spent some time cleaning the skeleton of their cat with peroxide and finally assembled the bones. Happy with the result they were eager to show it to Somakhya when he came. Vrishchika animatedly pointed the double-chambered auditory bulla that was so characteristic of feliformia to her sister. Lootika knowingly nodded having learned such things from Somakhya even as she was a kid.

On one of the days Lootika decided to go and see her in-laws. Vrishchika accompanied her. On the way Lootika stopped near a water tank, adjusted her spectacles, and smilingly gazed at it. Due to that resonance, which exists between similarly formed siblings, Vrishchika noted a rare flicker of sentimentality in her sister’s eyes: “Lootika, you seem to betray some yearning for this tank?”
Lootika: “anujā, I must confess that it was atop this tank that Somakhya and I had frolicked safely ensconced from the snoopy eyes of the masses. Cuddling with and tickling each other our experience was that of Madadravā and Mahāvighna.”
Vrishchika: “That sounds dangerous agrajā! What if you had fallen to your death either to the ground or inside the tank? In the latter case we might have not even known and your corpses would have contaminated the town’s water!”
Lootika: “No worries anujā. There is a nice high rim up there which precludes the possibility of us rolling off to hit the ground. On the other side the approach to the aperture of the tank is via a raised slope there by holding us back from rolling into the tank. Nevertheless, Somakhya used to remark that our perch was like the funerary tower of the Zarathustrians and that as we lay there we were simultaneously like those enjoying the highest bliss and also like rotting Iranians awaiting their defleshing by the dinosaurs of the air.”
Vrishchika: “Ah, that’s poetic indeed. I wish I could avail of so interesting a perch to be merry with my kāmin.”
Lootika said with a smirk: “Dear Vrishchika, you guys have to discover your own sthala.”

By then the two had reached the house of Somakhya’s parents and were welcomed with much fanfare by Somakhya’s mother. In the days of their youth Somakhya’s mother had mixed feelings towards the four sisters. On one hand she was immensely charmed by the four sisters due to their ārya appearance and was positively in awe of their preternatural gifts that were rather rare in the female kind. However, like most mothers she ardently wished her son to achieve the status of variman and was accordingly jealous of all others who might be competitors to him. Like several others, she sensed something in the four sisters that suggested that they might be true to their names. So she feared that her son might be bitten or stung by them and left behind like the hollow husk of a cockroach or a fly. “Could he hold his own like the Bhṛgu-s had done in their ancient conflict with the Gotama-s?” she wondered. She intuitively felt that he was good enough to hold his own against Lootika. However, due to the flawed prepossessions of her circle of companions (barring the catur-bhaginī’s own mother) Somakhya’s mother harbored a fear deep within her that Vrishchika was vastly superior to him and would eclipse him in the quest for everything she thought to be important in life. Further fuel was added to her fires by Somakhya’s father who felt that while his son was rather ordinary, it was little Jhilleeka who was superior to all of them. All things said, Somakhya’s mother had secretly wished that Vrishchika was her own daughter. Now, she felt contended seeing Vrishchika as part of the extended family and was especially happy that she had come to visit along with her daughter-in-law.

After serving them a sumptuous lunch, Somakhya’s mother, not without a sense of pride, wished to take the two sisters around to introduce them to some of her nearby friends. Now as mature adults Lootika and Vrishchika had developed greater politesse to handle such occasions than they had as kids. Thus, while being inwardly unengaged they mustered a sufficient display of social positivity for the rounds to go off smoothly. As they returned around midafternoon Somakhya’s mother led them into Somakhya’s old home lab because she knew well the nostalgia they had for it. Many of his old books still remained as he had last arranged them. Somakhya’s mother seeing the sisters getting lost in the books as in the days of old thought it an opportune moment for catching a siesta, and accordingly left them with the books. The afternoon air was mostly still but pierced by the occasional cackling of a babbler or bark of a distant dog. Lootika felt a surge of nice old memories as she plucked a textbook of stereochemistry from the shelf and leafed through it. Vrishchika had picked up an incomplete book written Somakhya’s grandfather titled “śatamanyu vijaya”. Leafing through it she asked Lootika: “This book details the heroic acts of Indra. Here it alludes to Indra’s killing of a demon who brayed like an ass. Where does that come in the śruti, agrajā?”
Lootika: “you should be aware of that at least for ethno-zoological if not religious reasons as a descendent of a high brāhmaṇa clan.” Saying so she pulled out her tablet and showed her sister the verse of śunaḥśepa ājigarti: “sam indra gardabham mṛṇa nuvantam pāpayāmuyā |”
Vrishchika: “That legend seems to have been transferred like many other things by the vaiṣṇava-s to the Saṃkarṣaṇa!”
Lootika: “Good! That indeed seems to be the case.”

Then Vrishchika pulled out an old notebook of Somakhya. As she browsed the first few pages she saw his drawings of microliths recovered from a Pravara river site from just before the emergence of the Chalcolithic cultures. He had written below it: “the scale was truly industrial!” Moving ahead she saw his drawing of an amoebozoan slime-mold, which was growing on the bark of a pomegranate tree. Below that was written the note: “Give it to L and Va for analysis of organohalogens.” Sandwiched in that part of the notebook was an envelope. Vrishchika carefully opened it and saw within in a number of Ultra High Performance Liquid Chromatography results and mass spectra along with the possible structures of a phenolic organohalogen compound. Below it was written in Varoli’s hand: “Likely uses similar biosynthetic pathway as the Dicytostelium chlorinated pyrone”. Below that Somakhya had written: “Ask Lootika to test the three START domains in the supplement for binding.” Vrishchika showed it to Lootika and asked: “This reminds me of the momentous day when our sister came of age by completing the synthesis of Akashin A, but did this thing ever reach a conclusion?”Lootika: “We never succeeded in conquering this fort but I have alerted your kāmin regarding the same and he seems to be poised to bring us close to a conquest. But Varoli needs to do more work to bring it all to a closure. Moreover, at some point we must explore some of our lichens for similar organohalogens.”

Thumbing through the notebook Vrishchika reached the last few pages where she saw something strange. There was another envelope on which was scrawled in Somakhya’s irregular writing “Vidrum’s second encounter.” Opening the envelope she saw a manuscript bearing a written account in a very different hand. Lootika who was curled beside her raised her head and looked closely at it: “Why? I think that is Vidrum’s writing.” As the two of them read through the document Lootika remarked: “This seems rather interesting. I suggest we take it with us.” Vrishchika: “I doubt Somakhya will be very thrilled about us rifling through his stuff.” Lootika: “Don’t worry. I will take the responsibility talking to him about it.”

That evening after dinner as Somakhya’s father was driving the girls back to their parents’ house they asked him: “Would you know where the hamlet of Tulagiri is located?” Somakhya’s father: “It is about 75 km to the south-west of our city.” Lootika: “Have you ever been there?” Somakhya’s father: “Long back.” Lootika: “Could you please tell us if there was anything notable that you might recall.” S.F.: “I was there when I was relatively new to this city. The only reason we went was because of the temple of Rudrāṇī. It is believed to house a deity whose original is in Mewar or Nepal. What exists there today is a relatively modern one, the old one having been destroyed by the Mohammedans long ago.” Vrishchika: “Was there anything else you might recall as being notable?” S.F.: “Not really other than the temple it is not really a place one would spend the effort to visit. It was rather desultory with an enormous cemetery just as one approaches the station. I understand these days Tulagiri is being absorbed by all the development around the city.” Seeing her father-in-law rather not too impressed by the place Lootika did not pursue the matter further.

By the time they reached home their sister Jhilleeka was already back and they all nestled together on the mat in their room to read the queer manuscript they had prised out of Somakhya’s notebook. Lootika read out aloud to her other two sisters what were likely the words written by Vidrum:

It seemed to me as though the calendar had ceased to exist. Every day I was working non-stop for almost 14 hrs and weeks or maybe even a few months had passed in a haze. Death and disease were all around me; so much so that I had become so hardened a man that no longer I saw death as a bad thing. It was the final release from the sufferings that the god Yama is said to subject men to – only that it was happening right here on earth. Most of my friends had gone their own ways and were hardly in touch with me. Hence, I was in a sense happy to be busy in this way and at least be of some use to those whose death sentence had not yet been passed by this bacterium or that virus, what to say of the occasional apicomplexan. After three months had thus passed I found myself finally with a free weekend.

I received a message from my old friend Sharvamanyu asking if I might be available to join him for a breakfast of certain vaṭaka-s from a famous food outlet near a temple. Feeling a craving for those vaṭaka-s I joined him. Since I was meeting him after long I enquired about his relatively new job and he regarding my travails as an over-worked intern. Having purchased the vaṭaka-s we went to the museum near my house to eat them whilst seated on the lawn. After a while I saw my coy but charming junior Vrishchika come out on to the lawn with her two sisters Varoli and Jhilleeka. I enquired to her regarding the health of her other sister, my former classmate Lootika. We also asked if Vrishchika might be interested in joining us on the foray Sharvamanyu and I were headed for. She did not take up the offer stating that she need to take her sisters back home right away and that she was not inclined for an overnight stay at the unknown Tulagiri. Nevertheless, Jhilleeka remarked that it was a night when meteors will be falling from the sky and that it we might be well positioned to see them. While not interested in astronomy, I had seen some meteors before while accompanying Somakhya; hence, I was curious as to how a shower might turn out.

Soon, Sharvamanyu and I boarded the train and were on our way towards Tulagiri. I had been there as a kid when it was starkly quiet and even tad desolate. But now as we approached it we saw it to be rather busy and the high-rises, which are coming up like mushrooms after the rain looked pretty enticing with all their modern facilities. But Sharvamanyu who knew more of these matters wryly remarked that there was always a risk of them coming down crashing due to the unscrupulous ways of the unqualified constructors. By then the train reached a vast cemetery and the parallels to the place where my house was built were becoming apparent. On the northern side we could already see the rapacious builders encroach into its land but on the south it extended up to the slopes of the Tulagiri hills. On the first and the lower of those hills was the Tulagiri temple. But our target was the second of those hills where Sharvamanyu had found excellent rock climbing spots, which he wanted me to help him with.

As we got out of the train on the station I found the place to be pleasantly quieter and cooler than the city, yet I felt something of a melancholy presence there. But then the people there seemed more relaxed and there was an air of contentment and even cleanliness, which is uncommon in the city due to the apathy and loss of community among our peoples. But not tarrying any further we headed straight to the hills and soon found ourselves where we wished to climb. The quarrying activities of the rapacious builders from the city and its ever-expanding circumference had left behind prominent escarpments, which formed ideal targets for a good climb. Taking advantage of the low sun we made several climbs differing in their levels of difficulty. The last of them gave even the stout-hearted Sharvamanyu a bit of a scare and left me feeling a bit triumphant upon its conquest. By then the sun was kissing the horizon and smearing it with redness so we decided to head to the high plateau and position ourselves for the night. Having chosen a good secluded spot where we could defend ourselves effectively even if detected we settled down to pass the night.

Yarning away about the day’s climbs, old adventures and the sorrows of life we passed a long time until the night lit up with a streak of heavenly light. We were taken aback for a moment but just then remembered what Jhilleeka had said earlier in the day. This was followed by several other streaks, which filled the sky, one every few minutes. Amazed by this sight we kept looking upwards and chatting until suddenly we realized we had been too careless with our stock of starter fuel and it had caught fire and burnt up with the rest of the dry bramble we had gathered. Though we did still have our flashlights we knew it was going to be a pain to collect sufficient dry bush in the dark for a good fire. With the embers of our fire out we realized it was probably better to last out the night in darkness rather than trying to start collecting faggots. It was well past the midnight hour and the cold had started to make us assuredly uncomfortable – we had not expected it to get so frigid – a sharp contrast to the city. Unable to take it any longer we decided to head to the lower altitudes with the intention of catching the earliest train back to the city. Hence, we started slowly making our way down in the blackness of the night, sparingly using our flashlights as they could do more harm by robbing us of our dark adaptation. To be frank we were not very sure of the best way down in the dark. We avoided the steep descents and used the lights from the distance as a compass. As we advanced we felt we had found an easy path which led us towards a relatively even stretch. The activity was also warming us up and we started feeling better. As we entered the gently sloping even area at the flank of our hill we saw few trees under which were small shrine-like structures.

We headed to the first of those and found that it was empty but to our surprise it had a little lamp lit inside it. We could not quite make out what it was but we saw a convenient culvert at its base where we parked ourselves. Ere long Sharvamanyu looked fast asleep while I still seemed to be struggling to get any. May be an hour later I was in the hypogogic state or having a disturbed sleep with some repetitive motifs appearing and disappearing when I felt an unexpected sensation. I felt utterly alone and sad for just no reason at all. I looked around around and to my horror I did not see Sharvamanyu. Before I could react to this I heard a deep voice call out to me from a tree which was in front of us. I felt strangely pulled towards that voice which was calling me. I soon saw a powerful muscular man of dark complexion emerge either from the tree or from behind it. In the same voice he asked: “Vidrum, did you see Mārgabasavī?” I was shocked that he knew my name but so powerful was his hold on my psyche that I did not think of anything else and responded: “No. I don’t know who Mārgabasavī is. Who are you?” He responded: “I am Kālappā Nāyaka.”
I: “Nāyaka, I have never seen you before. How would I know anything of the person you are enquiring about? Please tell me more.”

This Kālappā Nāyaka then began a rather copious narrative without a pause: “The vyādha Bhairappā Nāyaka’ was from Adoni. He went with his family to live in a hut situated within a clump of large rocks at Harivanam. He and his sons were good fighters. One kārttika ṣaṣṭhī day he and his family took his eldest daughter Mārgabasavī to a temple of Rudra that stood atop a prominent granite hill overlooking the rocks. There they married her to the sword of the god Vīrabhadra. From then on Mārgabasavī was free to consort with any man of the same stratum or higher. At that time I had collected various forest products at Harivanam and went to sell them to a brāhmaṇa who had contacted me via an emissary to meet him at the hilltop temple. There I saw Mārgabasavī, chose her as my woman and the brāhmaṇa blessed our union. We moved north and lived for some time at the forest beside a lake near Devadurga. My cousin Pid Nāyaka called me to come with my dala to help him at Sagar where he was engaged in a battle with the dreadful marūnmatta-s of the Emperor of Delhi, Awrangzeb. I set out with my family, my band, my dogs, and also those of Bhairappā’s sons to take a position near Sagar to ambush Awrangzeb’s army which was trying to besiege it. As vyadha-s of old we were confident of laying a trap for any animal that might cross our path, be a horse or the emperor of Delhi. I told my dala that there was no need to fear Awrangzeb as he was just another animal, which had no safety from our sharp arrows and dogs. I told them that we needed to put those arrows into his herd of men right away. I first sent Bhairappā’s sons with their men to reconnoiter and obtain information of the plan of the Mogols. They captured a couple of Mogol sipāhi-s and we tied them upside down above a gum arabic bush till they spilled their plan. They told us that they had established a fairly strong cordon on the northern side of Sagar and were seeking to complete it by taking good positions in the south.

Since we were coming from the south we decided to prevent the encirclement of Pid’s stronghold. So we planned to draw the Mogols into our ambush in the dense forest. I sent a few men to attract them towards my trap. They noiselessly approached the Mogol tents and set fire to them. As they came out, they fired arrows at them and made themselves briefly visible before retreating towards the ambush I had set up. The Mogol horsemen could not easily penetrate the forest so they dispatched their infantrymen to pursue us. But we sent our fierce dogs to drive them into our ambush and made short work of them by killing almost a hundred with our archers. I decided not to fritter the opportunity and led a counter-strike on their base immediately thereafter. They were sort of surprised and we managed to shoot many of their men. Finally, I caught sight of their grandee Baḍā Sayyid and unhorsed him with a single shot. One of Bhairappā’s men pounced on him and captured him; some of our other men captured few more marūnmatta-s. We brought them to our camp and brained them as offerings to Mārgammā devī. Then at the wee hours of the morning we went up to the camp of the Mogols and strung up to the cloven carcasses of Baḍā Sayyid and his fellows using pig entrails on trees in the vicinity. The famous tyrant of Delhi then sent a message that he would leave immediately if Pid Nāyaka paid him ₹3,00,000. Pid Nāyaka responded that he would utmost give him ₹10,000 else he was ready for war. The marūnmatta refused and continued the war with us. But we kept a good fight up and routinely sent the Delhi bandicoot corpses of his men bound in pig entrails.

The Delhi monster retreated but after a while he sent his powerful ghāzī Zulfikar Khan to attack our strongholds and forests. Zulfikar Khan detonated enormous quantities of powder to clear tracks through the forest despite our relentless attacks and completed the encirclement of the Sagar fort. I decided to help Pid Nāyaka to escape to Shorapur to continue the war from that hilly outpost. As I sallied against the marūnmatta-s, I left some of our dala along with Mārgabasavī and other women to shoot arrows upon at any Mogols who might try to scale our elevated positions. In course of the encounter Mārgabasavī slipped and tumbled down from the perch from where she was shooting arrows and was captured by the Mogols. They took her away as a slave for Shaikh Sahib. I was desperate to retrieve her. Once, I had done my duty of helping Pid reach his destination, I immediately set off to retrieve Mārgabasavī. I obtained intelligence from some Marāṭhā-s that she had been kept by the Shaikh near Tulagiri. After an arduous journey evading the pickets of Mogol garrisons, who were then locked in an epic fight with the Marāṭhā-s, I reached the garrison at Tulagiri along with Bhairappā and a few trusted companions. After much reconnaissance I established contact and tied a rope to haul Mārgabasavī down from the fortification. I had almost brought her down when a Mogol gunman shot me. I was buried by Bhairappā and my companions at this grave beside this tree. Sometime later I was brought out in incorporeal form by a brāhmaṇa employed by Pid to help him with some magic when he was embellishing the fort of Shorapur. But I came away soon afterwards to search for Mārgabasavī. If you manage to unite me with her I will richly reward you.”

Just then I (Vidrum) heard Sharvamanyu call out to me: “Hey, where were you all this time?”
I: “Why? I was near this tree for a while – right in front of you. In fact, I thought it was you who were missing before a bizarre apparition confronted me as though straight from my possessed house.”
Sharvamanyu: “That’s strange. I was sleeping right here all this time but I must confess that I too felt as though I was confronted by a strange visitation or in the least a very spookish dream.”
By then we realized that the so-called shrine where we were sleeping others like it were actually graves of vyādha chiefs. So we decided to continue heading towards the station. As we did so we told each other our stories.

Sharvamanyu told me the following story: “I could hardly differentiate what I saw from reality. I was shaken out of my sleep by a not unattractive woman who seemed to bear the faint smell of ethanol.” She said to me: “Did you see Boya Rāmappā? Take me to him?” Waking up I found you to be missing. I wanted to shout out your name when it appeared that the woman grabbed my hand and shaking it repeated the same words again. Though it was all very incongruous I responded: “I (Sharvamanyu) don’t know any Boya Rāmappā nor who you are. So how can I take you to him?” She said: “I am Meghubāī, can you find me Boya Rāmappā?” For some reason I was drawn to ask her more and in response she told me this odd story:

“I, Meghubāī, was married to the brāhmaṇa Nānu paṇḍita. He had hardly any interest in the good things of life and had nothing to talk and do but his books. One day I bought some nice sāra from a śendi who lived nearby. For that he severely upbraided me. In anger I wandered out of the house that night when he was asleep. I soon ran into Boya Rāmappā who was really nice to me. We spent some time drinking śendīr. Thus, we became friends and would often meet at night when Nānu paṇḍita was sleeping. One day Rāmappā told me that we could use a poison to get rid of the grouchy Nānu paṇḍita and run away together. He gave some fruits of the Cerbera tree and told me how to make the poison. A couple of days later Nānu paṇḍita said he was going to the city. I gave him some bread and curry to take along and mixed the poison into batches he was to take with him to the city. Thus, he would die in the city far away from here and no one would know. This indeed came to bear. But somehow he knew it was I who had poisoned him and before he died informed the magistrate. They sent the policemen from the city who captured me and Boya Rāmappā just as we were preparing to go away to the south. They tried us for adultery and murder and sentenced us to harsh punishment: the executioner shattered the skull of Boya Rāmappā by driving a nail into it. They put me in solitary confinement in a dark dungeon here in the fortifications of Tulagiri with hardly any food or water. However, one day a Moslem, Ashraf al Sullaj, who was employed by them at the fortification agreed to take me out and keep me with him in his house. While I was coming out of a window by means of a rope he had placed for me, I slipped and fell to death. Since then I have been searching for the pieces of Boya Rāmappā’s skull. If you can lead me to them I will richly reward you.”

Sharvamanyu: “Just then I either awoke or snapped out of this macabre vision and called out to you.”
Vidrum: “Indeed lurid, but entirely unsurprising given what we see around us. Not only were we sleeping on graves but in our descent we have made our way into the vast cemetery. ”
Thus, walking through the cemetery we made our way to the station.

This narrative of our adventure at Tulagiri was completely forgotten by me when I returned to the city and spent the rest of the weekend with my dear sweetie, the late Meghana. It was however later retrieved for me in the form of a dictation by during the frightening āveśa.

Lootika: “That was quite dramatic replete with a refresher on the much forgotten history of the struggle of the Shorapura nāyaka-s against the Army of Islam.”
Jhilleeka: “Lootika did you notice something odd about the narrative?”
Lootika: “The whole thing has a bit of outre ring to it, but anything specific?”
Jhilleeka: “I don’t know too much of Vidrum but Somakhya’s style is inconcealable. Do you not get a feeling that this narrative though you think it to be written in Vidrum’s hand has a touch of your puruṣa Somakhya’s style to it.”
Lootika: “Good point dear Jhilli, it certainly does have Somakhya’s invisible presence behind it but I am pretty sure this is not his hand but that of Vidrum, which used to be rather odd among our classmates. Hence, I suspect that this āveśa was caused by none other than Somakhya who was constantly guiding the bhūta/s from within Vidrum, perhaps to prevent it from taking complete control of him.”
Vrishchika: “From the allusions to us in the tale and fact that you were not around I can place a fairly precise time window for these events that Vidrum narrates in the bhūtalekha. While my memory for these incidentals is always imprecise, I do seem to recall that he made a real trip to Tulagiri because he worriedly asked me about his amnesia, sensing that it was something not in the realm of the regular world. However, since throughout the time you were not around Somakhya was also not around, I am puzzled as to when he performed this rite of āveśa.”

Lootika: “anujā that is solved by an incidental allusion in the narrative. Vidrum mentions his woman Meghana to be dead. This event happened in course of those tumultuous events during my last visit. So this should have happened after that time, quite some after the original events.”
Vrishchika: “Most likely after you had returned at the end of visit. I know Somakhya stayed a little longer then because I was still around and used to often hang out with Indrasena and him during that period. It was then that one day Vidrum came by and raised the theory of Meghana not dying from disease but from bhūtāveśa.”

Jhilleeka: “Do you think there might be some connection between that Meghubāī and Vidrum’s lover Meghana?”
Lootika: “Interesting thought. May be similar personalities, but then it could be that Vidrum just gave her a name thinking of his deceased woman.”

◊◊◊◊

Somakhya had arrived and was to go with Lootika to a temple of the awful Vināyaka that day. For some reason Lootika had asked him to meet her at shop in a rundown part of the city at a precise time. He thought to himself: “That is exactly the part of the city where spidery can attract all the wrong attention, which only means headache for me to get her out if that happens. What on earth would she want to do there! ” Nevertheless, knowing her quirks, unlike those of the common women, to almost always have “rational” foundations he agreed to see her there.

As he arrived at the shop he saw some loutish characters seated on broken walls or the footpath smoking, chewing tāmbūla, mixing tobacco, clearing their throat, spitting, or whistling. A few others were blowing on plastic vuvuzelas standing beside a picture of a netājī. Somakhya made sure that the weapon was in his pocket and looked inside the shop. Not finding Lootika in there he made himself inconspicuous beside it and somewhat anxiously looked around. Before long he caught sight of an oldish brownish-grey woman standing on the other side of the entrance somewhat hunched, her face partly covered by the uttara-vastra she had wrapped around it. Somakhya to himself: “Ah! that’s convincing but I should give her a taste of her own fun”. Having ascertained that she had not noticed him he quietly crept away from his position and suddenly appearing close to her caught her mouth in a firm grip with one hand and with the other placed the knife to her throat. In the shock of the attack Lootika’s legs nearly gave way beneath her when Somakhya whispered in her ear: “hiraṇyajālikā, kṛṣṇajālikā. Good show spidery, let’s be going!”

Enroute to the temple Somakhya pulled off her face mask and giving her back her glasses smiled: “Quite convincing, but do you think you were going to fool me after all these years with those glasses on?” Lootika: “Hey, but I also smeared myself with dark sun screen.” Somakhya: “Good to know, I will take care not to touch you then. By the way, why that shady place?” Lootika: “You will know when I show you the result. Let the suspense remain till then.” As they were going through darśana at the shrine Somakhya pointed to an idol the Ulka that was installed in a less-visited niche away from the main idols and remarked to Lootika: “The iconography of this idol is evidence for the temple having its roots in the Gupta-Vākāṭaka era though the tāntrika-s who embellished might belong to a later era. Lootika: “That would indeed make it one of the mūla-gāṇapatya-sthala-s as tradition holds it to be.”

On their way out of the temple Somakhya stopped at one of the many shops that lined the way to it. It was run by a duo of an old and a young woman, and sold a wide assortment of incense, which a throng of customers were seeking to buy. Only an observant person might have noticed that in two sacks stowed away inconspicuously in a corner were two types of human figurines one colored black and the other ocher. Somakhya purchased a couple of either type of image even as Lootika curiously watched and as soon as they stepped out asked regarding their purpose. Somakhya said with a grin: “This time you will need to wait till we get the result.” Thereafter, upon briefly meeting Lootika’s parents, Vrishchika and Jhilleeka at their home the two parted ways. Somakhya was to meet some of his old school acquaintances, whereas Lootika and Vrishchika were to have their old female schoolmates visit them later in the day.

The next morning Somakhya’s pleasant slumber was broken by a frantic call from Jhilleeka: “Lootika and Vrishchika are in a bad state. They seem paralyzed, unable to speak with swollen tongues and their bodies have blisters upon them. This is how I found them this morning. Our father is utterly puzzled and has called in the ambulance to have them admitted in the hospital. I suspect this is not to do with his domain – I must tell you something Lootika might not have told you. I understand that while visiting your house when you were away they had taken with them an envelope from your old notebook…”

Somakhya: “Jhilli, it’s very good you made the connection. While they might not have told me I am well aware and had made preparations for this – only that I did not expect the strike to happen so soon. Which seems strange to me. Any reason for them to be compromised in their rituals?”
Jhilleeka: “Not to my knowledge. Wait…. I don’t know if this is relevant but they got a new nṛkapāla…”
Somakhya: “Ah that is relevant. Don’t worry. You can ask your father to try to treat them minimally on a symptomatic basis but I believe I should be able deal with this. There is some chance I might fail. If I do, I will need you to come over deploy what you seem to have forgotten.”
Jhilleeka: “Wow! How could I forget that. How come Varoli did not sense anything in distance? We are natural siddha-s! Let me deploy right away and remind Varoli of the same.”
Somakhya: “No, No, Jhilli. Wait for now. If needed we will come to that. Think about it, why do you think Varoli would be immune even if far away when you were breached?”

◊◊◊◊

That night Lootika was curled up on the mat beside Somakhya tightly hugging him. On the table beside them was the new nṛkapāla gleaming in the moonlight on the stand that Lootika had gotten made for it at the shop in the shady locality. Lootika: “That was a close call; how did you sense that I had taken the envelope from your notebook. Somakhya: “There are two ghosts of Tulagiri. Both were extracted in kept in there in the hope of later use. I believe you and Vrishchika thought the same but never expected them to be right there. Instead you all probably thought of going to Tulagiri physically for the same. My father with his characteristic penchant of narrating incidental details mentioned your interest in Tulagiri. That immediately informed me that curiosity could kill the two kitties.” Lootika: “But we were well-protected. We did a fairly elaborate tarpaṇa just that morning.”

Somakhya: “Gautamī, that new kapāla which you had gotten had a bhūta which you had not respectfully neutralized for the donation he was making to your cause. That weakened your defenses. Moreover there is something about those Tulagiri bhūta-s you don’t know. Both had taken hold of Vidrum and zapped his memory just like they did to your siddha-mantra-s in Jhilleeka. When he visited Meghana upon returning one of them, seized her and eventually led to her death; you can guess which one. I understand Meghana had some special “love” for you Lootika. As she was dying she realized it was due to the bhūta and called out to it to seize you as a victim rather than her. With your defenses breached you were eventually seized.”

Lootika: “Your pratikriyā?”
Somakhya: “The simple approach worked. That’s why anticipating this I got the two figurines from the shop near the prāsāda. I drew them into them and have pegged them in the courtyard of the Padmāvatī shrine. The prayoga was of Mahāraudrapūtanā-kālī. I guess you did not recognize her when you came face to face with her along with your Mongolian student?”

The great rājan, the founder of the last Hindu empire, can only be effectively compared to one figure in history, namely Chingiz Kha’khan. Both displayed the rare combination of military and administrative genius that in rarely manifest simultaneously in a ruler. Sadly, even though the Hindu nation needs such leaders more than ever before, those coming through the modern Indian style democratic system can never match these natural leaders of the past.

One of the challenges created by the Mohammedan system in the subcontinent arose from their destruction of water management systems, either directly or indirectly due to their assaults on Hindu traditional knowledge systems like those maintained by the saiddhāntika Śaiva tāntrika-s. Combined with the dry climatic phase in this period, it resulted in many huge famines. These famines taxed production base on which the Mohammedan military system stood, especially in course of their struggle against the revived Hindu empire of Vijayanagara who retained the superior water management techniques. As result they had to swallow the bitter pill and make concessions for Hindus to aid them with the revival of agriculture in their lands. These problems were inherited by the successor Sultanates of the Bahmanid state and in the north by the Mogol emperor. But with most of the agricultural communities being Hindu the Mohammedans saw them as no different from other consumables like cattle.

As examples of this attitude in the earlier phase of the Mogol tyranny, we might note a Mohammedan source itself, i.e. Abd al-Qadir Bada’uni who states that “Pādśāh Akbar… had the wives and children of peasants sold and scattered abroad.”

The Dutch observer Francisco Pelsaert confirms this for tyrant Jahāngīr’s reign:
“The land would give a plentiful, or even an extraordinary yield, if the peasants were not so cruelly and pitilessly oppressed; for villages which, owing to some small shortage of produce, are unable to pay the full amount of the revenue-farm, are made prize, so to speak, by their masters or governors, and wives and children sold, on the pretext of a charge of rebellion. Some peasants abscond to escape their tyranny, and take refuge with rājā-s who are in rebellion, and consequently the fields lie empty and unsown, and grow into wildernesses. Such oppression is exceedingly prevalent in this country.”

This is confirmed by the Christian subversionist Sebastien Manrique: “…when the wretched people have no means of paying this [the revenue demanded in advance] they [the Mogol officials] seize the wives and children, making them into slaves and selling them by auction.”

As the noted Hindu historial KS Lal observed these activities had a side-effect of swelling the ranks of Mohammedans in India for the auctioned women and children now belonged to the Dār al momīn. However, by the reign of Awrangzeb low agricultural production was a major problem for supporting his expansive jihads. Hence, he was forced to give the farmers some concessions but these can be hardly described as being major improvement. Thus we hear in Awrangzeb’s farmān to Muhammad Hashim the divān of Gujarat:
“If they can cultivate ply them with inducements and assurances of kindness… but if after inquiry it is found that in spite of their being able to cultivate … and they are abstaining from cultivation, you should urge and threaten them and employ force and beatings. Where the revenue is fixed proclaim to the peasants that it will be realized from whether they cultivate the land or not.” [Translation provided by GB Mehendale]

In Maharashtra the ace ghāzi of the Adilshahi Sultanate Afzal Khan provides a taste of the “force”, which could be used while threatening peasants who had left his jāgīr in terror: “Take notice that we will dig you out of any place where you go, cut to pieces the one who gives you refuge along with his family, and extrude them through an oil mill.”

In Śivājī’s svarājya he made special arrangements to ensure that peasants have conducive conditions. For example the Sabhāsad chronicle gives his edict in this regard:
“New cultivators who will come [to settle in svarājya] should be given cattle. Grain, and money for seeds should be given. Money and grain should be given for their subsistence [and] the sum should be realized in a couple of years according to the means of the cultivators. In this manner the cultivators should be supported. In every village, from each individual cultivator the kārkūn should realized rent in grains according to the assessment of the crops.” [Modified based on the original from the translation from the Marathi by Mehendale]

This is further corroborated by Śivājī’s letter of 5th September 1676 to his officer Rāmājī Anant:
“His Majesty had kindly appointed you to the division [Prabhāvali]. You have taken a solemn oath that you will not appropriate anything for yourself and serve His Majesty loyally. Accordingly, act justly without yearning for even the discarded stem of a leaf of vegetable [that doesn’t belong to you]. Execute the work of sowing, storing, and realization of the government taxes at the proper time. Revenue settlement by sharing is adopted in the deś. See to it that the farmer gets his share and the government its dues. Bear in mind that even slight injustice and oppression on the people would displease His Majesty.

Secondly, there are no orders to take cash instead of grain. DO NOT take cash instead of grain. Revenue should be realized in grain, which should then be sold as to fetch a high price and prove beneficial to the state. Revenue [grain] should be realized and stored in proper time. Then it should be sold in proper season. Coconut, dry coconut, betel nut, pepper should be sold out in such a season that on the one hand they should not be spoilt and on the other would fetch a good price.

Encourage the cultivators and promote agriculture. Exert yourself and go from village to village. The farmers in the village should be assembled. If a farmer has the manpower, oxen and seed to cultivate his piece of land, well and good. Then he can cultivate the land on his own. But if the farmer has the ability and manpower to cultivate his piece of land but does not have the oxen, plow and grain, and is therefore forced to remain idle then he should be given cash and made to purchase two to four oxen. He should be given a khaṇḍi or two of grain for subsistence. You should get him to cultivate the land according to his ability. The money advanced for the oxen and the grain should subsequently realized according to his ability without charging any interest. You are authorized by His Majesty to spend up to two thousand Lārī-s [Footnote 1] for this purpose – to make inquiries about the peasants, support them, bring fallow lands under cultivation and increase revenue.

If a farmer is ready to exert himself but is unable to pay arrears of dues and is in dire straits, then the realization of the dues should be suspended a report made to His Majesty’s about the promotion of agriculture as well as about the cancellation of such dues. Then His Majesty would issue a decree about the remission in such cases.” [translation from the Marathi by Mehendale]

We find no evidence for the great rājan ever coercing the peasants in the manner of the Mohammedan tyrants. In contrast, he appears to have made several measures to provide assistance to them including interest-free loans. The grain remission (baṭāī) was in most Mohammedan domains accompanied by additional taxes including jaziya on Hindus. However, in svarājya it was the only tax they had to pay. Moreover, because Śivājī set remission in grain and not cash (unlike the Mohammedan control territory) it would not result in a glut shortly after harvest with resultant lowering of returns for the farmer frantically trying to send cash to the Moslem tyrant. But getting the remission in grain Śivājī was also able to handle the famines caused by Mohammedan depredations within svarājya much better because he could always count on the food reserves he accumulated.

Thus, in conclusion his set up was a much better deal than what a cultivator might face under an Mohammedan tyrant.

:::::::::::::::::::::::::
The Lārī was a hairpin-shaped silver coin which was first apparently struck by the Safavids in Lar, Iran. ₹1=2.5-3 Lārī. It was subsequently struck by the Adil Shahi in the Konkan and was captured from them by Śivājī.

To be read in conjunction with this handout: Harihara in the Indosphere

One of the poorly understood but immensely important facets of Hindu history is the role of the saiddhāntika Śaiva-s in the cultural unification of the Indosphere within the subcontinent and beyond. For the white indologists within the Abrahamosphere this is a topic which necessarily needs to be alternately downplayed or obfuscated under their negationist routine of “religion in South Asia”. The only exception I could name in this regard in Alexis Sanderson. On the other hand the recent Hindu workers within India have in most part chosen the path of ignorance, which characterizes many of they endeavors starting with the morbid fascination of the “out of India theory” for beginning of their own religion and Indo-European languages.

Over the years we have been gathering evidence for the existence of a vast network of shrines the driving forces behind which was the spread of the saiddhāntika Śaiva teachers and mantravādin-s throughout the subcontinent. In many cases the rulers of major dynasties received tāntrika-dīkśa from them. In some cases major rulers, like Bhojadeva Paramāra, were themselves scholars of the tradition. To the lay Hindus this network was primarily visible in the form of the shrines they erected. While they saw the shrines through the lens of the purāṇa-s there was an underlying tāntrika tradition that was only known to the dīkṣita-s. This saiddhāntika tradition while undoubtedly sectarian was nevertheless sympathetic to the older Indo-Aryan Vaidika tradition and emphasized the preservation of the Śruti and its rituals. On the other hand the smārta-s, who were primarily aligned with the old Indo-Aryan Vaidika tradition had a similar symbiotic association with the tāntrika-s particularly of these Śaiva traditions, even though some of the ācārya-s on both sides might have had major objections to the philosophy and praxis of the other. Thus, while competing internally these systems, along with the developing vaiṣṇava tāntrika tradition of the pāñcarātra formed the core of the medieval expression of the Hindu religion which interacted with a periphery of more heterodox systems falling under the rubric of the jaina and bauddha mata-s.

This system eventually met a cataclysmic end, particularly to the north of peninsular India, with the coming of wave after wave of Meccan demons. As a result we are left with little surviving physical evidence of the grandeur of the old saiddhāntika system in the north. The evidence needs to be gathered from relatively obscure archaeological and iconographic records, and what we learn is a staggering loss of old Hindu civilizational centers. While our collection is large, putting the examples out in a digested form does not seem easy to us. Hence, what is presented here is just a small note on some specific sites, which may seem whimsical, but we just need to do this remind ourselves of the bigger picture that we have in our minds.

Just as a flavor of the losses we could cite the case of the famous Golagī maṭha: This famous Śaiva center is mentioned in multiple saiddhāntika texts, such as inscriptions from the Kākatīya kingdom in the Andhra country, texts in Nepal and inscriptions associated with Pāla rulers of Bengal and Coḻa-s of the Tamil country. For instance, the Malkapuram inscription in the Andhra country mentions how both Paramāra and Coḻa monarchs obtained mantra dīkṣa from Golagī ācārya-s. Thus, the saiddhāntika teachers of the Golagī maṭha had a widespread distribution across the subcontinent and played a major role in the establishment of new towns and temples throughout the subcontinent. However, the location of this all important Golagī maṭha had been largely erased from the Hindu consciousness. In 1931 RD Banerji the famous archaeologist who discovered the Indus Valley Civilization uncovered vast ruins of a Śaiva-kṣetra at Gurgi near Rewa. Subsequently, an obscure Andhran scholar Sarojini Devi and later Sanderson correctly identified this Gurgi to be the ruins of the famed Golagī.

A parallel case is that of Āmardaka-tīrtha which was once one of the holiest of Śaiva-kṣetra-s which find mention in the texts of both the saiddhāntika and bhairava streams. This site was largely erased from the Hindu mind. It was eventually identified by Vasudev Mirashi as being the Aundha Nagnath temple in Maharashtra. Only the basal level of this splendid, gigantic seven-level temple survives, the rest of it having been detonated by Awrangzeb in course of the 26 year jihad. Sadly the modern Hindu restoration is such an eyesore that it totally devalues the sanctity of the site while illustrating how the traditional knowledge for building such structures has been destroyed by the Mohammedans.

If this is the fate of some of the most famous kṣetra-s of the saiddhāntika-s then what to say of the rest. As an example one could cite the famous Rudramahālaya of Siddhapur, Gujarat, which was built by Siddharāja Jayasiṃha and Kumārapāla. Today the few ruins of it, which were identified by the ASI, are not accessible to Hindus from the fear that the secular fabric of the modern Indian nation might be shredded by Hindu obscurantists. On the other hand as an example of a more obscure shrine we could site the lost Śaiva maṭha near Varanasi from a place today called Mirzapur where the remains of a colossal image of Śiva has been found which might have been at least 5.3 meters when complete. In a similar vein one could mention the lost Śaiva kṣetra of Ghanauli in the Panjab where the ASI has recovered fragments of a shrine including a fragmentary Umāmaheśvara image depicting the Śaiva pantheon.

The specific sites we wish to discuss further here are from Vaṅga and Magadha respectively. A previous investigation into them was by Gouriswar Bhattacharya, whose report provides the background for the ensuing discussion. In the former region the first of these shrines is from Deopara, Rajshahi district in TSB. In 1865 after the English were firmly in control of their greatest conquest, Hindustan, one of their officials, CT Metcalfe, who was posted in East Bengal discovered a dark bluish stone slab with an old Sanskrit inscription at Deopara. The inscription was reported by Kielhorn in Epigraphia Indica, I, 1892, pp. 305-15. ‘Deopara Stone Inscription of Vijayasena’. This inscription decorated with the verses of the poet Umāpatidhara, a courtier of king Vijayasena, against whom Jayadeva rates himself in his Gītagovinda: “vācaḥ pallavayaty umāpatidharaḥ sandarbha-śuddhiṃ girāṃ jānīte jayadeva eva…” [The utterances (poetry) of Umāpatidhara are like buds blooming but Jayadeva alone is acquainted with the purity of lyrical arrangement in songs…]. There Umāpatidhara states that the king Vijayasena (1095-1158 CE) performed the kumbhābhiṣeka of a grand temple known as Pradyumneśvara and had a tank excavated before it.

While no signs of the temple were seen, despite the ravages of Mohammedanism until not long ago there remained in local memory the knowledge about the existence of a dried up tank they called Padumśār. Excavation of the dry bed of this tank in 1919 recovered 129 pieces of stone-work which belonged to this Pradyumneśvara shrine which was built by Vijayasena. Further, the inscription states that the temple with the tank in front of it were huge, and that the inscription was set by the viśvakarman Śūlapāṇi, whose family is known to have produced noted temple artists in this region, i.e. Varendri. The inscription suggests that the image housed in the temple was actually a Hariharamūrti:
lakśmīvallabha-śailajādayitayor advaita-līlāgṛhaṃ
pradyumneśvara[-śavdabda]-lāñcanam adhiṣṭhānaṃ namaskūrmahe ।
yatrā+āliṅgana-bhaṅga-kātaratayā sthitvā+antare kāntayor
devībhyām apy abhinna-tanutā Śilpe ‘ntarayāḥ kṛtaḥ ॥

Words in [] are unclear to me but the verse can be understood as:

We pay obeisance to the temple bearing the designation of Pradyumneśvara,
which houses the husband of Lakśmī and the husband of the daughter of the mountain sporting in their non-duality,
where the from the fear of the breakup of their embraces (with the respective husbands),
the two goddesses have stood between their husbands and have indeed made a division in the icon depicting them with un-separated bodies.

The Sena rulers had their origin in the Karṇāṭa country from a general of the Chālukya-s in course of their victorious northern campaigns under Vikramāṅka. They rose to great power under Vijayasena and his scholarly son Ballālasena. They established a powerful Gangetic fleet to control much of Eastern India with their amphibious forces and an alliance with the Coḻa-Gaṅgā-s. Their inscriptions often bear the characteristic terms such as paramaśaiva/paramamāheśvara, Sadāśiva-mudrā and “Sadāśiva-mudrayā mudrayitvā…” Corresponding to these terms the image of Sadāśiva can be seen on their copper plate inscriptions. One example of such is a beautiful copper plate with the ten-handed image of Sadāśiva marking the rituals performed by Udayākara-deva for the Vijayasena’s queen Vilāsadevī on occasion of a lunar eclipse. These features indicate that the Sena-s were not just any Śaiva-s, but specifically those with saiddhāntika dīkṣa. Moreover, the Hariharamūrti as that installed at Pradyumneśvara is one of the Śiva forms specifically mentioned in the sthāpana-tantra-s of the ūrdhvasrotas. Further, the later work the Ballālacarita records another erstwhile massive Śaiva-kṣetra in Eastern Varendri suggesting that Pradyumneśvara was only one of many Śaiva centers patronized by the Sena-s.

A Śiva going by the name Pradyumneśvara was worshiped in the eastern reaches of the Vaṅga country from at least the late Gupta age for we encounter a temple housing a deity with that name in the grant of the second last Gupta king, Vainyagupta written by the kāyastha Naradatta in 507 CE. This temple was apparently located close to Gunaighar where the inscription was found and is described as having attached fields; adjacent to it was a bauddha vihāra. It was also apparently located on close to a channel mentioned in the inscription, which was the means of communication with the port of Pradamara. The inscription clearly states that Vainyagupta was a Śaiva though in the manner typical of most Hindu rulers he generously endowed various religious establishments. Thus, this inscription establishes beyond doubt that there was a comparable temple of even greater antiquity from Eastern Vaṅga. Evidently, this temple of Pradyumneśvara, the adjacent vihāra and the channel were all also destroyed by the Mohammedans without any known traces.

Attempting to trace the Harihara shrines Gouriswar Bhattacharya uncovered evidence for a 1.83 meter tall, damaged Harihara image from Maharava, a very obscure hamlet in the modern Nawada district of Magadha. It was housed at the Nawada Museum at the time when he examined it. This image is iconographically striking: The typical Harihara’s from the Pāla-Sena realms are flanked one either side the astra-puruṣa-s of the triśūla and the Sudarśana-cakra. However, in this Maharava image is flanked on the left (right of image) by the deities Mahākāla (larger) and Nandikeśvara (smaller) and on the right (left of image) by Sarasvatī and Lakṣmī who are shown as the consorts of Viṣṇu in Pāla-Sena iconography. The key point that sets this image apart is the presence of Mahākāla and Nandin, which suggests its saiddhāntika affinities rather than being an ordinary Harihara. Moreover, in this hamlet of Nawada several architectural fragments have been located of likely Hindu and Bauddha provenance. This suggests that there were proximal saiddhāntika Śaiva and bauddha shrines in the now obscure Maharava region. Thus, it represents yet another example of a Śaiva (and bauddha) shrine completely erased from Hindu memory and the remaining hamlet a poor reminder of a once active temple town.

Late in the reign of Lakṣmaṇasena, Māliq Ghāzi Ikhtiyār al-Din Bakhtiyār Khalji savaged the Sena kingdom. The savage destruction of Nalanda at his hands is only to well-known. Lakṣmaṇasena retreated to the East and the fight against the Moslems continued under three further Sena rulers Viśvarūpasena, Keśavasena and Madhusena. However, they steadily kept losing ground as the Mohammedan pressure from Delhi was unrelenting. By the mid 1200s they were eventually displaced by their sāmanta-s, the deva kings, who represented the last pockets of Hindu struggle in the Vaṅga country before being overwhelmed by the Delhi Sultanate. Some Sena-s dispersed to Himachal Pradesh and Nepal where they ruled small principalities and continued their Śaiva traditions. However, with the fall of the old Śivācārya network their saiddhāntika tradition dwindled and became extinct or highly diluted (Nepal). However, in Nepal the last blaze of the Sena-s was seen in the form of Hariharasena (1631-1672). He defeated the forces of the Awrangzeb’s Nawab Fidai Khan and liberated the territory centered around Makawanpur including 22 districts of modern Nepal. Upon this act he took on the title Hindupati and appears to have patronized a Śaiva shrine at Hetauda in addition to the Rūpanārāyaṇa shrine.

The above examples of lost saiddhāntika shrines are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of Hindu tradition in the East that was destroyed in the aftermath of Bakhtiyār Khalji. The story one is not told is that the brilliant center of Hindu knowledge centered in Varendri, representing the efflorescence of the saiddhāntika-s was extinguished in course of this struggle. This center was at the heart of a network that stretched all the way to the southern tip of the subcontinent. The illustrious saiddhāntika tāntrika Aghoraśiva-deśika from Chidambaram in the Tamil country counted in his preceptorial network Dhyānaśiva-deśika who was the preceptor of the Sena rulers and Śrīkaṇṭha-śiva the scholar from Varendri who was known as the Vaṅga-vṛṣbha. As we know from the works of Aghoraśiva that the saiddhāntika-s supported not just the study of Śaiva doctrine but practically all branches of Hindu knowledge. Thus, with their fall due to the Mohammedan onslaught many branches of knowledge simply became extinct. As an example we could mention the techniques used by the viśvakarman-s in Vaṅga for casting metal as well as techniques used to produce gilt and blue-green pigmented stone images. So much so that the latter type of images are commonly no longer considered of Indian origin but seen as being of Tibetan provenance.

That afternoon Vidrum was returning with a bunch of other friends whom he had taken through a tough course of climbing at a hilly locale. As they neared a certain road, he, Sharvamanyu, Somakhya and Lootika bade good bye to the rest of the group who wanted to proceed towards a restaurant for lunch. The four of them instread started biking towards a well-visited shrine. While the two others did not understand the reason for it, they nevertheless accompanied Somakhya and Lootika for the ritual of feeding a goat, which was kept by an old woman at the foot of the hill atop which stood a svāyambhuva temple of the goddess Caṇḍikā. After doing so they went to their bikes parked at the foot of a great bastard poon tree and an Indian ghost tree. But just as they were about to leave, the road which they had to cross was blocked by a vast procession of pilgrims, who were singing poems in a deśī language, dancing and playing musical instruments. Somakhya: “Would you know something regarding this great procession?” Vidrum: “It is a procession of devotees of a vaiṣṇava bhakti sect who are carrying the pedal icons of some of their important saints towards one of their pilgrimage sites.” Lootika: “Look, they are carrying a palanquin with much fanfare. Who might be in it?” Vidrum: “From their cries we can say that that particular palanquin carries the pedal icon of an important avarṇa saint of this saṃpradāya. As they watched the procession march on, Somakhya asked his friends: “Could any of you tell me more of the history of this avarṇa saint ?”

Sharvamanyu: “In the mid-1100s of CE when the evils of Abraham’s third mānasa-putra-s had not yet reached the Southern deśa-s of Bhāratavarṣa, the Cālukya-s were the great lords of much of the regions where these pilgrims are headed. In 1162 CE their sāmanta-s, the Kalacuris-s, who were stationed at Maṅgaḻaveḍhā overthrew their mahāmaṇḍaleśvara and established themselves as the rulers of the land. Over the next 100 years we observe a certain degeneration of the old religious landscape with several new religions movements centered on Bhakti rising to prominence in this region. At the end of the 1200s this avarṇa saint was born in a local depressed community, which in addition to necrokathartic duties also performed other functions such as running errands for local strongmen and as construction workers. The saint’s hagiography states that as his mother was carrying mangoes for a local strongman, a brāhmaṇa stopped her and asked her to give him one of the mangoes. He bit it and gave it back to her saying it was too sour for him. Some say that brāhmaṇa was none other than the god Viṣṇu. Not wanting the strongman to see the bitten mango, she hid it in her dress. The legend has it that it then miraculous turned into a boy, i.e. the saint in question. Eventually, he was initiated into this vaiṣṇava bhakti saṃpradāya by another saint from the tailor service jāti and composed devotional poetry to the deity housed at a local Viṣṇu temple, like those the pilgrims are singing.

In those poems he occasionally alludes to the difficulties of life as an ugly man at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. He explains that he was born in the said avarṇa because he had insulted Kṛṣṇa Devakīputra, the incarnate Viṣṇu, in a past birth as a man named Nīla. Finally, in around 1338 CE, even as the Army of Islam was rifling the land, after composing a sizable body of deśī poetry he was killed by the crashing rubble from the collapse of a wall he was helping build in Maṅgaḻaveḍhā. His friend, the tailor-saint, wanted to collect his remains, but then his bones were mixed in the rubble along with those of several others of his jāti who had perished along with him. As the other saint searched amongst the bones, those of the dead saint they revealed themselves to him by singing out the praise of the deity of the local shrine. Thus having identified them, the tailor-saint collected them and buried them beneath the steps of that temple.”
Somakhya: “Thank you for the hagiography; that was an interesting one.”

By then the procession had made its way and they were able to cross the road to continue biking homewards. Even as Sharvamanyu and Vidrum went their own ways, Lootika proceeded with Somakhya towards his house with the intention of looking more closely at and sharing the plants they had collected in the hills. Right then Somakhya’s mother called over to Lootika: “Why don’t you come in and have tiffin. You all have not eaten since the morning. Lootika, I have made your favorite, the śigru-patra pancake with the tumburu pickle. I’ll call your mother and tell her that you will eat at our place this afternoon.”

As they were eating Lootika remarked: “Somakhya, did you notice a rather interesting motif in that story of the saint?”
Somakhya: “Well, the motif of the fertilizing mango caught my eye right away. It is an old one which occurs right in the Mahābhārata itself. There the brāhmaṇa Caṇḍakauśika, an ancient clansman of yours, gave Bṛhadratha a fertilizing mango, the two halves of which he gave to his two queens. As a result Jarāsaṃdha was born in two halves. This fertilizing mango motif seems to be even more widespread. I encountered it in a story from a local kathāsaṃgraha under a story titled bhrātarau, it appears that is seen in folklore from more than one part of Bhārata. Here twin brothers are born to a king by means of the fertilizing mango given to his queen by a śaiva tāntrika. The tāntrika demands one of the twins to be given to him as a sacrificial offering to attain vidyādhara-hood. However, the prince tricks the yogin and sacrifices him instead and attains partial vidyādhara powers until he is himself overwhelmed by a mantriṇī with superior mantra powers. Then he is rescued from her spell by his twin. This tale of the two brothers without the fertilizing mango motif appears in Iran, Greece, Italy and Western Europe suggesting that the motif was inserted into an older tale of possible early Indo-European provenance.”

Lootika: “That’s very interesting but the motif I had in mind was different; its the one which appears in a distinct story called ‘Der singende Knochen‘ which I read in the śūlajana-bhāṣā reader.”
Somakhya: “Could you tell me the same?”

Lootika: “It was recovered as a folk-tale among the śūla-puruṣa-s by the Grimms.” Lootika took out her tablet from her backpack and digging out the tale it read it out to Somakhya:
A violent boar was causing havoc in the land and all who tried to hunt it were gored to death by its tusks. Hence, the king of the land offered his only daughter as a wife to the man who would kill the boar. There were three brothers in that kingdom: the eldest was cunning, the middle one somewhat intelligent, and the youngest naive and dull-witted. They all thought they should win the princess by killing the boar. Accordingly, the older brothers went together and the youngest went by himself. As the youngest entered the forest, a little man appeared before him holding a heavy black spear in his hand and told him: “Take this spear and attack the boar fearlessly. You will succeed in easily killing it.”

Indeed the youngest brother killed the boar with the black spear and happily lifting the carcass on his shoulders started carrying it home. On the way he passed by a pub where his older brothers were partying drinking wine. When they saw him come with the boar they called out to him:
“Come inside and have a drink with us. You must be tired.” The naive man went inside to their house and told his brothers the hold story. In the evening as they were all going home together the two older ones made a plan to kill their younger brother. They let him go ahead of them and when they were on a bridge they surprised him with their clubs and clobbered him to death. Then they buried him in the sand deep under the bridge. There after the eldest took the boar to the king, and got the princess for his wife.

Many years later when the shepherd was crossing the bridge he noticed a bone sticking out of the sand below. Since it was clean and snow white, he wanted to fashion into the mouth piece of his horn. Having taken the bone and incorporated it into his horn he wanted to use it when the bone began to sing on it own:
“Dear shepherd, blowing on my bone,
Hear my song, for I want you to know
My brothers killed me years ago!
They buried me by the brook that flows
and carried off the dead wild boar,
and won the king’s lone daughter.”
The shepherd immediately took the horn to the king, again it sang the same words. The king immediately had the ground beneath the bridge dug up, and the rest of the skeleton of the dead
brother was found. Thereupon two evil brothers confessed their crime and were executed by drowning, while the remains of the dead brother were interred in a beautiful grave. [Adapted from Zipes’s edition of Grimm’s tales]

Somakhya: “Lootika, thanks for reading out that tale, which is replete with several other motifs beyond the Der singende Knochen – the singing bone. That brings something back to my memory, and I must say that like in many other things we precipitate towards like things.”
Lootika: “That’s true but why so in this case specifically?”
Somakhya: “Sometime back I came across a book of Italian folktales in the possession of my cousin Babhru. I had made a copy of a similar story from that book telling myself that this idea of the singing bones must be explored further especially given that the bone-pipe has been found in Potapovaka graves in regions close to where our ārya ancestors first emerged and also later in Iranic kurgans of the Sarmatian type around 650 BC. Hence, this idea of a singing bone could have emerged from those bone pipes of the early Indo-European times.”
Lootika: “That sounds interesting. I am very curious to hear that Italian version of tale.”

Somakhya: “It was collected by the Germanic woman Gonzenbach who in her brief life of 36 years did her own interesting collecting in Sicily, partly overlapping in time with the activities of the Grimms in Germany.”
Then having dug out the tale he read it out:
There was a king and queen with three handsome sons. They got an eye disease which none of their physicians could do anything about. One day as the queen went on a walk she was accosted by a very old woman who told her: “You have very diseased eyes and no physician can save you. But I have a cure. You need three feathers of a peacock and on rubbing your eyes with them you will be cured without doubt.” Queen: “How can I get peacock feathers?” Old woman: “You have three strong sons. Let them go forth and procure the feathers for you.”

The queen then called upon her sons to go and blessed them to set forth on a journey to procure the feathers. After traveling long the three brothers encountered the same old woman who had advised their mother. She asked them why they were wandering. Upon being told of the their quest she warned them that they would have to spend an year, a month and a day wandering before attaining their goal. They kept wandering but their goal seemed no nearer. Then they encountered that old woman again who asked them again of their goal. The old woman then advised them that they would after wandering for an year a month and a day reach a deep cistern into which one of them would have to descend and after journey within it for another year, a month and a day they would be able to reach a peacock and obtain three of its feathers.

Indeed, as stated they reached said the cistern after the stated duration of time had elapsed and the eldest brother agreed to descend into it. They tied a rope around him and lowered him into the cistern. He also took a bell with him so that when he rang it they could pull him back out. After a short while he panicked in the dark and rang the bell so they pulled him back out. Then the middle brother tried to descend next but he too bailed out after a while frightened by the darkness. The youngest brother then decided to descend and told the other two that they should wait for an year, a month and day for him to sound the bell. But if they did not hear the bell after that they could return for he would probably be dead.

He kept descending unfazed until after a long time he reached the bottom of the cistern. There he saw a vault with a door on the opposite side. Upon opening the door he entered a bright hall where he saw the great peacock living. He became the bird’s servant for one year, one month and on the day after that he got his chance to rip out three feathers from the bird and scurry back to the cistern where he sounded the bell. His brothers were about to leave thinking he had died in the depths. But hearing the bell they pulled him back out. Once he was out, the eldest brother stated that he should give each of them one feather as all three had worked together to obtain the feathers. The youngest agreed but he gave his eldest brother the worst of the three feathers as he had stayed for the shortest time inside, the middling one to his middle brother and the best one he kept for himself.

The eldest brother was jealous and taking the middle one aside told him that they should kill the youngest and take his feather. The middle brother objected but then the eldest brother threatened to kill him and got him to agree that he will keep his mouth shut. Then the eldest clobbered the youngest with a rock and buried his corpse in sands of the Jordan river. Taking the youngest’s feather he started homewards with the middle brother. But the middle brother kept objecting and asking what they would tell their parents about the dead brother. The eldest brother said that they should say that he drowned in the Jordan river.

Eventually, they reached home with the feathers and stroked their parents’ eyes with the feathers curing them of their blindness. When the queen then asked about her youngest son the eldest son responded that he had drowned in the Jordan. She became sad but the father declared that the eldest should succeed him as king as he had brought two of the feathers.

A shepherd had spied upon the burial of the murdered brother [Evidently he was buried in the sands of the Jordan near the Dead Sea where the salinity might have cured his hide]. The shepherd thought he could make himself a bagpipe from the skin and bones of the dead brother. His dog unearthed the corpse and then after drying it thoroughly in the sun the shepherd made himself the desired bagpipe from the skin and bones. As the tried to play it the ghost sang out from within the the bones and skin:

Play me, play me, oh my shepherd,
play me merrily, as long as you like.
On the banks of the Jordan I was killed with a rock,
All for three feathers from the gorgeous peacock.
My eldest brother was the one who betrayed me.
The other’s not guilty, not guilty at all.
It’s only the eldest with blood on his hands.

The song had a great musicality to it and wherever the shepherd went he had an audience to hear it and give him some money. Finally, in his wanderings he reached the formerly blind king and queen’s kingdom. The king summoned the farmer to his castle and tried out the bagpipe. It sang the same song but instead of the shepherd identified the king as the father. Likewise, it sang that song when the queen and the middle son also played it, identifying them respectively. But when the eldest son played it, it sang thus:

Play me, play me, oh you filthy traitor,
play me merrily, as long as you like.
On the banks of the Jordan I was killed with a rock,
All for three feathers from the gorgeous peacock.
My eldest brother was the one who betrayed me.
The other’s not guilty, not guilty at all.
It’s only the eldest with blood on his hands.

So it became clear to all that it was the eldest who had murdered the youngest brother. Hence, the king hanged him to death and gave the shepherd a generous gift so that he might leave the bagpipe behind with the king. [Adapted from Zipes translation of Gonzenbach]

Lootika: “Most remarkable. Right away I would say that despite the Sicilian locale of its collection there are reasons to suspect that it originated in West Asia, specifically within the religion of Yezidis, who not so long ago were most blithely exterminated by the hirsute demons of Makkha-viṣaya: 1) the magical curative peacock smacks of their deity Malak Tāwūs; 2) the old woman is clearly suggestive of their old woman female deity Pīrā Fāt who is the key female deity of the Yezidi whom they worship as their protectoress ; 3) Finally, the burial at the Jordan is suggestive of them returning from land not far from the old Yezidi domain. Perhaps, in actual history, tales such as these were borne to Europe by itinerant shepherds from west Asia like the one in the tale.”
Somakhya: “Touche Lootika! That is very good – you have indeed apprehended the very provenance of this tale. Yet there is the Germanic form you narrated, which appears in a different setting suggesting the possibility of two distinct transmissions of this tale into Europe. I guess you noticed certain striking motifs in that one…”
Lootika: “Which ones are you thinking of Somakhya? The hunt of the varāha obviously comes to mind. It occurs in a different context in our tradition as the killing by Arjuna and Rudra as the tribal hunter of Mūkāsura who had the form of a boar. Despite the different context, we do see a faint echo in the Germanic folktale of the contest for the credit of killing the boar – in our case between Arjuna and Rudra and their case between the brothers. Do you think this motif might hence have a early Indo-European provenance?”

Somakhya: “Certainly! For we have two Greek parallels for the boar hunt motif, rich in many cognate features. First there is the Calydonian boar and then the Erymanthian boar.”
Lootika: “Could you please tell me these yavana tales so that I could learn of the parallels therein.”

Somakhya: “The first of them relates to Oeneus the king of Calydon who had forgotten to make the offering to Artemis, “the Lady of the Bow”, in the annual sacrifices at the sacred hill. Enraged she sent the Calydonian boar to ravage his kingdom. The boar destroyed his vineyards and crops and the people retreated into the fortified city (the polis) and began to starve. So Oeneus called for a great hunt to bring down the boar. It was led by his son Meleager and several great yavana heroes. Atalanta, a woman had sucked milk from the breast of Artemis and thus acquired the martial ability of men, also joined the hunt. Meleager was greatly enamored by her so he involved her in the hunt despite the objection of the men. Eventually she shot the arrow that wounded the boar and facilitated Meleager to kill it.

Then he rewarded the skin and head to Atalanta in honor of her drawing the first blood. But the other heroes disputed this saying that the hunt was a matter of men and Atalanta was being unduly honored by Meleager. So his uncles took away the trophy from her. Meleager enraged by this killed his uncles and other men who were against Atalanta’s role in the hunt. His mother grief-striken over the killing of her brothers threw the magical log of wood on which Meleager’s life depended into the fire. It burned and he died thus furthering the curse of Artemis. Under the curse of Artemis the battle over the boar’s remains continued after Meleager’s death and many of the heroes who participated in the hunt were killed.

The Erymanthian boar was another boar of Artemis. Once Erymanthus, a son of Apollo, spied the goddess Artemis in coitus with the deity Adonis. Hence, she caused him to go blind. In anger Apollo unleashed the Erymanthian boar which killed Adonis and ranged in the wild realm of Arcadia. Eurystheus sent Herakles to capture this boar as his fourth labor. He was advised by the centaur Chiron regarding how to catch boar. Accordingly, he drove the boar into thick snow where it got trapped and having caught it Herakles carried it on his back to Eurystheus. Scared by the terrifying boar Eurystheus asked Herakles to take it away. He accordingly threw it away into the sea and it swam away to the land of the Etruscans and Romans. There its skin and tusks were eventually placed in a great temple of Apollo at Cumae – the remains of which demolished by the pretācārin-s are said to be still there.

So Lootika I guess you were able to note the cognate elements.”

Lootika: “Indeed! First, the association of the boar-hunt with the Rudra-class of deities is clearly an old one. Both Artemis and Apollo feature in the yavana world and even in our world Rudra comes with Ambikā for the encounter with Arjuna – after all the Yajurveda calls her the sister of Rudra in great autumnal ritual of Tryambaka. Second, at least the tale of the Erymanthian boar is associated with the labor of Herakles, an action of the hero, the son of Zeus, in exile. In our tradition his cognate Arjuna, the son of Maghavan performs the same in course of his exile. Third, the Calydonian boar features the motif of the dispute regarding who killed the boar. There Atalanta, who was suckled by Artemis and her priestess, evidently features as a proxy for the Rudra-class deity who appears in the guise of a hunter in our tradition to dispute the hero Arjuna’s claim. Looming at the back of all of this is the motif of the wrath of Rudra by which many are killed. As in our tradition in the case of the Calydonian boar the wrath of the Rudra-class deity is triggered by the non-offering of the “rudrasya bhAgaH |”.
Somakhya: “That’s good. Indeed our tradition records an ancient link between the Rudra-class of deities and the boar. Verily, in the ritual of the great pacification of The god or in the abhicārika ritual as performed by Baka Dālbhya against Dhṛtarāṣṭra Vaicitravīrya we say: “divo varāham aruṣaṃ kapardinaṃ tveṣaṃ rūpaṃ namasā ni hvayāmahe । [The ruddy boar of heaven, the knotted-haired one, with an impetuous form we call down with obeisance.]. On the other hand in the śruti the original killers of the boar are Viṣṇu and Indra in the exploit of Emūṣa or the ancient water deity Trita. That appears to have been projected on to their earthly proxy Arjuna and among the yavana-s Herakles.”

Lootika: “That’s rather remarkable. Now the parallels between the Germanic folktale and the Greek versions are also abundantly clear. The contest for the credit of the hunt and the remains of the boar, as also the death of the hunters by infighting are seen clearly both the German tale and the Calydonian boar. The little man who gives the magic black spear to the youngest brother in the German tale parallels Chiron in the Greek tale. Again Chiron seems to be a proxy of the Rudra-class of deities having been fostered by Apollo and Artemis – in a sense their representative on earth. Who might that little man represent?”

Somakhya: “That’s good Lootika – indeed, a representative of the Rudra-class of deities reappears in proxy in the form of Chiron. Now, who is the little man in the forest with the great black spear? In greater Germania the many tribes took their names after the totemic weapons of their gods. Ger-man: the spear-man; Franks: Frankea, the spear; Saxon: Saxs, the sword. That spear was the weapon of Odinn and a totemic symbol derived from him. The sword the weapon and totemic symbol of Freyr or Saxsnot. Such totemic symbols were persistent across the IE world, especially for the Rudra class of deities. In our sphere and among our non-Zoroastrian Iranian cousins we see that trident and spear were used as totemic symbols of the Rudra-class of deities like Rudra himself or Kumāra and commonly appear on the coins of early Indic and Iranic rulers. It is due that totemic spear of Odinn that we call them the śūla-puruṣa-s. Hence, I would posit that the little man who gave the spear in that folktale was an agent of Odinn, or his proxy. Thus, the Germanic Rudra-class deity, as a master of the hunt, appears even there although concealed by the patina of folklore. Moreover, there is a further parallel with our own tradition. In both that tale and the Kirātarjunīya, the Rudra-class deity or his proxy gives the protagonist a weapon that will help in a future quest.”

Lootika: “ayam eva śūla-puruṣāṇāṃ śūlaḥ! Thus, like domains in proteins these motifs have dispersed across the tales which constitute the proteome of folklore. Indeed, it is quite possible that the hunt of the boar and the singing bones were old motifs going back to the junction between the hunter-gather strand of our ancestry and the pastoral and agricultural life-styles in the old steppe-zone. ”