CHAPTER 2 - The Vedic Age

Summary

About 150 kilometres north of New Delhi, in the state of Haryana, are the sacred plains of Kurukshetra, the site of both the most destructive battle of ancient mythic India, as well as the most profound discourse in Hindu philosophy. On the Kurukshetra plains, in Jyotisar, under a banyan tree, Krishna, the charioteer, had a philosophical conversation with Arjuna, the warrior. This is recorded in the 700 verses of the Bhagavad Gita which is one of the books that form the Mahabharata, an epic story centred on the 18-day battle between cousins belonging to the Kuru clan. At this site, a mango-shaped pond and a marble chariot with Arjuna and Krishna have been built to commemorate the event.

A few kilometres away are remnants of a fort which has been called Abhimanyu's Fort. At the end of the epic battle described in the Mahabharata, only Parashit, the son of Abhimanyu and the grandson of Arjuna, is left to continue the Kuru line. Many subsequent rulers of the Gangetic kingdoms trace their genealogy to the mythical Parashit. One study of genealogical lineage from known historical figures has dated the epic battle at Kurukshetra and Parashit's rule to about 1200 BCE.

Unlike the Indus Valley Civilization, there are no relics or artefacts from the Vedic Age for us to study. The lack of physical objects is compensated by a profuse volume of literature which includes the four Vedas (Rig, Sama, Yajur, and Atharva) and the two Epics (Ramayana and Mahabharata.) The Vedic corpus cannot be accurately dated as they were transmitted orally from generation to generation, and only committed to writing hundreds of years later. There is no mention of writing in the Vedas and, even after India reacquired the art of writing, for centuries, the priestly castes resisted the transcription of the Vedas to protect their monopoly of knowledge on the purported proper conduct of religious rites. Elaborate systems of memorization were developed to limit the introduction of errors. The Vedic verses were composed in ancient Sanskrit with many antique and obscure words making a literary understanding of the Vedas difficult even for scholars. The introduction of errors during oral transmission over multiple generations is impossible to detect without reference to authentic written works.