UCH OF WHAT INDIA AND HINDUISM ARE TODAY CAN BE UNDERSTOOD BY EXAMINING THEIR ORIGINS AND HISTORY. HERE IS A HUMBLE CHRONOLOGY THAT TELLS THE STORY OF THE SAGES, KINGS, OUTSIDE INVADERS AND INSIDE REFORMERS WHO contributed to the world’s oldest living civilization and largest modern day democracy. Hindu India has been home to twenty to thirty percent of the human race throughout most of recorded time. Her story, summarized here, is crucial to human history. The emphasis on spirituality in India’s thought and history is unparalleled in human experience. The king in his court, the sage on his hill and the farmer in one of Bharat’s 700,000 villages each pursues his dharma with a common ultimate purpose: spiritual enlightenment. This perspective is the source of Hinduism’s resilience in the face of competing faiths and conquering armies. No other nation has faced so many invaders and endured. These invasions have brought the races of the world to a subcontinent one-third the size of the US. There are many feats of which the ancient Hindus could be proud, such as the invention of the decimal system of numbers, philosophy, linguistics, surgery, city planning and statecraft. And most useful to us in preparing this timeline: their skill in astronomy. §
Dates after Buddha are subject to little dispute, while dates before Buddha have been decided as much by current opinion and politics as by scientific evidence. The overwhelming tendency of Western scholarship has been to deny the great antiquity of Hinduism. Indian scholar S.B. Roy points out that the commonly accepted chronology of German-born and Oxford University educated linguist Max Müller (1823‒1900) is based “on the ghost story of Kathāsaritasāgara.” Indologist Klaus K. Klostermaier agrees: “The chronology provided by Max Müller and accepted uncritically by most Western scholars is based on very shaky ground indeed.” Müller admitted his covert intention to undermine Hinduism. In a letter to his wife in 1886 he wrote: “The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years.’’ §
Contemporary researchers, such as Dr. B.G. Siddharth of B.M. Birla Science Centre, Dr. S.B. Roy, Professor Subhash Kak, Dr. N.R. Waradpande, Bhagwan Singh and Dr. David Frawley, have developed a much earlier picture of India, assembling new chronologies based on dating scriptural references by their relationship to the known precession of the equinoxes. Earth’s axis of rotation “wobbles,” causing constellations, as viewed from Earth, to drift at a constant rate and along a predictable course over a 25,000-year cycle. For example, a Ṛig Vedic verse observing winter solstice at Aries can be correlated to around 6500 BCE. Frawley states, “Precessional changes are the hallmark of Hindu astronomy. We cannot ignore them in ancient texts just because they give us dates too early for our conventional view of human history.” Besides such references from scripture, there is other evidence to support these scholars’ dates, such as carbon-14 dating, the discovery of Indus-Sarasvatī Valley cities and the recent locating of the Sarasvatī River, a prominent landmark of Vedic writings.§
Many entries in this timeline prior to 600 BCE derive from the work of Dr. S.B. Roy (“Chronological Framework of Indian Protohistory—The Lower Limit”) and that of David Frawley, PhD (Gods, Sages and Kings). In many cases, we have included more than one entry for an event to show the diverse postulations on its dating. For a comprehensive review of the Timeline, we were fortunate to have the scholarly assistance of Prof. Shiva G. Bajpai PhD, Director of Asian Studies at California State University, who co-authored the remarkable tome, A Historical Atlas of South Asia. §
Max Müller was an early evangelist of another, more invidious, dogma imposed on Hindu history: the “Āryan invasion” theory. Originally a Vedic term meaning “noble,” then applied to the parent-language of Greek, Sanskrit, Latin and Germanic, the term Āryan soon referred to those who spoke that parent language—a supposed race of light-skinned Āryans. The idea of a parent race caught the imagination of 18th and 19th century European Christian scholars, who hypothesized elaborate Āryan migrations from Central Asia, west to Europe, south to Iran and India (ca 1500 BCE) and east to China—conquering local “primitive” peoples and founding the world’s great civilizations. This theory holds that the Vedas, the heart and core of Sanātana Dharma, were substantially brought to India by these outsiders and only in part composed in India. Though lacking scientific evidence, this theory, like the alleged Āryan-Dravidian racial split, was accepted and promulgated as fact for three main reasons. It provided a convenient precedent for Christian British subjugation of India. It reconciled ancient Indian civilization and religious scripture with the supposed late 4000 BCE Biblical date of Creation. It created division and conflict among the peoples of India, making them vulnerable to conversion by Christian missionaries. §
Many scholars today, of both East and West, believe the Ṛig Veda people who called themselves Āryan were indigenous to India, and that there never was an Āryan invasion. India’s languages have been shown to share common ancestry in ancient Sanskrit and Tamil. Even these two apparently unrelated languages, according to current “super-family” research, have a common origin: an ancient language dubbed Nostratic. §
Evidence substantiating the New Model for India’s history includes the following. Ṛig Veda verses belie the old chronology: I.51.14-15 cites winter solstice occuring when the sun rises in Revati nakshatra, which is only possible at 6,000 BCE, long before the alleged invasion. Carbon dating confirms horses in Gujarat at 2,400 BCE, contradicting the claim that Āryans must have brought them to the region around 1500 BCE. NASA satellite photos prove the Sarasvatī River basin is real, not myth. Fire altars excavated at Kali Bangan in Rajasthan support existence of Ṛig Veda culture at 2,700 BCE. Kunal, a new site in Haryana, shows use of writing and silver craft in pre-Harappan India, 6-7,000 BCE. Supporters of the New Model include B.G. Tilak, P.C. Sengupta, S.B. Roy, S.D. Kulkarni, Pargiter, Jagat Pati Joshi, Dikshit, K.N. Shastri, Sri Aurobindo, Hermann Jacobi, S.R. Rao, Dayananda Saraswati, Subash Kak, David Frawley and B.G. Siddharth. The New Model states that India’s native peoples founded the Indus/Sarasvatī River civilization, developed Sanskrit and wrote her ancient texts, that European dates are wrong, and that the dating of the Bhārata War at 3139-38 BCE (not 1424 BCE) is the true “sheet anchor” of Indian chronology. By this school of thought, India’s history goes back perhaps 10,000 years, and India is not indebted to invaders for her traditions. Evidence shows that Vedic texts, once deemed partly mythology, are Earth’s oldest factual account of human experience.§
How to Read the Timeline: The thick maroon vertical line represents the flow of time. The thinner colored lines to the left indicate the duration of major dynasties. Not all are included, for at times India was divided into dozens of independent kingdoms. Approximate dates are preceded by ca, an abbreviation for circa, which denotes “around” or “in approximately.” Most dates prior to Buddha (624 BCE) are considered estimates.§