In Search of the Cradle of Civilization
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In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India is a 1995 book by Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, and David Frawley that argues against the theories that Indo-European peoples only arrived in India in the middle of the second millennium BC (Indo-Aryan migration) and supports the Out of India theory. Published by Quest Books, a branch of the Theosophical Society in America, it targets a popular audience.
To many Hindus, the idea that the Vedas were written by descendants of tribes that immigrated from Central Asia seems like a convenient myth perpetuated by European historians eager to attribute Hinduism's greatest artifact to non-Indians. For this reason, the "Aryan Invasion Theory debate" in India has strong political overtones, and Feuerstein et al 's theory is thus welcomed by many Indians as an alternative to current theories.
Contradicting established historical linguistic and archaeological views, the authors argue that Vedic civilization grew out of the "Indus-Sarasvati civilization", which is what they call the Indus Valley civilization. The authors enumerate fifteen arguments for their revisionist views. Several of these arguments emphasize linguistic, architectural, cultural, agricultural, and technological continuity between Harappan culture, the Vedas, and post-Vedic Hinduism. They also argue that it is improbable that the Vedas were the product of a nomadic or semi-nomadic group, an uncontroversial point, since mainstream opinion considers only the Rigveda as containing memories of an earlier nomadic period while the later Vedas are uncontroversially the product of a settled society native to India.
The authors do not claim that India is the Urheimat (original homeland) of the Indo-Europeans, but rather that "the Aryans could just as well have been native to India for several millennia, deriving their Sanskritic language from earlier Indo-European dialects."
Their claims, if true, have major implications for the chronology of early Indian history. Most historians believe that the Vedas are the work of a different ethnic group than that which inhabited the Indus Valley Civilization. The authors find continuity in Indian spiritual and religious artifacts from Mehrgarh, one of the first cities in the world, to the present. It should be noted that historical linguistics does not rule out elements of cultural continuity in spite of language change, so that such claims, likewise, are not in conflict with mainstream opinion. In the view of the authors, however, this alleged continuity rules out the later influx of another ethnic group, pushing back the date of the migration of Indo-Europeans into the subcontinent very far indeed.
[edit] Bibliographic information
Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak, David Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization: New Light on Ancient India Quest Books (IL) (October, 1995) ISBN 0-8356-0720-8
