Hunting communities Agricultural communities The "Indo-European" influence The Vedic period The ritual system
Hymns and commentaries Recommended reading
The question as to the “origins” of Indian religion and culture is still a hotly debated topic on the subcontinent, just as it was in Europe in the nineteenth century.
If part of the European fascination with India had to do with Europe’s search for its own origins, the “essence” of its own character, and a rationale for its own “superiority,” so the concern for “origins” in India has to do with self-definition and the affirmation of a certain superiority based on antiquity. So Hindu nationalists speak of sanatana dharma, or “eternal dharma,” an ideology that presumes its sources are rooted in a pristine past. The same ideology argues for the indigenous antiquity of the “Aryan,” or “Vedic” culture, that period in Indian history from which all else is presumed to spring. Many non-brahman communities, on the other hand, claim their cultural roots precede those of brahmanic culture and are therefore more ancient and superior to those “later” developments. Many Europeans, for their part, at least until the archaeological work of the 1920s in the Indus Valley, had assumed that such culture as existed on the subcontinent was the product of external sources, generally characterized as the Indo-European migration.We know, of course, that this search for “origins” is rather fruitless. Much archaeological work remains to be done as to the earliest nature of Indian civilization, and archaeologists are not agreed on the meanings of artifacts that have been unearthed. Nor is it the case that there is any single origin of culture on the subcontinent or that such an “origin,” if it did exist, would have remained intact into later history.
What seems the more prudent way to discuss this issue is to recognize the existence of multiple sources of what became Indian religion and civilization. In this chapter we will identify some of those sources and reflect on some of their possible implications for the emergence of religion on the subcontinent.