-Santa Barbara, California

Dear Dr. Badlani,

The scope of your book is impressive, and the clarity with which you have handled a wealrth of material is commendable. Your integration of the sanatana dharma with the disciplines of science and history lends the book a special strength. Within that framework, the wealth of detail you provide on social and religious customs, myths, teachers and other significant personalities enhances the book still further. Your wide-ranging view, free of sectarianism, is refreshing. And along with the pleasure imparted by your clear prose, even after an initial reading the book remains valuable as a reference work.

That said, there are a few details which I, as a critic, would like to point out. Being very exacting in matters of language, I noticed a lack of consistency in the Romanization of Sanskrit terms. (Personally, I favor the standardized international transliteration scheme with diacritical marks, as it is an exact replication of the Devanagari.) Also, there was a strong tendency, common in modern Indian languages, to elide internal vowels and to drop the final ones: thus, "Sarada" appears as "Sarda" and "Paramahamsa" as "Paramhans."

It would be virtually impossible to create a book of such scope without making a few factual errors. To give an example, you wrote that religion began around 10,000 years ago. Only recently, in preparation for the trip to Australia, I was reading about Aboriginal religion and learned that religious cave paintings there are 43,000 years old. Human knowledge is constantly expanding, of course, and you cannot be blamed for the absence of that information in the sources you consulted.

On a similar matter, I'd like to comment on the references to the Aryans and the dating of the Rigveda to around 1500 BCE. This is an area of study on which I like to keep well informed. The old Aryan Invasion Theory is almost entirely discredited now and has been replaced by an Aryan Migration Theory, which is pretty much a repackaging of the older, Eurocentric theory. (Even Michael Wood, in his splendid documentary series on India, is reluctant to let go, alas!) More and more, the possibility of Aryan-Harappan identity is taking hold, even among respected authorities such as B. B. Lal, who for many years would not consider it seriously.

However, in-depth studies of text of the Rigveda point out that it contains more historical information than meets the eye, along with a wealth of data that can be correlated to scientifically measurable facts in a wide variety of disciplines, all of which suggest very strongly that the Rigveda Samhita dates to the third millennium BCE. Interestingly, Max Muller's colleagues dated the Rigveda to before 2000 BCE and were aghast when in 1859 he published his opinion placing it around 1200-1000 BCE. Later he admitted it was mere guesswork and tried his best to refute it, but even today it appears as an article of faith in the work of many scholars.

Srikant G. Talageri has written three important books:
The Aryan Invasion Theory: A Reappraisal
The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis
The Rigveda and the Avesta: The Final Evidence

All three of these books contain valuable new information. The problem is getting beyond the author's defensive, nearly hysterical tone. He has been attacked ruthlessly by Michael Witzel of Harvard University (a die-hard invasionist and late-dater) and would have done better to ignore the attacks and merely present his findings. They are deserve the attention of other scholars, who can bring their own skills to bear.

The second of the books sorts out all the material of the Rigveda chronologically according to the rishis and their families and correlates it to the geographical information contained in the hymns, to the names of rulers, and so on. This is highly suggestive of the movement of the Aryan tribes.

The third book has a valuable chapter on isoglosses and what they suggest about the dispersal of various Indo-European speaking peoples. Other authors worth reading are Bhagwan Singh (The Vedic Harappans--a ground-breaking book, even if some of his ideas seem untenable, such as that Vedic culture preceded the Harappan), Dilip K. Chakrabarti (The Battle for Ancient India: An Essay in the Sociopolitics of Indian Archaeology), S. P. Gupta (The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization: Origins, Problems, and Issues), M. K. Dhavalikar (The Aryans: Myth and Archaeology"). None of them reach consensus, but all of them deserve consideration and can be helpful in assessing the wildly conflicting data (or their interpretation) of archeological, textual, linguistic, and scientific sources. The gradually unfolding picture continues to fascinate.

Once again, I'd like to express my appreciation for your work and extend my best wishes for the book's success.

Yours sincerely,
Devadatta Kali (David Nelson)