There was an incredible news item in one of our major national dailies. Over 400 students flocked to Allahabad from different parts of North India for admission into a Vedic Vidyalaya there with only 25 available seats. There are reports of Vedic Vidyalayas sprouting up all over the country. My first reaction was one of alarm, thinking that it was a reaction to the Khariji Madrasas that are mostly residential schools, instructing children solely in theological matters. As I continued reading the article, my worry turned into relief when the reporter explained: “The reason behind enrolling wards in the Vedic Vidyalaya is the fact that Vedas are getting popular in western countries and new research studies are creating employment.” It all ultimately boiled down to the “Green Card.” Parents must have been duped by the propaganda that the world is waking up to a new consciousness of India&’s great past by the untiring efforts of our globetrotting Prime Minister.

The Vedas have become the source of serious disputes at present between the Hindutva advocates and scientific rationalists. The two sides have taken extreme positions at the two ends of the spectrum. If someone chooses a position between these two extremes, he/she is forcibly put into one camp or the other. The rationalists have brought our illustrious scientist, Professor Megnad Saha, into this dispute. It is true that Megnad Saha felt “frustrated” with a friend of his father who, on hearing the sort of research the young man had done in Europe, remarked, “Everything is in the Vedas (shobi Vede achhe)”! I do not think that he got “irritated” with this typical comment of his ignorant and superstitious countrymen, as claimed by the rationalists. He definitely wanted them to develop a scientific attitude, but realised that sarcastic remarks would not achieve that goal. I believe that Megnad Saha subsequently read the Vedas and Upanishads in order to challenge misleading claims from the Shastras by our influential leaders, thereby helping to reduce prejudices of the simple and illiterate masses.

I must confess that I have not read the Vedas in Sanskrit, or in any other language for that matter. I did read the English translation of some Vedic hymns by Professor Max Mueller long before he was accused by our Hindutva advocates of wilful wrong translation of the Vedas at the behest of his English paymasters. I did not understand the meaning behind the hymns much. It was only books on Indian philosophy and classical Indian history that gave me a vague impression about the Vedas. What I understood from those sources is that some rudimentary speculations of a scientific kind are indeed manifest in the sacred texts. During some phases of the Vedic period, Agni was the principal deity, while in some others, that role was assigned to Varuna. There is uncanny similarity with the Greek philosophers of antiquity. Heraclitus claimed that fire was the primordial element, out of which everything had arisen, while Thales thought that everything was made of water. There was some mention of “atoms” in the Upanishads as well, although nowhere as detailed as the ideas of Leucippus and Democritus. There was some elementary speculation on cosmology and psychology that were way ahead of their times. But this is different from the mockery made of Indians by our Hindutva advocates at the Indian Science Congress this year in front of famous foreign delegates by their wild claims of the scientific achievements of our Rishis in the Vedic period. To fix the time frame for further discussion, there are four Vedas; namely, Rig, Sama, Yajur and Atharva. Each Veda consists of three parts: Hymns, Brahmanas and Upanisads. The collection of hymns is called the Samhita. The Samhitas of the first three Vedas are similar, with Rig Veda being the principal one. Atharva Veda is believed to be of somewhat later period. The Brahmanas that consist of religious duties arose later, followed by the Upanisads that dealt with philosophical questions.

There is no better illustration of extreme positions taken by the adversaries than the dispute over Vedic mathematics. One Bharati Krishna Tirthaji assembled certain rules of mental calculations and wrote a book that was published five years after his death in 1965 under the title Vedic Mathematics. Tirthaji claimed that he found those sutras in the Parishishta of the Atharvaved, although no such sutras are found in any standard available version of the Parishishta. In the preface of the first edition, the editor of the book admitted that the arithmetic algorithms explained in the book had nothing to do with the Vedas. These algorithms are found in many later Indian texts of the classical period such as the Patiganita of Sridhar, the Ganita Sara Sangraha of Mahavira or the Lilavati of Bhaskara II. To counter the fraudulent claims of the advocates of Vedic mathematics, the rationalists take the other extreme position and declare that there is no truth to the claim that some serious mathematics was indeed mentioned in the Vedas.

This puts genuine researchers on the history of mathematics of the Vedic period in a bind. Their dedicated efforts are ignored; or, even worse, ridiculed, by a large section of rationalists. Let us mention two interesting contributions to mathematics during the Vedic period. These examples have nothing to do with the Vedic mathematics that is propagated by the Hindutva advocates. The first is the concept of the “powers of ten”, central to the decimal place value system. It appears already in the treatises of the Samhita phase. Here is the verse of Medhatithi in the Vajasaneyi Samhita of the Sukla Yajurveda:

O Agni! These Bricks are my fostering Cows – eka and dasa; dasa dasa a sata; dasa sata a sahasra; dasa sahasra an ayuta; dasa ayuta a niyuta; dasa niyuta a prayuta; dasa prayuta an arbuda; dasa arbuda a nyarbuda; dasa nyarbuda a samudra; dasa samudra a Madhya; dasa Madhya an anta; dasa anta a parardha.”

There were also some spectacular advances in geometry, developed in relation to Vedic rituals in the Brahmana phase. The most important is the statement of the celebrated Pythagoras theorem that was explicitly mentioned in the Baudhayana Sulba-sutra: “The diagonal of a rectangle produces by itself both [the areas] which its length and breadth produce separately.” I am indebted to Professor Amartya Dutta of the Indian Statistical Institute for these quotations.

The most recent dispute relates to the eating of beef during the Samhita phase of the Vedic period. Devout Brahmins with profound knowledge of Vedic Sanskrit and Samhitas told me during my youth that there was explicit mention of eating beef and drinking wine (soma) during the early Vedic period, and those customs started being frowned upon from the Brahmana period as the Vedic people settled down along the Ganges plain. Now the Hindutva advocates are disputing this fact. Maneka Gandhi, Minister for Women and Child Development, used these “new” research findings to justify the ban on beef in Maharashtra and Haryana in a recent article, entitled “Misleading Analysis of Ancient Scriptures” (The Sunday Statesman, 12 July). The article is full of inconsistencies from the start to the finish. Even if beef were prohibited in the ancient Vedic period, it does not justify denying the later migrants to India the right to have their own food. The argument that 90 per cent of beef is exported is also meaningless. If the government does not want that for whatever reason, they have every right to ban such exports. If Maneka Gandhi and her ilk are against animal slaughter as a matter of principle, they should try to ban chicken and pork, and possibly fish, as well. Why bring the Vedas into this? Nothing illustrates the difference between the two camps better than astrology. The human faces of this dispute are Megnad Saha and Murli Manohar Joshi, both having once taught physics at Allahabad University. Megnad Saha&’s ionisation equation opened the door to stellar astrophysics, the discipline closest to astronomy. By contrast, Murli Manohar Joshi wanted to introduce Vedic astrology as a ‘scientific discipline’ to be studied in Indian universities when he was Education Minister in the Vajpayee Cabinet. All Hindus are proud of the Vedas. Some use it as inspiration for the future, while others dream of going back to the Vedic age. How could one bridge this gap?