On the Future of Indigenous Traditions - Munin

(culture) and all capitals of internally heterogeneous British Indian provinces,” with
their “regional and local variations in all spheres of cultures tended to be neglected
[though having] widest possible communalities. Also neglected were the most sacred
but esoteric Vedas, the speculative Upanishads, and the limitless variety of puranas.
Certain parts of the popular epic literature, and particularly one ethical text from the
Mahabharata – the Bhagavad-Gita – were exalted beyond the hundreds of
contending holy books. The Gita gained some thing like the status of a unified Hindu
‘Bible’ where none had existed before.” 19 These holy books are one important set of
sources, conditioned to its objective interpretation for investigation.
According to S.C. Roy, in these set of sources, whatever may have been the name of
ancient India before the Aryan Hindus found their way into the country, he says, that
the “Hindus legends concur with the traditions of the Mundas themselves in locating
this people and other Kolarian tribes in north-western India, when the worshipers of
Brahma stepped on the threshold of the country.” 20 The traditions of the Mundas
themselves concur with various statements in these ancient Sanskrit works in
suggesting that the Mundas and other cognate tribes occupied Northern India before
the forefathers of the Hindus entered the country. 21 The woods and valleys by the side
of the ancient Drisadwati and Saraswati River appears to have rung with the
Bacchanalian songs or durangs of the Mundas and other allied tribes long before the
venerable Arya Rishis of old chanted their sonorous Vedic hymns on their sacred
banks. 22 (See Map 2 on page 113 the Indus Valley Civilization 2600-1700 BC)
As an illustration, if we take the hymns in the Rig-Veda – the ancient Hindu
Scriptures, the fair skinned Aryan warriors invoking the aid of their bright and
beneficent gods against those and other black races who long and strenuously fought
19
Clifford Geertz, Old Societies and New states, The quest for modernity in Asia and Africa (New
York: The Free Pess, 1967), 32.
20
S.C. Roy, Mundas and Their Country (Ranchi: Catholic Press, [1912], 1995), 13.
21
Ibid., 13.
(The passage in the Vishnu Puran (I 5, 28-32), which describes the Asuras as the first born of
Brahman, from who’s thigh they sprang, and the similar statement in Mahabharata (Santi Pava 84) that
the Asurs were elder brothers of the Gods, - and the further statements in Tittiriya Upanishads (VI.2)
that the earth formally belonged to Asuras while the gods had only as much as a man can see while
sitting have been supposed by Muir and other Orientalists as referring to the former occupation of the
country by the black aboriginals. And the German Orientalist points Weber (Ind. Stud I, 18., II, 243)
points out that the ‘Devas’ and ‘Asuras’ of ancient Sanskrit literature referred to the broad divisions of
Indian population, as “…the fair skinned sacrificing Aryans and the godless black aboriginals…”
22
Ibid., 13.
28