How old are Vedas? ICCR to take debate to Moscow

The scholars will also speak on “relooking the dating of the Vedas, the religious and philosophical thoughts of the Atharvaveda as the cultural code of Indian civilisation and the contribution of Russian scholars to Vedic studies”, among other things.

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Ramesh Bhardwaj, the head of the Sanskrit department of Delhi University who had organised a conference on reassessing the chronology of the Vedas in September, is the Indian coordinator of the conference. He said that the idea to hold such a conference came from President Pranab Mukherjee during his visit to Russia in May this year.

“During his visit, the President met a group of Russian indologists and realised that there was a lot of work which was unexplored and needed to be showcased. So, he had suggested that we should organise such a conference. I have been working on the details of the conference with my Russian counterpart (S D Serebriany) since July,” he said, adding that Russia was the first country in the West to start Sanskrit studies in 1725 in St Petersburg.

Besides Bhardwaj, five other Indian scholars will speak at the conference. They are B R Mani, Gaya Charan Tripathi, Sree Kishore Mishra, Ganesh Umakanant Thite and R C Sharma. Russian scholars and those from neighbouring Uzbekistan and Belarus will also speak at the conference.

“At the recent conference held in Delhi University, it was concluded that ascribing the Avesta to the 1st millennium BC (backed by some scholars) is not convincing. The origin and existence of the Avestan dates to a much earlier period,” said Bhardwaj.

While Tripathi will seek “to re-examine this date on the basis of archaeological and linguistic and may be also astronomical evidence to find out whether the date, fixed some 150 years ago, still stands the test of the time, Thite will argue that “some scholars from the Soviet Union were opponents of the Aryan invasion theory”.