Oral tradition, too, presupposes longer intervals of time than would be necessary, had these texts been written down. Generations of pupils and teachers must have passed away before all the existing and the many lost texts had taken definite shape in the Vedic schools, On linguistic, literary and cultural grounds we must therefore assume that many centuries elapsed between the period of the earliest hymns and the final compilation of the hymns into a Samhita or “collection”, for the Rigveda-Samhita after denotes only the close of a period long, past, and again between the Rigveda-Samhita and the other Samhitas and Brahmanas, The Brahmanas themselves, with their numerous schools and branch schools, with their endless lists of teachers and the numerous references to teachers of antiquity, require a period of several centuries for their origin, This literature itself, as well as the spread of the brahmanical culture, theological knowledge, and not least, the priestly supremacy which went hand in hand with it, must have taken centuries, When we come to the Upanisads, we see that they too, belong to different periods of time, that they too pre-suppose generations of teachers and a long tradition.

It is easy to see that this estimate [i.e., two hundred years] is far below the minimum of the possible period, during which in India a department of literature could take its rise, reach perfection, become obsolete and die out, to give place finally to a thoroughly new departure. For a Brahmana, for example, could only be widely spread by being learned by heart by a gradually extending circle of Brahmanas, and with the size of the country this would certainly demand a long time. Every man, who learned such a work, became, so to say, a copy of it. ... But several of such works must successively take the place of their predecessors, before the entire class of works in question becomes obsolete. I maintain that a minimum of a thousand years must rather be taken for such a process, which in the conditions that prevailed in ancient India was of necessity a very slow one, especially when we take into consideration that in historical times die literature of the classical period remained for more than a thousand years unaltered.

Thus, taking an average of the whole, we may consider fifty-five princes to be the number of descents from Budha to Krishna and Yudhishthira; and, admitting an average of twenty years for each reign, a period of eleven hundred years; which being added to a like period calculated from thence to Vikramaditya, who reigned fifty-six years before Christ, I venture to place the establishment in India Proper of these two grand races, distinctively called those of Surya and Chandra, at about 2256 years before the Christian era; at which period, though somewhat later, the Egyptian, Chinese, and Assyrian monarchies are generally stated to have been established, and about a century and a half after that great event, the Flood.

The period between the arrival of the Indo-Aryan in the Indian subcontinent and the composition of the oldest Vedic hymns must have been much longer than was previously thought.

The Brahmans who were custodians of the idols and idol-houses, and “teachers of the infidels”, also received their share of attention from the soldiers of Allãh. Our citations contain only stray references to the Brahmans because they have been compiled primarily with reference to the destruction of temples. Even so, they provide the broad contours of another chapter in the history of medieval India, a chapter which has yet to be brought out in full. The Brahmans are referred to as magicians by some Islamic invaders and massacred straight away. Elsewhere, the Hindus who are not totally defeated and want to surrender on some terms, are made to sign a treaty saying that the Brahmans will be expelled from the temples. The holy cities of the Hindus were “the nests of the Brahmans” who had to be slaughtered before or after the destruction of temples, so that these places were “cleansed” completely of “kufr” and made fit as “abodes of Islam”. Amîr Khusrû describes with great glee how the heads of Brahmans “danced from their necks and fell to the ground at their feet”, along with those of the other “infidels” whom Malik Kãfûr had slaughtered during the sack of the temples at Chidambaram. Fîrûz Shãh Tughlaq got bags full of cow’s flesh tied round the necks of Brahmans and had them paraded through his army camp at Kangra. Muhmûd Shãh II Bahmanî bestowed on himself the honour of being a ghãzî, simply because he had killed in cold blood the helpless BrãhmaNa priests of the local temple after Hindu warriors had died fighting in defence of the fort at Kondapalli. The present-day progressives, leftists and dalits whose main plank is anti-Brahminism have no reason to feel innovative about their ideology. Anti-Brahminism in India is as old a the advent of Islam. Our present-day Brahmin-baiters are no more than ideological descendants of the Islamic invaders. Hindus will do well to remember Mahatma Gandhi’s deep reflection--“if Brahmanism does not revive, Hinduism must perish.”

Brahmins cannot hope to claim a high and superior status forever. Times are changing. They have to come down. Then only they could survive with dignity. Otherwise they will one day be forfeiting their high status. It will not be by force. It will be just laws of the land and the people.

Surely, there is a limit even to the lack of the historical sense we may attribute to Indian chronologists. Critics of the Puranic time-scheme would definitely overshoot the mark by asking us to believe that an Indian living day after day under a particular king could be mad enough to push publicly the same monarch back in history by more than 6 centuries. Here is a reductio ad absurdum of the modern criticism and of the chronology currently accepted.

Both the Jews and the brahmins of southern India are communities that, for twenty centuries, have devoted themselves tirelessly to the most abstract subtleties of grammar and theology. For the Jews it was the study of the Talmud, a task often passed down from father to son; for the brahmins, it was the Brahmanas and the Upanishads. It is hardly surprising that the younger generations, when their time came, turned toward the sciences, and preferably the most abstract among them: this trend was merely the natural extension of millennial traditions.

Between the arrival of the Aryans ... and the formation of the oldest hymns of the Rigveda a much longer period must have elapsed than is normally thought.

Now it is clear that the presumption of 200 years for each of the literary epochs in the birth of the Veda is purely arbitrary... it was strangely forgotten on how weak a footing the prevailing view actually stood...” (Ketkar 1987:272)

…With the permission of Father General I left Rome in 1603 and after two years spent travelling I arrived in Goa. Soon after I came to Cochin, and thence to Madura. There I remarked that all the efforts made to bring the heathens to Christ had all been in vain. I left no stone unturned to find a way to bring them from their superstition and the worship of idols to the faith of Christ. But my efforts were fruitless, because with a sort of barbarous stolidity they turned away from the manners and customs of the Portuguese and refused to put aside the badges of their ancient nobility.
When I noticed that certain Brahmins were highly praised because they led lives of great hardship and austerity and were looked upon as if they had dropped from the sky, I thought that, if to win popularity among the pagans, and raise themselves in their esteem, they contrived to keep perpetual chastity and weaken their bodies by watching, fasting and meditation, I could, to win them to Christ, conform myself to their mode of life in all such things which were not repugnant to the holiness of the Christian doctrine, for it seemed to me that with divine help I could do for God’s sake, what they did with wicked cunning to win vain applause and worldly honours.
Therefore I professed to be an Italian Brahmin who had renounced the world, had studied wisdom at Rome (for a Brahmin means a wise man) and rejected all the pleasures and comforts of the world. I had already learned Tamil and Sanskrit, which among them holds the same place as the Latin among us…

— 'India is the world’s cradle : thence it is that the common mother in sending forth her children, even to the utmost west has, in unfading testimony of our origin bequeathed us the legacy of her language, her laws, her 'Morale,' her literature and her religion-Traversing Persia, Arabia, Egypt and even forcing their way to the cold and cloudy north far from the sunny soil of their birth, in vain they may forget their point of departure, their skin may remain brown or become white from contact with snows of the west, of the civilizations founded by them splendid kingdoms may fall and leave no trace behind but some few ruins of sculptured columns, new people may arise from the ashes of the first; new cities may flourish on the site of the old but time and ruin united fail to obliterate the ever legible stamp of origin. The legislator Manu; whose authenticity is incontestible, dates back more than three thousand years before Christian era; the Brahmans assign him a still more ancient epoch. What instruction for us, and what testimony almost material, in favour of the oriental chronology, which, less ridiculous than ours (based on Biblical traditions) adopts, for the formation of this world, an a speech more in harmony with science. We shall presently see Egypt, Judea, Greece, Rome, all antiquity, in fact, copies Brahminical society in its castes, its theories, its religious opinion, and adopts its Brahmins, its priests, its levites as they had already adopted the language, legislation and philosophy of the ancient Vedic Society whence their ancestors had departed through the world to dessiminate the grand ideas of primitive revelation.

According to the astronomical calculations of the Hindus, the present period of the world, Kaliyug, commenced 3,102 years before the birth of Christ, on the 20th of February, at 2 hours 27 minutes and 30 seconds, the time being thus calculated of the planets that took place, and their tables show this conjunction. Bailly states that Jupiter and Mercury were then in the same degree of the ecliptic, Mars at a distance of only eight, and Saturn of seven degrees; whence it follows, that at the point of time given by the Brahmins as the commencement of Kaliyug, the four planets above-mentioned must have been successively concealed by the rays of the sun (first Saturn, then Mars, afterwards Jupiter and lastly Mercury)....The calculation of the Brahmins is so exactly confirmed by or own astronomical tables, that nothing but an actual observation could have given so correspondent a result." The learned Count continues: "He (Bailly) further informs us that Laubere, who was sent by Louis XIV as ambassador to the King of Siam, brought home, in the year 1687, astronomical tables of solar eclipses and that other similar tables were sent to Euorpe by Patouillet (a missionary in the Carnatic - India), and by Gentil, which later were obtained from the Brahmins in Tirvalore, and that they all perfectly agree in their calcuations although received from different persons, at different times, and from places in India remote from each other. On these tables Bailly, makes the following observation. The motion calculated by the Brahmins during the long space of 4,385 years (the period eclipsed between these calculations and Bailly's), varies not a single minute from the tables of Cassini and Meyer; and as the tables brought to Europe by Laubere in 1687, under Louis XIV, are older than those of Cassini and Meyer, the accordance between them must be the result of mutual and exact astronomical observations." Then again, "Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that discovered by Tycho Brahe, a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria, and also to the Arabs, who followed the calculation of this school."

Jonaraja gives more details. He begins by saying that while Sikandar put some limits to the persecution of the Hindus, tnese were now exceeded and there was no restraint. What he probably means is that, while the religious bigotry in the preceding reign took the forms mainly of destroying temples and demolishing the images of gods, Sthabhatta now more violently persecuted the Brahmanas. He imposed a fine or inflicted punishment (danda) on the Brahmanas and forbade religious sacrifices and processions (yoga-yatradi). Lest the Brahmanas leave the country to avoid the oppression and maintain their caste, orders were issued that no one might leave Kashmir without a passport, so that Sihabhatta might torment the Brahmanas as a fisherman torments the fish after putting them in a net in river. In spite of the regulation, some left the country by unfrequented roads. As to the rest, some tried to save themselves by putting on Muslim dress, while others put an end to their lives by fire, poison, drowning, hanging and jumping from a precipice. In order to put a stop to Hindu learning, Suhabhatta stopped the allowances of the Brahmanas, who had to move from door to door, like dogs, for food. It is interesting to note that Sthabhatta maintained that all these he did out of his regard for Islamic faith, and not out of any malice towards the Brahmanas (vv. 863-81).