True Indology: "Rana Safvi says Paraśurāma was a Persian".
Shrikant Talageri
Someone sent me a twitter thread of True Indology's comments on a writer named Rana Safvi who is apparently being touted as a master-historian, and who has been given plenty of "awards" for her alleged historical skills by other anti-Hindu and leftist authorities. True Indology gives quite an impressive list of her "historical" gaffes. No-one among us is unaware of how the leftists and anti-Hindus dominate the world of information and knowledge and are in positions of power and privilege and are able to award, reward, punish, stonewall, slander, etc. whoever they find it fit to do in the course of their anti-Hindu activities. I myself have plenty of reason, in fact more reason than most, to know and condemn the activities of such fake scholars and writers, since I have borne the brunt of their venom or disinformation techniques than anyone else.
But, there is this other side of the story: the narrow-minded bigots, who actually claim to be fighting for the "Hindu" side, but are as ignorant of facts, and as determinedly unwilling to acquaint themselves with them, as the leftists and anti-Hindus. I am as much anathema to many of them as to the leftists, because they do not like the Truth and the facts. And strangely, they do not want the "Hindu" side to win on the basis of the Truth and the facts, either: they would prefer to wallow in ignorant ideas and assertions, and to let the "Hindu" side lose the battle, by allowing the leftists full monopoly over the serious debate, while they expressly want Hindus only to debate silly and irrational ideas and issues.
This came out once again in the responses to True Indology's tweet.
The tweet was as follows:
This tweet has aroused a storm of derision for Rana Safvi, and no doubt, as part of the whole exposure, well-deserved derision. However, the responses to this particular tweet included many which have also dragged me into this picture. A few tweets pointed out that I had also made a similar claim. Many other fans of True Indology (I won't dignify them by naming them) drew out their knives to attack me, one of them, for example, declaring that he found my claim "far-fetched" and another, somehow under the impression that I have a craving for extremely stupid and illiterate "fans", declared that it was because of such "weird" claims on my part (and Koenraad Elst's) that he was "a fan of neither" of us!
I am aware that the internet, and places like facebook and twitter, are happy-hunting grounds for the mentally-sick, the compulsive trolls, and for extremely stupid and illiterate (but swollen-headed) people, so I have remained firm in myself not stepping into such twilight-zone quicksand regions.
But in the rare case, when such cases are brought to my notice, I do sometimes find it necessary to comment. This is one of them.
Firstly, "Persia" or "Iran" did not exist as such in the time of Rāma, the son of Jamadagni Bhārgava. Even the worst anti-Hindu historian does not place the Rigveda at a date later than 1000 BCE, and both these personalities are Rigvedic figures. Even at this date (1000 BCE), present day "Iran" and ancient "Persia" did not exist. Here are some western sources on this:
“We find no evidence of the future ‘Iranians’ previous to the ninth century BC. The first allusion to the Parsua or Persians, then localized in the mountains of Kurdistan, and to the Madai or medes, already established on the plain, occurs in 837 BC in connection with the expedition of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III. About a hundred years afterwards, the Medes invaded the plateau which we call Persia (or Iran) driving back or assimilating populations of whom there is no written record” (LAROUSSE 1959:321).
“By the mid-ninth century BC two major groups of Iranians appear in cuneiform sources: the Medes and the Persians. [….] What is reasonably clear from the cuneiform sources is that the Medes and Persians (and no doubt other Iranian peoples not identified by name) were moving into western Iran from the east” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1974, Vol.9, 832).
“‘Persians’ are first mentioned in the 9th century BC Assyrian annals: on one campaign, in 835 BC, Shalmaneser (858-824) is said to have received tributes from 27 kings of Paršuwaš; the Medes are mentioned under Tiglath-Pileser III (744-727 BC) [….] There are no literary sources for Iranians in Central Asia before the Old Persian inscriptions (Darius’s Bisotun inscription, 521-519 BC, ed. Schmitt) these show that by the mid-1st millennium BC tribes called Sakas by the Persians and Scythians by the Greeks were spread throughout Central Asia, from the westernmost edges (north and northwest of the Black Sea) to its easternmost borders” (SKJÆRVØ 1995:156).
So if Parśurāma was a "Persian", he cannot have been from "Persia" or "Iran". What was he then, and from which area?
People who try to derive the whole of Indian/Hindu religion and culture from the Vedic religion and culture, and who prefer myths to facts, do not (and will not) like what I have to say in this respect, but the fact is that the Rigveda was a book of just one of the many tribal conglomerates of ancient India: of the Pūrus, and initially of only the Bharata-Pūrus among them, who resided in present-day Haryana and westernmost U.P. Our great Hindu religion and culture is a magnificent, spreading banyan tree, and Vedic religion and culture were not the roots of this tree, they were just one local branch. All the other branches were, and are, equally Indian, and equally Hindu.
One of these other branches of this great Indian and Hindu banyan tree was the religion and culture of the Anu branch to the west of the Pūrus. Later on in time, sections of these Anus migrated westwards and gave birth to the religions, cultures and civilizations of the Iranians (including Persians, Parthians, Medians, etc.) and the Greeks, Thraco-Phrygians (Armenians) and Illyrians (Albanians). But this does not make their Indian and Hindu ancestors of the Vedic days non-Indian or non-Hindu, or natives of Iran, West Asia or Europe.
The dāśarājña battle described in the Rigveda took place between Sudās, the Rigvedic Pūru-Bharata king on the one hand (who, let me make it clear here, was the aggressor in this battle), and a coalition of ten Anu tribes of the Punjab, which included the Parśavas (proto-Persians), Pārthavas (proto-Parthians), Pakthas (proto-Pakhtoons), Bhalānas (proto-Baluchis) and others. After the battle, most of these tribes migrated or spread out westwards. But even during the subsequent period of composition of the Avesta, these people had not spread into present-day Iran or the areas of ancient Persia: they were still restricted to Afghanistan! Centuries later, they spread out into those historical areas.
The Bhṛgus were the priests of the Anus (and enemies of the Aṅgiras, who were the priests of the Pūrus or Vedic Aryans), and were also arraigned against Sudās in the battle.. However, well before this battle, one section of these Bhṛgus had separated from the others, and aligned with the Pūrus. This group was led by Jamadagni, the father of Rāma (later remembered as Parśu-rāma, since he and his father belonged to the Parśu tribe, which was 100% as Indian and Hindu as the Bharata Pūru tribe). Later, as myths were manufactured in his name, his name was associated with the paraśu, or "axe", and his name also became more popularly Paraśu-rāma.
Therefore, nothing associates him with the "Persians" or "Iranians" of very much latter-day history. He was fully Indian and Hindu. And in fact, the latter-day Persians and Iranians of the west were not even related to him: they were local natives of the Iranian plateau who accepted the language, religion and culture of the Indian Parśu tribe (and the other Anu tribes) which migrated westwards.
So why all this fuss over the fact that Rāma, the son of Jamadagni was a "Parśu"? Linguistically also, the name Jamadagni itself is "Iranian" (let me repeat, Indian and Hindu "proto-Iranian" Anu of the Rigvedic days). In Vedic, the name would have had "gamad-". And the only other name with -agni in the entire Vedic period is the Avestan name Dāštāγni.
In my second book, in chapter 6, I have given in full detail the history of the Aṅgirases and Bhṛgus in the Rigvedic period (TALAGERI 2000:163-231). I would advise people to read this (and read it intelligently) in full before making illiterate comments comparing me with Rana Safvi, or dismissing, on childish grounds, the conclusions derived by me from the actual original data.
I will end this article on this note, although there is a corollary issue that I would have wanted to take up: the tragic tendency among self-styled militant Hindus to take "sides" based on the biases and prejudices of the ancient writers of the Sanskrit books. This is a very controversial issue and I will leave it for a different article in future.