A
Last Reply to Lies about My Position on Manu Vaivasvata
Shrikant G. Talageri
After months of prevarication and dissemination of disinformation on a war-footing, accompanied by a refusal to take notice of my repeated and very detailed refutations of his lies, Koenraad Elst has finally been forced to take note of what he dismissively (and very strangely in a person who always claims to stand for authentic references whenever he is dealing with critics on the internet) calls “some commotion … over the historical/scriptural location of Manu Vaivasvata” – it should have been “some indignation over a deliberate and sustained disinformation campaign to put words into the mouth or pen of Talageri about the geographical location of Manu Vaivasvata, words never ever spoken or written by him, in order to make his formulations sound as fictitious and immature as those of Jijith Nadumuri Ravi”:
“Some
commotion has erupted over the historical/scriptural location of Manu
vaivasvata. As I remember it, Shrikant talageri wrote in his 1993 book, still
strongly Purāṇa-based, that Manu stayed in Ayodhya. In that area, his daughter
Iḷā’s son Purūravas founded the Lunar Dynasty,/1”
1:11 PM . Jun
17 2025
After five more tweets on this issue where he makes rambling and irrelevant points, he ends (?) with a seventh tweet:
“7/Whether this flies in the face of a position once taken by Talageri, I'm presently in no position to check. But since this is not a spectator sport, among you some possessor of his 1993 book may get up from his couch & check, then let us know? Ah, good you Hs are so helpful”.
2:12 PM . Jun
17 2025
I will address
this man directly for hopefully the last time:
If you are not in a position to check whether what your very faulty memory tells you is right or not, how does it justify your militantly repeating this faulty “remembrance” for months on end in the face of continuous and strong denials from my end?
And now, cornered on this (to you, as you now claim, superficial and unimportant) issue, but which you made the very basis of comparing my OIT case with Jijith’s AIOIT case throughout your disinformation campaign, do you think you can get away with flippant and contemptuous remarks about Hindus being spectators sitting on couches and discussing irrelevant issues?
If you were in no position to check, why did you carry on this disinformation campaign for so long and in so militant and determined a fashion? And when you challenge people with whom you argue on different issues on twitter and elsewhere and ask them to produce exact citations, and they fail to do so, is it because you are sitting free on a couch while they are too busy to examine the sources on issues on which they are making categorical assertions?
And even now, when a response is being practically choked out of you by public exposure, you are trying to get away with fudging the issues. You still do not admit that you deliberately lied, or even that you were very wrong. You state: “As I remember it, Shrikant talageri wrote in his 1993 book, still strongly Purāṇa-based, that Manu stayed in Ayodhya.” It is your duty to give the relevant quotations from my 1993 book, not the duty of others to search out these references to expose your lies.
Well, it was my
book; your false accusation is about me; I am a retired person with time
hanging on my hands as I sit idly on my couch (but as the original writer you
are misrepresenting, and not just a “spectator”); I do have a copy of my 1993
book with me; and I am in a position to check out the facts about your
assertions about my 1993 book.
You are right: it was “still strongly Purāṇa-based”. But nowhere did I present the Puranic data as a result of my own investigations. Before writing my 1993 book, I had never even seen an actual copy of the Rigveda with my own eyes, or the Puranas. It was after my 1993 book that I started my own detailed investigation of the Rigvedic data and found out exactly where and how it clashed or contrasted – or fitted in – with the accounts in the Puranas. Throughout my first book, I was dealing with the Puranic analyses of other scholars like Pusalker, Bhargava and Pargiter.
And I was mainly concerned with demolishing their arguments (especially those of Bhargava). Thus even Pargiter, whose conclusions I found more conducive than those of Bhargava (since Pargiter concludes that all the Indo-European languages of Europe, Iran and West Asia migrated from India through the northwest), made extremely ridiculous arguments which I rejected in strong terms. I will mention some of them, just for safety, in case tomorrow your faulty memory tells you that I had made those assertions in my 1993 book: he asserted that there was an Aryan invasion from across the Himalayas; he asserted that the Ikṣvākus were Dravidian-language speakers; he asserted that Sudyumna ruled from Prayag; he asserted that all the Rigvedic rishis and the brahmana families descended from them were “non-Aryans”; he asserted that most of the Rigvedic hymns were translations into Vedic Sanskrit of “pre-Aryan” hymns in some “non-Aryan” language!
Nowhere did I accept their assertions: I only described them all, and rejected with detailed arguments those that I found most necessary to reject.
But, to come
back to Manu, did I accept him at least in my first book as a genuine ancestral
king with a kingdom and “Court”? Here is what I wrote even in 1993, when I had not
learnt to look at the Puranic data with as much skepticism and careful scrutiny
as in my writings after 1993:
“The Puranas
commence the traditional history of India with the division of the whole of
northern India among the ten sons of Manu. Now it is obvious that these ten
kings could not have been the sons of a single person, and that this was the
mythical way of presenting the relationship between the kings of the ten
kingdoms which must have existed in India at the point of time at which the
traditional historians commenced their recording. Manu Vaivasvata may have been
an emperor who ruled over all the kingdoms.”
Note the last sentence. It was a nominal concession (as my first step into the subject) to the idea of a historical Manu who may have lived at some time in the remote prehistorical past, long before the situation “which must have existed in India at the point of time at which the traditional historians commenced their recording”. But nowhere, even in my first book, did I talk about his geographical location (whether Ayodhya, Kashi, Haryana or anywhere else) – and, what is more, I don’t think even Bhargava or Pargiter gave Manu’s “Court” a geographical location, and certainly not Ayodhya!
It is unfortunate that people, who pretend to base their arguments (when arguing with other less careful critics) on quotable citations, treat exact citations in such a cavalier and even contemptuous manner: “among you some possessor of his 1993 book may get up from his couch & check, then let us know? Ah, good you Hs are so helpful”.
So now your positions (on which you are discreet and
diplomatic enough to avoid committing yourself openly) on various issues is out
in the open. According to you and Jijith:
1. In the Rigveda there are three different rivers named
Sarayu (apart from the only two historical ones known to all students of
ancient history: the ones in Ayodhya and in Afghanistan, which you both agree
are unknown to the Rigveda).
2. The Ikṣvākus are archaeologically identifiable on the
northern banks of the Sarasvati river (which was one of the three Sarayus) in
pre-Rigvedic times. And there is an archaeological trail of their identifiably
“Ikṣvāku” archaeological artefacts (pottery? tools? cultural items?) moving
west-to-east from the Sarasvati river to Ayodhya in the east, such
archaeological proof standing in sharp
contrast to the total absence of such “archaeological” evidence in my OIT case
to show an east-to-west movement of the Ikṣvākus.
3. In the Rigveda (especially in the older and oldest parts)
the Bharata Pūru dynasty and sub-tribe to which Divodāsa and Sudās belong are
the heroes in half the hymns but the enemies in the other, and older, half (where
the “Samvaraṇa Bharatas”, their enemies, are the heroes).
4. In fact, many kings in what I have called the “New
Rigveda’ are actually older than Sudās who belongs to what I have called the
“Old Rigveda” (so that the terms Old Rigveda and New Rigveda are plainly
wrong), and these older kings were already in the NW (in the Swat area) even
before Sudās commenced his westward journey from Haryana (so that the actual
“Aryan” movement in the Rigveda cannot be east-to-west, or, at least, Sudās’
battles do not mark any such east-to-west movement).
And how does all this stand proved? Simply because I have
made the supreme mistake of locating Manu in Ayodhya while Jijith correctly
located him in Haryana!
Well, we will see whether ultimately the truth will prevail or your lies!
Incidentally, the war also seems to have been joined by other forces:
Jijith apparently sent a comment to your tweets, claiming that I am always making contradictory statements in my writings. He quotes my reference to Mandhāta’s father (for some reason, he persistently calls Mandhāta "Manthata") being from Ayodhya. However, his brainless comment was immediately replied to by a tweeter who pointed out:
“Where in this image did Mr Talageri
locate Manu in Ayodhya? He just said that an eastern IKSHVAKU king Mandhata's
mother was a Puru from the west (haryana & westernmost UP) so he went to
the west (Puru lands) to help the Purus & returned to Ayo to continue the
line of Ikshvakus.”
Another person has apparently quoted my reference (in my 2000 book) to Pratardana as a king of Kashi. But I already replied to this when it was pointed out by a person commenting on my previous article:
“"Pratardana was a king of Kashi, which is in eastern Uttar Pradesh. This can only mean that the Bharata Kings of the Early Period of the Rigveda were Kings of Kashi; and, in the light of the other information in the Rigveda, the land of the Bharatas extended from Kashi in the east to Kurukshetra in the west."
This was an indirect attempt at interpretation of
the late Anukramani attribution of a verse in Book 10, where I have suggested
that (if true) Bharata Purus (extremely late descendants of the Rigvedic Purus)
may have reached Kashi by the late period of Book 10. In any case, in the same
book (in 2000) I also suggested (on the basis of information then gleaned by
me) that Kikata was Bihar (while it is in northern-Madhya-Pradesh Rajasthan,
which I have accepted in all my subsequent writings).
In the same book where I wrote the above, I also
wrote on p.49 about Book 10:
"The ascription of hymns in this Maṇḍala is
so chaotic that in most of the hymns the names, or the patronymics/epithets, or
both, of the composers, are fictitious; to the extent that, in 44 hymns out of
191, and in parts of one more, the family identity of the composers is a total
mystery.
In many other hymns, the family identity, but not
the actual identity of the composers, is clear or can be deduced: the hymns are
ascribed to remote ancestors, or even to mythical ancestors not known to have
composed any hymns in earlier Maṇḍalas."
In all my writings after 2000, I have repeatedly
reiterated that the Ikshvakus were the only people in the east.
In any case how does this ascription about a king named Pratardana of Kashi (as per the Anukramanis) in Book 10 indicate that I have located Manu Vaivasvata (long into the pre-Rigvedic days) in Ayodhya? So much that in spite of my repeated denials these two keep on propagating this lie?”
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