The Absurdities of Vedveer Arya’s Chronological Theories

 

The Absurdities of Vedveer Arya’s Chronological Theories

Shrikant G. Talageri 

 

Someone has just sent me a tweet by Vedveer Arya apparently uploaded less than an hour ago:

https://x.com/VedveerArya3/status/2014349521124499940

“Why It Is Absurd to Relatively Date the Mandalas of the Rigveda  ……………………………………………….

According to Shrikant Talageri, the 6th Mandala is the oldest. The hymns of the 6th Mandala were composed by eight Rishis belonging to the Bharadvāja gotra, with Bharadvāja Bārhaspatya (son of Bṛhaspati) authoring 59 of its 75 sūktas.

In this mandala, Bharadvāja refers to King Nami Sāpya (6.20.6). The Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa states that Nami Sāpya was the first to perform the Sarasvatīya Sattra and that he travelled from Plakṣa Prāsravaṇa (the source of the Sarasvatī) to Vinaśana (the place where the river disappeared). This clearly indicates that the Sarasvatī had already been lost in the desert at Vinaśana well before the time of Videha King Nami Sāpya.

Consequently, Bharadvāja Bārhaspatya must be counted among the latest Rishis of the Rigvedic period. If the 6th Mandala is treated as the oldest, a serious chronological contradiction arises: how could Rishi Gṛtsamada (of the 2nd Mandala) and other Rishis describe the Sarasvatī as the mighty, flowing “nadītamā” river and refer to the Sadānīra — features that belong to an earlier phase when the Sarasvatī was still a perennial river? This makes any relative dating of the mandalas chronologically untenable.

It is fundamentally mistaken to assign relative dates to entire mandalas of the Rigveda. The true authors of the mantras are the individual Rishis who composed the sūktas. Chronology must therefore be established by dating these Rishis through careful relative analysis of their references and historical indicators, rather than by mechanically dating whole mandalas.

The entire framework of relatively dating the mandalas is a speculative construct introduced by colonial Indologists, which many later Indian scholars have adopted without critical examination.”

8:18 PM ·Jan 22, 2026

 

I find it strange that a person living in a glass house should dare to throw stones at a stone house. Vedveer Arya’s absurd datings have been noted by me in an earlier article:

This man, whose datings are so absolutely absurd that they will never be taken seriously by any genuine scholar, has a very large fan following, as will any man who writes nonsense, because nonsensical claims seem to attract certain types of minds.

But even within his own range of absurd dates, how does he fit in his mad ramblings in the above tweet?

1. In this tweet he tells us that “In this mandala, Bharadvāja refers to King Nami Sāpya (6.20.6). The Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa states that Nami Sāpya was the first to perform the Sarasvatīya Sattra and that he travelled from Plakṣa Prāsravaṇa (the source of the Sarasvatī) to Vinaśana (the place where the river disappeared). This clearly indicates that the Sarasvatī had already been lost in the desert at Vinaśana well before the time of Videha King Nami Sāpya”. But in his above table, he dates the entire Rigveda from 11500-10500 BCE.

Does he mean that “the Sarasvatī had already been lost in the desert at Vinaśana” at some point of time between 11500-10500 BCE?

2. He takes a statement in a later text like the Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa to date a Rigvedic king. But in his above dates for the different texts, he does not give us his dates for the Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa. If we assume that it is the same as his date for the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa (i.e. 8800 BCE), isn’t it strange that he takes the data from a text that he dates at 8800 BCE to decide the date of a king named in the Rigveda that he dates from 11500-10500 BCE?

3. And then he completely ignores the data given in the Rigveda itself and arrives (on the basis of his data from the Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa) at a conclusion completely contradicting the evidence of the Rigveda.

Thus he concludes that Book 6 and its rishi “Bharadvāja Bārhaspatya must be counted among the latest Rishis of the Rigvedic period” since “the Sarasvatī had already been lost in the desert” at the time of composition of Book 6, while Book 2 is a very much earlier book because “Rishi Gṛtsamada (of the 2nd Mandala) and other Rishis describe the Sarasvatī as the mighty, flowing “nadītamā” river and refer to the Sadānīra — features that belong to an earlier phase when the Sarasvatī was still a perennial river”.

This man thereby wants us to believe, purely on his say-so:

a) That within the Rigvedic period (which he dates 11500-10500 BCE), we have both the phases of the Sarasvati river, the “earlier phase when the Sarasvatī was still a perennial river” as well as the later phase when “the Sarasvatī had already been lost in the desert at Vinaśana”!

b) That the Rigvedic data, which tells us before every hymn of Book 2 that “Rishi Gṛtsamada (of the 2nd Mandala)” was originally a descendant of Bharadvāja’s descendant Śunahotra Bhāradvāja, and was later adopted into the family of Śunaka Bhārgava, is wrong and that Gṛtsamada is actually an ancestor of Bharadvāja!

And he talks about “serious chronological contradictions”!

Incidentally, was he hallucinating when he saw the Rigveda "refer to the Sadānīra"? This is a very much post-Samhitā word, which represents a late Dravidian borrowing nīra, first found only in this combination in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa before the word nīra itself for “water” was used in Sanskrit.

And you cannot get away with any nonsense simply by castigating “colonial Indologists”! Especially when your whimsical objections to “relatively dating the mandalas” coincide with those of western Indologists like Witzel.

I feel degraded to have to reply to people of this low an intellectual level. To such people, pure data has no value and must give way to their personal biases and prejudices. In my books and articles, I have given all the solid data which shows the exact order of the books of the Rigveda.

And my article on the Chronological Gulf simply cannot be answered by "scholars" of this type:

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2022/08/final-version-of-chronological-gulf.html

As I have said before in referring to these chronological extremists, they are free to cultivate and enjoy their legions of admirers. But please they should not make the mistake of thinking that they can find any “absurdities” in my chronological datings.

Postscript added 24 January 2026:

Incidentally, though the context of speaking about the chronology of the name Namī Sāpya in the Rigveda has never arisen before in my writings, the important fact to be noted (as I noticed just now, and hence this postscript) is that the hymn in which the name occurs (and is cited by Vedveer Arya) has already been cited by me in my earlier books and articles, whenever and wherever I have referred to the occurrence of the name Purukutsa in the Old Rigveda as interpolated references:

“VI.20.10 is the only verse in the Old Books, singled out by Prof. Hopkins (HOPKINS 1896a:72-73), in the "Final Note" to his path-breaking article "Prāgāthinī - I", as a verse which seems to have "interesting marks of lateness", in spite of the hymn not being a Redacted Hymn.”

Now, on going through Hopkins' article once more, I find that while he specifies this particular verse as having “interesting marks of lateness”, he notes that the hymn VI.20 as a whole (although Oldenberg did not include it in his list of Redacted hymns because it did not violate the system and criteria by which the hymns of the Rigveda were serially “ordered” within each book, and therefore could not directly be called an “unordered” hymn, since only those hymns which directly violated those criteria were classified by him as “unordered”, i.e. Redacted hymns) is nevertheless a Redacted Hymn since it contains late words, occurring outside this hymn “in i., viii., and x., but not elsewhere in family books”.

And not only does Hopkins cite this as his own conclusion, but notes that Oldenberg himself (although as pointed out above, the regularity of its ordered nature prevented him from directly including it in is list of “unordered” hymns) classified hymn VI.20 as “enstellt”. And check it out: “"Enstellt" is a German adjective meaning disfigured, distorted, or deformed. It describes something that has been marred, spoilt, or altered in a way that spoils its original appearance”.

Obviously, neither Hopkins nor Oldenberg wrote the above things after consulting their crystal balls and discovering that this would be an important point in my historical analysis of the Rigveda. In short, they had no "colonial" or otherwise ulterior motives at all in classifying hymn VI.20 as having “interesting marks of lateness” or being “enstellt”.

As I have always been insisting, the division of the hymns of the Rigveda into Old, New and Redacted is the key to any meaningful historical analysis of the Rigveda and Rigvedic history.

It is interesting that while the “colonial Indologists” through their objective and masterful analysis of the Rigveda left us these clues which prove the chronological divisions of the Rigveda which prove the OIT, although they did not realize it since they wore the blinkers of the AIT, it is present-day supporters of the OIT who seek to disprove this chronological division of the Rigveda for their own petty reasons in order to fulfill certain petty personal prejudices of their own, regardless of the fact that their attacks are actually attacks on the OIT.