“What a terrible day to be literate” I thought as I read through An Arctic Home in the Vedas by Bal Gangadhar Tilak. I had picked up the book because it was written by a foundational figure of 20th century Indian Nationalism, and because debunking bad history is a guilty pleasure of mine. But I never realized just *how bad* bad history can be. Until now.

Oh! What Racism!

This book starts bad and only gets worse as it goes. But let me give a little background before I go forward: the “Vedas” are the oldest part of the Hindu scripture, and some of the oldest books that we still have. The writers of the Vedas were the Indo-Aryan people, who spoke an Indo-Aryan language. The word Aryan sadly has many undesirable connotations, but in their native language “Aryan” meant something like “Noble,” and the word “Aryan” still survives as the etymology of “Iran.”

“Aryaman” land of the Noble People became “Eran” in middle Persian and then “Iran” in modern Persian.

The Indo-Aryans were on one branch of the language family that is Indo-European, and discovering how exactly the languages of Europe and India are connected has been a major topic of study for almost two centuries. Part of this study is searching for the Indo-European “Urheimat” or “original home,” the place where the Indo-European language first developed and where the Indo-Europeans first migrated out from.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (can I call him Bal?) is here to tell us that the Indo-European Urheimat was in the Arctic, and he’s got the Vedas to prove it.

But a large section of his early proof is devoted to racially categorizing the people of Europe using, of all things, phrenology. I first heard the term “phrenology” in a video game called Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodline. There, a certain vampire is also a psychologist, but since he’s a hundreds of years old vampire, he has some kooky ideas about what psychology *is*. He laments that 21st century psychologists have abandoned “phrenology” and “dacto-pintalism” in favor of more chemical understandings of the brain. “Phrenology” was the very early believe that people’s head-shape determined how their brain worked, and was also used to catagorize people into races. “Dacto-pintalism” seems to have been made up by the game devs, but probably involved measuring fingers (dactylo – finger).

So Bal spends much of his first two chapters talking about how to racial categorize all Europeans by 4 different classes of head-shapes. He then tries to argue which of these head-shapes represents the “original” Indo-Europeans, and which is the uncivilized “early peoples” that the Indo-Europeans found when they arrived. He off-handedly mentions the idea that “when two groups meet, it is the most cultured language that survives and overpowers the other,” by which he concludes that the “Baltic” head-shape could not have been the Indo-Europeans, as the “Gallic” head-shape comes from the more cultured peoples, and (I’m paraphrasing) “It’s more likely that the cultured Gauls civilized the uncultured Balts than vice versa.”

All this is unbelievably, and unexpectedly racist. I had been expecting a lot of bad geography and ecology. You have to have those if you’re going to explain how exactly the Vedas, which mention a very temperate climate, could have actually been describing the Arctic. And oh boy there’s plenty of that. But I was far less expectant to start the book with a long catalogue of races to explain who “civilized” whom during ancient history.

Oh! What ignorance!

When we finally get to the bad history/bad science (the two go hand in hand here), we see that Bal has really put his faith in a small number of facts to support his conclusions. Bal’s theory that the Indo-European Urheimat was in the Arctic (and that that is where the Vedas was written) rests largely on the idea that the Arctic was incredibly temperate at that time. While it’s true that in Earth’s deep past, the Arctic was occasionally much milder, that hasn’t really been the case during the time of modern Man.

There are, and were, a lot of scientists studying Earth’s past climate. Many had already been theorizing at how the wobble of the Earth’s axis over tens of thousands of years can cause severe changes in climate (what we now know as the Milankovitch cycles). But Bal dismisses that evidence in favor of his preferred (and seemingly unfounded) hypothesis that a different arrangement of the Earth’s land and water was enough to turn the Arctic temperature, though altering the currents of warm and cold air.

And while Bal’s hypothesis kind of sounds like continental drift, it isn’t. He appears to state that the earlier earth in his models was one in which there were a small number of islands peaking out above a large, worldwide sea, the largest mountains today formed in place in this sea and were then slowly eroded down (along with the rest of the world?) to what they are today. So no, the continents didn’t move, just there were less of them.

Oh! Where’s the Vedas?

So far I haven’t seen much of his Vedic evidence for all this, instead he is mostly quoting or misquoting the scientists of his day. The only “Vedic” evidence he has so far presented is that during the time the Vedas were written, the Autum Equinox was in the constellation of Orion. This is… not true and not possible. It IS true that the equinoxes have changed over earth’s history, the precession of the equinoxes was the first hint in astronomy that earth’s wobbly orbit changes a little over time. But the equinoxes precess along the plane of the zodiac, the catchy 1960s chorus “Age of Aquarius” was about exactly this fact. Orion isn’t in the zodiac, and as far as I can tell the Autumn Equinox was never in Orion, or at least not at any time during which humans lived on earth.

Bal’s source for this Orion Equinox is that a certain part of the Vedas seems to say that a certain god will always stand guard in a certain direction. And Bal has associated that God with a particular constellation and that direction with the Autumn Equinox. This isn’t exactly strong evidence, firstly this interpretation is shaky at best, and secondly just because someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true. Bal doesn’t even begin to ponder if the Vedic quote he’s using is metaphorical, or if he’s mistranslated, or if the quote is just plain wrong.

I came here wondering how exactly the “Vedas” provide evidence that people lived in the Arctic, but I’ve been quite disappointed how little Vedas and Vedic interpretation I’m getting. He blithely states his Orion-Equinox conclusion, spends less than a sentence justifying it, and is then right back into the race-science and non-continental-drift climatology that makes up most of the book.

To be honest, it’s exhausting, and while I like dunking on books, I don’t know how much more of this I’ll be able to take. Stay tuned, I guess.