The Manufactured Past: Colonial Distortion of Indian History, the Indo-Aryan Myth, and the Contested Timeline of Classical Sanskrit
A Critical Research Paper
"Knowledge is power — and when power becomes knowledge, history becomes the first casualty of conquest."
— Adapted from Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)
Abstract
This paper examines how British colonial rule systematically distorted the historical record of ancient India through a convergence of Orientalist scholarship, racial ideology, and strategic alliance with Brahmin intermediaries whom colonialists identified as fellow Indo-Aryans — a shared ancestry myth that served to legitimise both Brahmin social authority and British imperial dominion. A central section analyses the role of the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) — the great Bronze Age civilisation of Turkmenistan — as a cultural staging post and religious crucible in the three-stage Indo-Aryan migration model (Sintashta Steppe → BMAC contact zone → Punjab entry), distinguishing between migration as demographic fact and colonial racial conquest narrative as ideological fabrication. The paper further conducts a detailed critical analysis of the received narrative around Pushyamitra Shunga (c. 185–149 BCE) — founder of the Shunga Dynasty — interrogating the literary myths constructed around his persona, the contested dating of Patanjali and the evolution of Classical Sanskrit, the reliability of the Ashokavadana as a historical source, and the archaeological ambiguities surrounding the Ayodhya Inscription of Dhanadeva. The cumulative argument is that what passes for ancient Indian history in mainstream texts is, in significant measure, a 19th-century colonial construction — and that its nationalist counter-narrative often mirrors rather than corrects the distortions it claims to oppose.
Part I — The Architecture of Distortion: British Colonial Historiography in India
1.1 The Problem of Writing India's History from the Outside
The writing of Indian history under British rule was not a neutral academic enterprise. It was embedded in the political economy of empire and shaped by the need to justify foreign domination over one of the world's oldest and most complex civilisations. The foundational problem was structural: those who held power produced the knowledge about those they governed. As Edward Said argued in his landmark Orientalism, Western representations of Eastern cultures are not disinterested scholarship but exercises in constructing difference — always measuring the East against a European standard that it inevitably fails to meet.
British colonial historiography was never monolithic. It passed through distinct phases, each with its own logic of distortion. But all phases shared one assumption: that contemporary Western civilisation represented the apex of human achievement, against which India's past and present were to be measured, classified, and found wanting. What varied was whether ancient India was admired (Orientalists), condemned (Evangelicals), or simply dismissed (Anglicists like Macaulay). What did not vary was the use of historical writing as an ideological instrument.
1.2 The Orientalists: Admiration as Condescension
The first wave of British colonial scholars — William Jones, Henry Thomas Colebrooke, Nathaniel Halhed — arrived in India in the late 18th century and were genuinely astonished by what they found. William Jones founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 and began the systematic translation of Sanskrit and Persian texts into English. Jones and Colebrooke represented a particular Orientalist attitude: deep respect for ancient India combined with the assumption that this ancient civilisation had irreversibly declined and that its glory could only be recovered by Western scholarship on behalf of its contemporary inheritors.
This benign-seeming posture carried a devastating payload. By locating India's greatness exclusively in a remote, Brahminical, Sanskrit-literate past, the Orientalists simultaneously validated elite Brahmin identity (as custodians of that past) and invalidated contemporary Indian culture as a degenerated relic. It also served colonial administration directly: to govern India, one needed to understand India's sacred and legal texts, which meant relying on Brahmin pandits as interpreters. The colonial bureaucratic order thus played a crucial role in re-formulating caste as a Brahminical ritual system, making the most esoteric forms of social distinction the basis for administrative knowledge.
1.3 Friedrich Max Müller and the Weaponisation of Sanskrit Philology
No single figure did more to shape — and distort — the Western understanding of India's ancient past than Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), the German-born Oxford philologist sponsored by the East India Company to produce a monumental translation of the Rig Veda. Müller brought to India's textual heritage the full apparatus of 19th-century German Romanticism and comparative philology. His central contribution — and central distortion — was the elaboration and popularisation of the Aryan concept as a racial category.
Müller observed the structural similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, and Germanic languages and proposed a common ancestral tongue, which he called Proto-Indo-European. So far, so defensible as a linguistic hypothesis. The catastrophic leap was the conflation of linguistic kinship with racial identity — the construction of a prehistoric "Aryan race" of warrior nomads who invaded the Indian subcontinent from Central Asia, subjugated the darker-skinned indigenous Dravidian peoples, and imposed the Vedic civilisation that would become classical Hinduism.
This Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) was not primarily an academic hypothesis. It was, as subsequent scholars have demonstrated, a narrative that served multiple imperial and ideological functions simultaneously. For the British, AIT provided a legitimising script: by portraying Indian civilisation as the product of successive foreign intrusions, British rule could be positioned as merely the latest — and most benevolent — chapter in a long history of conquests. The Aryan ancestors of the Brahmins had come from outside and imposed civilisation; the British were doing the same. The shared "Indo-European" ancestry of Brahmin pandits and British administrators could be invoked to explain why high-caste Hindus were "naturally" fitted for collaboration with colonial governance.
For German scholars, the Aryan concept took on a different but equally dangerous trajectory — one that Müller himself eventually tried to disown — culminating in the Nazi appropriation of "Aryan" as a racial category of white supremacy, with catastrophic consequences that are well known.
The Aryan concept as a racial marker was, in any case, a colonial invention superimposed upon indigenous Indian categories. The Sanskrit terms ārya and varṇa had long carried social, ethical, and ritual connotations available in principle to all — not markers of biological race. Colonial philologists transformed ārya into "Aryan" as a racial type, and in doing so created an artificial fissure within Indian civilisation that had not previously existed in that form.
1.4 Macaulay, Mill, and the Systematic Devaluation of Indian Knowledge
While the Orientalists distorted Indian history by over-romanticising its ancient past, the Anglicists attacked on a different front. James Mill's six-volume History of British India (1817), written without ever visiting India or learning any Indian language, divided Indian history into the Hindu period, the Muslim period, and the British period — a tripartite scheme with no logic other than the convenience of colonial administration. Mill presented an unrelievedly demeaning picture of Hindu civilisation, condemning every institution and idea and holding Hindus responsible for all the ills of the country.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, architect of the English Education Act of 1835, went further. His Minute on Education declared traditional Indian knowledge systems not merely inferior but worthless — "a single shelf of a good European library worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." English became the primary medium of instruction, marginalising Sanskrit, Tamil, and Persian. The goal, stated with unusual candour, was to produce "a class of Indians in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in words and in intellect" — a class that would serve as interpreters between the colonial rulers and the millions they governed, and that would consume colonial history as their own.
This Macaulayite program did not merely suppress indigenous knowledge. It actively replaced it with a colonial narrative so thoroughly embedded in the education system that it persisted — and in many respects persists — long after formal independence.
1.5 The Brahmin-British Axis: Alliance of Convenience and Common Mythology
Perhaps the most structurally important and least examined dimension of colonial historiography is the strategic alliance between British administrators and Brahmin scholars. The British rightly understood that to govern India they needed interpreters of India's legal, religious, and social codes — and Brahmin pandits, as self-appointed guardians of Sanskrit learning and ritual authority, were the obvious candidates. The relationship was explicitly one of give and take: in exchange for colonial favour — formal recognition, legal authority, educational privilege — Brahmin scholars unlocked the Indian psyche and society for the colonisers.
The consequences were far-reaching. Customs around caste became codified under colonial legislation in ways that gave Brahmin priests new formal prominence. The colonial census, introduced in 1871, used the category "caste" for the first time — a translation of the Portuguese casta — to classify Indian society, overlaying and distorting the existing, more fluid varṇa-jāti framework. Herbert Risley, Director of Ethnography, developed a "Nasal Index" measurement tool to racially classify Indian communities — a direct application of European race science to Indian bodies.
The deeper ideological convergence was genealogical. Both British colonial scholars and high-caste Brahmin pandits had strong interests in the story that Sanskrit-speaking "Aryans" were a superior civilisation with ancient roots — the British because it legitimised conquest as the restoration of Aryan order, Brahmin scholars because it validated their own claimed lineage and social authority. Swami Vivekananda, writing in 1897, saw clearly that colonial scholarship had created an artificial divide within Indian civilisation, manufacturing the Aryan-Dravidian opposition as a political tool. The Dravidian movement, whatever its legitimate grievances about Brahmin dominance in South India, derived its intellectual framework from European Volk ideology rather than indigenous historical consciousness.
1.6 Archaeological Manipulation: Making Sites Speak Colonial Language
The distortions were not confined to textual scholarship. British archaeologists conducted extensive excavations across the subcontinent, but discoveries were frequently presented in ways that emphasised discontinuity, foreign origin, and the absence of organic historical development. The Indus Valley Civilisation, for instance, was described as a "lost civilisation" unrelated to contemporary Indian culture, minimising its significance in India's historical continuity. The Archaeological Survey of India under figures like Alexander Cunningham — however valuable some of their foundational work — operated within a framework that consistently translated Prakrit inscriptions into Sanskrit, read post-Vedic remains as "degenerate" derivatives of a Vedic golden age, and interpreted ambiguous evidence in ways that corroborated the AIT narrative.
The problem was not always bad faith — it was the epistemological framework itself. When your interpretive grid assumes that civilisation came from outside, every piece of evidence gets fitted to that grid.
Part II — Pushyamitra Shunga: Disentangling History from Constructed Narrative
2.1 Who Was Pushyamitra Shunga? The Baseline Facts
Pushyamitra Shunga (reigned c. 185–149 BCE) was the Senapati — Commander-in-Chief — of the Maurya Empire who assassinated the last Mauryan emperor, Brihadratha, during a military review and proclaimed himself ruler, founding the Shunga Empire. He performed the Aśvamedha (horse sacrifice) twice to legitimise his claim to imperial authority. His empire controlled central and eastern India, and his capital was at Pataliputra, with Vidisha as a secondary base. These baseline facts command broad scholarly consensus.
Beyond them, almost everything is contested.
2.2 Deconstructing the Literary Myth: The Rama Avatar Claim
One of the most egregious examples of 20th-century myth masquerading as ancient history is the claim that Pushyamitra Shunga was a reincarnation or avatar of Lord Rama — a Kshatriya warrior restoring Brahminical Vedic order after the Buddhist "aberration" of Ashoka. This narrative has circulated in popular Hindu nationalist historiography and serves a clear ideological function: it retroactively consecrates Pushyamitra's coup as a divine act of cosmic restoration.
The textual origin of this claim is traceable not to any ancient source but to Volga Se Ganga (1944), a work of historical fiction by the Marxist scholar Rahul Sankrityayan. Sankrityayan's text is a creative literary exercise, not a historical document. The elevation of fictional characterisation to historical fact is a pattern common to nationalist mythmaking of all varieties — but its presence in mainstream popular discourse about the Shunga period demands explicit debunking. No ancient Sanskrit, Pali, or Prakrit source describes Pushyamitra as an avatar of Rama, as a Kshatriya (he is consistently identified as Brahmin by dynasty), or as a cosmically ordained restorer.
2.3 Re-examining the Timeline of Patanjali and Classical Sanskrit
The conventional account situates Patanjali, author of the Mahābhāṣya (the great commentary on Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī), in the 2nd century BCE, making him a near-contemporary of Pushyamitra Shunga — a dating based primarily on the Mahābhāṣya's references to Pushyamitra and to the Yavana (Greek) invasion. This would place the full systematisation of Classical Sanskrit grammar in the post-Mauryan period and tie it directly to the Brahminical cultural programme of the Shunga dynasty.
However, the dating of Patanjali is far from settled, and the 7th-century CE travel accounts of the Chinese Buddhist monk I-Tsing (Yijing, 635–713 CE) introduce significant complications. I-Tsing, who spent fourteen years in India (primarily at Nālandā) between 673 and 685 CE, describes Sanskrit learning as very much a living, developing enterprise in his time — not the reception and transmission of a body of rules fixed five hundred years earlier. I-Tsing learned Sanskrit grammar during his six-month stopover in Srivijaya before even reaching India, and his accounts describe Brahmin and Buddhist scholars at Nālandā actively engaged with grammatical texts.
The relevance of I-Tsing's timeline to the Patanjali question is this: if the full apparatus of Classical Sanskrit grammar — as encoded in the Aṣṭādhyāyī tradition augmented by Kātyāyana's Vārttikas and Patanjali's Mahābhāṣya — was firmly established by the 2nd century BCE, we would expect to find consistent Sanskrit-medium epigraphic and literary production from that period onward. What we actually find is that Sanskrit inscriptions are remarkably rare before the Gupta period (4th century CE). The overwhelming majority of Ashokan and post-Ashokan inscriptions are in Prakrit, not Sanskrit. The shift to Sanskrit as the official language of royal inscriptions occurs dramatically in the 2nd–4th centuries CE — a linguistic transition that makes more sense if the standardisation of Classical Sanskrit grammar was still in process during this period rather than complete by the 2nd century BCE.
This is not to claim that Panini or Patanjali did not exist when tradition says they did. It is to note that the reception, codification, and institutionalisation of their grammatical systems may be considerably later than the conventional dating implies — a possibility that the I-Tsing evidence makes impossible to dismiss.
2.4 Pāṇini and the Aṣṭādhyāyī: The Problem of 4,000 Sūtras
The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is one of the most remarkable intellectual achievements in human history — a generative grammar of Sanskrit in approximately 4,000 aphoristic sūtras (the exact count varies by manuscript tradition: 3,959 in some recensions, 3,983 in others, with 4,000 as the conventional figure). The text is of extraordinary concision and systematic rigour, and its formal structure has been compared to a Turing machine for its recursive, meta-linguistic architecture.
But the dating of Pāṇini himself is, as the mathematical historian J.J. O'Connor has frankly admitted, "pure guesswork." Scholarly estimates range across a 300-year span — from the 7th century BCE to the 4th century BCE — with no consensus and no contemporaneous documentary evidence to anchor the figure. Pāṇini mentions at least ten earlier grammarians, which means a substantial pre-Pāṇinian grammatical tradition already existed, making his dates even harder to fix. His birthplace in Śalātūra in Gandhāra (near the Indus, in present-day Pakistan) was described by the 7th-century CE Chinese traveller Xuanzang, who found a statue of Pāṇini still standing there — evidence of his continuing veneration but not of his historical date.
More significantly for the thesis examined here: the Aṣṭādhyāyī as it has come down to us is demonstrably not a single unitary composition. Scholars including George Cardona and the Pāṇinian commentators themselves acknowledge that the text has accumulated layers. Entire sūtras were added to the original corpus, single sūtras were split into two, words were inserted, and case forms were modified — most of these changes responding to points raised by Kātyāyana in his Vārttikas and Patanjali in the Mahābhāṣya. Later grammarians like Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita explicitly recognised that some sūtras in the Kāśikāvṛtti recension (which became the standard text with 3,983 sūtras) were not original to Pāṇini and attempted to restore unmodified versions.
The claim — circulating in some revisionist accounts, including the video under analysis — that the Aṣṭādhyāyī originally contained ~1,000 sūtras and was subsequently expanded to 4,000 has no direct textual citation in the mainstream scholarly literature. What is documented and uncontested is that the text grew through accretion from its original Pāṇinian core through the contributions of Kātyāyana and Patanjali, and that later recensions incorporated these additions into the body of the text. Whether the original Pāṇinian nucleus was as small as 1,000 sūtras is speculative; that it was meaningfully smaller than the received 4,000 is an inference that the scholarly tradition of acknowledged interpolation supports without definitively confirming.
2.5 The Pushyamitra–Patanjali Link: A Political Grammar?
The association of Patanjali with Pushyamitra Shunga rests on two pillars: the Mahābhāṣya's apparent contemporaneous references to Pushyamitra and to a Yavana (Greek) siege of Madhyamikā and Sāketā, and the traditional biographical claim that Patanjali composed the Mahābhāṣya at Pushyamitra's court. If both are accepted, then the Shunga dynasty becomes the political sponsor of the grammatical standardisation of Classical Sanskrit — making the "fixing" of Sanskrit grammar a deliberate Brahminical-political project that coincided with the restoration of Brahmin royal power after Ashoka's Buddhist dispensation.
This is a politically charged interpretation, but it has textual support. The Shunga period is widely recognised as one of significant literary and philosophical activity, including the composition of the Manu Smṛti — the codification of Brahminical social law — and the systematic organisation of Brahminical knowledge systems. The patronage of Sanskrit grammar by a Brahmin dynasty that had just displaced a Buddhist-patronising Mauryan empire would be entirely consistent with the political function of language standardisation across many historical contexts.
However, the Pushyamitra–Patanjali connection is itself ambiguous. The Mahābhāṣya references to Pushyamitra are not unambiguously contemporaneous — they could be historical allusions by a later author — and the traditional attribution should not be treated as settled fact without acknowledging the evidentiary limitations.
Part III — Buddhist Texts as Evidence: The Ashokavadana and Its Discontents
3.1 The Ashokavadana's Account
The primary textual source for the claim that Pushyamitra Shunga violently persecuted Buddhists is the Aśokāvadāna, a Buddhist Sanskrit text that forms part of the Divyāvadāna compilation. The text — composed between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE, some 350–600 years after Pushyamitra's reign — describes Pushyamitra as offering a bounty of one gold dīnāra per head of a Buddhist monk, and as having personally destroyed 84,000 stupas built by Ashoka. The text is explicitly hagiographic in character, written to glorify Ashoka and to contrast his Buddhist piety with the malice of his successors.
3.2 Internal Contradictions and Anachronisms
The Ashokavadana account contains several features that undermine its reliability as historical testimony. First, it misidentifies Pushyamitra as the last Mauryan emperor — a confusion of Pushyamitra with Brihadratha that is acknowledged even in the Wikipedia article on Pushyamitra, citing scholars including Lahiri. This is not a minor error: it conflates two distinct persons and dynasties in a way that suggests the author had only a vague grasp of the political history he was narrating.
Second, the mention of a dīnāra (Roman/Kushana gold coin) as the denomination of the bounty is an anachronism. The dīnāra did not come into general circulation in India before the 1st century CE — two centuries after Pushyamitra's reign. This is either evidence of later composition or interpolation, and it significantly weakens the evidentiary value of the account.
Third, the claim that 84,000 stupas were destroyed — mirroring the Ashokavadana's own claim that Ashoka had built 84,000 stupas — has the character of religious competitive number inflation rather than historical record. The Buddhist historian Étienne Lamotte, one of the most authoritative Western scholars of Buddhist literature, concluded: "To judge from the documents, Pushyamitra must be acquitted through lack of proof."
3.3 Archaeological Evidence: A Different Story
The archaeological record directly contradicts a narrative of systematic persecution. Buddhist sites at Sanchi — the most important Buddhist monumental complex in central India — were not destroyed but expanded during the Shunga period. The famous carved stone gateways (toranas) at Sanchi, among the finest Buddhist art in existence, were added under Shunga patronage. The Buddhist stupa at Bharhut near Satna was also built during the Shunga era. The Mahāvaṃsa, a Sri Lankan Buddhist chronicle, implies that monasteries in present-day Bihar, Awadh, and Malwa continued to exist and function during Pushyamitra's reign.
As the Grokipedia analysis of the Ashokavadana notes, "Archaeological findings provide no corroboration for mass-scale destruction or persecution under Pushyamitra; instead, Shunga-era inscriptions and expansions [of Buddhist sites are found]." The simplest explanation for the Ashokavadana's hostility toward Pushyamitra is not historical persecution but the withdrawal of lavish Mauryan state patronage of Buddhism — an economic and political disappointment that Buddhist institutional memory transformed, over centuries, into a narrative of active persecution.
3.4 Pushyamitra's Lineage in Buddhist Texts: Mauryan or Brahmin?
A point raised in the video under analysis is significant and deserves attention: the Ashokavadana identifies Pushyamitra as the last Mauryan emperor — i.e., it places him within the Mauryan lineage rather than treating him as a distinct Brahmin outsider. This is historically incorrect (he was the Brahmin general who killed the last Mauryan), but the error itself is revealing. If Buddhist accounts conceptualised Pushyamitra as a Mauryan rather than as a Brahmin usurper, the narrative of Brahmin-versus-Buddhist dynastic conflict is complicated — the persecution, if any, would not fit neatly into a narrative of "Brahmin reaction against Buddhist Mauryan legacy."
The Puranic tradition, by contrast, is unambiguous that Pushyamitra overthrew the Mauryans and founded a new Brahmin dynasty. The ideological distance between these two constructions — Buddhist (Pushyamitra as last Mauryan) versus Brahminical/Puranic (Pushyamitra as Brahmin usurper) — suggests that even ancient sources were constructing their Pushyamitra to suit their narrative needs, and that the "real" Pushyamitra lies somewhere in the gap between them.
Part IV — The Ayodhya Inscription of Dhanadeva: Epigraphic Ambiguity and Colonial Translation
4.1 The Inscription: What It Actually Says
The Ayodhya Inscription of Dhanadeva is a short two-line Sanskrit inscription in Brahmi script, found at a monastery in Ayodhya and dated paleographically to somewhere between the late 1st century BCE and the early 1st century CE. Its transliterated text reads:
Koṣalādhipena dvir-aśvamedha-yajinaḥ senāpateḥ Puṣyamitrasya ṣaṣṭhena Kauśikī-putreṇa Dhana[deva] Dharmarājñaḥ pituḥ Phalgudevasya keṭanaṃ karitaṃ.
The translation, as rendered by D.R. Sahni: "Dhana[deva], Lord of Kosala, son of Kauśikī, the sixth of Senapati Pushyamitra who had performed the Ashvamedha twice, erected a shrine in honour of Phalgudeva, the Dharmarāja, his father."
This inscription is frequently cited as the earliest epigraphic confirmation that Pushyamitra Shunga performed the Ashvamedha twice and that his dynasty controlled Ayodhya. It is, in this sense, genuinely important.
4.2 What the Inscription Does Not Say — And What Is Contested
Several critical ambiguities surround this text that mainstream accounts tend to gloss over.
The phrase ṣaṣṭhena Puṣyamitrasya — "the sixth of Pushyamitra" — is genuinely contested. It can mean "sixth son of Pushyamitra" (implying Dhanadeva lived in the early 1st century BCE) or "sixth in descent from Pushyamitra" (implying a 1st century CE date). D.C. Sircar, one of India's most authoritative epigraphers, dates the inscription to the 1st century CE based on paleographic evidence — that is, the script style resembles that of Northern Satraps in Mathura from the 1st century CE, not the 2nd century BCE script style one would expect from a contemporary of Pushyamitra.
If Sircar is correct, then this inscription — composed at least 200 years after Pushyamitra's reign — is not a near-contemporary document but a later dynastic genealogy, claiming descent from a prestigious ancestor. Such genealogical inscriptions are extremely common in South Asian epigraphy and are not reliable as records of events from two centuries earlier. The inscription would tell us about the political need of a 1st century CE local king to connect himself to the prestigious Shunga legacy — not about Pushyamitra's actual deeds.
4.3 Alexander Cunningham and the Perils of Colonial Translation
Alexander Cunningham, the founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, made foundational contributions to Indian epigraphy. He was also a man of his time, working within a colonial-Orientalist framework that predisposed him toward certain interpretive conclusions. The broader concern raised by the video — and by scholars of colonial historiography more generally — is that Cunningham and his contemporaries sometimes "corrected" Prakrit inscriptions into Sanskrit equivalents in their translations, in ways that subtly reshaped their meaning. They operated with assumptions about the historical priority and purity of Sanskrit that led them to treat Prakrit as a degraded form and to interpret ambiguous Prakrit readings in light of Sanskrit grammar.
Whether any specific "corrections" in the Dhanadeva inscription's reading are attributable to such tendencies cannot be confirmed without a detailed paleographic re-examination of the original stone. What can be confirmed is that the inscription's date, its genealogical reading, and its identification of "Pushyamitra" with Pushyamitra Shunga specifically are all matters of scholarly debate, not settled fact.
Part V — Synthesis: History, Power, and the Responsibility of Interpretation
5.1 The Pattern of Constructed Narrative
Across the domains examined in this paper — colonial historiography, racial linguistics, the Ashokavadana, the Dhanadeva inscription — a consistent pattern emerges. Historical figures and events are not neutrally recorded but actively constructed to serve present-day political and ideological needs. The British constructed an Indo-Aryan past that legitimised their rule. Brahmin scholars constructed a genealogy that validated their social authority. Buddhist hagiographers constructed a Pushyamitra who served as a narrative foil to Ashoka's Buddhist piety. Nationalist mythmakers constructed a Pushyamitra-as-Rama who served as proto-Hindu hero.
The video under analysis is correct in demanding that each of these constructions be subjected to source-critical scrutiny and that the gap between primary evidence and received narrative be made explicit. This is not revisionism for its own sake — it is basic historiographical hygiene.
5.2 The Sanskrit Timeline: What We Can and Cannot Say
On the specific question of Classical Sanskrit's evolution from the Pushyamitra Shunga period through the Gupta era and the testimony of I-Tsing in the 7th century CE:
The most defensible position is one of layered acknowledgement:
- Pāṇini's grammatical work in its core form predates the Mauryan empire, probably by one to three centuries, though the exact date cannot be determined.
- The Aṣṭādhyāyī as received is a text that grew through documented accretion, incorporating Kātyāyana's Vārttikas and the influence of Patanjali's Mahābhāṣya.
- The institutionalisation and spread of Classical Sanskrit as the prestige language of royal courts and literature occurred most dramatically during the Gupta period (4th–6th centuries CE), not the Shunga period.
- I-Tsing's 7th-century observations of Sanskrit as a living, evolving medium of scholarship — rather than a fixed code established 800 years earlier — are consistent with a model of continuous grammatical development rather than a single 2nd century BCE crystallisation.
- The claim that the Aṣṭādhyāyī originally contained ~1,000 sūtras is not directly attested in the scholarly literature, but the fact of accretion and expansion of the text is. The magnitude of original versus added material is genuinely uncertain.
5.3 Implications for Indian Historiography
The broader implications of this analysis for how Indian history should be written and taught are clear. The nationalist counter-narrative — which simply inverts colonial distortions, replacing British superiority with Hindu superiority, Aryan invasion with unbroken indigenous civilisation, Buddhist-persecuting Pushyamitra with avatar-of-Rama Pushyamitra — is not a corrective. It repeats the epistemological error of using the past as a mirror for present political identity.
What is needed, and what the best contemporary scholarship is attempting, is a genuinely source-critical Indian historiography: one that takes ancient texts seriously while reading them against their grain, one that uses archaeological and numismatic evidence to check literary claims, one that acknowledges the colonial contamination of the archival record without using it as an excuse to abandon the archive, and one that is honest about what we do not know.
The history of ancient India is rich enough to require no mythologising. Pushyamitra Shunga was a significant historical figure who overthrew a declining imperial dynasty, revived Brahminical ritual forms, and patronised some of the most remarkable art and literature of the ancient world — without needing to be an avatar of Vishnu or a genocidal persecutor of Buddhists. The Aṣṭādhyāyī is one of humanity's greatest intellectual monuments — without needing its authorship date forced into any particular political narrative. The history of Classical Sanskrit is a complex, centuries-long process of codification, transmission, commentary, and institutionalisation — not a single moment of Brahminical cultural revolution in 185 BCE.
Conclusion
The manufactured past described in this paper was not primarily the product of individual dishonesty. It was the product of systems — the system of colonial power that required historical legitimation; the system of Orientalist scholarship that conflated linguistic kinship with racial identity; the system of Brahmin intermediary authority that colonial administration reinforced and codified; the system of Buddhist hagiography that transformed institutional disappointment into narratives of persecution; the system of nationalist counter-narrative that mirrors the distortions it claims to correct.
Understanding these systems is the precondition for writing something better: a history of India that respects the complexity of its evidence, the plurality of its sources, and the sheer improbability that any single ideological framework — colonial, nationalist, Brahminical, or Buddhist — can contain what the subcontinent has actually been.
The past, in India as everywhere, is not a mirror for the present. It is a record of a world genuinely different from our own, recoverable only partially, only through multiple and often conflicting sources, and only by scholars willing to be honest about the limits of what they know. That honesty — not the replacement of one mythology with another — is what Indian historiography urgently requires.
References and Primary Sources
Primary Sources:
- Pāṇini. Aṣṭādhyāyī (c. 500–300 BCE). Various recensions. Kāśikāvṛtti text with 3,983 sūtras.
- Patanjali. Mahābhāṣya (c. 2nd century BCE, traditional dating). Commentary on the Aṣṭādhyāyī.
- Ashokavadana (part of Divyāvadāna). Composed 2nd–4th century CE.
- Ayodhya Inscription of Dhanadeva. 1st century BCE–1st century CE. Brahmi script, Sanskrit.
- I-Tsing (Yijing). A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (AD 671–695). Trans. J. Takakusu. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1896.
- Rahul Sankrityayan. Volga Se Ganga (1944). [Literary fiction; not a historical source.]
Secondary Sources:
- Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
- Lamotte, Étienne. History of Indian Buddhism. Institut Orientaliste, Louvain, 1958.
- Cardona, George. Pāṇini: A Survey. Motilal Banarsidass, 1976 (revised editions).
- Elst, Koenraad. Various works on Indian historiography and the AIT critique.
- Sircar, D.C. Indian Epigraphy. Motilal Banarsidass, 1965.
- MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive. "Pāṇini." University of St Andrews.
- Staal, J.F. A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians. MIT Press, 1972.
- O'Connor, J.J., and Robertson, E.F. "Panini." MacTutor Archive, University of St Andrews.
- Elst, Koenraad. "Ashoka and Pushyamitra Sunga: A Study in Mythmaking." IndiaFacts, 2015.
- Mukhopadhyaya, Sujitkumar (ed.). Ashokavadana. Sahitya Akademi, 1963.
Paper prepared June 2026. For academic and research purposes.
PART II — CONTINUATION
Part VI — The Genetics of a Myth: The BMAC, Ancient DNA, and the Three-Stage Migration Model
6.1 From Philology to Genetics: A New Battlefield
For most of the 20th century, the Aryan Invasion / Migration debate was conducted primarily on the ground of linguistic and archaeological evidence. Max Müller's philological hypothesis — that linguistic kinship implied racial common origin and that a migration or invasion introduced Sanskrit-speaking people into the subcontinent — became the foundational colonial narrative. Its critics, from Indian nationalists to revisionist archaeologists, argued that no physical evidence of a large-scale invasion existed, that the Harappan and Vedic civilisations showed continuity rather than rupture, and that the Aryan concept was a colonial projection rather than an ancient reality.
With the advent of ancient DNA analysis in the 2010s, this debate entered a new and more technically complex phase — one that has generated enormous controversy in India, where the genetic findings have been selectively reported and manipulated by all sides of the political spectrum. But crucially, the genetic evidence does not simply vindicate either side. It validates a migration, while definitively refuting the racial conquest narrative that colonialism built upon it. And it assigns a precise, hitherto underappreciated role to the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC) — the great Bronze Age civilisation of Turkmenistan and surrounding regions — as a critical cultural staging post in the Indo-Aryan journey, while simultaneously confirming that the BMAC was not the genetic or linguistic homeland of the Aryans, as some earlier colonial-era theories proposed.
6.2 The BMAC: The Oxus Civilisation as Cultural Crucible
The Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (BMAC), also known as the Oxus Civilisation, was a remarkable Middle Bronze Age urban culture centred on the Murghab River delta in what is now eastern Turkmenistan and northern Afghanistan, with its urban phase dated broadly to c. 2400–1700 BCE. Its "capital" — excavated from 1974 onward by the Greek-Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi — was Gonur Depe, near modern Mary (ancient Merv), in Turkmenistan.
Gonur Depe covered approximately 55 hectares, with a central citadel-palace measuring 100 by 180 metres, elaborate fire temples, ceremonial water pools, and a royal necropolis of extraordinary material richness. Sarianidi uncovered fire altars at Gonur which he associated with proto-Zoroastrian religion — structures predating Zoroaster by at least fifteen hundred years but linked ritually to what would become that faith's distinctive practices. The BMAC site at Togolok 21 in Turkmenistan yielded equally critical evidence: rooms containing traces of ephedra and hemp, along with implements for preparing a hallucinogenic ritual beverage — almost certainly an ancestor of the Vedic soma and the Zoroastrian haoma, the sacred ritual drinks central to both branches of the Indo-Iranian tradition.
The BMAC engaged in long-distance trade with both the Indus Valley Civilisation and Mesopotamia. It was a sophisticated, sedentary urban civilisation of builders, irrigators, weavers, and craftspeople — the very antithesis of a steppe pastoral culture. And crucially, genetically, its people had no significant kinship with the steppe populations to their north. This is the essential point that early 20th-century theories — including some that informed colonial racial ideology — fundamentally misread: the BMAC was not the source of the Aryans. It was their cultural school.
The current scholarly consensus, integrating ancient DNA, comparative linguistics, and field archaeology, establishes a three-stage model for the arrival of Indo-Aryan speakers in the Indian subcontinent. Each stage is distinct in geographic location, cultural character, and evidential basis.
Stage 1 — Origin: Pontic-Caspian Steppe (c. 2200–1900 BCE)
Proto-Indo-Iranian culture — the common ancestor of both the Indo-Aryans and the Iranians — originated as the Sintashta culture on the Central Asian steppes north of the Caspian Sea, in present-day Russia and Kazakhstan, and developed further as the Andronovo culture (2000–1450 BCE). The Sintashta culture is distinguished archaeologically by planned, fortified settlements (the circular site of Arkaim in the southern Urals being the most celebrated), elaborate weapon and vehicle burials, extensive copper and bronze metallurgy, and — most strikingly — the earliest confirmed use of horse-drawn spoke-wheeled chariots.
The connection between Sintashta's chariot burial tradition and the Vedic Ashvamedha (horse sacrifice) ritual is direct and archaeologically compelling. Sintashta chariot burials, with nobles accompanied by their war horses, anticipate by two millennia the ritual logic of the Ashvamedha — the same ceremony Pushyamitra Shunga would perform to legitimise his post-Mauryan throne. Genetically, Sintashta populations carried high frequencies of Y-chromosome haplogroup R1a-Z93 — the same haplogroup found today at frequencies of 30–70% among North Indian Brahmin communities, the highest concentration in the subcontinent.
Stage 2 — Transit and Transformation: The BMAC Contact Zone (c. 2000–1600 BCE)
The Indo-Aryans separated from the broader Indo-Iranian family sometime between 2000 BCE and 1600 BCE and migrated southward into the BMAC zone. Here they encountered the urban Oxus Civilisation and underwent a profound cultural transformation — while remaining largely genetically distinct from the BMAC populations themselves. The genetic evidence from Narasimhan et al. 2019 is explicit: there is little evidence of genetic mingling between the incoming steppe migrants and the BMAC population, even though the cultural contact was deep and lasting.
According to David W. Anthony, whose landmark study The Horse, the Wheel, and Language (Princeton University Press, 2007) remains the definitive archaeological synthesis of Indo-European origins, the Old Indic religion probably emerged among Indo-European immigrants in the contact zone between the Zeravshan River (present-day Uzbekistan) and Iran. It was "a syncretic mixture of old Central Asian and new Indo-European elements" — a hybrid that borrowed "distinctive religious beliefs and practices" from the BMAC world.
The specific BMAC contributions that entered the proto-Vedic tradition include: the soma/haoma ritual drink (the word and the practice were borrowed from the BMAC, as established by the Togolok 21 excavation evidence and comparative linguistics); fire altar worship foreshadowing the Vedic agni-hotra tradition; and possibly cosmological and eschatological frameworks shared between early Vedic and early Avestan religion. The great Iranian-Indian religious divergence — Zoroastrianism versus Brahmanism — is itself best understood as a bifurcation that began in the BMAC contact zone, with one stream continuing into India and the other remaining in Central Asia and eventually reaching the Iranian plateau.
This BMAC cultural synthesis is one of the most important and least popularly understood facts about Vedic origins. The hymns of the Rigveda carry within them the traces of a Central Asian cultural encounter that occurred in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan roughly 4,000 years ago. The Vedic tradition was already a composite before it reached the Punjab. This does not diminish the Rigveda's achievement — it makes its genesis considerably more historically interesting, and definitively rules out any narrative of pure, uncontaminated indigenous origin.
Stage 3 — Entry into the Subcontinent: Gandhara, Swat, and the Punjab (c. 1900–1000 BCE)
From the BMAC contact zone, the Indo-Aryans moved southward through the Hindu Kush passes into Gandhara (modern Swat Valley and northwestern Pakistan) and thence into the Punjab and the greater Indus-Gangetic plain. Ancient DNA from the Swat Valley, published in Narasimhan et al. 2019, provides a precise chronological anchor: individuals from the SPGT (Swat Proto-Historic Grave Type) culture dated 1200–800 BCE show the first confirmed steppe ancestry in South Asian burials. This steppe component, absent from all pre-2000 BCE South Asian samples including the Rakhigarhi individual, increases progressively through subsequent centuries as admixture with indigenous populations deepened.
The Mitanni evidence from northern Syria provides a striking parallel data point. Cuneiform tablets from the 14th century BCE record distinctively Indo-Aryan personal names and deities — Mitra, Varuna, Indra, Nasatya — among the Mitanni ruling class of northern Syria and Mesopotamia, demonstrating that some Indo-Aryan-speaking groups had dispersed westward from the BMAC zone by 1400–1500 BCE while others continued into India. The Proto-Indo-Iranian world was never monolithic: it was a complex of related but diverging populations spreading outward from the steppe across a vast arc of the Old World simultaneously.
6.4 The Rakhigarhi Evidence and Its Political Manipulation
The 2019 Rakhigarhi genome — zero steppe ancestry in a 2500 BCE Harappan female — was correctly reported as supporting indigenous development of the IVC at that date. What it emphatically did not show was that the Vedic tradition was indigenous to the Harappan people. The logical gap between these two propositions is elementary: pre-migration evidence cannot speak to what happened post-migration. The IVC declined largely due to climatic aridification beginning around 2000 BCE; the main documented entry of steppe ancestry into South Asia follows after this decline. The absence of steppe ancestry in 2500 BCE Harappan DNA and the presence of 20–30% steppe ancestry in modern upper-caste Indians are not contradictory — they describe different moments in a continuous history.
The politics surrounding the publication are themselves a case study in how modern identity agendas distort scientific findings in ways that mirror 19th-century colonial distortion. Vasant Shinde, first author of the paper, publicly endorsed the Out of India theory the very day after its publication — directly contradicting his own paper's conclusions. Vagheesh Narasimhan, co-author of the companion Science paper analysing 523 ancient individuals across 8,000 years of Central and South Asian history, explicitly rejected this reading. American geneticist Razib Khan stated without qualification that steppe ancestry in almost every Indian group, and its correspondence with Indo-Aryan language distribution, pointed strongly to migration. The science was unambiguous; the politics around it were not.
The caste gradient in steppe ancestry — highest among Brahmin communities, lower in South Indian Dravidian-language populations, lowest in adivasi groups — is among the most politically significant findings in modern Indian genetics. It does not vindicate colonial ideology. It is evidence of a demographic history in which a migrating population with significant steppe ancestry selectively mixed with indigenous populations in ways shaped by the emerging social structure of early Vedic society. The colonial error was not in noticing a demographic pattern; it was in translating that pattern into a racial hierarchy of civilisational worth.
6.5 What the Three-Stage BMAC Model Does to the Colonial Narrative — And to Its Nationalist Mirror
The three-stage model (Sintashta → BMAC contact zone → Punjab entry) simultaneously vindicates migration and demolishes the colonial racial narrative, in the following specific and important ways:
It eliminates the "invasion" framing: there was no military conquest of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The IVC had already fragmented before the main steppe-ancestry entry. Wheeler's "Indra stands accused" interpretation of Mohenjo-daro unburied skeletons — one of colonial archaeology's most influential moments — has been comprehensively refuted.
It establishes the Vedic tradition as syncretic from its very formation: the soma ritual, fire altar practices, and proto-Zoroastrian cosmological frameworks borrowed from the BMAC mean that "pure Aryan civilisation" is a fiction on its own terms. The Rigveda carries Central Asian borrowings.
It places the BMAC as a shared, independent heritage: the Oxus Civilisation was neither Aryan nor Dravidian, neither Indo-European nor indigenous Indian. It was an independent urban tradition that influenced the proto-Vedic migrants passing through it and possibly the Harappan traders to its south. No nationalist tradition has a proprietary claim on it.
It confirms that the BMAC was a cultural contact zone, not a racial homeland: the Narasimhan et al. paper explicitly rejected Bactria as a genetic source for South Asian populations. The Indo-Aryans borrowed the BMAC's rituals and left almost no genetic trace in its people. This is cultural diffusion, not racial kinship — and it is the exact opposite of what colonial AIT implied.
6.6 What Genetics Cannot Tell Us
Genetic evidence establishes the movement of populations and its approximate chronology. It cannot establish what language the steppe migrants spoke on arrival in India, whether it was already recognisably Proto-Sanskrit or underwent further transformation during centuries of BMAC contact and subcontinent settlement. It cannot tell us whether the Vedic texts encode memories of a steppe pastoral homeland (as some hymns suggestively imply) or are entirely the product of Indian agricultural conditions. It cannot tell us whether varna emerged as an import, a BMAC-zone development, or an organic product of migration-and-mixing social dynamics in the Gangetic plain. It cannot tell us whether Pāṇini's grammar encodes a language brought from the steppe, one crystallised in the BMAC contact zone, or one that evolved over a thousand years of Indian linguistic development. These questions remain genuinely and productively open — and any scholar, nationalist, or politician who claims genetics has settled them is, knowingly or not, repeating Max Müller's original category error in a new technical register.
Part VII — The Manusmriti: Interpolation, Colonial Weaponisation, and the Architecture of Communal Division
7.1 The Text and Its Many Contested Identities
The Mānava Dharmaśāstra — known in popular discourse as the Manusmriti, or "Laws of Manu" — is among the most consequential and most abused texts in Indian civilisational history. It has been simultaneously invoked as the constitutional charter of Hindu civilisation, condemned as the ideological foundation of caste oppression and gender subjugation, and deployed by British colonial administrators as the legal code governing the lives of two hundred million people. None of these uses was historically accurate. Each, in its own way, represents a massive distortion — and understanding the specific mechanisms of that distortion is essential to understanding how Indian society was reshaped by colonial governance.
The text as it exists today consists of approximately 2,685 verses across twelve chapters, covering an enormous range of topics: the duties of the four varṇas, the stages of life, rules of marriage and inheritance, governance and taxation, military conduct, purity and pollution, penance for transgression, and eschatological cosmology. It was composed in Sanskrit, in the śloka metre, and presented as the instruction of the primal lawgiver Manu to a group of sages. Its approximate date of composition is traditionally placed between 200 BCE and 200 CE, though internal evidence is complex and contested.
What is not contested is that the text has undergone massive alteration. Over fifty manuscripts of the Manusmriti are now known, and they differ significantly from one another, providing clear evidence of extensive interpolations across centuries. According to Indologist Patrick Olivelle of the University of Texas at Austin, whose 2005 critical edition published by Oxford University Press remains the standard scholarly translation, only around 1,200 of the text's verses are considered part of the original core text. The rest — more than half of the received text — may have been later additions reflecting differing values, regional practices, and the interests of different commentatorial traditions.
Wendy Doniger has called the text a "patchwork woven using scraps from multiple sources." The earliest substantial commentary, by Medhātithi (9th century CE), already identified some verses as possible interpolations. The 15th-century commentary by Kulluka Bhaṭṭa became the dominant version taught across India for centuries — and it was specifically this Kulluka recension, the Calcutta manuscript, that William Jones translated into English in 1794. This is a point of enormous historical consequence: the version of the Manusmriti that became the basis of British colonial "Hindu law" was not the oldest or most authoritative textual tradition. It was a 15th-century commentary-based recension, itself already substantially post-Pāṇinian in its Sanskrit and reflecting the specific socio-religious preoccupations of late medieval Brahminical scholarship in Bengal.
7.2 What the Original Text May Have Said — and What Was Added
The implications of Olivelle's finding — that fewer than half the verses are original — become politically explosive when one examines which verses fall into the original core and which appear to be later additions. The pattern that emerges from careful philological analysis is deeply revealing.
The most extreme caste-hierarchical prescriptions, the harshest penalties for śūdras (lower castes), and the most degrading restrictions on women tend to cluster in the sections that textual analysis identifies as late additions or interpolations. The original text, by contrast, appears to have been a more balanced dharmaśāstra — a code of ethical and legal conduct rooted in varṇa (occupational-ritual category) rather than jāti (hereditary birth group), with a far more nuanced treatment of social obligations than the received text suggests.
Consider the numerical evidence Ambedkar's own analysis surfaced: of nearly 2,500 verses in the Manusmriti, more than a thousand concern kings and governance, a similar number pertain to Brāhmaṇas, whereas only eight pertain to Vaiśyas and two to Śūdras. This grotesque disproportion in textual attention — with the two lowest categories receiving a combined total of ten verses out of 2,500 — is itself a signature of a text that has been repeatedly augmented by its custodians to serve the interests of those custodians.
The prescriptions on women in the received text are similarly extreme. The oft-cited Manusmriti verse 5.148 — "In childhood, a female must be subject to her father; in youth, to her husband; when her lord is dead, to her sons; a woman must never be independent" — appears in scholarly analysis as one of the most frequently cited examples of misogynistic prescription. Chapter 9 prescribes that women should be continuously guarded to ensure their chastity. These verses have been used for centuries to justify the denial of women's property rights, educational access, autonomy in marriage, and public participation.
Yet against these verses, Ambedkar and subsequent feminist scholars have pointed to contradictory verses within the same text that affirm women's dignity, prescribe their education, and grant them substantial rights. The internal contradictions are not incidental — they are the fingerprints of a composite text that has been revised over many centuries by scribes and commentators with differing and often opposing agendas. A text that genuinely and coherently prescribed female subordination from a single authorial voice would not contain verses that pull in the opposite direction.
7.3 William Jones, Warren Hastings, and the Colonial Elevation of Manusmriti
The transformation of the Manusmriti from one dharmaśāstra among many into the definitive constitutional code of Hindu civilisation is one of the colonial period's most consequential acts of textual manipulation. It was not a deliberate conspiracy — it was the product of the structural logic of colonial administration operating through the Orientalist-Brahmin axis described in Part I of this paper.
The process began with Governor-General Warren Hastings, who in 1772 laid down the foundational colonial policy on personal law: "In all suits regarding inheritance, marriage, caste and other religious usages or institutions, the law of the Koran with respect to Mahometans and those of the Shaster with respect to Gentoos shall be invariably adhered to; on all such occasions the Moulvies or Brahmins shall respectively attend to expound the law." This single policy statement had enormous downstream consequences. It immediately elevated Brahmin pandits as the authoritative interpreters of "Hindu law," excluded lower-caste, tribal, and customary legal traditions from colonial legal recognition, and created an institutional incentive for Brahmin scholars to assert the widest possible scope for Brahminical textual authority.
The next step was Jones's 1794 translation of the Manusmriti as The Institutes of Hindu Law or the Ordinances of Manu. Jones was a judge in the Calcutta Supreme Court who had mastered Sanskrit. His choice of the Manusmriti above all other dharmaśāstras — and his specific choice of the Kulluka Bhaṭṭa Calcutta manuscript — was shaped by the advice of the Brahmin pandits who served the colonial courts. By elevating Manusmriti to the status of state law, the colonial administration gave the text an unprecedented authority it had never previously held.
The scale of this distortion cannot be overstated. Pre-colonial India did not have a unified, pan-subcontinental "Hindu law." It had a rich plurality of dharmaśāstras, local customary codes, royal decrees, guild regulations, and community traditions that varied enormously by region, caste, and occupational group. The Manusmriti was one influential text in this landscape — more influential in some regions and communities than others, and nowhere treated as a binding constitutional document in the way the British codification implied. By selecting one text, translating one manuscript tradition, relying on high-caste Brahmin interpreters, and writing it into colonial law, the British both Brahminised Indian legal culture and simultaneously froze a living, evolving tradition into a single, static, colonially convenient document.
British codification ignored the more progressive or flexible aspects of the shastra tradition and local custom, tending instead to reinforce Brahminical patriarchy, since the colonial judges relied on high-caste scholars and texts. The selectivity of the process resulted in what one scholar has called "the Brahminization and Islamization of customary laws" in British India — the elevation of the textual traditions of religious elites over the living practices of ordinary people, in both the Hindu and Muslim communities simultaneously.
7.4 The Quran-Hadith Parallel: Sacred Texts as Legal Instruments of Control
The process described above for the Manusmriti has a precise structural parallel in the British treatment of Islamic law. Warren Hastings's 1772 policy applied identically to both communities: Muslim personal law was to be governed by the Quran and the Hadith, with moulvies (Muslim clerics) as authoritative interpreters, just as Brahmin pandits interpreted the shastra for Hindus.
The parallel operation of these two systems of religiously-codified personal law had an identical distorting effect on both traditions. In both cases, colonial administration selected and elevated specific textual traditions above the enormous diversity of regional Islamic practice across the subcontinent. In both cases, clerical elites — Brahmin pandits for Hindus, orthodox ulema for Muslims — were empowered as legal interpreters at the expense of more heterodox, syncretic, or reformist tendencies within each tradition. In both cases, the result was the hardening and rigidification of identity categories that had previously been more fluid and porous.
Pre-colonial India's religious landscape was characterised by a remarkable degree of syncretic exchange — shared shrines, common devotional practices, overlapping saint traditions in both Sufi Islam and Bhakti Hinduism, and a general cultural intermixture that colonial religious categorisation systematically dismantled. By insisting that every individual was either a Hindu governed by the shastra or a Muslim governed by the Quran-Hadith tradition, and by empowering the most orthodox interpreters of each, colonial administration eliminated the vast middle ground of syncretic practice and heterodox custom that had historically been the lived religion of most ordinary Indians.
7.5 Manusmriti, Communal Scripture, and the Rise of Identity-Politics Organisations
The colonial elevation of the Manusmriti as the constitutional charter of Hindu civilisation did not merely distort legal practice. It created an ideological battlefield on which competing political movements fought for the meaning of Indian civilisation — and that battlefield shaped the catastrophic communal politics of the early 20th century.
By the 1930s, activists on both sides published alternative historical and religious narratives: Muslim League-patronised writers emphasised Muslim civilisational contributions and Muslim political distinctiveness, while Hindu nationalist historians rewrote India's past as a "Hindu golden age" interrupted by Muslim conquest. These trends had roots directly in colonial policies that had separated communities in education and treated them as monolithic religious blocs. The creation and perpetuation of Hindu-Muslim antagonism was, in the view of many historians, the most significant accomplishment of British imperial policy as a tool of social control.
The All-India Muslim League was formed in 1906 under British auspices — it has been described by historian Mukherjee as the first of several "religion-based communal instruments" created or fostered by the British to weaken the nationalist movement. The Hindu Mahasabha (founded 1915) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, founded 1925) arose in the same structural environment: each was, in different ways, a product of the communal categories that colonial policy had institutionalised.
The Hindu Mahasabha was founded by V.D. Savarkar, who articulated the Hindutva ideology — a concept of Hindu nationhood defined by racial, cultural, and civilisational ancestry. The RSS, set up by B.S. Hegdewar in the 1920s (formally consolidated in 1925), drew upon European fascist organisational models as well as a reading of Indian history shaped by the colonial Brahminical-Aryan myth. Both organisations were, in their early decades, largely upper-caste Hindu movements that drew upon the very colonial elevation of Brahminical Sanskrit culture — and the Manusmriti-based conception of Hindu social order — that the British had institutionalised.
The structural irony is precise: the British colonial state had elevated Brahminical textual culture as the definition of "Hindu" identity. The Hindu Mahasabha and RSS then mobilised that definition as the basis of political nationalism. They fought the British using ideological raw material the British had given them. And in doing so, they reproduced and deepened the communal divide that the British had engineered. The Muslim League, mirror-structurally, did the same with the parallel elevation of orthodox Islamic legal identity.
Both movements were, in an important sense, products of colonial policy rather than expressions of ancient civilisational antagonism. The claim — made by both communal traditions — that Hindus and Muslims had been engaged in eternal civilisational conflict since the medieval period is a colonial and post-colonial construction projected onto a pre-colonial past that was significantly more complex and pluralistic.
7.6 Ambedkar's Mahad Satyagraha and the Burning of Manusmriti
On 25 December 1927, at the Mahad Satyagraha in Maharashtra, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar led the public burning of the Manusmriti in a specially constructed symbolic funeral pyre before thousands of gathered volunteers. The event followed the Mahad Satyagraha's central action — Dalits asserting their legal right to drink from the Chavdar Tank, a public water reservoir barred to them by upper-caste enforcement despite an existing legal order permitting access. When upper-caste Hindus responded with violence and legal challenge, Ambedkar recognised the need to confront not just the specific discriminatory practice but its ideological foundation.
For Ambedkar, the Manusmriti was not merely an ancient text of doubtful historical authority. It had become, through colonial codification and Brahminical social enforcement, the living ideological scaffolding for untouchability. The Manusmriti had already been given the authority of state law by the British; it had been given the authority of sacred tradition by generations of Brahminical commentators; and it had been given the authority of political identity by Hindu nationalist organisations. Ambedkar's burning of it was a simultaneous challenge to all three of these authority structures.
In his speeches at the Mahad burning, Ambedkar articulated clearly that the root of untouchability lay in the prohibition of inter-caste marriages and in the textual authority that legitimised the treatment of śūdras and women as lesser beings. He declared: "Let us destroy the authority of ancient Hindu scriptures that are born in inequality. Religion and slavery are not compatible." When critics asked what was achieved by burning a book, Ambedkar answered: "What did Gandhi achieve by burning foreign clothes? This was the form of registering protest."
The response from Brahminical institutions and media was immediate and vicious. Upper-caste publications branded Ambedkar "Bhim Asur" (demon Bhim) and intensified efforts to suppress Dalit gatherings. The polarisation the burning exposed was not created by Ambedkar — it was created by the Manusmriti's colonial elevation and Brahminical enforcement. Ambedkar merely made visible what had been structurally embedded in Indian public life since 1794.
7.7 The Manusmriti and the Longer Colonial Damage: What Was Lost
The damage done by the colonial elevation of the Manusmriti to constitutional status was not only to the communities most directly oppressed by its prescriptions — Dalit communities and women. It also did profound damage to the historical record of India's legal pluralism.
Pre-colonial India had an extraordinarily rich tradition of legal and ethical thought in which the Manusmriti was one voice among many — and not always a dominant one. The Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya, with its sophisticated statecraft and relatively pragmatic treatment of social organisation; the Jain Āgamas with their radical equality before the law of non-violence; the Buddhist Vinaya with its institutional rules of community governance; the regional customary codes of the Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Marathi-speaking regions; the tribal customary systems of adivasi communities — all of these were legally marginalised and administratively invisible under the colonial personal law system, which recognised only two categories: "Hindu" and "Muslim," each governed by its respective sacred text tradition as interpreted by its respective clerical elite.
The Manusmriti's colonial elevation also distorted the historical record of women's status in ancient India. The text's harshest anti-women prescriptions were, as noted above, likely later interpolations. Pre-colonial India had traditions of women's learning (the Rig Veda contains compositions attributed to women poets such as Ghoṣā, Viśvavārā, and Lopāmudrā), women's property rights (the strīdhana tradition), and women's religious and institutional authority (abbesses in Buddhist monastic traditions, female Jain renunciants). By freezing "Hindu law" around the most patriarchal reading of the most distorted recension of the most Brahminically-convenient dharmaśāstra, colonial codification simultaneously denied India's women the rights that pre-colonial practice, in many contexts, had granted them — and made that denial appear religiously and historically mandated.
The Manusmriti continues to function as a political battleground in contemporary India — invoked by Hindu nationalist politicians as evidence of eternal Hindu constitutional wisdom, condemned by Dalit and feminist movements as the textual root of structural oppression, and debated by scholars uncertain how much of the received text reflects any historical legal reality at all.
What the analysis of this section establishes is that the text's current political salience is itself largely a colonial creation. The Manusmriti's elevation to constitutional status in 1794; its use to rigidify caste boundaries and restrict women's rights in colonial courts; the Brahminical-colonial alliance that selected, translated, and empowered a specific manuscript tradition above all others; and the subsequent mobilisation of that elevation by both Hindu nationalist and Dalit protest movements — all of this is a 200-year-old political drama, not a 2,000-year-old civilisational given.
A genuinely decolonised approach to the Manusmriti would: (1) distinguish sharply between the original textual core and the layers of later interpolation, using Olivelle's critical philological work as the starting point; (2) situate the text as one voice in a diverse and internally contested Indian legal-ethical tradition, not its constitutional summary; (3) recognise that the "Hindu law" created by colonial codification was a 19th-century British-Brahmin construction, not an ancient organic tradition; and (4) recover the silenced plurality of legal traditions — Buddhist, Jain, customary, tribal, regional — that colonial administration marginalised in favour of the sanitised Brahminical-textual model.
The burning of the Manusmriti at Mahad was not, in this context, an act of cultural vandalism. It was a precise symbolic repudiation of the colonial-Brahminical construction of "Hindu law" — a refusal to accept that a heavily interpolated 15th-century manuscript tradition, selected and codified by British judges and their Brahmin advisors, should define the civilisational heritage and legal rights of the people of India.
Part VIII — The Shunga Paradox: Buddhist Art from a "Buddhist Persecutor"
7.1 The Fundamental Contradiction
There is enough evidence to show that Pushyamitra patronised Buddhist art. Buddhist monuments at Bharhut and Sanchi were renovated and further improved during his reign. Later Shunga emperors were seen as amenable to Buddhism and contributed to the building of the stupa at Bharhut.
This is perhaps the single most remarkable fact about the Pushyamitra persecution narrative: the same ruler who Buddhist texts describe as offering bounties for monk's heads presided over, or at least did not prevent, the expansion and elaboration of two of the most important Buddhist monumental complexes in the ancient world.
The Bharhut Stupa from the 2nd century BCE is a prime example of Shunga-era patronage that directly contradicts the "anti-Buddhist" narrative. Its railings are adorned with intricately carved sculptures depicting scenes from the Jataka tales, the life of the Buddha, and various Buddhist symbols — unequivocally Buddhist in their subject matter and demonstrating a clear commitment to Buddhist iconography and artistic expression.
The Shunga period saw the renovation and expansion of several stupas, most notably the Sanchi Stupa, which was adorned with new gateways and decorations. Apart from Sanchi, other Buddhist stupas and chaityas at Bharhut and Amaravati were built or expanded during the Shunga period, indicating a complex relationship with Buddhism.
7.2 Resolving the Contradiction: Patronage Without Persecution
How do we reconcile the Bharhut and Sanchi evidence with the Ashokavadana persecution narrative? The most coherent resolution emerges from understanding the distinction between state patronage and tolerance. Some authors argue that the constructions of the Shunga period at Sanchi cannot really be called "Shunga" in the sense of royal state sponsorship — they were not the result of royal decree, in contrast with what happened under the Mauryas. Most dedications at Sanchi were private or collective, rather than the result of royal patronage. Some scholars believe that Brahmanism competed in the political and spiritual realm with Buddhism in the Gangetic plains.
This distinction is critical. What the Shunga period represents — and what the Ashokavadana probably encodes as "persecution" — is the withdrawal of lavish Mauryan state patronage from Buddhist institutions, not a campaign of active destruction. Buddhist monasteries and stupas continued to exist, to receive private donations, to develop artistically, and to function as centres of learning. What ended was the automatic flow of state resources. For an institutional religion dependent on royal favour, this was experienced as a severe blow — and in the retelling, over centuries, an economic and political disappointment became a narrative of existential persecution.
Buddhist sites like Sanchi and Bharhut continued to exist and develop during the Shunga period, even as texts like the Divyavadana accused Pushyamitra of persecution. The period reflects a blend of Brahminical and Buddhist influences, shaping a complex cultural environment with evolving religious practices.
7.3 The Heliodorus Pillar: A Further Complication
The Heliodorus Pillar at Vidisha — erected by the Greek ambassador Heliodorus under a Shunga king, dedicated to the god Vāsudeva (Vishnu) and inscribed in Brahmi script with Vaishnava devotion — adds yet another dimension to the complexity of the Shunga religious environment. The Shungas maintained both military and diplomatic relations with the Indo-Greeks. While Pushyamitra repelled Indo-Greek invasions, later Shunga rulers like Bhagabhadra established diplomatic ties, as evidenced by the Heliodorus Pillar erected by the Greek ambassador.
A Greek diplomat converting to Vaishnavism and erecting a devotional pillar in the Shunga capital is not the picture of a narrow, persecutory Brahminical state. It is the picture of a pluralistic, sophisticated court in which multiple religious and cultural currents — Brahminical, Buddhist, and Hellenistic — coexisted in dynamic tension.
Part IX — Sanskrit as Political Instrument: The Epigraphic Shift and Sheldon Pollock's Sanskrit Cosmopolis
8.1 The Epigraphic Silence: Where Are the Sanskrit Inscriptions?
One of the most under-discussed facts in the standard narrative of classical Sanskrit's antiquity is the near-total absence of Sanskrit royal inscriptions before the Gupta period. The Ashokan edicts — the most extensive body of royal inscriptions from ancient India — are written entirely in Prakrit. Post-Mauryan inscriptions through the Shunga, Kanva, and Satavahana periods continue predominantly in Prakrit dialects. The dramatic shift to Sanskrit as the language of royal power — the language in which kings announced their conquests, their donations, and their genealogies — occurs in the Gupta period, most conspicuously in the 4th–5th centuries CE.
The Gupta period became the "Golden Age" of colonial and nationalist historiography largely because it was the period of renascent Hinduism. It was maintained that Hinduism in its Sanskritic form was the essential culture of India, and that other forces were in a sense an intrusion.
This observation by Romila Thapar is sharper than it first appears. The Gupta period was retrospectively designated the "Golden Age" precisely because its Sanskritic, Brahminical, high-Hindu cultural production most closely matched what colonial Orientalists had identified as the apex of Indian civilisation. The designation naturalised a particular kind of cultural production — Sanskrit-medium, Brahminical, textually sophisticated — as the standard of Indian greatness, and marginalised everything that did not fit: the Prakrits, the Pali tradition, the vernacular literatures, the tribal and oral knowledge systems.
8.2 Sheldon Pollock and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis
The Columbia University Sanskrit scholar Sheldon Pollock developed the concept of the "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" to describe the remarkable spread of Sanskrit as a supraregional language of political and cultural power across South and Southeast Asia from roughly the 3rd century CE onward. Pollock's central insight is that Sanskrit's expansion was not the result of military conquest or forced imposition — it was a voluntary adoption by local elites who found in Sanskrit a model for expressing political power that transcended local vernacular boundaries.
The implications for our analysis are profound. If the Sanskrit Cosmopolis reached its fullest elaboration only from the 3rd–4th centuries CE onward, then the claim that Classical Sanskrit was definitively standardised and institutionalised in the 2nd century BCE under Pushyamitra Shunga significantly overstates the case. The Shunga period may represent an important stage in the process of Sanskrit standardisation — but it is one stage in a centuries-long development, not a completed act of political linguistic engineering.
Pollock also addresses the colonial appropriation of Sanskrit directly, arguing that colonial Indologists fundamentally misread Sanskrit's political functions by projecting European models of language, race, and national identity onto a very different cultural logic. Sanskrit was not the "Aryan" mother tongue of a racial elite — it was a transregional prestige language available, at least in principle, to any local polity willing to invest in the enormous cultural infrastructure required to produce and sustain it.
8.3 I-Tsing Revisited: Sanskrit as a Living Grammatical Project
I-Tsing visited India between 673 and 695 CE, just 28 years after Xuanzang left India. In his time, India was known as "Brahma-rashtra" and Sanskrit was called "Brahma language," used even by Buddhist monks. I-Tsing mentions 96 non-Buddhist sects and notes that Brahmins were regarded throughout the five parts of India as "the most honourable caste." Their four Vedas, containing more than 100,000 verses, had been handed down orally, not written on paper or leaves.
I-Tsing's 7th-century account is an invaluable corrective to any notion that Classical Sanskrit was a completed, frozen grammatical monument by the 2nd century BCE. The language he describes is alive, contested, elaborated — a medium of living scholarship and religious competition, not a historical artifact. The Buddhist monks at Nālandā were studying Sanskrit grammar actively, not receiving it as an ancient inheritance. This is fully consistent with a model in which the Pāṇinian grammatical tradition was continuously elaborated and institutionally transmitted from wherever Pāṇini actually lived, through the centuries, reaching its fullest standardisation and supraregional currency only in the Gupta and post-Gupta periods.
Part X — The Dravidian Question: A Colonial Construction Repurposed
9.1 The Origins of the Aryan-Dravidian Binary
No dimension of the colonial distortion of Indian history has had more lasting political consequence than the construction of the Aryan-Dravidian opposition. The linguistic distinction between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families is real and scientifically documented. The political construction built upon that linguistic fact — that "Aryans" and "Dravidians" represent two distinct races with incompatible civilisational claims, with caste hierarchy as the mechanism of Aryan domination over the indigenous Dravidian majority — is a colonial fabrication.
The key architect of this construction was the Scottish missionary Robert Caldwell (1814–1891), whose Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages (1856) argued that Dravidian languages were entirely distinct from Sanskrit and constituted a separate civilisational tradition. Caldwell's motivation was partly intellectual and partly evangelical: by demonstrating that the Dravidian-speaking majority of South India had no essential cultural connection to Sanskrit Brahminism, he hoped to make them more amenable to Christian conversion and to weaken the hold of Brahmin priests.
The idea of an Aryan "invasion" was fuelled by the discovery of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which declined around the period of the Indo-Aryan migration, suggesting a destructive invasion. The argument was developed by the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, who interpreted unburied corpses at Mohenjo-daro as victims of conquest, famously stating that "Indra stands accused." Scholarly critics later argued that Wheeler misinterpreted this evidence and that the skeletons were better explained as hasty interments, not massacre victims.
9.2 The Dravidian Movement and Colonial Categories
The Dravidian political movement in Tamil Nadu — which became one of the most significant regional political forces in post-independence India — drew explicitly on the Caldwellian colonial framework, inverting its evangelical purpose while retaining its racial structure. The "Dravidian" identity constructed by E.V. Ramasamy Periyar and elaborated by the Dravidian parties represented a genuine challenge to Brahmin dominance in South Indian social and political life. Many of its grievances were legitimate: Brahmin communities in South India had disproportionate access to colonial education and employment, and they used their position to maintain social hierarchies.
But the intellectual framework — the notion of Dravidians as a conquered race oppressed by Aryan invaders, their native culture displaced by an alien Sanskrit civilisation — was a colonial intellectual import. It reproduced the racial logic of empire while inverting its hierarchy. And it created a permanent political fissure within Indian civilisation that has been regularly exploited by external powers and internal political actors alike.
The historical irony is deep: the Dravidian movement fought Brahmin dominance using a conceptual framework that Brahmin scholars (through the Orientalist-Brahmin axis) and British missionaries (through Caldwell) had jointly constructed.
Part XI — Towards Decolonised Indian Historiography: Principles and Practices
10.1 What Decolonisation Is Not
The term "decolonisation of history" has been appropriated by political movements with very different — and sometimes antithetical — agendas. In India, Hindu nationalist historiography claims to be "decolonising" Indian history when it replaces colonial narratives with nationalist counter-myths: substituting an ancient Hindu golden age for the colonial narrative of civilisational stagnation, substituting indigenous Aryan origin for the Aryan Invasion Theory, substituting Pushyamitra-as-hero for Pushyamitra-as-persecutor.
This is not decolonisation. It is the replacement of one ideologically constructed past with another. The epistemological structure — the use of history as validation for present political identity — remains identical. As the Substack writer on decolonising Indian knowledge correctly observes: "Muller was writing about the true meaning of the Rigveda without having visited India once. Jones declared Sanskrit grammar superior to Greek and Latin in the same breath that he decided Vedic religion was primitive animism. The Orientalist project was simultaneously admiring and condescending, and that combination was very effective at disabling indigenous intellectual self-confidence." The nationalist response that re-instates the admiration while stripping away the condescension does not cure the epistemological disease — it merely changes its symptom.
None of the things colonial scholars said about India were entirely false. All of them were enormously reductive. And then those reductions got exported back into Indian education, Indian law, and eventually Indian self-understanding. When Indians started writing about themselves in the 19th century, many of them were unconsciously using colonial categories to describe pre-colonial realities.
10.2 Romila Thapar and the Critique of Communalised History
Romila Thapar has transformed our understanding of India's past by questioning myths first devised by British colonial ideologues before they were taken up by Hindu chauvinists. Through her work on the periodisation of Indian history and the history of religious beliefs and communities, she has exposed the agenda of the far right and its efforts to manufacture a particular historical memory.
Thapar's methodological contribution has been to insist on the primacy of primary sources — epigraphic, archaeological, numismatic, and literary — over later traditions of commentary and community memory. Her Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (1961) demonstrated that the Ashokan edicts themselves, rather than the Ashokavadana hagiography, were the proper primary source for understanding Ashoka's Buddhism — and that the edicts revealed a far more pragmatic, politically calculating ruler than the saintly Buddhist emperor of tradition. The same source-critical principle, consistently applied, yields similarly nuanced results for Pushyamitra Shunga, for the Gupta "Golden Age," and for the history of Sanskrit.
10.3 The D.D. Kosambi Method: Material History Against Textual Bias
Damodar Dharmananda Kosambi (1907–1966) — mathematician, numismatist, and historian — developed an approach to ancient Indian history that remains the most methodologically rigorous alternative to both colonial Orientalism and nationalist myth-making. Kosambi insisted that the material record — coins, pottery, agricultural residues, trade routes, tool types — could not be manipulated by scribal tradition in the way that textual sources could. Coins do not lie about which dynasties controlled which territories; pottery distributions do not lie about trade networks; the absence of iron tools in a stratum tells you something real about economic development that no later text can revise.
Applied to the Pushyamitra question, Kosambi's method yields the following: the numismatic evidence from the Shunga period is consistent with a relatively decentralised state in which many cities issued their own coinage; the material archaeological record shows Buddhist sites continuing to function; and there is no stratum of deliberate destruction at major Buddhist sites that can be dated to the Pushyamitra period. The textual persecution narrative has no material correlate. The material evidence, alone, suffices to cast serious doubt on it.
10.4 Principles for a Post-Colonial Indian Historiography
Drawing together the analysis of this paper, the following principles emerge for a genuinely decolonised approach to Indian history:
Principle 1: Source Stratification. Every claim must be traced to its primary source, and primary sources must be distinguished from secondary and tertiary tradition. The date, authorship, context, and ideological position of each source must be made explicit. The Ashokavadana as a 3rd–4th century CE Buddhist hagiography cannot serve as 2nd century BCE historical testimony.
Principle 2: Archaeological Primacy. Where textual and material evidence conflict, the presumption should favour material evidence, which is harder to fabricate retrospectively. Buddhist art flourishing at Sanchi during the "Shunga persecution" is more reliable evidence than a text written five centuries after the fact.
Principle 3: Resistance to Monolithic Narrative. Indian civilisation has never been monolithic — not religiously, not linguistically, not culturally. Any narrative that requires reducing its complexity to a single axis (Aryan/Dravidian, Hindu/Buddhist, indigenous/foreign) should be treated with automatic scepticism.
Principle 4: The Colonial Contamination Principle. Every text, translation, and archaeological interpretation produced under British rule must be examined for colonial-era assumptions, particularly around race, linguistic hierarchy, and civilisational progress. This does not mean discarding colonial-era scholarship — much of it is foundational and irreplaceable — but it means reading it against the grain, identifying its assumptions, and checking its conclusions against evidence it could not or chose not to consider.
Principle 5: Continuity Without Essentialism. Indian civilisation shows remarkable continuity across millennia — in artistic conventions, philosophical categories, social structures, and ritual practices. This continuity is real and significant. But it does not translate into an "eternal Hindu civilisation" impervious to historical change. Recognising continuity without essentialising it is the challenge at the heart of post-colonial Indian historiography.
Principle 6: The Plurality of Indias. The history of the subcontinent is not the history of Sanskrit Brahminism writ large. The Pali tradition, the Prakrits, the Tamil Sangam literature, the Jain Agamas, the oral epics of adivasi communities — all of these are archives of Indian historical experience, no less authentic for being non-Sanskritic. A genuinely decolonised Indian historiography recovers all of these voices, not merely the ones that fit pre-existing narratives of greatness.
Part XII — The Timeline Reconstructed: A Provisional Synthesis
Drawing together all the strands of this analysis, a more honest and evidentially grounded timeline for the evolution of Classical Sanskrit emerges:
c. 600–400 BCE (uncertain): A grammarian known as Pāṇini, probably from Śalātūra in Gandhāra, composes a systematic grammar of the educated speech current in his time and region. The original number of sūtras is unknown. The text is transmitted orally in grammatical lineages.
c. 3rd–2nd century BCE: The Pāṇinian grammatical tradition is elaborated by Kātyāyana, who composes Vārttikas (supplementary remarks and corrections to Pāṇini's rules). The Mauryan period sees Prakrit established as the language of royal administration and Buddhist teaching, while Sanskrit remains the language of Brahminical ritual and higher learning.
c. 185–73 BCE (Shunga period): The Shunga Dynasty, founded by the Brahmin general Pushyamitra, withdraws state patronage from Buddhist institutions while reviving Vedic ritual forms. Patanjali, if he lived in this period, composes the Mahābhāṣya, engaging in a grand synthesis of the Pāṇini-Kātyāyana tradition. The Aṣṭādhyāyī as transmitted incorporates the influence of the Vārttikas and begins to grow through accretion. Sanskrit literary and philosophical activity intensifies.
c. 1st–3rd century CE: Sanskrit begins to appear in royal inscriptions, initially in hybrid Prakrit-Sanskrit forms, then increasingly in pure Classical Sanskrit. The Manu Smṛti and other Dharmaśāstra texts are codified. Buddhist Sanskrit literature flourishes at Nālandā and related institutions. The Aṣṭādhyāyī continues to accumulate commentarial material.
c. 3rd–6th century CE (Gupta period): Sanskrit becomes the definitive language of royal power across South and Central Asia — what Pollock calls the Sanskrit Cosmopolis. The Gupta emperors commission and patronise Sanskrit literature, drama, science, and philosophy on an unprecedented scale. Kālidāsa's works in this period represent the apex of Classical Sanskrit literary culture. The grammatical tradition of the Aṣṭādhyāyī is systematised and academically institutionalised.
c. 7th century CE (I-Tsing's observations): Sanskrit remains a fully alive, contested, and developing scholarly medium at Nālandā and across the Buddhist-Hindu scholarly world. Chinese pilgrims study Sanskrit grammar as a prerequisite for advanced Buddhist studies. The Aṣṭādhyāyī tradition is in active use, interpretation, and elaboration — not a monument from 800 years earlier but a living intellectual inheritance.
This timeline — longer, messier, and more interesting than the standard colonial narrative — suggests that Classical Sanskrit's development was a centuries-long civilisational project rather than a single political act. The Shunga period was a significant catalyst, not a moment of completion.
The study of ancient India under colonial and post-colonial conditions raises ethical questions that go beyond historiographical methodology. When a colonial power constructs a historical narrative that serves its dominion, it does not merely distort the past — it actively shapes the present and the future of the colonised people. The children educated on Macaulay's curriculum did not merely learn wrong history; they were trained to doubt the validity of their own civilisation's knowledge systems, to measure their culture against a European standard it was designed not to meet, and to see their own past through eyes that had been carefully calibrated to find it deficient.
The recovery of an honest account of Indian history — one that neither romanticises nor denigrates the ancient past, that traces every claim to its source, that reads material evidence without ideological preconception, and that holds open the questions that remain genuinely open — is not merely an academic exercise. It is an ethical act of civilisational restoration.
The Pushyamitra Shunga debate is, in this sense, a microcosm of the whole. A real historical figure — a Brahmin general who assassinated a failing emperor, revived ancient ritual forms, patronised extraordinary art, defended India against Greek invasion, and governed for 36 years — has been buried under layers of hagiography, polemic, colonial mistranslation, nationalist mythmaking, and political instrumentalisation. What remains of him in most popular accounts is either a Hindu hero or a Buddhist villain, depending entirely on which mythology the reader has already accepted.
The honest answer is that we do not know enough about Pushyamitra Shunga to make him either. We know what he did — by the standards of his time, rather a great deal. We do not know who he was. And that uncertainty, honoured rather than papered over with convenient narratives, is the beginning of genuine historical understanding.
Expanded Bibliography and Further Reading
Primary Sources and Classical Texts:
- Pāṇini. Aṣṭādhyāyī. (c. 5th–4th century BCE, traditional). Critical edition: Sumitra Mangesh Katre, trans. University of Texas Press, 1987.
- Patanjali. Mahābhāṣya. (c. 2nd century BCE, traditional). F. Kielhorn, ed. Bombay, 1880–1885.
- Divyāvadāna (incl. Ashokāvadāna). Composed 2nd–4th century CE. E.B. Cowell & R.A. Neil, eds. Cambridge University Press, 1886.
- I-Tsing (Yijing). A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (AD 671–695). Trans. J. Takakusu. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1896.
- Mānavadharmaśāstra (Manu Smṛti). Composed c. 2nd century BCE – 3rd century CE.
- Rahul Sankrityayan. Volga Se Ganga. Allahabad: Kitab Mahal, 1944. [Historical fiction; not a primary historical source.]
Colonial-Era Scholarship (read critically):
- Jones, Sir William. Asiatic Researches. Vols 1–. Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1788–.
- Müller, Friedrich Max. Rig-Veda-Sanhita. 6 vols. Oxford, 1849–1875.
- Müller, Friedrich Max. India: What Can It Teach Us? London: Longmans, Green, 1883.
- Macaulay, Thomas Babington. "Minute on Indian Education." February 2, 1835.
- Mill, James. The History of British India. 6 vols. London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy, 1817.
- Cunningham, Alexander. The Ancient Geography of India. London: Trübner & Co., 1871.
- Caldwell, Robert. A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages. London: Harrison, 1856.
Modern Historical and Archaeological Scholarship:
- Thapar, Romila. Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas. Oxford University Press, 1961; revised ed. 1973.
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From Origins to AD 1300. Allen Lane, 2002.
- Thapar, Romila. Early Indian History (collected essays). Oxford University Press, 2026.
- Kosambi, D.D. An Introduction to the Study of Indian History. Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1956.
- Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. University of California Press, 2006.
- Pollock, Sheldon. "Deep Orientalism? Notes on Sanskrit and Power Beyond the Raj." In Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament, ed. Breckenridge & Van der Veer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.
- Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
- Lamotte, Étienne. History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Śaka Era. Institut Orientaliste, Louvain, 1958. Trans. Sara Webb-Boin. Peeters Press, 1988.
- Sircar, D.C. Indian Epigraphy. Motilal Banarsidass, 1965.
- Cardona, George. Pāṇini: A Survey of Research. Mouton, The Hague, 1976.
- Staal, J.F., ed. A Reader on the Sanskrit Grammarians. MIT Press, 1972.
- Wheeler, Sir Mortimer. The Indus Civilisation. Cambridge University Press, 1953.
Genetics and Archaeological Science:
- Shinde, Vasant et al. "An Ancient Harappan Genome Lacks Ancestry from Steppe Pastoralists or Iranian Farmers." Cell 179(3), 2019: 729–735.
- Narasimhan, Vagheesh et al. "The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia." Science 365(6457), 2019. DOI: 10.1126/science.aat7487.
- Reich, David. Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past. Pantheon Books, 2018.
- Anthony, David W. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton University Press, 2007.
- Sarianidi, Viktor. Margiana and Protozoroastrism. Athens: Kapon Editions, 1998.
- Sarianidi, Viktor. Necropolis of Gonur. Athens: Kapon Editions, 2007.
- Lubotsky, Alexander. "The Indo-Iranian Substratum." In Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations, ed. Christian Carpelan et al. Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 242, 2001.
- Hiebert, Fredrik T. Origins of the Bronze Age Oasis Civilization in Central Asia. American School of Prehistoric Research Bulletin 42. Harvard University, 1994.
- Parpola, Asko. The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization. Oxford University Press, 2015.
- Mallory, J.P., and D.Q. Adams, eds. Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997. [See entry on BMAC, p. 495, on Togolok soma/haoma evidence.]
- Kuz'mina, Elena E. The Origin of the Indo-Iranians. Ed. J.P. Mallory. Brill, 2007.
- Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni. Kikkuli horse-training texts, 14th century BCE. [Cuneiform tablets establishing early Indo-Aryan presence in northern Syria.]
Critical Historiography:
- Mukherjee, Radhakamal. The Culture and Art of India. Allen & Unw
