Although India is acknowledged as one of the four oldest civilizations of the world, at more than 5000 years old, the earliest kingdoms in India are dated to only about 600 BC, with the birth of Gautam Buddha dated to 563 BC and Mahavir Swami dated to 599 BC. In contrast, Egypt’s earliest monarch, King Menes, is dated to 3100 BC; the Sumerian city-states, the earliest political entities of Mesopotamia, are dated to 3000-2500 BC, and the Shang kings, the earliest rulers in China, are dated to 1523–1028 BC or 1751–1111 BC. This raises serious questions – Who were the people who lived in India from the earliest times till 600 BC? What system of governance did they have? What philosophy did they follow? The current widely prevalent narrative fails to answer these critical questions. Why is it so?
My book The History and Chronology of Ancient India: Undoing Distortions from Colonial Rule published recently seeks to address these questions. It is not common knowledge, even within India, let alone the world, that the current widely presented history and chronology of ancient India is not the one recorded by Indians, but a distorted version created during the British rule of India.
After the fall of Bengal to the British East India Company in 1757, William Jones founded Asiatic Society in 1784 in Kolkata, and only Europeans were allowed as members of the society until 1829. This Society under patronage of the East India Company began questioning the high antiquity of Indian civilization heard from pandits in Bengal.
In the colonial era (18th-19th centuries) European Indologists were invested in the biblical version of world history wherein the world originated with Adam in 4006 BC. These Indologists believed the Greek history which started at about 600 BC to be the oldest and could not accept the documented chronology of India starting from 3100+ BC. To perpetuate their convictions, the Indian chronology was rejected and altered to no earlier than 600 BC.
The colonial Indologists wrongly identified Chandragupta Maurya of 1534 BC, instead of Chandragupta I of the Gupta Dynasty of 327 BC, as the contemporary of Alexander, thus shrinking ancient India’s chronology by over 1,200 years. This wrong identification was the ‘sheet anchor’ for redating the chronology of Magadh (the center of power in ancient India for several millennia) and everyone before and after Chandragupta Maurya such as Gautam Buddha, Nanda, Chanakya, Ashoka etc., was dated in relation to Chandragupta Maurya being the ruler in 322 BC, discarding their original time of 15th to 19th centuries. The chronological record of the dynasties spanning 1,200 years preceding Gautam Buddha’s time of the 19th century BC was also discarded. Thus, the chronology of Magadh was shrunk from 3100+ BC to 600 BC, and the thousands of years of Indian history before 3100 BC were discarded. Similarly the documented chronology and histories of Kashmir and Nepal were also rejected and shrunk accordingly.
William Jones had noticed a strong similarity between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin and had proposed that these languages arose from a common source. Max Muller, a German Sanskritist who had never visited India, was hired in Britain in 1847 by the British East India Company to translate the Rig-Veda Samhita of Sayanacharya from Sanskrit to English. He facilitated the shrinking of India’s chronology from 3100+ BC to 600 BC by inserting a completely new theory of Aryan invasion/migration of India in 1500 BC, claiming that Sanskrit came to India from
central Asia.
Although earlier colonial Indologists such as William Jones did not doubt the historicity of Shree Ram, Shree Krishna and Mahabharata, later colonial Indologists of the 2nd half of the 19th
century declared them mythical.
Rewriting of India’s chronology and history was essentially completed by the end of the 1800s. Based on this distorted chronology and history, the books written by Vincent Smith and the likes in the early 1900s were made the standard in the schools and colleges since then and it has remained so to this date. Archaeological excavations of the Sindhu valley took place in the 1920s and essentially validated the Indian tradition that India had a continuous civilization since at least 3000 BC. These findings were ignored and explained away with newer convoluted arguments.
Although we have been taught to dismiss Puranas as mythology, colonial Indologists rewrote India’s history based on the list of kings and dynasties given in the Puranas. Nothing in India’s Puranas and literature corresponded to their fabricated chronology. They declared the Puranas to be unreliable and proceeded to edit them to justify their conjectures. They cherry-picked the information, discarded some kings and dynasties, and arbitrarily shortened the reigning period of the kings. The colonial Indologists also ignored extensive records of ancient Indian calendars and claimed that Indians did not have a system of tracking time.
From the beginning, the new but distorted chronology and history of India was protested by many eminent personalities such as Swami Dayanand Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo Ghosh and many scholars. The most note-worthy among these are T. S. Narayan Sastry (1916), M. Krishnamachariar (1937), Pandit Kota Venkatachelam (1950s) and K. D. Sethna (1989) who devoted their lifetime in reconstructing ancient India’s chronology and published their books in the years indicated next to their names.
The chronology presented in my book is a unique synthesis of the works of these stalwarts of ancient Indian history, supplemented by new research literature available since then. I have discussed numerous specific cases of how the chronology was distorted.
Restoring true history is like putting together a puzzle of a thousand pieces where each puzzle piece must connect on all its sides, bound by the corners. The history of India written under British rule is discontinuous; the corners of the puzzle do not connect with other events of the same time. My book describes corrected, continuous, and connected history and chronology of India from 3139 BC to CE 1192 with ample evidence, based on years of extensive research, supported by hundreds of references cited in the book.
I recognize limitations of uncovering thousands of years of history, and admit that some of the history and chronology presented in the book may be further refined in the future. True chronology is the backbone of history. Without true chronology, the history is just a story.