K.D. Sethna’s book takes up ‘from an Indian Point of View" a cluster of important historical questions about India’s most ancient past and formulates fresh answers to them in great detail with the temper of a scrupulous scholar. At one time modern historians had no doubt that Aryans who were the authors of the Rigveda had invaded the Indian subcontinent in the middle of the second millennium B.C. and overrun a primitive Dravidian population. After the highly developed Indus Valley Civilization, also known as the Harappa Culture, was discovered, the assumed in-coming Aryans were thought to have destroyed it around 1500 B.C. and, though the script of this Civilization has not yet been acceptably read, the general tendency is to consider it as couching an old form of the Dravidian language Tamil. Lately several historians have attributed the destruction of the Harappa Culture to natural causes, but the belief that in the wake of that event foreigners who were associated with the Rigveda entered India is still very much in the air. The first edition of Sethna’s book dealt at length with this belief and its various corollaries as they were conceived up to the date of its publication: 1980. Archaeology, linguistics and literature were pressed into service so as to leave no loose ends. In the process a comprehensive framework got built for the insights and researches of contemporary India’s greatest seer and thinker: Sri Aurobindo. One of the pet current ideas shown with his help as well as independently to lack any firm basis was the popular antinomy of "Aryan" and "Dravidian" which has caused a good deal of bad blood in the country. The second edition, extensively enlarged with five supplements, demonstrates for the period after 1980 – at still greater length – with the same tools of wide-spread scholarship the validity of the first edition’s thesis. Whatever criticism, explicit or indirect has opposed this thesis has been unflinchingly faced. Now, at a number of points the penetrating vision of Sri Aurobindo comes into play again with even a more elaborate presentation of his study of the spiritual and cultural issues connected with the ancient Rigveda. Special attention has been drawn in the longest supplement to the well-known Finnish linguist and Indologist Asko Parpola who has recently made the most impressive attempt so far to revive the theory of an Aryan invasion in c. 1500 B.C. and to cope with problem of Aryan origins. Close study of the diverse arguments brought forward by Parpola has led Sethna to probe deeper into his own general position that the Rigveda is anterior to the Indus Valley Civilization by a broad margin. The result is both a minute scrutiny of several surprising suggestions arising from the Rigveda and a many-aspected review of events dating back to the sixth millennium B.C. and covering not only India’s antiquity but also the earliest formative stages of Baluchistan’s Mehrgarh and of Central Asian Regions.
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