The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c16.s1.14

c16.s1.14

Similarly, chronology of the texts is the worst bane of Indian traditional literature. Very few of our literary texts could even be approximately dated without arousing a controversy. Hence, as it happens very often, most of our accounts—historical and geographical—are anachronisms. We have already described the horizontal expansion of peoples and cultures. Hence, if we compare the Vedic and puranic accounts, we find the earlier members of a family stationed in the *Brahmavarta* being associated with the later homes of their successors. Uncritical acceptance by Pargiter, and some of the subsequent writers, gives us the fantastic picture of the early Aryan settlements spread over the whole of Northern India right from the 3rd or the 4th generation from Manu, the ancestral founder of all the Hindu Royal families. Similarly the Mahabharata lists most of the States of the Early centuries of the Christian Era, as taking part in the Great War; and Sahadeva is supposed to know every nook and corner of India and even Antioch and Rome! *Thus if we are allowed to use the term, these are not only anachronistic in time, but also in space.*