History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v3.c53.s2.18

v3.c53.s2.18

In the Indian Antiquary, vol. 41, Dr. Sham Sastry contributed a series of articles on the Vedic calendar in which he adduced weighty arguments for holding that the Gavāmayana was a symbolic representation of the efforts made to square up the Vedic lunar year with the solar year by adding intercalary days. It is somewhat remarkable and also indicative of the bias of most western scholars that while Prof. Keith in his work on the 'Religion and philosophy of the Veda' refers ad nauseam to all sorts of lucubrations by European scholars on the origins of the Vedic sacrifices, about rain spells and fertility rites and similar lore he does not condescend to notice the views of Dr. Sham Sastry or Mr. Tilak, which have far more probability than many of the learned hypotheses advanced by European scholars who appear to be obsessed by the notion that Vedic usages must be similar to practices found in the 19th century among the backward races of Africa, America and Oceania.