Precisely!
My whole argument here is to examine the term "indigenous" since these people claim that Vedic culture is "indigenous" to India whereas "foreign faiths" aren't.
However, the fact is that, prior to the British era, the subcontinent was more like Europe than anything else: a collection of loose kingdoms which were united into a political entity for very brief periods -- around 200 years total throughout history. Only the Maurya Empire united the entirety of the subcontinent into a single political unit prior to the British era. There was always cultural India, but to claim indigenous status based on that is a tautology: it's a circular argument since the whole definition of "cultural India" is regions that contributed to Indian culture.
I could not disagree more.
It helps, of course, not to believe that Vedic culture is indigenous. For starters, Vedic culture is not shorthand for Indian culture, as some cultural fundamentalists seem to believe. Vedic culture was as starkly different from our contemporary culture as was chalk and cheese. We are not migratory people, measuring our wealth in heads of cattle, protected by our chieftain king and his trusty war-band, mounted on steeds bred on the steppes, armed with iron weapons superior to any that we might encounter with foemen other than our own kind, riding war chariots into battle, celebrating with feasts punctuated by draughts of soma and choice cuts from the pick of our herds, worshipping the great Thunder God, the bringer of victory, and revering our wise men, who compose hymns in lofty language for us to sing.
Nor are we the people of the later ages who survived domestication and the shock of taking to an agricultural life, and measured life in the number of cattle we lifted from our neighbours in wild, hard-riding raids, maintained royal courts where musicians, dancers, bards, and wandering holy men regaled the king and his boon companions, while the husbandmen and merchants went soberly about their business, building bonds of trade where there were bonds of tribe and kinship, a life where one gave up worldly care when the blood ran thin, and retired to a gentler life with one's life partner, under the spreading greenwoods near a pleasant river.
This kind of harking back to the past is so singularly phony that it hurts. The vision of these cultural Luddites compresses the life-style of the Vedic era, with that of Puranic times, with historical information about imperial India, and the early mediaeval ages, all into one mish-mash which makes singularly little sense, either as reconstruction or as a culturally coherent vision. On the one hand, there is the rich, civilised, sophisticated world of the nagar badhu, the merchant prince and evil kotwals, all dancing around a royal court famed across many countries, adorned by famous poets and playwrights, perhaps by great musicians, and reigned over by accomplished and learned kings or great war-lords, or both; on the other, there is the bucolic vision of the riders off the steppes, picking their way across the rivers to mount great attacks on neighbours of their own kind, when not attacking the settlements of the autochthones and bringing them to realise the great desirability of the new culture.
How can anyone, even these deranged idiots, compress around 2,000 years of cultural existence, punctuated by major wars towards the latter one-third, imagine that a homogeneous culture would inhabit it with no change? And if they acknowledge change, which part is the part that is Vedic, the earlier, or the later? For the two were so incredibly different, the difference between high noon and the early dawn.
On the other hand, the disagreement.
Why do you, and other apologists for Pakistan as a counter-weight to this Vedic vision, insist on taking the mistakes of the deluded Vedic visionaries and riding it on a pendulum swing in the opposite direction? Why, for instance, do you, all of you, with not many exceptions that I can name, obsess to the point of clinical extremism about the political entity named India that exists today, and insist that such an India never existed politically in the past? Why is it that you do not sit for a moment and think through the fact that India was the foreigner's name for us, never our name for ourselves? Why, because mediaeval raiders and marauders called this land Hind do you imagine that the people called themselves Hind? Or derivatives thereof? Why do you emerge flushed from these discoveries, exuberant about the fact that never in the past was there ever a Republic of India? What significance does this have? and what discoveries have you made by stating this?
Finally, what relevance does this have to the cultural unity of India, which allowed a traveller from Pragjyotishpur to know that he would be comfortable in Poompuhar or in Kusumapura alike, that he would have his vocation in life recognised and accepted, that he would get food that would be acceptable to him in terms of what he normally ate, that the exotic changes in clothing and attire were finally minor changes only, that the language that he would find might be comprehensible or not, but that he would be assured of finding those who could speak a common language, that the coinage he carried would be honoured and exchanged for local coin, and used for food, and drink, and clothes and shelter and transport?
I really don't 'get' what point you and your ilk are trying to make out of this India never existed before 1947 idiocy.
