Puranic Histyory versus Histoeians Puranas
Historical consciousness developed in india as early as gathering stage[1]. I do not know about other cultures. I shall not be surprised if some of them also made a similar claim. But there is a notable difference. In India, they passed accounts of social experience and extraordinary events through narratives, stories and songs. They made it almost a duty of the senior members to narrate these stories on certain occasions. It was a general practice to tell and listen such tales at the time of sleep as well.
After they advanced to cleared fields and were cut off from forest life they did not discontinue this legacy. At least once a year they spent some days in a forested area, and discussed historical and philosophical questions (एकदा नैमिषारण्ये). This session was called parayan (पारायण). This question-answer practice developed into a popular literary style often resorted to explain dry subjects or complex problems. This practice continued till my childhood in its rudimentary form. An orchard stretching over a few acres was called the forest for parayan (परवने केऽ बारी). (bar- i. leaf, ii. tree > barii -i. the professionals who stitched leaves to make use-and-throw plates and cups from leaves, ii. forest, iii. orchards).
They had developed a unique literary style in which exaggeration and hyperbole added to improbable feats created a wonderland which lured people to listen and narrate with catalytic effect. Thus was the tradition retained for thousands of years with little variation.
These basics must be understood by anyone who approaches ancient texts in order to glean historical information from Puranic accounts. Failure of most of the scholars who reject Puranas as a source of history lies in the fact that they either take the accounts verbatim and create a mess or outright reject it. All bad artisans blame their tools.
In my writings I used Puranic lore as source for deeper drilling into the past with the same self-sureness that archaeologists use their material. Nay, I found the Puranic information more reliable than the results of specialised studies. It is no small credit that archaeologists were the first to admire my work and they mended their puritanic ways to give weight to literary information thereafter.
2
In order to test the merit of the above claim, let us again visit the geneticists who studied Rakhi Gadhi material and whose findings have validated my reading of history and in addition eroded the very foundation of the version of history taught by the so called marxist historians who ruled the roost for decades. Quite natural that the new genetic conclusions have rubbed these historians hard enough to to bleed their nose:
“Pointing out that Indo-European is a linguistic, not genetic concept, Habib says, ‘What they’ve found is not related to the language problem. Language doesn’t necessarily spread through genes.’ He mentions the Greek and Turkish populations: genetically inclined to each other, linguistically separated. Ratnagar, who has worked extensively on Harappan sites, too says: “Indo-Iranian languages have no relation to genetics. This kind of claim is an old-fashioned, racial one.”
The points these scholars want to gloss over is (1) the Rakhi Gadhian or say Harappan tradition has a continuity down to the present; (2) that language spreads through humans who carry their genes, (3) that Turkistan, i.e. Anatolia (the land of sunrise) of the Greeks was heavily populated by Greeks and Homer, the first epic poet of Greek was Asiatic. Change of religion does not change the gene nor does imposition of a different language make a difference; and (4) that attested Iranian or Central Asian migration was not a migration from Central Asia abut homeward return of a people who had been inbreeding for generation with Central Asian stocks resulting into change in genome.
As such we may dismiss the objections of our chair-bound historians either as novices who do not fulfill the demands of their profession or a crafty lot busy in intigues.
But what is as amusing is the fact that in their effort to explain the genetic correspondences the experts have themselves landed into a mess prompting them to offer a lame excuse:
“The first mixing happened around 6000-5000 BC. As the Neolithic (period) started, the Northwest Indian mixed significantly with Iranian farmers,” says Rai.
The key takeaway is that earlier mixing seems to have given us the ‘Ancestral South Indian’ (ASI)—with an ‘Iranian farmer’ component as part of it. And ‘ASI’ later mixed with incoming pastoral people from the Central Asian Steppe, giving us the ‘Ancestral North Indian’ (ANI).
Thus, the events that formed both the ASI and ANI overlapped (with) the decline of the Indus Valley Civilisation.” The researchers suggest the first admixture between the Iranian agriculturalists and South Asian hunter-gatherers created the ASI, Harappan people among them. Further, around the second millennium BC, the Steppe pastoralists (the ‘Aryans’) intermingled with the Harappan people and others in the northern Indian plains to create the ANI. This is a visualisation that confirms what have by now become popular ‘cultural’ notions, so one needs to move carefully—especially if ‘science’ uses apparently technical terms to denote genepools. It needs to be stated that ASI, or the ‘Ancestral South Indian’, is better read as everyone’s ancestor in South Asia—whether Punjabi, Bengali or ‘Madrasi’.

It is here that Puranic material as analysed by us comes to our rescue. We may better defer the Puranic accounts which leave no space for doubt.