Daniélou and Puranas as translations

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, nemonemini@... wrote:

> [T]hat devoted student of Hinduism and convert thereto, Daniélou,
> with his useful _A History of India_, from another generation,
> simply assumed AIT in some form and, issues of the Indus set to
> one side, [...] [i]n the process [...] also made clear that he
> thought Indic tradition preceded the Aryan entry on the scene
> [...]. The exact language involved would not therefore have been
> Indo-European, presumably thus by speculative inference a Dravidian
> tradition being the case.
>
> The point of my communication is to refer to some of Daniélou's
> considerations as a possible alternate form of research here, for
> it was his hypothesis that literature such as the Puranas, and much
> else, was in fact translated from this original pre-Aryan language.
> That's a line of attack rarely taken up, but a brilliant
> intuition, one that Daniélou simply assumed as the case, given his
> linguistic specialties.
>
> These are statements that an expert in the history and linguistics
> here could verify or refute, surely, with a close analysis of the
> texts involved, thus offering, as Daniélou in all innocence
> suggested as the case, a new way to support the AIT or dismiss it.
> Thus, it seemed obvious to a close scholar such as Daniélou that
> these literatures in many instances were translations (cf.
> Daniélou's work on this). These are probably falsifiable
> hypotheses, thus yielding an alternate venue in the AIT/OIT debate.

The key word in your summary is "speculative". The reading of Alain Daniélou's books (such as _Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The Traditions of Shiva and Dionysus_, _A History of India_, and especially his magnum opus _Hindu Polytheism_) constituted my first impact with Indology twenty years ago. At that time I was greatly fascinated (like you have probably been) by his theories about the alleged existence of a prehistoric "Indo-Mediterranean" religio-cultural complex centering round the figure of "Shiva/Dionysus" and, on the Indian versant, of a (pre-Vedic and pre-Aryan) "Dravidian-speaking Shaivite civilization" which would have produced a mass of lost oral religious texts, later on "translated" into Sanskrit in order to be incorporated into the by then dominant Vedic Aryan religious milieu.

Unfortunately, with the passing of time I came to realize that Daniélou, who by no means specialized in linguistics (at least, not in historical linguistics), could offer no linguistic evidence whatsoever to support his conjectures, which were mainly based on the work of an earlier Indologist, F.E. Pargiter (1852-1927), now regarded as greatly outdated. Though it is probably true that post-Vedic texts such as the Shaiva Agamas, the Puranas, and the later Shaiva and Shakta Tantras include mythemes originating from outside the sphere of the Vedic religion -- namely, "non-Aryan" ones, though not necessarily "Dravidian" ones only --, Daniélou's speculations about the existence of "pre-Aryan" oral texts which would have been translated into Sanskrit long after the "Aryan invasion" of India took place, are simply fantasies.

There is not a shred of proof of that -- and not even, for what matters, for Daniélou's (and Father Heras') "prehistoric Indo-Mediterranean Shaivism" and the like. Believe this poor ex-fan of Daniélou's!

Regards,
Francesco Brighenti, Ph.D.
VAIS -- Venetian Academy of Indian Studies
Venice, Italy