Epic-Puranic chronology
Traditional The Epic-Puranic chronology is a timeline of Hindu mythology based on the Itihasa (the Sanskrit Epics, that is, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana) and the Puranas.
These texts have an authoritative status in Indian tradition, and narrate cosmogeny, royal chronologies, myths and legendary events.
The Epic-Puranic chronology is referred to by proponents of Indigenous Aryans to propose an earlier dating of the Vedic period, and the spread of Indo-European languages out of India, arguing that "the Indian civilization must be viewed as an unbroken tradition that goes back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati Valley traditions (7000 BCE to 8000 BCE).
"[1] The history of India up to (and including) the times of the Buddha, with his life generally placed into the 6th or 5th century BCE, is a subject of a major scholarly debate.
[6] The Mahābhārata narrates the struggle between two groups of cousins in the Kurukshetra War, and the fates of the Kaurava and the Pāṇḍava princes and their successors.
[9] The Puranas (literally "ancient, old",[10]) is a vast genre of Indian literature about a wide range of topics, particularly legends and other traditional lore,[11] composed in the first millennium CE.
[22] The Puranas, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana contain lists of kings and genealogies,[15] from which the traditional chronology of India's ancient history are derived.
[35][36] Within the frame story of the Mahabharata, the historical kings Parikshit and Janamejaya are featured significantly as scions of the Kuru clan,[37] and Michael Witzel concludes that the general setting of the epic has a historical precedent in Iron Age (Vedic) India, where the Kuru kingdom was the center of political power during roughly 1200 to 800 BCE.
[38] Indian historian Upinder Singh has written that: Whether a bitter war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas ever happened cannot be proved or disproved.
Attempts to date the events using methods of archaeoastronomy have produced, depending on which passages are chosen and how they are interpreted, estimates ranging from the late 4th to the mid-2nd millennium BCE.
The late 4th-millennium date has a precedent in the calculation of the Kali Yuga epoch, based on planetary conjunctions, by Aryabhata (6th century).
"[59] Golwalkar was inspired by Tilak's[note 17] The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903), who argued that the Aryan homeland was located at the North Pole, basing this idea on Vedic hymns and Zoroastrian texts.
[60][note 18] Subhash Kak, a main proponent of the "indigenist position", underwrites the Vedic-Puranic chronology, and uses it to recalculate the dates of the Vedas and the Vedic people.
"[61] According to Sudhir Bhargava, the Vedas were composed 10,000 years ago, when Manu supposedly lived, in ashrams at the banks of the Sarasvati river in Brahmavarta, the ancient home-base of the Aryans.
