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From: "Mani M. Manivannan"
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Date: Fri, 16 Apr 1999 02:09:03 -0700
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Subject: [agathiyar] What happened on the day Kali Yuga began?
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Rajeev Srinivasan, a columnist for the Rediff
began his writing career on the internet posting messages to
the soc.culture.indian group. He is from Kerala, and I understand
that he is from the Eezhava community and is acutely aware
of the bitter struggle for equality waged by his community.
He began as a left-wing liberal, gravitated towards neo-liberalism
but now has become the poster child of "compassionate"
conservatives of India.

In a column for the Rediff web magazine, he speculates on the
calendars, in particular the Indian calendar. This is the 52nd
year of the Kali Yuga according to the Hindu calendar. So,
what marked the beginning of the Kali Yuga? Let us hear
the story from his own words. The complete, unedited article
is at

-Mani M. Manivannan

Millennium Fuss

In the midst of all the fuss about the new millennium in the Gregorian calendar, most of us missed another centenarian event: the beginning of the 52nd century of the Kali Yuga in the Hindu calendar, on March 18. This is Yugabda 5101. So why should anyone care? Indians or at least Hindus should care.

However, the earliest known Hindu text is the Rg Veda, dated to about 1500 BCE. Thus the Hindu calendar should date back only about 3,500 years. Therefore, the business about the Kali Yuga and 5,000 years must be some convenient fiction made up by medieval Hindu scholars, right? This is certainly what we have been led to believe by the Macaulayite educational system in India.

According to conventional wisdom, the Hindu texts that state that the Kali Yuga began in 3102 BCE, and that there was some spectacular celestial configuration of planets to mark that event, are merely fanciful mythical accounts. For after all, in 3102 BCE, Hindus were still far from writing the earliest Vedic texts -- and they were not a civilisation until around the 1500 BCE date of the Rg Veda.

It turns out, however, that Hindu texts do fairly accurately describe historical celestial events -- for instance the singular planetary configuration that is supposed to have taken place in 3102 BCE to mark the beginning of the Kali Yuga did in fact take place. This leads to two possibilities: one, that the astronomical events were actually observed then; two, that someone, after the laws of astrophysics became known (say Newton's time) back-caculated and inserted them into texts.

There is a problem with the first hypothesis: ancient Indians were not known to be astronomers, unlike, say the Chinese, who left detailed records of supernovae they observed, for instance in the Crab Nebula in 1054 CE. Second, if Indians were accurate astronomers 5,000 years ago, that presupposes an advanced civilisation by that time, which makes India the oldest of all known civilisations. This does not fit in with conventional wisdom.

It turns out that Indian astronomy (and astrology) over the centuries has had an error in it: it does not take into account the precession of the axis of the earth as it rotates around the sun. This is the tendency of the axis itself not to be oriented in space in fixed fashion, but to describe a cone -- it spins like the axis of a top does.

This error has accumulated over time. So for instance, Hindus celebrate the Winter Solstice on Makara Sankranti day, January 14th; however the real Winter Solstice is on December 22nd. Similarly, the Indian astrological months are offset by a couple of weeks from the real dates on which the sun enters those constellations.

Therefore, if an Indian mathematician were to recognise this error in Indian astronomy, take it into account, correct it, and backtrack to 3102 BCE, it would take a prodigious amount of computing power, that was not available until the recent creation of supercomputers. Therefore, the second hypothesis is impossible -- it was not back-calculated. The event was in fact observed in 3102 BCE.

We are left with the possibility then that Indian civilisation was already well-established in 3102 BCE. Which is interesting in and of itself. Furthermore, the Hindu calendar does speak in cosmic terms -- and it establishes the age of the universe as some 8.64 billion years, which fits in with modern, scientific cosmology (see Carl Sagan at http://www.rediff.com/news/jan/29sagan.htm).

I understand that the Indian government has denoted this year of the Hindu calendar as the Year of Sanskrit. Maybe in some of those crumbling palm-leaf manuscripts rotting away unsung, unwept, and unhonored, there are other ancient treasures like the astronomical observations from 5,000 years ago.

Rajeev Srinivasan



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