Date: Friday, September 11, 2009, 6:07 PM
Dear friends, In doing all the dating exercises most of the researchers forget to take into account (a) the living traditions as well as (b) the precessional data, at all. In doing the dating of the Mahabharata if only the researchers would have cared to take into account the continuing tradition of the Saptarshi calendar and also the Precessional data like Dr. Abhyankar did, they would have found that the Mahabharata war was fought in 3139 BCE. This also meets all the astronomical data given by Vedavyasa in the Mahabharata. In doing the dating of Lord Rama's time Dr. Vartak closed in on the date through precessional data and then of course he gave importance to the Buddhist tradition that Lord Rama was born about 5,500 years before the Nirvana of Lord Buddha (in 1807 BCE). Lord Buddha himself claimed to belong to the Ikshaku Vamsha (lineage,) to which Lord Rama too belonged. So one has to look for the date of Lord Rama somewhere around 7,307 BCE (1,807 + 5500 = 7307 BCE). Then Dr. Vartak came out with the date of 7.323 BCE. While the perfectionists will want the exact time of the day when Lord Rama was born, the historian in me (can I claim to be so?) is quite satisfied with the date found by Dr. Vartak though I would think that L:ord Rama was actually born in 7319 BCE, just four years later than Dr. Vartak proposed. Now coming to Shri Kaul's mentioning that Lord Rama ruled for eleven thousand years, he is obviously unaware of the fact that Lord Rama has been presented in the Bala Kanda and the Uttara kanda as God whereas in the other Kandas he is treataed as a human being.and for this very reason it is beyond doubt that the Bala Kanda and th Uttara Kanda have been interpolated into the Ramayana at a much later date and these two Kandas were not composed by Valmiki. In all probability Lord Rama ruled for about 30 years and 6 months and considering Lord Rama to be God and assuming the years associated with him to be the year of the gods, the period of 30 years were wrongly multiplied by 360 to arrive at 11,000 human years. One can know about the length of the human life span in the ancient days from the phrase "Jivet Sharadam shatam", though there were exceptions, such as Lord Krishna lived for 125 years and the Pandavas lived still longer. Shri Kaul rightly refers to me as a Parokshya professor because of my looking at things, which normally escape the attention of the Pratyaksha professors. However I wish to tell Shri kaul that in 1963, ie before my joing the Atomic ranergy Establishment as a scientist. I was teaching Chemistry in a Degree college for a few months. So he may call me as Chemistry professor too. Regards, Sunil K. Bhattacharjya
