The Arctic Home of Aryans – Deliberate Joke of Tilak

An excerpt from the book,

Secret of India’s Greatness, Sanatana Vaidika Dharma by His Holiness Jagadguru Bharati Krishna Teertha.

In passing, we may mention that the late Lokamanya Tilak’s book “The Arctic Home of the Vedas” was long regarded by many of his readers (including ourselves) as an attempt to establish the theory of Aryan migration from the Arctic Regions (still further north) into India! But, subsequently, he himself declared that wonderful book of his to have been a deliberately planned and farcical parody of, and counterblast to, the Orientalists’ Central Asian theory, couched in such terms as to carry an air of the utmost seriousness. In fact, he used to say that, like an actor who played his part too well on the stage and produced on the minds of his spectators and hearers the Illusion of Reality, he had overshot his mark and made all his readers take him too seriously and that he meant, in course of time, to demolish his own arguments in a new book to be called the “Antarctic Home of the Vedas” and prove the whole thing to have been a mere farcical fooling of the Orientalists’ methods!

But, unluckily, Indian Nationalist Politics and the Valentine Chirol case and other such pre-occupations stood in the way of and prevented his fulfilling that intention of his, and then Death prematurely intervened and robbed the world of the pleasure and the fun promised.

The book is available here