Origins & Evidence
Where the tradition comes from and how we know: the Indus question, the Aryan debate, and the inscriptions, manuscripts and digs behind the reconstruction.
The origins of Sanatana Dharma are reconstructed from evidence rather than remembered, and the evidence is thinner than the certainty around it. The question is not rhetorical. The Vedas were unwritten for perhaps three thousand years, the earliest manuscripts are recent, and the archaeology of the Indian subcontinent is unusually difficult because the material culture was largely perishable.
So the evidence comes from odd angles. Inscriptions on copper plates and temple walls. Astronomical references that can be dated. A river the Rigveda describes as mighty, which later dried, and whose bed satellite survey appears to have found. Since 2019, ancient DNA.
That last strand runs into the Aryan migration question, which is where scholarship and politics collide most sharply in Indian history.
These pages set out the methods and the arguments, name the scholars on each side, and mark inference as inference. Where the record genuinely does not settle a question, that is said rather than smoothed over.