- Joined
- Aug 7, 2023
The masses of pre-modern India were much less familiar with the Vedas compared to the masses of the pre-modern Christian and Muslim worlds with the Bible and the Quran respectively. At most, your average jeet back then heard about a bastardized version of a part of the Vedas through oral tales, but that’s it.
Meanwhile, even with literacy being a privilege of the elite before the early modern era, Christians were still familiar with the Bible through the preaching of priests (and after the Protestant Reformation, theology increasingly became democratized and literacy increased in Protestant areas as the masses were taught how to read so that they can read the Bible). There was a rich oral tradition of reciting parts or even all the Quran in all aspects of life that developed throughout the Muslim world and it still exists to this day. The Sinic civilizations placed an especially strong emphasis on scholarly activities, and the elites of those civilizations can all be assumed to be familiar with the Chinese, Buddhist, and/or local classics, and even your average East Asian was very familiar of the teachings of Confucius and/or the Buddha. The only parts of the world that were and/or are less cultured and literate than India were the Pre-Columbian Americas, Aboriginal Australia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. To this day, I don’t believe most jeets have read the Vedas at all, they are more familiar with Bollywood slop and pornography if anything.
