On the fourteenth of May, 2009, a rocket stood on its launch pad on the coast of French Guiana, wrapped in the morning haze of the Atlantic. Inside its fairing rode a satellite named for a physicist: Planck. Its mission was strange and simple. It would fly a million and a half kilometres from Earth, turn its instruments away from the Sun, and photograph the oldest light in existence, the glow left over from the universe's infancy.
The engines lit. The rocket rose. And a question rose with it, a question older than any rocket, older than any nation, older than writing itself. What was there in the beginning?
More than three thousand years earlier, on the plains of northwestern India, a man sat beside a fire through the last watch of the night and asked the same question. He had no telescope and no equations. He had a trained mind, a poet's discipline, and the longest unbroken tradition of memorised knowledge the world has ever produced. His answer, seven verses long, was chanted from teacher to student across a hundred generations until it reached us. It is called the Nasadiya Sukta, the Hymn of Creation.
How can a hymn and a satellite belong in the same book without one swallowing the other? The old thinkers of India solved this problem long before we needed it solved. When they asked how human beings come to know anything at all, they named the pramanas, the valid instruments of knowledge, and two of them govern every chapter of this series.
Shabda, the testimony of the texts, gives the tradition the first word, quoted exactly. Pratyaksha, the seen evidence, then speaks: what archaeology, dating, genetics, and the instruments of science show. Each chapter closes with samanvaya, the harmonising, where the two testimonies face each other honestly. One eye alone sees a flat world. Two eyes, set a little apart, give depth. This is an experiment in binocular history.
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