The Arctic Home in the Vedas

The Arctic Home in the Vedas is a 1903 book on the origin of the Indo-Aryan peoples by Indian nationalist, teacher and independence activist Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Based on his analysis of Vedic hymns, Avestic passages, Vedic chronology and Vedic calendars, Tilak argued that the North Pole was the original home of Aryans during the pre-glacial period, which they left due to climate changes around 8000 B.C., migrating to the Northern parts of Europe and Asia.
Publication.
The book was written at the end of 1898, but was first published in March 1903 in Pune.
Background.
Tilak held the view that further study of Vedic hymns and Avestan passages might reveal the long vista of primitive Aryan antiquity.
Tilak cites a book by William F. Warren, the first President of Boston University, "Paradise Found or the Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole", as having anticipated his ideas to some extent. Warren dedicated his book to Max Müller, with whom Tilak had shared ideas before the book was completed.
Tilak's Arctic homeland theory.
According to Tilak, writing at the end of the 19th century, the Neolithic Aryan race in Europe cannot be regarded as autochthonous, nor did the European Aryans descend from the Paleolithic man. Hence, the question of the original Aryan home is was regarded as unsettled by Tilak.
According to Tilak, the close of the Pliocene and the whole of the Pleistocene period were marked by violent changes of climate bringing on what is called the Glacial and Inter-Glacial epochs:
The Arctic was inhabited by the Aryans. The ending of the Glacial age changed the climate there, and set the Aryan people on a migration to new habitats:
Characteristics of an Arctic home, characterised by a climate different from today's, are clearly recorded in several Vedic hymns and Avestic passages. There are descriptions of the prevailing conditions and of the day-to-day experience, but also recordings of stories told by the earlier generation, sometimes presented as myths. Tilak gives the following chronology of the post-glacial period:
Influence.
M.S. Golwalkar, in his 1939 publication "We or Our Nationhood Defined", famously stated that "Undoubtedly [...] we — Hindus — have been in undisputed and undisturbed possession of this land for over eight or even ten thousand years before the land was invaded by any foreign race." Golwalkar was inspired by Tilak's "The Arctic Home in the Vedas". Gowalkar took over the idea of 10,000 years, arguing that the North Pole at that time was located in India.
Tilak's ideas influenced Soviet Indologist Natalia R. Guseva and Soviet ethnographer S.V Zharnikova, who argued for a northern Urals Arctic homeland of the Indo-Aryan and Slavic people; their ideas were popularized by Russian nationalists.