“Burnouf, noticing the fact that the story of the deluge is found only in one of the most modern Brahmanas, also thinks that it might have been borrowed by the Hindus from the Semitic nations. Against such an assumption are ranged all the traditions and customs of the Hindus. The Aryans, and especially the Brahmans, never borrowed anything at all from the Semitists, and here we are corroborated by one of those “unwilling witnesses”, as Higgins calls the partisans of Jehovah and Bible.
“I have never seen anything in the history of the Egyptians and Jews”, writes Abbe Dubois, forty years a resident of India, “that would induce me to believe that either of these nations, or any other on the face of the earth have been established earlier than the Hindus, and particularly the Brahmans; so I cannot be induced to believe that the latter have drawn their rites from foreign nations. On the contrary, I infer that they have drawn them from an original source of their own. Whoever knows anything of the spirit and character of the Brahmans, their stateliness, their pride, and extreme vanity, their distance, and sovereign contempt for everything that is foreign, and of which they cannot boast to have been the inventors, will agree with me that such a people cannot have consented to draw their customs and rules of conduct from an alien country.”
This fable which mentions the earliest avatar – the Matsya – relates to another yuga than our own, that of the first appearance of animal life; perchance, who knows, to the Devonian age of our geologists? It certainly answers better to the latter than the year 2348 B.C. Apart from this, the very absence of all mention of the deluge from the oldest books of the Hindus suggests a powerful argument, when we are left utterly to inferences as in this case.
“The Vedas and Manu”, says Jacolliot, “those monuments of the old Asiatic thought, existed far earlier than the diluvian period; this is an incontrovertible fact, having all the value of an historical truth, for, besides the tradition which shows Vishnu himself as saving the Vedas from the deluge – a tradition which, notwithstanding its legendary form, must certainly rest upon a real fact – it has been remarked that neither of these sacred books mention the cataclysm, while the Puranas and the Mahabharata, and a great number of other more recent works, describe it with the minutest detail, which is a proof of the priority of the former. The Vedas certainly would never have failed to contain a few hymns on the terrible disaster which, of all other natural manifestations, must have struck the imagination of the people who witnessed it.”
“Neither would Manu, who gives us a complete narrative of the creation, with a chronology from the divine and heroical ages, down to the appearance of man on earth – have passed in silence an event of such importance.””
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 