tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-61380823543488314742024-03-15T18:09:17.922-07:00Koenraad ElstKoenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.comBlogger348125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-39148879441889938862023-10-26T03:05:00.006-07:002023-10-26T03:05:43.250-07:00This book review by the late NS Rajaram of my books Asterisk in Bhâropîyasthân and Return of the Swastika must be from 2007 or 2008. More precise publication data are welcome.
RajaramReview
>
> Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan, Koenraad Elst, Voice of India, Rs 325
>
> Return of the Swastika, Koenraad Elst, Voice of India, Rs 400
>
> Koenraad Elst's 'new' books, Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan and Return of
> the Swastika, are filled with reproductions of extensive quotes from
> his own earlier writings and opinions, which in turn might themselves
> be quotations of still earlier quotations. Sadly, I could not find
> anything new and pathbreaking in either of the two books.
>
> The first book deals with the Aryan invasion theory, which is now a
> dead issue. The second, on the other hand, is a collection of
> commentaries (vyakhyanas) on miscellaneous issues, including personal
> disputes. The result of his approach is "commentaries multiplied
> beyond necessity to the point of opacity".
>
> Elst's Asterik... is supposed to be an updated version of his earlier
> Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate. It is somewhat idiosyncratic and
> excludes major developments like: (a) maritime symbolism in the Vedas,
> now supported by marine archaeology; (b) the impact of findings in
> natural history and genetics on prehistory; and, © the Vedic-Harappan
> relationship of which Harappan language and script are a part.
>
> Those unfamiliar with the field may believe that Asterisk...
> represents the latest research on the subject. It is, however, not the
> case. The book is a commentary mainly on topics that engaged
> researchers some 50 years ago. Part of Elst's agenda seems to be to
> rescue philology (or IE linguistics) from oblivion. This puts him
> squarely in the Witzel-Farmer camp.
>
> This agenda is doomed to fail. First, Elst must answer the question
> raised by statisticians Kruskal, Dyen and Black in their 1978 paper
> that demolished the classification scheme used by Witzel-like
> linguists. (See my book Saraswati River and the Vedic Civilisation,
> 2006, Aditya Prakashan, for a brief discussion. The just released
> book, Hidden Horizons, by David Frawley and Rajaram, has more on
> natural history.)
>
> What we need today is a "natural history" of the evolution of language
> and not just rehashing of old IDEAS with new terminology and clever
> rhetorical flourishes. This cannot come from soft fields like
> linguistics and IE Studies with their pseudo-discipline called
> historical linguistics.
>
> Again, I want to highlight the fact that despite its tone, Asterisk...
> skirts important questions while discussing issues that have been
> either demolished or made irrelevant. For those interested in a more
> scholarly discussion of these issues by workers actively engaged in
> research, I recommend the two-volume Early Harappans and the
> Indus-Saraswati Civilisation. (Kaveri Books, New Delhi.) It was
> sponsored by the National Museum, New Delhi, and edited by DP Sharma,
> head of the Harappan Gallery in the National Museum. It has articles
> by a wide range of experts approaching from different angles.
>
> Since Asterisk... is concerned with the Aryan invasion question, it is
> surprising that Elst has completely missed the main point that the
> subject now is no longer the invasion but the Vedic-Harappan
> relationship. This has been the subject of several conferences and the
> two-volume work referred to earlier. Natural history and genetics have
> shed a great deal of light on the pre-Harappan and even pre-Vedic
> periods, going back to the Ice Age, but there is no hint of it in
> Elst's writing.
>
> With this blind spot, Elst has also completely missed the obvious -
> that the Harappan language and script question is part of the
> Vedic-Harappan relationship. If Harappan archaeology is part of the
> Vedic milieu, how can the language be something totally unrelated to
> each other? Elst's comment that he finds the readings in our book (The
> Deciphered Indus Script, Jha and Rajaram) "too solemn" to be
> convincing, is little more than prejudice. By this I suppose he means
> it is too full of religious symbolism. The same is true of the
> Harappan iconography, which invariably accompanies the writing on the
> seals.
>
> In the face of this preposterous position, the writer's views on the
> language and script are worth nothing. Not that it matters, for he has
> no competence in the field. Several eminent individuals and
> organisations are taking our account of the evolution of writing, and
> not just the decipherment, more seriously. (In addition to the
> two-volume work mentioned earlier, one can refer to Peter Watson's
> book, IDEAS.)
>
> Strangely, Elst has little substantive to say on the Vedic-Harappan
> relationship, to which we devoted three full chapters in our book.
> This makes me suspect that he has only selectively scanned a few words
> and sections of that book that he can use to support his preconceived
> positions. This too puts Elst squarely in Witzel's camp, though I have
> to admit that Steve Farmer is more thorough, despite being stubborn at
> times and often taking wrong stand on important issues.
>
> The two books will appeal to those who like Elst's discursive and
> polemical style of writing, but one must not expect anything new in
> them. Repeating old IDEAS and arguments, he is generally out of depth
> when it comes to primary sources and new data.
>
> At the same time, this takes nothing away from Elst's earlier work on
> Ayodhya and negationism. They remain valid and valuable.
>
> -- The reviewer, a scientist and historian, has recently written,
> along with David Frawley, a book, Hidden Horizons: 10,000 Years of
> Indian Civilisation
>
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-29722190079174343762023-09-16T02:01:00.000-07:002023-09-16T02:01:17.519-07:00Open letter to the editors of The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited(SENT FROM KÖLN ON 12 SEPTEMBER 2023, PUBLISHED IN PRAGYATA, DELHI, ON 13 SEPTEMBER 2023)
Open letter to the editors of The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited
Dear Doctores,
Congratulations upon the successful completion of your editing of a collective scholarly book of seemingly historic significance. It is not without regret that in this letter, we will have to deal with a stain on the fair face of this book.
A review in The Wire
In the Indian paper The Wire (1 June 2023) we come across a review of The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited (Cambridge University Press), the book you have edited:
“New Book on Indo-European Migrations Says ‘Out of India’ Theory ‘Firmly Refuted’”.
We have downloaded the book and are presently reading it thoroughly with an eye on addressing the evidence offered in it. But meanwhile, this review already merits a review in its own right, especially your own statements quoted and instrumentalized in it.
The Wire review is not exactly disinterested; it is not some piece of scholarly feedback. The fighting agenda of The Wire publishers and the article’s writer (viz. “The Wire staff”) already comes out in their very first sentence:
“The authors of The Indo-European Puzzle Revisited use the examples of the Out of India theory [OIT] and Nazi German nationalism to warn against the political misuse of new genetic research that has impacted our understanding of the Indo-European migrations.”
Clearly the 41 scholar-authors have addressed a much wider field than the OIT (and thus far, in the actual research part of the book, we haven’t even seen them addressing the OIT at all), but that is the one point of interest for The Wire, the only one that warrants devoting a review to the book. They have never shown any interest in Indo-European (IE) research; they merely try to safeguard the political advantages that the Aryan Invasion/Immigration Theory (AIT) has conferred on them, as it once did on the Nazis. To what extent the Nazi angle is brought up in the actual papers remains to be seen, but for the reviewers this introductory passage is the book’s foremost message: criminalizing the OIT through association with National-Socialism.
The occasion for the review article is this:
“A new book on Indo-European migrations has cautioned against the misuse of new genetic findings for political and ideological reasons, including by citing an example from India. (…) It is edited by well-known archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen, linguist Guus Kroonen and geneticist Eske Willerslev and the contributors include familiar names J.P. Mallory, David W. Anthony and Alexander Lubotsky.”
Is there currently a problem of “misuse of new genetic findings for political and ideological reasons”, a replay of what happened with skull-measuring a century ago? We haven’t heard of it, neither in The Wire nor from you, gentlemen. In all the jargon of aDNA and R1a1, we haven’t noticed anything that could nurture a sense of superiority. The only known case of ideological instrumentalization in this context, viz. of the then-recent genetic findings by David Reich, is a 2018 book by the Indian journalist Tony Joseph, Early Indians: the Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From. (It was answered in detail, and his ideological intentions mapped and connected with his stance on history, by Shrikant Talageri: Genetics and the Aryan Debate: “Early Indians”, Tony Joseph’s Latest Assault, 2019.) But Joseph’s book was an attack on the OIT, and an argumentation in favour of the AIT. Unless you had intended to warn against the AIT, this fact seems to militate against your stated objective. Since it is you who are quoted as making this allegation, perhaps you can explain this apparent contradiction; in your book you have missed the opportunity.
All the names summed up here are familiar to us as supporters of a non-Indian homeland theory. Except for Eske Willerslev, whose work is little known to non-geneticists. A first look in the not-so-scholarly Wikipedia tells us that in his work, IE migrations are only a minor focus of interest, but still he is cited there as, surprisingly, refuting the Yamnaya-centric received wisdom: his research group “further showed that in contrast to Europe, early Bronze Age expansion of Yamnaya into Asia had limited genetic and linguistic impact in either Central Asia or in South Asia, contrary to earlier claims by the [David] Reich group from Harvard. The paper thereby challenges the so-called ‘Steppe Hypothesis’ for early spread of the Indo-European languages that seem to explain the early expansion of Indo-European languages into Europe but not Asia.”
As a direct challenge to the established Yamnaya-centric view, this wouldn’t exactly fit into the Wire narrative. We too think the Yamnaya influence in South Asia is limited at best. Linguists cherish the view that the linguistic influence was decisive but have so far not been able to prove that, hence their enthusiasm when genetics seemed to provide such proof. But clearly there is no consensus on that yet.
As you must have heard, from the Indian vantage-point non-Indian homeland theories are all variants of the over-arching Aryan Invasion Theory, nowadays squeamishly called Aryan Immigration Theory by its advocates. It is not forbidden to espouse a hypothesis, but for concluding with such a grim allegation against a rival hypothesis it would have been in the fitness of things to research this other hypothesis first before pontificating on it. But to judge from your output or even from your book’s index, you are conspicuously non-conversant with it.
Mind you, though groomed in perfect ignorance of the OIT, AIT-observant scholars do often unknowingly produce insights propitious to the OIT. We already found several in the scholarly papers making up this very book. For your information, among this handful of people who have elaborated versions of the AIT (rather than the millions who applaud or support it), two of these authors are fairly popular in the small world of OIT researchers: Mallory because in his long career he has shown a level-headed awareness of the relativity of the Homeland question, contrasting with the Indian AIT party’s cocksure claim that there is a scholarly consensus about the Homeland question against which it is futile to posit any alternative, such as the OIT; and Kristiansen because he has painted a vivid picture of the disruptive and violent character of Europe’s Indo-Europeanization.
For what little Indians know about this European part of our topic, Kristiansen’s work serves in summary to prove that Europe shows, both archaeologically and genetically, what an “Aryan invasion” looks like; and thereby contrasts with India, where this population replacement scenario and this disruption in material culture traceable to outside origins are absent. Painting a realistic picture of this Aryan invasion of Europe emphasizes a contrario the glaring lack of proof for an Aryan invasion of India. Hence, Prof. Kristiansen, your good reputation in the minuscule world of OIT pioneers.
A strange debate
The strange phenomenon characterizing the Homeland debate is that it is completely one-sided. There are shrill tirades against the OIT from several Indian political movements, and curt condescending remarks by Western academics, like the one we are addressing here. The only exceptions are a few papers ca. 2000, most notably by Michael Witzel and Hans Henrich Hock, and less well-known, ca.1840, when a first OIT/AIT debate took place, with Veda translator Alexandre Langlois and historian Mountstuart Elphinstone defending the OIT against the then-rising tide of the AIT. Since then, there are just no argumentations against actual claims developed by Out-of-India theorists. The term “OIT” in outbursts against it, including your own remark, is not an ad rem critique of a rival hypothesis after studying it, but merely a label imposed on a straw man.
Looking around for explanations, we think first of all of the fact that many of you academics have no scholarly respect for non-academics, like the skepticism your colleagues of yore had against non-entitled discoverers such as Michael Faraday or Heinrich Schliemann. It is the reaction we hear most often from back-benchers at Indo-Europeanist conferences, to the extent that they know of the OIT at all. But it is a mistake, again stemming from a basic ignorance about the OIT, this time about its crew.
To get our own case out of the way first: after a few brief stints as visiting professor at minor Indian universities, we are back to the status of “non-affiliated Oriental philologist and historian”, eking out a meagre living with free-lance political journalism. Though fully qualified for this debate, with thirty years of experience in the thick of it, this lack of status is often held against us, esp. by laymen and sophomores. More consequential is how some AIT champions express their disdain for the OIT’s mastermind, “bank clerk” Shrikant Talageri. Alright, nothing to do about it, his academic status (though Doctor Honoris Causa) is inversely proportional to the brilliance of his analysis, and socialites who merely go by status feel emboldened to look down on him. Scholars, who go by knowledge, ought to behave differently, but let’s say the time hasn’t seemed ripe for that yet.
Since many in your camp insist on disparaging an opponent for his lack of status, instead you could have started with addressing legitimate “but” AIT-skeptical professors from top Indian universities, who are of the same academic rank and by now similarly numerous as the crusaders for the AIT. You could for instance take your pick from the Archaeology faculty at top institution IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Gandhinagar. When we participated in a Harappa conference there last February, we witnessed all kinds of technical quarrels, as is normal among scholars (disputant doctores), but saw no one stand up to defend the Aryan immigration scenario. Among this faculty is Michel Danino, a naturalized French Jew, author of a book significantly titled The Invasion that Never Was. (Normally we don’t specify whether someone is Jewish, but it’s you who chose to throw the Nazi label around against an array of scholars, among whom are also Jews.)
In the introduction to the collective book The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia (1995), editor George Erdosy already wrote that a contrast of views on the Aryan Immigration Theory was crystallizing along the border between linguists (pro) and archaeologists (contra). Apparently the linguists among you have succeeded in starkly ignoring the archaeological input for a full 28 years, all sermons about interdisciplinary cooperation notwithstanding. Or even longer, for it mainly was American professor James Shaffer, not exactly a “Hindu nationalist”, whose 1984 paper on the archaeological assessment of the hypothesised Aryan invasion threw the gauntlet against AIT complacency. He noted that already for more than half a century, well-financed excavations in the Harappan area had been looking for traces of the Aryan immigration (whether violent, as the archaeologists had expected, or under the radar, as they were later forced to postulate), but no trace had appeared. Indian archaeologists were becoming skeptical but the signal for them to gradually go public with this, at least in India to start with, was Shaffer’s statement.
Most older OIT champions are converts from the AIT. The most important conversion to the Out-of-India position was by the dean of Indian archaeology, Prof. BB Lal, deceased last year at age 101. As we personally learned in our student days from leading Indologist Pierre Eggermont, it was Lal who first added an archaeological scaffolding to the linguists’ hypothesis of an Aryan immigration. In the 1950s, he had mapped out the newfound Painted Grey Ware in the Mahābhārata cities, and theorized that this must be typical for the Aryans on their way deeper into India. From the 1980s onwards, he understood that this had merely been an application of the Aryan Invasion paradigm, not proof of it as he and the AIT crowd had believed. The last decades of his life he wrote several books against the AIT, summing his position up as: “Vedic and Harappan are two sides of the same coin.” Pray, why can the mature BB Lal, with many other feathers in his cap (e.g. identifying the Harappan script’s now-unquestioned writing direction), be cavalierly ignored while the young BB Lal could be trumpeted as the decisive voice of archaeology in the Homeland debate?
Those in India who clamour that “Western scholars have disproven the OIT”, are misinformed. The Wire staff, who make this claim, have clearly not read your book beyond the introduction. Those authority-exuding “Western scholars” have never addressed the OIT, only lambasted or at best ignored it. This conduct was explicitly advocated by leading Sanskritist Stephanie Jamison in her review of the only book that gives both sides of the argument a hearing, The Indo-Aryan Controversy edited by Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton in 2005: she lambasts the very idea of a debate, likening the OIT to Biblical Creationism, unworthy of scholarly attention.
In India, numerous people ascribe to “racism” the Western scholars’ wilful blindness to the ever-growing amount of OIT evidence. This is on the face of it very anachronistic, perpetuating the image of “Aryan race” theorists from a century ago, unaware that non-racism has become a matter of (not even enforced) consensus in Western universities. And yet, there are serious remains of the Western disdain for India typical of the colonial age at work here. We wonder whether any of you would dare to put it in cold print, but in colloquial interaction with dozens of participants in Indo-Europeanist conferences, we have noted that the argument of Indian academics supporting the OIT carries no weight with them because they disdain Indian universities per se. We expect that the ongoing geopolitical shift towards Asia is about to cure this.
The crucial work in IE linguistics and till recently for the OIT has not been done by Indians secure in their Indianness, nor by Europeans ignorant of India, but by Europeans living in India. It all started from the 16th century onwards with several European travellers to India whose attention was drawn by linguistic similarities between their own and the native languages: Filippo Sassetti, Thomas Stephens s.j., Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, Jean Calmette s.j. The official birth of the IE theory in Europe was the arrival in the Paris Academy of a systematic treatment of the Greco-Roman-Sanskrit kinship by Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux s.j. (1767), a Catholic missionary living in Andhra; and for India, the “philologer” speech by William Jones, a judge living in Kolkata (1786). When the OIT was elbowed out by the AIT, it was Europeans living in India who defended it, most permanently (scripta manent) Mountstuart Elphinstone in his History of India (1841). Today a prominent role is being played by the French-born archaeologist Michel Danino, and somewhat by ourselves, frequently in India since 1988.
The reason is that, unlike most Indians, we can’t ignore the non-Indian branches of IE, and unlike most Europeans, we can’t ignore India: we are fully aware of its magnitude and importance. Europeans can hold week-long conferences about Historical Linguistics where India is hardly ever mentioned, even when discussing a language family of which half the speakers are in or from the Subcontinent. This forgetfulness about India was established when India was temporarily a mere colony, contrasting with the 17th-18th century when India was a wealthy mystery land in the distance. It will take a full mental decolonization before India is given its due again.
Narratives of exclusion
In spite of all the obvious lack of scholarly interest in the OIT, you people have recently confronted the OIT, no matter how briefly, but certainly very sharply. At least, The Wire quotes you:
“‘We must be aware of the huge popular interest in the new genetic results, and the need to constantly and critically debate their dissemination… where complex knowledge can sometimes be transformed into dangerous stereotypes’, the book says in its introduction. (…) It continues: ‘One of the most destructive political misuses of the past has been in constructing nationalist narratives of exclusion.’”
This is very true, only it is not the OIT against which this can be held. It is AIT champion Mallikarjuna Kharge, the then leader of the Congress parliamentary party and now its party chairman, who said on the floor of the Lok Sabhā (India’s House of Commons) in 2015: “You Aryans don’t belong in India!” Just last week, Udhayanidhi Stalin, State Minister in Tamil Nadu (seconded post factum by Karnātaka State Minister Priyank Kharge), stated, citing the AIT, that “Sanātana Dharma (= Hinduism) is like mosquitoes, malaria and dengue, like Covid-19, it must be exterminated”. Doesn’t that comparison of a targeted group with vermin remind you of another “Aryan”-monger’s fulminations?
These calls to exclusion are not from some Twitter troll nor from some tattooed alcoholic SiegHeiler, but from top politicians. They are but recent examples of a discourse that goes back uninterruptedly to British days, starting with the British collaborator Jotirao Phule in the 19th century, and spawning characters like mid-20th-century Dravidianist leader EV Ramaswamy Naicker (invoked by Stalin as his inspiration), who actually preached violent methods: “If you see a snake and a Brahmin, kill the Brahmin first.” He expressly rejected the belief of “hate the sin, love the sinner”: for him, ending the sin required killing the sinners. Therefore he is on record as calling in so many words for a genocide of the Brahmins.
An innocent-seeming fruit of this current is the AIT-based pseudo-Sanskrit neologism Ādivāsī, “aboriginal”, designating India’s Tribals (°ca. 1930). This is a one-word disinformation campaign painting the non-Tribals as immigrants. In fact, some Tribals aren’t even aboriginal: the northeastern Nāga, incidentally a native designation effectively meaning “tribal”, have immigrated from Southeast Asia only a thousand years ago, a short time for those making a fuss about Aryans allegedly immigrating some 3500 years ago. But the main point about this term is its intentional implication that the non-Tribals are immigrants/invaders. In his speeches, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist par excellence, unthinkingly uses this AIT-laden word.
Interestingly, in the British period this politicized AIT had both pro-“Aryan” varieties, such as among the Sinhalese (Sri Lanka’s Indo-European-speakers in a sea of Dravidian-speakers) and Sikhs (after 1857 mostly a collaborator community, who even visually looked like how the Vedic seers get depicted in historical movies and comic-strips); and anti-Aryan varieties such as the anti-Brahmin and Dravidianist movements. The first variety withered away after Independence, the second kept on flourishing, permeating public discourse and in Tamil Nadu even forming the State Government for decades on end. For more than a century, the AIT has been used to demand the exclusion of non-Tribals, of North-Indians, of Upper-Caste people.
But maybe this can also be said, though only for a more recent period, about the OIT? That would be a case of the “symmetry fallacy”, the lazy assumption that the opposite side must be behaving the same as this side. But let us give it a fair hearing.
Are there any cases of OIT-minded scholars who deduce doctrines of exclusion? A good test case: leading AIT skeptic, geneticist Dr. Gyaneshwar Chaubey from Banaras Hindu University, has recently shown that the so-called aboriginal Munda speakers have in fact immigrated from Southeast Asia in the 2th millennium BC (just when you people assume that an Aryan immigration from the Northwest was taking place). Neither he nor his supporters have ever hinted that the Munda people, including the present-day Indian President, Mrs. Droupadi Murmu, are therefore somehow unworthy of their Indianness. Indeed, such an anti-immigrant stance would go against the grain of Hindu society’s traditional practice of extending hospitality to newcomers, such as the Malabar Jews, the Syrian Christians, the Parsis, the Armenians, the Baha’i, the Tibetans, and during World War II even a group of Polish Jews that had been rejected everywhere else.
There is not one example that you or the Wire editors have cited, nor could cite, of an OIT-based attempt to exclude any Indian population group; whereas there are very many where the AIT has been put to such use in India. Not to mention cases well-known to you in Europe, where Jewish and even Indian-originated Indo-Aryan-speaking Gypsies were excluded for their degree of Aryanness.
It is therefore only normal that from around 1990, any Indians who loved their country (“Hindu nationalists”) flocked to the OIT, or at least to the non-AIT, once news reached them that the pro-AIT consensus was not that solid after all. Note this distinction between anti-AIT and pro-OIT. In the 21st century, most people identifying as Hindus (people like the Wire editors may have Hindu names but rarely identify as Hindu, just as few contemporary Europeans will identify as Christian, whereas outsiders still call them that) strongly reject the AIT, but don’t care about the IE family’s other branches, hence about their link with India through a migration either way.
Before that, Hindu nationalists like Vinayak Damodar Savarkar accepted the AIT, covered as it was in the prestige of Western science. It was also of little importance especially to nationalists, as the founding myth of many nations consists in a conquest or immigration. Bal Gangadhar Tilak even thought up his own version of it, with the Homeland being in the Arctic. But once the AIT started tottering, they collectively apostatized from it. At any rate, first there was a shift among scholars, only in a reaction to this did Hindu nationalism get involved.
Only a negligeable minority of Brahmin casteists, who had been tutored to link their assumption of caste superiority with their presumed Aryan-invader origins, has weakly defended the AIT in the early years of this debate (today we don’t hear them anymore). And while they are certainly Hindu, they can’t be counted as “Hindu nationalists”.
Typical for the latter is precisely that they try to erase fissures within the nation, which in India means the rejection of caste, while they treat caste-attached traditionalists as a nuisance. Thus, check the example of at once the most hate-evoking face of Hindu nationalism: Nathuram Godse, the murderer of Mahatma Gandhi, had been an anti-caste activist. His case against Gandhi was that the latter had condoned the Partition of India, whereas he himself had preferred an undivided India – which would necessarily have been a multicultural India. No matter how much many Hindus disliked or resented Muslims, they preferred to live under one roof with them rather than being excluded by them from a Partitioned-off part of the Motherland.
The whole notion of Hindu nationalism is rather more inclusive than Europeans with their memories of two World Wars would give it credit for. In India, “nationalism” is a term hallowed by the Freedom Struggle. Mahatma Gandhi was a nationalist. Its second connotation is anti-separatism. The most serious separatist movements in recent memories have been in East Panjab and Kashmir, both characterized by the most extreme form of “cleansing” and exclusion, viz. killing thousands of non-Sikhs c.q. non-Muslims. By comparison, “nationalism” rings rather benign to Indian ears.
But whatever one can say for or against the Hindu nationalists and their ideology, they have not contributed anything whatsoever to the research undermining the AIT or supporting the OIT: not creatively nor even institutionally or financially. To the extent that social policies presuppose the AIT (reservations and legal privileges for the Tribals and Dalits), the presently ruling Bhāratīya Janatā Party (BJP) has simply continued them. And given their organizational culture of anti-intellectualism, actually meddling in high-brow research questions is just beyond them.
It is seriously insulting that papers attacking the OIT systematically describe the scholars concerned as “the Hindu Nationalists”. Have scholarly papers on the Homeland question ever introduced you not as “linguist Guus Kroonen” but as “Groenlinks/Green-Left activist Guus Kroonen”; or not “archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen” but “Sweden Democrat Kristian Kristiansen”? Even if true, this categorization would still be insulting. In the present case, worse than insulting, it is simply untrue. Among scholars, this ought to make it a serious reason for course-correction. And even worse than this: it is not based on any empirical data. It has the status of gossip.
There are anti-AIT or pro-OIT researchers to whom this label could not possibly apply, like Indian Marxist Bhagwan Singh, author of The Vedic Harappans (who finally took issue with the AIT’s colonialist thrust; 1995). Likewise Athenian Sanskritist Nicholas Kazanas or Russian archaeologist Aleksandr Semenenko, two outspoken skeptics of Hindu chauvinism, or Russian linguist Igor Tonoyan-Belyayev; or indeed ourselves, neither nationalist nor Hindu. Let alone those who have never explicitly joined the anti-AIT camp but have contributed evidence eagerly cited against the AIT. And let alone those who really are Hindu nationalists, but whose work is methodologically impeccable all the same, e.g. Dileep Chakravarty.
Note also that practically all aforementioned critics of the AIT, both Indian and foreign, have gone through a process of conversion. While their ideological commitments remained roughly the same, their position on the Homeland changed in the light of new or of freshly-reconsidered evidence, illustrating how a stance in the Homeland debate, about prehistoric events, is independent from ideology.
One explicit Hindu nationalist in our circles is mastermind Shrikant Talageri, but not the way you imagine. He is India’s most perceptive critic of the so-called Hindu-nationalist party presently in power, the BJP, because for him this is an ideal, a principle, and not a label for a political party that has become completely untrue to it. Unlike the academic supposed-experts whose hearsay you have reproduced, he actually knows his subject, the people involved, their history, their stated goals, and their actual performance. But even he did not develop his OIT insights from his ideological moorings but through a process you as scholars should be familiar with: he noticed that the data did not add up to the established paradigm. This process is described passim in his books and additionally in his blogs, easily accessible but seemingly an impenetrable desert to academics.
The Holy Grail of genetics
The Wire staff further summarizes your contribution thus:
“‘Where the original PIE speakers lived has been long contested: some say they lived in the steppes of what is today southern Russia, while others say they lived in what is today Turkey. But the authors of Revisited say that evidence from breakthrough genetic studies in 2015 points towards the former as the PIE homeland. At the same time, they believe that the results of these genetic studies must be used to dispel racist theories that were spread about the Proto-Indo-Europeans. If there is anything that the recent interdisciplinary biomolecular studies have shown, it must be that the once-dominant Eurocentric and supremacist perspectives on the Indo-European homeland are not supported by any genetic or linguistic evidence’, they say in the book.”
Leave aside that the shifting sands in the over-all picture developed by the young science of genetics don’t warrant such precocious cocksureness about its provisional conclusions, and that this passage shows the familiar disregard for the contribution by some geneticists who happen to be Indian, the real question raised by this passage is: do you really recognize this as the meaning of your recent output? Having gone through a similar curriculum as you all, we thought that after World War II, all courses of Indo-European studies shunned the “supremacist” vantage-point, and even emphatically repudiated it. There is nothing that recent discoveries or new insights could add to this. Repudiating the supremacist distortions was necessary, but it is a station we have long passed. Are you really still busy proving that point? Aren’t you flattering yourself by claiming to have pin-pricked supremacist perspectives that had been taken care of by an earlier generation?
But leave aside supremacism, at least the word “Eurocentric” still applies, quite literally. Here we don’t mean that people who situate the Homeland in Europe deliberately do so because of some Eurocentric prejudice. Maybe the founders of the US-based Journal of Indo-European Studies could have been suspected of such an attitude, viz. by critics like Stefan Arvidsson or Jean-Claude Demoule; but they are long dead. (On second thought, these critics might even be read as raising suspicions against the whole Indo-Europeanist discipline, including you.) A dwindling handful of Euro-Nationalist ideologues in the French Nouvelle Droite might also think this way, but they are amateurs without any influence on this debate. Indeed, in view of new findings, scholars like David Reich and Paul Heggarty have effortlessly moved their putative Homeland south of the Caucasus, i.e. outside Europe (though still outside India). We only mean that those who, with The Wire, insist on locating the Homeland in Eastern Europe, espouse an objectively “Eurocentric” position. This is especially striking since their explicit goal is to deny Homeland status to a region of Asia.
About the theories that were developed in Germany to support nationalist ideologies, the Wire staff says:
“In the pre-war period, the prehistoric spread of the Indo-European languages was increasingly attributed to the superiority of an alleged Indo-European-speaking ethnolinguistic unity, which, despite all linguistic evidence to the contrary, was claimed to have developed… in North Europe. The question of Indo-European linguistic origins was integrated into nationalist theories of German ethnic origins, which demanded a North European centre of spread.”
While no big deal, this passage bespeaks a poor grasp of the relevant research. Gustaf Kossinna’s attempt, ca. 1910 (in “pre-war”, which war is meant?), to apply the budding science of archaeology to the Homeland question did not conflict with the then state of linguistics, still very fluid. Even now linguists have a hard time determining the Homeland, so what could this decisive “evidence” have been back then? The sub-discipline of Linguistic Paleontology, then not questioned yet, did argue for a northern (the “bear” argument) and a western (the “beech” argument) Homeland, criteria which Kossinna’s choice for the German-Danish borderland certainly satisfied. The Wire’s invocation of “linguistic evidence to the contrary” in 1910 is sheer bluff.
Kossinna proved wrong, but that’s a risk every launcher of new hypotheses takes. Even during his lifetime, the general preference (crystallized in Gordon Childe’s 1926 book The Aryans: a Study of Indo-European Origins) clearly shifted back to Eastern Europe. Some academics who landed in the Nazi camp (pun unintended) would accept this while others stuck to the German option, as some post-War scholars have continued to do. But all of them taught variations within what Indians call the Aryan Invasion Theory. Yes, the Nazi scholars were all with the AIT (even Heinrich Himmler’s expedition to Tibet looking for lost Aryans was a disappointment: unlike the dolichocephalic Aryans, the Swastika-wielding Tibetans proved to very broad-skulled). The Wire dilates upon half-understood data from a far-away continent a century ago to fill up the space logically reserved for incriminating data from contemporary India, which remain glaringly absent.
Your attack
Coming closer to the point, The Wire informs us:
“In the introduction, the book advises caution against nationalist theories about the Proto-Indo-Europeans from outside Europe: ‘Here we should mention the rise of an ‘Out of India’ model of Indo-European languages during the last generation, motivated primarily by Hindu nationalism. These are the same kind of forces that used the model of Gustaf Kossinna to support a Nazi racist ideology nearly one hundred years earlier. However, the Out of India model has been firmly refuted by recent aDNA [ancient DNA] results, and it has little or no support in historical linguistic research … [It] should serve as a warning example of the political impact of nationalism, even in the present.’”
“Firmly refuted”? On the shifting sands of the fast-evolving discipline of genetics, nothing is “firm”. Very conflicting hypotheses are being proposed by different geneticists; it is a lively and interesting scene. But “firm”, certainly not. This is a misrepresentation of the state of the art. But there is something even more fundamentally wrong here.
So you claim that the OIT was “motivated primarily by Hindu nationalism”? That is both a conspiracy theory and a lie.
Conspiracy thinkers always suspect a sinister intention behind seemingly innocent facts. You say Hindu nationalism generated the OIT, exactly like numerous Hindu nationalists claim racism generated the AIT. Come to think of it, you two deserve each other. But what a funny concept: a political activist tries to strengthen his position by thinking up a scholarly theory, so good that even the specialists in the field run away with it. Whenever you hear an argument about isoglosses or mitochondrial DNA, don’t get fooled by the puppet-show, there’s a “racist” c.q. “Hindu nationalist” puppeteer behind it pulling the strings.
As for “lie”, your claim is first of all untrue. The OIT 1.0 was thought up by Europeans together with the very realization that an Indo-European family exists (1767). The French freethinker Voltaire was one of the first to hear of it. He gave it wide publicity (and trend-settingly, he at once instrumentalized it ideologically, viz. to diminish the role of Christianity in making European civilization, which had first of all come from India), and others spoke similarly, such as Immanuel Kant. These are not marginal Hindu nationalists but the cream of European Enlightenment thinkers. For about half a century, it remained the default assumption, the dominant Homeland hypothesis, most explicitly in Friedrich Schlegel’s book Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1808). The main alternative back then was the Bible-based Armenian Homeland theory: from the Ark came Noah’s son Jafeth, the purported progenitor of the Indo-Europeans. (Ironically, it is to Armenia, south of the Caucasus, that David Reich and Paul Heggarty have recently, on genetic c.q. linguistic grounds, moved the putative Homeland.)
The critical decade was the 1830s, when the AIT definitively gained the upper hand. By the mid-19th century some further seeming successes had cleared the field completely for the new peri-Caucasian Homeland theory. It would still have to compete with other attempts, esp. the North-European Homeland, but till today, whether Yamnaya or the Southern Arc, this central area of the Indo-European expanse (halfway between Sri Lanka and Iceland, between Tarim and Portugal) has remained the great favourite.
Secondly, the OIT 2.0 was again the work of non-Hindus and non-political Hindus. It started in the 1980s with an archaeology-based (rather than a traditionalist scripture-based) higher chronology for the Vedas as per the book Karpāsa by KD Sethna, a Parsi. Then followed the repudiation of the AIT as still lacking the least bit of archaeological evidence (later admitted by AIT champion Michael Witzel: “no archaeological evidence yet”), by US archaeologists James Shaffer and Diane Lichtenstein; and likewise by the British anthropologist Edmund Leach. In this early stage, Hindu nationalism played no role at all.
In the 1990s some Hindu amateurs (typically expatriate scientists dabbling in history) monopolized the attention. In the main, they were still far more AIT-rejecter than OIT-creator. This is another point that AIT polemicists like you fail to understand: the difference between anti-AIT and pro-OIT. Only a handful of scholars thought in terms of an emigration from an Indian Homeland, but millions upon millions of Hindus rejected the AIT. They didn’t give a damn about the story behind the non-Indian branches: being nationalists, their horizon stopped at the Khyber Pass. Moreover, they suspected that the emigration scenario was a wily trick from Westerners to somehow maintain a connection with India and thus keep a colonial foot in the door. When two books elaborating the OIT came out, Talageri’s The Rigveda and the Avesta: the Final Evidence (2008) and our own Asterisk in Bhāropīyasthān (2007), the most blistering reviews they received were not from AIT zealots but from a very vocal AIT opponent, space scientist NS Rajaram.
Here was a stereotypical Hindu nationalist, given to heavy rhetoric and colourful anti-Westernism (though US citizen). Your Nazi allegations seem quite odd here, though: he made them himself about your kind. He was full of anti-colonial discourse about Western “racism” and all that. Together with fellow Hindu-American physicist Subhash Kak and with American convert David Frawley (and seconded by several India-loving US Orientalists) he brought some interesting facts about ancient Indian science to light, not compatible with the AIT’s low chronology. Alas, this crowd failed to understand the basics of the debate, such as the whole notion of an IE language family, e.g. by claiming that Sanskrit-related words in Lithuanian or Albanian were a matter of borrowing, or by rejecting the Indo-Aryan/Dravidian divide. Rajaram’s prominent presence on the early internet seems to have fixed a furious image of the OIT (in fact the non-AIT) in Westerners’ minds. When we hear all today’s hate speech against the OIT, it sounds like they are still fulminating against long-dead Rajaram. Time has stood still in the AIT champions’ mind.
To be sure, till today some vocal and increasingly knowledgeable AIT skeptics continue to walk in his footsteps, such as ML Raja, with degrees in Medicine and History (in India most historians and philosophers first obtained a Science degree before following their hearts’ desire in the Humanities). His understanding of the IE framework and of the Homeland question’s stakes and history is still very poor, but his array of anti-AIT arguments has become very rich and remains largely unanswered. That AIT-minded authors have never even taken cognizance of these arguments is no excuse, at least not for scholars. But they concern only the affirmation or refutation of the AIT; the OIT specifics are another hypothesis.
An incipient systematization of the AIT critiques resulting in a real OIT was pioneered by Sanskrit professors SS Misra and Nicholas Kazanas. The great breakthrough came with Shrikant Talageri’s book The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis (2000), along with its 2008 sequel just mentioned. In the oldest Vedic texts he discovered enough factual data to reconstruct ancient history. After that, once the OIT had become a specific narrative, a number of new faces flocked to it and extended the OIT-directed research to other disciplines, e.g. Premendra Priyadarshi’s work on the genetics of human, zoological and botanical emigration. This included outsiders from Russia, Italy and elsewhere, most notably Aleksandr Semenenko who is finding more matches between Vedic data and material findings, and filling an important gap in the OIT case: positive archaeological data for an Out-of-India emigration, as distinct from the absence of evidence for an immigration. So there you have the growing but still very small OIT crew.
So what they have alleged is firmly untrue.
It is very rare that we accuse people of telling lies. We are aware of the many influences on what people say: wishful thinking, peer pressure etc., and most ordinarily, hearsay. All on the background of degrees of ignorance, a factor of the human condition diagnosed by Socrates as the root of all evil. Often there are mitigating factors, so why spoil a (potentially) good discussion by bringing out the big guns and accusing people of lies?
A lie is a consciously uttered untruth. You people were not somnambulating when you wrote what you wrote; to that extent this untruth was certainly a conscious one, for which you bear full responsibility. Only, you may really have believed it, which would make it a mistake rather than a lie.
Though we don’t have your word for it, we will assume that this lie is not your own. As babes in the wood of India’s raw AIT/OIT confrontation, you have borrowed it from sources you have innocently trusted, and of which The Wire is quite representative. Thus, what has gone on between you and The Wire is a classic case of what, in our research of Indian political life, we have called the circular argument of authority. First India’s usual suspects feed Western intellectuals misinformation about India, then the Westerners start selling this hearsay as privileged inside information, and finally their authority-laden words are quoted back to the Indian public.
When we prepared our doctoral dissertation on the Hindu political movement, the first thing we noticed was the veritable abyss between the extant academic literature on it and the reality on the ground. Having researched several more books on this topic and the disinformation techniques determining the reporting about India’s political relations, we are now convinced that the last few decades’ main corpus of research literature on this topic will become a laughing-stock once the power equation that fosters such disinformation has lapsed.
But that’s all we will say about it for now: you people have better things to do than pondering India’s ideological cauldron, try finding the Homeland instead.
Godwin’s law in academe
You have unilaterally chosen to burden this old debate with references to the National-Socialist movement. Most of us thought that Adolf Hitler and fellow ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg were laymen, whose opinion is not really worth a scholar’s consideration, at least not for arriving at the answer of his research questions. But you brought them in to criminalize a whole school of scholars, of no lesser rank than you.
We have not so much chosen to draw attention to your intemperate attack because it is slanderous: to stay in the kitchen of India’s controversies, you have to be used to the heat of violent language or what they now loosely call “hate speech”. We could have consoled ourselves once more that this is just par for the course. But in this case, the slander is of an exceptional gravity. In contemporary Western culture, accusing anyone of anything Nazi is the single worst allegation you can make.
This point really must be emphasized: it is you, not us, who have soiled this debate with off-topic Nazi references. As we have often found out: when an outsider dares to criticize an established authority, the whole establishment gangs up against the critic to shift the blame for the commotion to him. It is all very feudal in character: when a premodern earl’s son broke a precious vase, not he but the footman got the blame (that’s the story of our own bans from the Religion in South Asia list and from the Indology list). So let’s be clear, it is you who have claimed that Misra’s, Talageri’s, Kazanas’s and others’ OIT is a replay of the Nazis’ stance on the “Aryan” question, no less.
Would you dare to repeat this to their faces? There is also a human side to this conflict, but you have benumbed yourselves to this dimension by keeping the demonized OIT scholars at a distance. From our student days we remember an incident where allegations flew between professors until the Dean of the Faculty forced them to reconcile. Here such mechanism seems unavailable because of the lack of human relations. The water still seems to be too deep.
Neither you nor the sources you have parroted have been able to underpin this allegation with any incriminating facts. In fact, all the trouble we take here to explain matters is a generous gesture of goodwill towards you, for it is not up to us to do any explaining. Those who utter an allegation are ipso facto guilty of slander unless they prove their point, or retract it and apologize. So far, no such proof.
In the present power equation, you have no pressing need to³ retract or apologize: most of the establishment in the West and part of it in India will only, if this polemic ever gets any publicity, praise you as champions in the struggle against ugly vicious history distortion. They will ignore anything argued here against the standard hate narrative and use that very narrative to demonize us. The last thing they will countenance is a climbdown from their high horse of false indictment. We have no power to shame, let alone to force, people into doing what we think they ought to do. And even if we had, we’d choose not to use it. It’s only a matter of honour.
No one can be forced to do the honourable thing. As free speech absolutists we also don’t believe in punishing people for failing to do the honourable thing. Honour has no use; you just have it, or you don’t.
We’ve been here before. In 1993, Sheldon Pollock, one of the tallest Western Indologists, ludicrously wrote that National-Socialism was but applied Pūrva Mīmānsā, the most orthodox of Hindu philosophies. We took the trouble of drawing attention to this scandalous slander and refuting it, but this has made no difference at all. He didn’t even pretend to any scholarly objectivity but declared candidly that this way he wanted to contribute to the anti-Hindu struggle then crystallizing around the demolished Ayodhya temple. He and most academic and journalistic India-watchers worldwide pretended this temple had never existed, though evidence for it was accumulating and in 2003 the temple remains were excavated. None of them ever admitted to having been wrong. (You will understand why not everyone is impressed by claims of “academic consensus”.) Perhaps this precedent is relevant for our present dispute: accumulating evidence countered by “Nazi” slander…
And Hitler in all this?
So, suit yourselves. But we should not walk away from this dispute without reminding everyone where the Nazis, whom you chose to bring in, stood in the Homeland debate. For them, the AIT was a cornerstone of the racist worldview.
First, the dynamic White Europeans went all the way to the land of the indolent Brown natives, and conquered it. Then like proto-Nazis they installed the caste system as a kind of racial Apartheid. (At that stage they still produced lofty philosophies, which explains the handful of Nazi takers for the tall light-skinned Buddha or the caste-conscious Bhagavad Gītā.) But they still fell for native charms and racially mixed somewhat, thus losing much of their superior qualities and becoming the dirty superstitious Hindus we know. Fortunately for them, their cousins in distant Britain had preserved their racial purity and generously came over to provide the benighted ex-Aryans with good governance.
The Nazi use of the Swastika also fits in with the AIT. Hindus in the West often have to hear that “Hitler borrowed the Swastika from Hinduism”. The true story is different. If Hitler had believed it was Hindu in origin, he never would have chosen it. He rarely talked about Hindus, and only contemptuously. Instead, he was aware of the Swastika’s frequent occurrence in Troy and Greece (of which he was an admirer) and in the Baltic (where many Nazi Party rank-and-file had gone to fight the Bolsheviks in 1919-20), so he deemed it European. Next, the Aryan invaders had taken it along during their conquest of India, whence it then made its way to India’s Buddhist “colonies”. So it is as a European symbol that Hitler glorified the Swastika.
This, by contrast, is what he thought of the Hindus:
“We know that the Hindus in India are a people mixed from the lofty Aryan immigrants and the dark-black aboriginal population, and that this people is bearing the consequences today; for it is also the slave people of a race that almost seems like a second Jewry”.
(For the German original, see: https://scilogs.spektrum.de/natur-des-glaubens/der-geschichtsmythos-von-adolf-hitler/.)
There you have it: according to Hitler, the Aryan invasion explains the state of the Hindus today. Or rather “Aryan immigration” (Einwanderung), for then already he followed the current fashion of avoiding the toxic-masculine term “invasion”. He really was one of yours.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Koenraad ELST
Köln (Cologne), 12 September 2023
PS: note that Köln is not only where today the Indogermanische Gesellschaft’s conference is taking place; it was also the city of the remarkable anti-Nazi statesman Konrad Adenauer, after whom the undersigned was named.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-69854246885733002412023-06-13T07:38:00.004-07:002023-06-13T07:38:26.024-07:00A Reply to Rainer Stuhrmann's Die Zehnkönigsschlacht am Ravifluss
(This abstract was sent in, spring 2023, to the call for papers for the annual conference of the International Association for Comparative Mythology, summer 2023 in Saloniki, Greece. Though it would have constituted a great leap forward in the mythologists’ understanding of the Ten Kings’ Battle, it was predictably rejected by anti-OIT crusader Steve Farmer c.s.)
Abstract
1. Historicity
We agree with Rainer Stuhrmann (2016) and the early Veda translators (who largely based on it the scenario of the then "Aryan invasion") on the essential historicity of the Ten Kings' Battle, and on Vasiṣṭha’s Seventh Maṇḍala’s information about the battle’s course. While the Ṛg-Veda contains lots of myth, this episode, though ideologically streamlined, is about historical facts. But in the hallowed tradition of controversy, we want to take issue with other parts of Stuhrmann’s thesis.
2. Facts of the battle
In the RV, the direction of king Sudās’s offensive is plainly east-to-west. This fits the wider context, where he, like his father Divodāsa, is based in the Sarasvatī basin. (Stuhrmann reconnects with a long tradition of scholars identifying the Sarasvatī with the present-day Ghaggar in Haryāṇā, after a decade-long intermezzo of it being pooh-poohed as a recent concoction.) Sudās has reached the third river westwards from there, the Paruṣṇi, and the Ten Kings are coming eastward from the fourth, the Asiknī.
3. The dark-skinned Natives, or…?
There’s no indication whatsoever that either party is more indigenous than the other. At most Panjāb was invader territory for the Bhāratas from Haryāṇā, but no area outside India is indicated. None of the kings’ or tribes’ names is Dravidian, or Munda, or any known language – except Iranian. Many (Kavi, Kavaśa/Kaoša, Dāsa/Daha, Dasyu/Daŋhyu, Paktha, Parśu etc.) are well-known Iranian names. Vasiṣṭha’s description of their religion as “without Deva”, “without Indra” and “without yajña/fire-sacrifice” exactly matches Mazdeism.
Though Stuhrmann and all translators before him have missed it, Sudās obviously defeated an Iranian-dominated alliance. Those who insist they came from outside, could liken it to the colonial wars: after defeating the natives, the colonial powers fought each other. But the text itself nowhere indicates that they came from outside.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-60266130819167034782023-06-01T12:53:00.006-07:002023-06-08T15:55:39.841-07:00 The Vedas as Influential Literary Achievement
(Summerhill [bulletin of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies], summer 2023, paper version of a lecture I have given at the IIAS in autumn 2022)
Abstract:
Most Hindu traditionalists claim that the Vedas are a revealed scripture, not made by human hand, apauruṣeya. This is an object of ridicule for modernists, both outsiders and Hindu reformists. But for devout Hindus too, it can be problematic, for a closer look at the content of the Vedas shows that the Ṛṣis themselves didn’t see it that way.
History vs. blind belief
Most Hindu traditionalists claim that the Vedas are a revealed scripture, apauruṣeya, “not made by human hand”. Some of the great Hindu thinkers, such as Śaṅkara, insist on this divine origin very much. In this respect, even the egalitarian anti-caste Ārya Samāj, socially reformist, was traditionalist. Generally it is not known as traditionalist but as fundamentalist: its “back to the Vedas” as an instance of the common viewpoint of all fundamentalists, “back to the sources”. Unlike the traditionalists, it rejected post-Vedic practices, such as idol-worship and untouchability, and scriptures such as the Purāṇas. But it didn’t think through the fundamental assumptions of Hinduism, which then were mostly traditionalist. So, it equally continued to assume the revealed origin of the Vedas.
This contrasts with the view of the Indologists and of everyone who would stumble upon a book full of hymns: these hymns are poetry written by human poets. In the disastrous attempts by California Hindus to introduce more Hindu-friendly amendments in the state’s social science textbooks in 2005-6 (see Elst 2012:137-155), one demand was to replace the term “poetry” for the Vedas with “scripture”, on a par with the Bible and the Qur’ān. “Scripture” is a status that the believers attribute to a book, whereas “poetry” as a characterization of the Vedic hymns is just descriptive, factual. Even if revealed, they visibly remain poetry. But alright, it then also has the status of scripture. Yet, if Hindus claim their religion to be “scientific”, as they often do, they ought to do better than such primitive a-dime-a-dozen claims for a supernatural origin.
Why should we take issue with this belief? The first reason is the one behind every scholarly paper: la verité est bonne (French proverb: “Truth is a good thing”), it will do no harm to set the record straight on a belief that animates millions. Let’s find out the true story and let the chips fall where they may. The second reason is the one that triggered this research: we have noticed that this belief is the enemy of historical investigation of Vedic society and culture.
In reply to Shrikant Talageri’s historicization of the Vedas (Talageri 2020a), Prof. Narahari Achar argues from scripture that neither the Vedas nor other ancient sources give a historical analysis. Mostly they don’t, and even those few that deliberately did try to write a historical account (say, Thucydides, or Kalhaṇa), still fell short by modern standards. From a poetry book, a fortiori, you wouldn’t expect any better. Historians are the last to read religious poetry as a factual account, yet they remain interested in it. What they hope to find in there are meta-data, historical information not intended as such by the writer but nonetheless present because all writers unwittingly let on much about their circumstances.
Traditionalists, however, are allergic to historical readings of Vedic episodes. The Ārya Samāj’s translations avoid all history-related word meanings (discussed in Talageri 2000:406-412). Followers of Sri Aurobindo too prefer profound symbolic readings. Hence the Hindu protests against the first Orientalist translators of the Vedas and now against Shrikant Talageri for their mining the Vedas for historical data. Thus, Talageri (2000, 2020b) notes that most traditionalists reject not only the notion of “pre-Vedic” but also the discerning of successive historical layers within the Vedas, the key to lots of data about the geographical east-to-west gradient crucial in the “Aryan” homeland debate.
Traditionalists pull up their noses for something as mundane as the early history of the Indo-European languages, a mere 6000 years ago. This language family’s homeland location, a question not arising from Vedic literature itself, is at most a very fleeting concern. It didn’t exist until the 18th century and won’t survive the 21st, given that the advances in linguistics and archaeology and the emergence of genetics have brought the resolution to this question very close – in all, too ephemeral to sacrifice the belief in the supernatural Vedas to. This argument would be unassailable if the supernatural provenance of the Vedas were true; but we will show reason why, even for Veda devotees, this hypothesis is baseless.
Apauruseyatva imputed to the Vedas
Let us first verify how believing Hindus say that the Vedas are apauruṣeya, "non-human“. This means that they are of super-human or divine origin, revealed, uncreated, as old as the universe.
Thus, a cathechism-style introduction to Hinduism teaches: “The real name of our religion is Vedic dharma. In ancient days it was just called Dharma. Our religion has its roots in the Vedas, which are our original scriptures. (…) Another name for our religion is Sanatana Dharma.” (Vedalankar 1978:7)
Sanātana (Dharma) means “eternal (normative system)”, and if it is deemed synonymous with “Vedic”, it implies that the Vedas are eternal. The position of this paper is just the opposite: Hindus carelessly use the two terms interchangeably, but they are different in meaning: “Vedic” refers to a literary corpus that can be located in a specific time and place, non-eternal. For modern outsiders to the Vedic tradition this will not be very sensational, but we will argue that even for Vedic practitioners this ought to be evident as soon as they look into the Vedas’ contents.
Note that if “our religion” is Hinduism, it is quite an assertion to say that its real essence is “Vedic dharma”, for this is not so obvious. If you visit a Hindu home or temple, you will see a lot that is not Vedic, starting with mūrtipūjā, idol-worship. In spite of lavish lip-service, few Hindus know the Vedas. In terms of books (or their derivative plays, dances, music and films), their favourites are the epics, the fable collections and the Purāṇas. And even the specialists of Vedic recitation have rarely contemplated the contents of what they recite. The Vedas are the most prestigious tributary to the Hindu stream, but it would be very partisan and unhistorical to reduce Hinduism to Vedic dharma.
Anyway, this is how the author (of Ārya Samāj persuasion) pictures the mechanics of this divine revelation: “The Vedas have not been created by men. In the very beginning God revealed unto the Rishis the knowledge of the Vedas. (…) When these Rishis sat in meditation, God gave them the knowledge of the Vedas.” (Vedalankar 1978:32)
Traditionalists divide scripture into Śruti, "that which is heard (from a divine source)", viz. the Vedas in the broad sense (Saṁhitā, Brāhmaṇa, Āraṇyaka, Upaniṣad); and Smṛti, "that which is remembered" (and of which no divine origin is claimed, though in practice it is also treated as unquestionable authority), viz. the Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature and the Dharma Śāstras.
According to Annie Besant and Bhagavan Das: “The Śruti, consisting of the four Vedas, is the final authority in the Āryan religion, and these four Vedas form in their entirety the Veda, the perfect knowledge, revealed by Brahmā, seen by the ṛṣis, and clothed in words by them to benefit the Āryan peoples.” (Besant & Das 2000:2) In this view, the Vedic composers or Ṛṣis were not Mantrakāra, “verse maker”, but Mantradṛṣṭā, “verse seers”.
Modern authors often show a certain embarrassment about this apparently irrational claim, yet try to save it. Thus: “The rishi or rishika received the revelation of wisdom from the supreme plane termed as parame vyoman in RV and transcribed it into poems with appropriate words and metres. Thus there is no contradiction between the traditional view that the Veda is apaurusheya, not composed by a human being, and the modern view that the rishis are the poets of RV since the verses came out of their mouth. This is clear from the RV itself.” (Kashyap 2012:12) What follows are a few claims by 20th-century authors like Sri Aurobindo, and only one from the Veda itself: the phrase“dadarśa vācam”, “he saw the word” (RV 10.71.4), from the fag end of the (literally millennial) composition span of the Ṛg-Veda.
This Vedic phrase is not a straightforward description of the genesis of Vedic verses. The entire hymn is, at any rate, a human composition addressed to the “god” Jñāna, “wisdom”, though poet Bṛhaspati Aṅgiras also addresses himself. He never pretends that some divine source is putting words into his mouth or that he himself “sees words”. He only makes the point that some see a word, some hear a word, but don’t “get” it, while a rare individual seizes upon “her”, the word, who then “gives herself like a loving wife to her husband” (in itself a beautiful way to describe the poet’s extraordinary openness to inspiration). In case this verse does describe the way a Vedic poet encounters the words he puts in verse, it only fits the scenario we envision to reconstruct the slow evolution from purely human poetry via this late-Vedic verse to the post-Vedic belief in revealed hymns.
A rather authoritative commentator is the late Kanchi Shankaracharya, Sri Chandrashekharendra Saraswati. He explains: “The Vedas are called anādi – without a beginning in terms of time. That is to say, anything previous to it or older than it does not exist.” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:3) But he starts by doubting this: “How can this be accepted? A book has necessarily to have an author; at least one, if not more.” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:3)
This sounds promising, but the sequel doesn’t lead to the answer modern rationalists expect. The choice is only between “as old as” or “older than” creation: “If the Vedas came into being with the first creation, they cannot be said to be without beginning.” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:5)
He finds the solution for this strange conundrum in a late-Vedic verse (Western Orientalists limit the term Veda or Śruti to the Saṁhitās, but Indians include the Upaniṣads in them): “Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4.10 says the Vedas are Īśvara’s exhalation.” So “they coexist with Him” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:6), the Vedas inhere in the Divine every moment of its eternal existence. But since we didn’t create our breath, it existed from as soon as we were born, and likewise the Vedas exist for as long as God exists: “even He cannot be said to have created them. They have always existed together.” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:6) So, sort of eternal.
By the way, having been written long before a wave of theistic devotionalism submerged Hinduism, this Bṛhadāraṇyaka phrase doesn’t contain the word Īśvara which a 20th-century commentator imputes to it. It merely says that, the way smoke emanates from fire, the Vedas together with the natural sciences have all emanated, but doesn’t say whence. If this late-Vedic verse had made a distinction between the Vedas on the one hand and on the other hand history, the natural sciences and all compositions agreed to be of human origin, we could have categorized it as typical for the transition period between the fully creative Vedic period and the static exalted post-Vedic belief in apauruṣeyatva. But we don’t even have to that: in spite of the 20th-century attempt to enlist it in the apauruṣeyatva doctrine, it actually fails to exalt the Vedas above the undoubtedly human compositions. It treats all books as essentially the same kind of composition, viz. by a human author.
Philosophical basis
The term apauruṣeya is usually translated as “non-human”, “impersonal”. It does not come from the Vedas themselves, not at all, but from the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā school of philosophy, centuries younger than the youngest book that could reasonably be called Vedic: “The Mīmāṁsakas hold that the Veda is self-subsistent, eternal and ‘Śruti’ or divine revelation.” (Anirvan 2018:11-12)
In the intervening centuries, the Vedas had been extolled, with a class of people set apart just to memorize them and pass them on unchanged to the letter; with the best of sciences (grammar, mathematics, astronomy) growing up around them; and with kings in distant parts of India invited Brahmin communities and settling them in privileged agrahāras to add Vedic lustre to their dynasties. If anything in the surroundings of an ancient Hindu approached the divine, this was it. The idea of divinizing them or at least their provenance caught on among intellectually unsophisticated minds, and finally also among the cream of Hindu philosophers, Śaṅkara and the others.
So the authority for the apauruṣeyatva belief can be traced back in writing at least some 2200 years: to the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā school, the most Veda-centric of the Hindu philosophical schools. In the foundational Pūrva Mīmāṁsā Sūtra, sage Jaimini sets out to prove: “The unquestionable validity of ‘Vedic injunction’ as the only means of knowing Dharma.” (PMS 5) Yet he admits something that was already opined by (no, not ugly ill-wishing foreigners or incomprehending Orientalists, but) his Hindu contemporaries: “According to some people, the Vedas are the work of human authors; being, as they are, named after man. Also because we find (in the Veda the mention of) many non-eternal things.” (PMS 27-28)
He waves these objections off by breezily claiming: “But the eternality of the word has already been established.” (PMS 29) So let’s check the preceding passage he refers to. They merely assert (questionable) claims about the word, as a generic category, never specifying Vedic as distinct from other texts: “(The word) must be regarded as eternal.” (PMS 18)
But none of the reasons given for this bizarre claim is convincing. Thus it is asserted: “What is perceptible [by the ear] is not what is spoken of.” (PMS 22) In modern linguistic terms (incidentally inspired on Pāṇini): the signifier (le signifiant) differs from the signified (le signifié). Of course the word “water” does not equal the element water, but linguists don’t deduce the eternality of any object from this.
Or because the word exists before it is uttered and still exists after having been uttered. (to sum up PMS 13) By this standard, your car is eternal, for before you take it out on a ride, it already existed, and after you park it, it goes on existing.
Or: “We meet with (texts) indicative of the eternality of words).” (PMS 23) We don’t think that highly of the longevity of texts, but they can indeed last longer than their composition or recitation. More pertinently, though, by making a claim about “the” word, any word, this fails to differentiate between fleeting human compositions and the supposedly very special, divine Vedas. If this proves the Vedas are uncreated, it does the same for all profane writings.
The Qur’ān as apauruṣeya
This apauruṣeyatva doctrine is actually a mirror-image of the Islamic view of the Qur’ān: abiding since creation (if not earlier) in God's bosom, the Qur’ān is rained down on humanity at a time and place of God's choosing.
Next to the Qur’ān, the Hadīth (traditions about the Prophet’s sayings and doings) and Sīra (the Prophet’s biography) do not have that divine status, but function nonetheless as the basis for unchangeable Islamic law, Šarī’a. In Hinduism the Śāstras have a similar status.
The difference between really existing Dharma and Dīn, effective Hinduism and Islam, viz. Śāstra and Šarī’a, is not as radical as often thought. The exclusive claim of Islam has no counterpart in Vedic tradition, that much is radically different; but its attitude to the supernatural is similar. Part of its scripture has a supernatural origin; and part of it has a human origin (and is thus a bit more negotiable) but is nonetheless normative. And this did not come about under Islamic influence, but stems from a common layer in human nature, a pan-human tendency to idealize and absolutize anything deemed spiritual, a tendency well-attested in many cultures throughout history.
Yet, the difference is unmistakable for those who care to read the source texts. The Qur’ān (or likewise, the Biblical Ten Commandments) takes the form of God speaking to his prophet or to mankind. By contrast, the Vedic hymns take the form of a human composer addressing or describing a Deity.
Ṛṣis are not receptacles
Traditionalist Hinduism makes a claim on the Vedic Ṛṣis, viz. that they were passive receptacles of divine revelations. However, this assertion would be unrecognizable to the Ṛṣis themselves: they created these “revelations”.
The Vedic text itself serves to verify this. Unlike Mohammed for the Qur’ān, at least according to Islamic doctrine, the Ṛṣis were authors of the Vedic hymns. They all mention themselves as the agentive minds behind the hymns and the worship proceedings which they captured in words or in which they were employed.
The very first hymn of the Ṛg-Veda is Oṁ Agnim ile, "I worship the Fire” (RV 1.1.1): The poet as subject, the personified Fire or the Fire god as object. Likewise hundreds of others, e.g.: “I worship Heaven and Earth, parents of the Gods.” (RV 7:53:1 and again 7:43:1)
The first hymn was probably put first on purpose, but is not considered the oldest. Since Hermann Oldenberg (1888), and made widely known in India by Shrikant Talageri (2000:38), not the first but the sixth book is considered the oldest. The hymns within the book are not necessarily in chronological order, but its first hymn belongs at any rate to the oldest generation of hymns.
Well, its composer Bharadvāja starts with: Tvaṁ hyAgne prathamo…, “You, Agni, are truly the first…” (RV 6.1.1.) God spoken to, man speaking. His second hymn, likewise directed to Agni, likewise opens with Tvam hi… , “You truly”, and credits him with giving na, “us”, our food and all the rest. (RV 6.1.2) In the third hymn, the poet describes his own devotion to “you, Agni”, and implores Agni for protection. (RV 6.1.3)
(Of Bharadvāja we don’t have much biographical detail except in much later post-Vedic literature, esp. in the notoriously fanciful Purāṇas. The extant contemporary writings on the Vedic Ṛṣis, such as Sastry 1980, Nagar 2012:86-96, and Mishra 2022, are typically based on these divergent later accounts and conflate the original sages with their descendants who carry the same name; they lack a critical investigation of what we can reliably know about these sages. Anyway, we plead for more scholarly attention to the individual histories of the Vedic sages, esp. Bharadvāja as the first of them, given their crucial importance for Hindu history.)
For some more stray examples from later hymns, consider one showing how the composers valued their compositions as precious gifts to the deity addressed: “Agni, Creator, to you who are wise, acquainted with the past, I address, oh sage, these soliciting mysterious words, ever-to-be-recited poems, together with praises and prayers.” (RV 4.3.16)
Or they illustrate the principle of “feeding the gods”, how it is sacrifices by humans that give life to the gods: “For you, Agni, these sweetest words; for you, may this invocation be a blessing to the heart. You are the one these songs fill with power.” (RV 5.11.5)
Or they ask “you”, the deity, to purify “our” thoughts: “God Savitā, impel the ritual! Impel for good fortune the lord of ritual! Divine Gandharva, purifier of thought, purify our thoughts!” (YV, Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4.1.7) Witness especially the two most famous Vedic hymns: in the Gāyatrī Mantra, “may You, the rising Sun, awaken our minds” (RV 3.62.10); or in the Mṛtyunjaya Mantra: “we worship the tryambaka deity” (RV 7.59.12).
The composers are sometimes quite explicit about their own effort to complete and perfect their poems: “A thought have I imagined, like a workman.” (RV 3.38.1) This refers to the craftsmanship needed, and the hard work of fashioning verses: as any poet knows, composing poetry is one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration.
Ṛṣi Vasiṣṭha even praises himself for having, through his perfect hymns, swayed the god Indra into supporting his employer, king Sudās, so that the latter wins the Battle of the Ten Kings (in the only hymns that takes a living human being as presiding deity, viz.: Vasiṣṭha and his sons): “Vasiṣṭhas, through your prayers did Indra defend Sudās in the War of the Ten Kings.” (RV 7:33:3)
The hymns themselves regularly refer to a pre-Vedic age, impossible if they are uncreated. Thus, to the "Ṛṣis from the past” (RV 1.1.2); to past battles, e.g. against the Druhyu tribe with the help of Aikṣvāku king Māndhātā (RV 1.112.13, RV 8.39.8, RV 8.40.12). within memory of the Vedic project’s initiators, king Bharata and his court-priest Ṛṣi Bharadvāja; or many times to more distant ancestors like Manu and Ilā.
For a final example, consider the concluding verse of the Īśa Upaniṣad: “Oh Agni, lead us along the auspicious path to prosperity, oh god who knowest all our deeds. Take away from us deceitful sins. We shall offer many prayers unto thee.” (IU 18) The Upaniṣads, the philosophical prose concluding the Vedas, though later and from a period when the Vedic hymns were already being idealized, continue the position taken by the hymns: when mentioning a deity, they do not pretend to be spoken by this deity (1st person), but instead are human utterances about (3rd person) or towards (2nd person) the deity.
Criticism
For the modern scholarly view, we can start in the introduction to philosophy by Prof. Chandradhar Sharma, who says point-blank that “the orthodox view that the Vedas are authorless and eternal (…) cannot be philosophically sustained”. (1987:16)
One indication is human fallibility, presumably not applicable to God. The Vedas do contain mistakes. Not many, but enough to prove their humble human origin. Thus, the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad (1.4) evokes an impression of increasing chaos, a familiar lament. As an example how not only sinful men but even the stars have started disobeying natural law, it mentions that Dhruva (Thuban or Alpha Draconis), the Pole Star in ca. 2800 BC, is falling away from the North Pole. The name Dhruva, “fixed”, was clearly given at a time when it was indeed on the Pole and didn’t seemed to move in a night time, whereas the other stars all circled around the Pole. But because of a perfectly natural movement called the precession, less visible than daily rotation or yearly revolution, no Pole Star is forever. Precession is a cycle of around 25772 tears, or 1° per ca. 71 years, so it takes sophisticated astronomical knowledge to become aware of it. The Maitrāyaṇīya writer clearly hadn’t, so he give a wrongly negative interpretation to a movement that was perfectly compliant with ṛta, natural law. Would God have made this mistake?
One of the proofs is the intertextuality (quotations and other deference to earlier texts) present in Vedic literature, possibly even with the oldest hymns quoting passages of irretrievable pre-Vedic texts, but at any rate verifiably with later Vedic texts quoting earlier Vedic texts. This is sometimes to repeat their meaning, sometimes to give novel interpretations to old phrases set in stone, and sometimes even to disagree with what some ancestor had said. Prof. Daya Krishna (1990:63-94) gives a number of examples of later hymns borrowing from earlier hymns, or the Yajur-Veda and Atharva-Veda reproducing mantras from the Ṛg-Veda, or the Upaniṣads from the Saṁhitās.
Thus, the Puruṣa section of the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (3.11-21) is an obvious and explicit reference to the Vedic Puruṣa Sūkta (RV 10.90). It partly restates the hymn’s verses literally, but also shifts the focus to the deity Śiva, equated with the cosmic man, and the typically Upaniṣadic concept of the colourless Self (Ātma).
Another famous passage from the Ṛg-Veda concerns two birds: “Two birds associated together and mutual friends take refuge in the same tree, one of them eats the sweet fig; the other, abstaining from food, merely looks on.” (RV 1.164.20) This imagery is copied in the Mundaka Upaniṣad 3.1.1-2 and the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 4.6-7, and there becomes the master image of the choice between savṛtti and nivṛtti, worldly involvement vs. renunciation; or between jīva, “soul”, the entity wandering through life and facing all its challenges, and ātma, “Self”, the unchanging core of our being. This was to remain a major theme throughout Hindu philosophy.
These are just a few examples of the common phenomenon of Vedic intertextuality. Does God, by definition the highest authority, deal in quotations, which are an appeal to higher authority?
A specific case of intertextuality is later Vedic passages referring to earlier ones to disagree with them. It is often said that the Buddha rejected Vedic ritualism, as part of the now-common assertion of Buddhism’s separateness from “Hinduism” or at least from the Vedic tradition. But this is in fact one of the cases where the Buddha simply continues a trend started in the Upaniṣads, i.e. in the concluding part of the Veda itself (“Vedānta”). To put it in well-known terms, the Upaniṣads replace (or at least, shift the focus from) karmakāṇḍa, the ritualist half, to highlight jñānakāṇḍa, the wisdom half.
Thus, in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad 7.1.4 ff. the senior sage Sanatkumāra explains to the junior sage Nārada that the Vedas are called nāma, “a mere name”, together with (and on the same footing as) a string of worldly sciences. Then he assures him that there is something higher than this “name” category, and enumerates a number of things successively higher, such as saṅkalpa (decisiveness) and prāṇa (life breath). This chapter is not one of the most logically cogent in the Upaniṣads, but at least it testifies that the Vedas are not given the unique reverence due to a uniquely divine revelation.
The Mundaka Upaniṣad 1.1.5 lists the four Vedas along with the auxiliary (undoubtedly human-originated) sciences or Vedāṅgas as aparavidya, “non-supreme science”. It contrasts all of these, including the Vedic hymns, with the roadmap to the akṣara, the “immutable” or absolute, which is paravidya, “supreme science”. To drive home this point further, the Mundaka Upaniṣad 1.2.7 compares Vedic sacrifices or yajñas to leaky boats: “These ships of sacrifice (…) are inferior in merit, transient and fleeting.”
Would God, or whatever we call the supernatural power that supposedly gave us the Vedas, first reveal a doctrine that He had carried with Him for ages, and then within a few centuries (a mere blip on a divine time-scale) repudiate His very own message?
Actually we do find this situation in the Islamic system, where Allah is said to have “abrogated” some Qur’ān passages with later ones of a different or opposite thrust. But if we take a sober outsiders’ look, we see this “abrogation” doctrine for what it is: a transparent attempt by apologists to keep up the postulated divinity of a text though it bears the hallmarks of authorship by an human composer who changed his mind under changing circumstances. Similarly, the world evolved in the Vedic age and new human insights gave rise to new texts of a different thrust.
Finally, we have a few cases of intertextuality with non-Vedic texts. The overlaps with the Mahābhārata are a bit trivial, but are to be noted, for they confirm the Vedic situatedness in space and time. Thus, the youngest person mentioned in the Ṛg-Veda is Śantanu, who is the stepfather of the Veda editor (Veda-Vyāsa, né Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana). The youngest in the Yajur-Veda is Veda-Vyāsa’s biological son Dhrtarāṣṭra, which tallies well with the tradition that Veda-Vyāsa gave the definitive form to the Vedas, or at least to the Veda-Trayī of Ṛg-Veda, Sāma-Veda (which mostly repeats from Ṛg-Veda, but now set to music) and Yajur-Veda. The Atharva-Veda took a few generations more, for the youngest person mentioned there is Veda-Vyāsa’s great-great-grandson Parīkṣit.
A far more sensational case of external intertextuality concerns the Vārṣāgira battle mentioned in RV 1.100. It lists the main protagonists of the battle, which took place on the Afghan side of the Bolan Pass (a sequel to the Battle of the Ten Kings mainly discussed in RV 7.18, 7.33 and 7.83). This battle and the main protagonists likewise figure in the Iranian scripture Avesta, mainly Yašt 5.109-113 and Yašt 9.30, and they match (fully discussed in Talageri 200:208-231, esp. 216). It is extremely exceptional to find a battle this early where we have the version of both the warring parties.
Finally we must mention a very fundamental critique, for which we can as yet only quote a personal communication from the nonagenarian art historian Dr. Lokesh Chandra. According to him, the term Śruti is usually subject to mistranslation, it should be “that which can be heard; fame, glory”. Indeed, whereas the Śāstras are discretely used for learned reference in judicial proceedings among specialists, the Vedic hymns were recited in public or included in publicly-conducted rituals. They were heard from afar. It is not impossible that this down-to-earth use of the description “heard” was subsequently reinterpreted in a supernatural sense. The latter interpretation has become the accepted one since more than two thousand years, but that doesn’t make it authentic.
Vedas in history
The Vedas, by their own testimony, are located in history. Their flora (no sequoias or pine trees), fauna (no giraffes, penguins or kangaroos), rivers (no Yellow River or Mississippi) and level of technology (no stone fist-axes nor automobiles) indicate a particular window in space-time. Unambiguously, their cradle was in Bronze-Age Northwest-India. From there and then, a number of historical events found their way into otherwise religious poetry.
All the arguments we have ever heard against the historicity of the Vedas (which cannot annul the Ṛṣis’ own primary testimony anyway) are based on post-Vedic sayings making the same claim that the traditionalists still make, nothing more. Thus from the Manu Smṛti: “But from fire, wind and sun, He [= Prabhu, the Lord] drew forth the threefold eternal Veda, called Ṛk, Yajus and Sāman, for the due performance of the sacrifice.” (MS 1.23)
Mind you, already in the Ṛg-Veda, the Ṛṣis’ distant ancestor Manu was known as a lawgiver, and the notion of “Manu’s Law” may already have existed. But it was malleable, evolved with the times (as still explicitly permitted in the concluding part of the presently-available Manu Smṛti), but the historically-attested version bears the imprint of the social conditions ca. two thousand years ago. It is absolutely not a contemporary testimony of the Vedas’ genesis, and anyway, its florid formulation seems just a manner of speaking, not a denial of the Vedas’ composition by human hand.
In a general sense, it is of course true that the Manu Smṛti, the Bhagavad Gītā and other post-Vedic literature took this new narrative of uncreated revealed eternal Vedas and ran with it, making it into an unquestioned tradition. Yet, with all due respect for those authority-laden books, their claim is and remains in conflict with the much older evidence from the Vedas themselves, and wrong.
Among the reasons not yet discussed, we might mention that explaining the hymns as supernaturally induced does injustice to the divine character of the gods: if these have to dictate to the poets the hymns of praise to themselves, they are narcissistic. If a girl is given a serenade by a suitor below her balcony, she is not going to dictate to him which praises to sing. On the contrary, she wants to be surprised by what new imaginative phrases he comes up with.
The relation between composer and deity is indeed that of a lover singing a serenade under his beloved's balcony. Just as the suitor hopes to sway her and make her favour him, the poet hopes to influence the deity towards his side ("do ut des"). It is absurd to think that the girl has dictated the lyrics of the song of praise to the suitor: “Tell me how uniquely beautiful I am. Sing how my eyes are as deep as the ocean! Compare me to a summer’s day!” On the contrary, she wants to get impressed with the novel imagery he has managed to invent. Similarly, it is absurd to think that the gods have dictated the hymns in praise of themselves to the composers.
How was the transition made from human hymnal poetry into a legacy from the gods?
In practice, the Vedas derived an enormous prestige from: 1) the quality of the poetry, at a time when mastery of the possibilities of language was the highest art form (cfr. the pre-Islamic Arabs, who as nomads had no sculpture or architecture worth the name, but had a cult of singing and poetry); 2) the discipline of learning the hymns by heart, the whole edifice of their mnemotechniques and the social support by a Brahminical class set apart for it, and 3) the fact that they became the backbone around which many new sciences grew (Vedāṅgas, Upavedas, some of them worldwide firsts, esp. linguistics and some branches of mathematics).
They peacefully conquered India, because kings in eastern and peninsular India invited Brahmin communities to settle in their domains, encouraging their immigration with the gift of privileged neighbourhoods (agrahāras), all in order to add the prestige of the Vedic tradition to their dynasty’s fame. This way, the Vedas and their language acquired a new role as the glasses through which to see all the accruing non-Vedic components of Hinduism (e.g. mūrtipūjā), serving as vault over these and providing them with a conceptual framework and technical language.
As their origin disappeared on the horizon but their glory became ever more conspicuous, the Vedas were elevated ever higher. A new narrative gained ground, allotting them a divine origin.
Invented tradition
This evolution provides one of world history's best examples of an “invented tradition”. The term was launched by the British Marxist philosopher Eric Hobsbawm, ca. 1980. An invented tradition is fairly recent but falsely claims ancientness. Or more charitably, it reinterprets earlier tradition and absorb it into a new worldview. By the time literacy was popularized (we won’t speak out on the common assumption that it was “revived”), ca. 300 BCE, a new tradition had been invented that continues the centrality of and veneration for the Vedas, but overlays this with a newly-added doctrine of their supernatural provenance.
An invented tradition projects the present norms onto the past, or norms valid in a recent past onto a more ancient past. Its votaries homogenize the past into a single screen, denying any specific time-depth to different phases. They do in time what we all do in space when looking at the stars: we see no space-depth, these stars all look homogeneously far, whether 4 or 4,000 light years away. In doing so, the invented-traditionalists deny changes that have taken place at some historical point in the past. This takes the form of grafting onto the ancient past far more recent traditions.
When Marxists speak of an invented tradition, they usually insinuate a sinister motive for imposing this false account of the past. The oppressor class misuses its cultural power to misinform the oppressed classes, all the better to seduce them into accepting their subaltern position. In this case, however, we see no reason to posit such an ulterior motive. The Hindu mind innocently tends towards divinization, as exemplified by the cases of Rāma and Kṛṣṇa.
The heroes Rāma and Kṛṣṇa started out as ordinary human beings: born from a mother like everyone (as attested by their respective birthplaces, still centres of pilgrimage), they both experienced love and intrigue, war and flight and victory, mourning and joy, doubt and compromise. They died an all-too-human, meaningless death: drowned in a flood c.q. shot in a hunting accident. Yet a few generations later, they got elevated to the status of Viṣṇu’s incarnation, in recognition of their role as upholder of dharma in the human world (magnified in the retelling), the human counterpart of the deity’s role in the pantheon as Preserver. Next, temples are dedicated to them, on the same footing as temples to the immortal gods.
Though we consider the apauruṣeyatva doctrine a mistake, we need to emphasize its relative innocence, for it contrasts with a similar and related invented tradition that is not so innocent: the attribution of a divine origin to the institution of caste.
Caste was absent in the Vedic age, as affirmed by Orientalists like Frits Staal (2008:53-55) and even Marxist historian Shereen Ratnagar (in Thapar 2006:166). On its fundamentalist revaluation of the Vedas, the 19th-century reform movement Ārya Samāj based its seemingly very modern rejection of caste, taking Vedic society as model for its projected casteless society.
Next, patrilineal caste appeared during the long millennium when the Mahābhārata was being edited. This may be exemplified by the case of Veda-Vyāsa, sage par excellence and son of sage Parāśara, but his mother belonged to a fishermen community. This patrilineal system prevailed till at least the Buddha’s lifetime (he had to deal with a conflict in his friend Prasenajit’s family when son Virūdhaka discovered that his mother was not a proper kṣatriya: no problem according to the aged Buddha, but intolerable for the young prince). Then the new norm of endogamy appears in the upper class, and this gradually gets generalized to all of Hindu society by ca. 300 CE, when geneticists find that it has developed a box-type division in separate communities. (Biswas 2016)
Traditionalists will at this point tend to minimize the caste problem, pointing out e.g. that outsiders typically fail to understand how, before being an exclusion-from, caste also is a belonging-to, a solidarity network. Alright, the issue is complicated, but it remains true that the new caste structure of society privileged certain communities. It clearly served the power interests of certain emerging castes, while demeaning others.
It is too late now to get worked up over social evolutions taking place thousands of years ago, but we may frown when we still see an (admittedly shrinking) group justifying caste stratification and distorting history to that end. Invented-traditionalists tend to dehistoricize caste. They deny its gradual rise, and claim it as eternal and intrinsic to Hinduism. (Today, it certainly serves the interests of the Christian Missionaries and anti-Hindu Leftists who pontificate that “there is no Hinduism without caste” – in perfect unison with the Hindu invented-traditionalists.)
This invented tradition on caste differs from but piggy-backs on the apauruṣeyatva tradition. They argue that caste was divinely ordained, and that this is clear from its legitimation in the God-given Vedas. We just argued that caste is absent there, yet they always point to the Puruṣa Sūkta (RV 10:90) as the basis for caste. This hymn appears at the very end of the Ṛg-Veda, and according to many scholars including Friedrich Max Müller it is an even later interpolation, put there precisely to create Vedic legitimacy for caste. This would make it a very wilful case of invented tradition, fielded deliberately with an oppressive intent.
However, no matter what the hymn’s provenance, a close reading shows surpringly that it doesn’t contain the defining elements of caste at all: hereditary profession and endogamy. It merely sums up four functional layers in society, hierarchically arranged like the body parts from head to toe, which you find in any developed society. This is simply the application of the corporatist, “body-like” model to the social world, after the hymn had likewise applied it to the natural world. This again is a comparison you find in many cultures: the skull corresponding to the heavenly vault, the eyes to sun and moon, the bones to the mountains, the bloodstream to the rivers, the feet to the earth.
In Roman society too, the upper-class negotiator Menenius Agrippa (ca. 500 BC) persuaded the rebellious lower classes with the corporatist metaphor: all parts of society have to work together and accept each other’s specificities, just like the parts of the body. Saint Paul, a Roman citizen, would repeat it (1 Corinthians 12:12-31). Then with that passage as a lead, the Catholic Church through Pope Leo XIII (encyclical Rerum Novarum 1891) would declare corporatism the “social teaching of the Church”, upholding the harmony model against the then-rising socialist model of class struggle.
But here you see the poison of invented traditions again. The terms used had not been casteist in the mind of the writer, but had meanwhile become caste terms. For at least sixteen centuries, 4th till 20th, these four varṇa (colour, quality) groups had a hereditary monopoly on certain professions, and refrained from intermarriage. These defining traits of caste (hereditary profession and endogamy) got back-projected onto the Puruṣa Sūkta, hence on the Vedas, hence on the gods who had supposedly authored the Vedas. This went effortlessly: every Hindu in 800, or 1800, who heard about a Brāhmaṇa or a Śūdra, was bound to think of caste, and was likewise bound to associate the Vedic source with divine revelation.
This is how bad history, including invented traditions, can lead to grave problems. It can absolutize them, turn them into a matter of divine volition, no less. But this also shows how good history can relativize them and make them manageable again.
Conclusion
The assumption that the Vedas are of supernatural origin, apauruṣeya, is demonstrably in conflict with various types of testimony in the Vedas themselves. Oddly, for people who hold the Vedas in such quasi-divinizing awe, the invented-traditionalists turn out to go against this Vedic testimony. We invite them to briefly interrupt their devout Veda recitations for a critical reading of the Vedas, to clear up their confusion.
They won't welcome this refutation of their fond belief. They may associate our observations with despised ideological movements like Nehruvian secularism, materialism and atheism. But look at the bright side. Hindus too are called to develop the Constitutionally-ordained “scientific temper”, which was never contradicted by any Hindu religious dogma. The apauruṣeyatva belief was never un-Hindu, only a mistake, as happens once in a while to human beings.
Moreover, if traditionalists care about ancestry, this refutation of their cramped belief ought to gladden them. It implies that their Ṛṣi ancestors were not passive receptacles of voices from above, but creative geniuses. Surely this quality is still lurking somewhere in their own genes.
Bibliography
Achar, BN Narahari, 2020: Revisiting the Chronology of Rigveda and the exact identity of Vedic Aryans, Academia.edu.
Anirvan, 2018: Veda Mīmāṁsā, vol.1, Akshaya Prakashan, Delhi.
Besant, Annie, and Das, Bhagavan, 2000 (1940): Sanātana Dharma. An Advanced Textbook of Hindu Religion and Ethics, Theosophical Publishing House, Chennai.
Chandrashekharendra Saraswati, Sri, 1991: The Vedas, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay.
Elst, Koenraad, 2012: The Argumentative Hindu, Voice of India, Delhi.
Biswas, Premankur, 2016: “Genetic study suggests caste began to dictate marriage from Gupta reign”, Indian Express, 16 February 2016.
Jha, MG, 1915: The Purva-Mimamsa-Sutras of Jaimini, Bharatiya Publishing House, Varanasi.
Kashyap, RL, 2012 (1999): Why Read the Rig Veda?, Sri Aurobindo Kapali Sastry Institute of Vedic Studies, Bengaluru.
Krishna, Daya, 1996 (1991): Indian Philosophy. A Counter Perspective, OUP, Delhi.
Mishra, Sampadananda, 2022: The Rishi Tradition of Bharat, Subbu Publ., Delhi.
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Rao, SK Ramachandra, et al., 2012 : Exploring the Mystery of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo Kapali Sastry Institute of Vedic Studies, Bengaluru.
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Talageri, Shrikant, 2000: The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi.
--, 2020a: Rigveda and the Aryan Theory: a Rational Approach, talageri.blogspot.com.
--, 2020b: A Reply To Prof. Narahari Achar’s Critique of my article “The Rigveda and the Aryan Theory: A Rational Perspective. The Full Out-of-India Case in Short”, talageri.blogspot.com, 7 July 2020.
--, 2020c: The Chronological Gulf between the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda, talageri.blogspot.com, 4 Oct. 2020.
Thapar, R., et al.: India. Historical Beginnings and the Concepts of the Aryan, National Book Trust, Delhi 2006.
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Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-15521468186648366632023-03-14T08:40:00.003-07:002023-03-14T08:40:36.722-07:00What the Rāmāyaṇa tells us about itself(Swarajya, March 2023)
We are lucky that we can devote a book review to Jijith Nadumuri Ravi’s The Geography of Ramayana. A Geographical Journey into the Rama Era (Notion, Chennai 2023), a swift sequel to his geographical analysis of an earlier scripture: Rivers of the Rg-Veda (ibidem 2022). This book draws our attention to numerous geographically or historically consequential details in the epic, which often yield unexpected information. And this, the former ISRO space scientist Nadumuri does with great rigour, contrasting with the endless wishful thinking of so many self-styled history rewriters.
Nadumuri is not the first scholar who refuses to accept the Ramayana geography that has come down to us. In the 1950s already, the skeptical Marxist DD Kosambi, followed by HD Sankalia and a string of later “rationalists”, already doubted that Rāma had ever gone that far south, certainly not as far as Rāmeśvaram or Śrī Laṅkā. But precisely because of their principled skepticism, their denial of serious value to an epic poem that had become a Hindu scripture, their criticism of the traditional reading lost some of its force. A priori, Leftists tended to dismiss the epics as little more than fantasy. In the late 19th century in Europe, the scientist vogue had similarly dismissed all ancient tradition as mere invention: Troy did not exist, the Hittites mentioned in the Bible had not existed, even Jesus had been no more than a product of fantasy. This approach was still being imitated in India in the late 20th and even in the 21st century, and praised by the secularists as a refreshing contrast to Hindu obscurantism.
The epics and real history
But in fact, this approach is quite obsolete. While the academics pooh-poohed the legend of Troy, an amateur went to excavate the site that geographically corresponded to Homer’s Troy, and he found the city. Shortly after, the Hittite language was discovered and proved to explain some names of Trojan heroes. At once, the Biblical references to a hitherto unknown Hittite people (to which e.g. Esau’s two wives belonged) also proved historical. About Jesus, no serious scholar will repeat today that he didn’t exist. That he was God’s only-begotten son, born from a virgin, resurrected from the dead, the redeemer from sin, or the Messiah (“anointed one”, the heir to king David’s throne), those are items of faith, up for discussion and doubt. But that an exorcist and purported healer roamed Palestine, that he fancied himself the Messiah, and that he died on the cross, are now generally accepted as historical facts.
So, Nadumuri takes the present text seriously. This starts with genealogical data, where he makes a productive use of the king-lists. These are another such artefact from ancient literature that Indian “rationalists” mock. However, the histories of Mesopotamia and Egypt would be nowhere but for their local king-lists. In India too, these are the most reliable part of the Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature. To explain this phrase “most reliable”, it is worth quoting Nadumuri’s unassailable assessment of the degrees of soberness versus fantasy in the different parts of Hindu literature:
“Despite being poetry, RV [Ṛg-Veda] is mostly devoid of magical narratives. RV does describe boons and curses. They cause mental discomfort. But they don’t cause any physical transformations like turning a man into an animal or such magical effects found in the Itihāsa Purāṇas. The nouns that come close to the word ‘curse’ in RV are Aghaśamsa (evil wish) and Abhiśasti (blaming). The noun Śāpa appears only in RV 10 (the 10th Maṇḍala of RV) meaning evil wish, damnation, or blaming. Vara (boon) mentioned in RV has nothing magical. It represents a general blessing like that of Indra to his worshippers. Similarly, there are no divine weapons (Divyāstras) mentioned in RV. The noun Vimāna is used to poetically describe the act of the sun moving through the sky, in the sense that it ‘measures out’ the sky. In the Vedas, the Ṛṣis aspire to live for 100 years considering it as a very long life. The Purāṇic poets describe people as living for 1000s of years.” (p.29)
Many Hindu readers will be curious as to what this no-nonsense historian makes of the Vimāna, so often cited as proof of how their ancestors already had helicopters; so we will let you share in Nadumuri’s insights: “Vimāna – a vehicle that can fly in the sky based on the will of the rider -- could be a Poetic Imagination of Vālmīki himself. The imagination of flight is very ancient in human prehistory, in all the cultures across the globe. Vimāna originally meant the tall towers of the cities. They contain balconies where people can stand and watch the ground from an elevation. If Vālmīki were to stand inside one of them, it could trigger the feeling that the static Vimāna is somehow flying in the sky, carrying the people standing inside them.” (p.31) He analyses the occurrences of Vimānas more closely (p.359) and concludes that in those cases where they are flying vehicles, this has all the characteristics of poetic imagination. “The concept of a flying Vimāna that can go to any place based on the will of the person using it, was thus born in the mind of the poet. This is the world’s first science-fiction.” (p.67)
Rāma and Śantanu
We see history shade over from mostly sober and factual in the Vedas to a more embellished and sometimes purely fantasized form in the Itihāsa-Purāṇas. Yet, the part that was least tampered with, that was learned by heart and arguably formed the first reason for composing quasi-historical literature, were the king-lists. We skip the flood of light that Nadumuri throws upon the genealogical information in the early Veda and the later Mahābhārata, and focus on his startling coordination of the Rāmāyaṇa with the Vedas’ end and the Mahābhārata’s beginning.
As year of the Mahābhārata battle Nadumuri takes 1783, the time calculated by Ashok Bhatnagar on astronomical grounds, and he correlates this with newer archaeological findings of Ochre Coloured Pottery (with newly-appearing hoards of weapons), certified by the Archaeological Survey of India to date to the 18th century BC, and with the known timing of the Sarasvatī’s desiccation. He thus rejects oft-cited traditionalist dates like 3139 BC, or other dates thereabouts or even millennia earlier. The great-grandfather of the Kaurava and Pāndava warriors is Śantanu. His stepson is Kṛṣṇa Dvaipayana who becomes the final editor of the Veda-TrayĪ, hence nicknamed Veda-Vyāsa. This Vyāsa is also the sperm donor who stands in for his early-deceased half-brother VicitravĪrya in order to father upon the latter’s widows the sons Dhrtarāṣṭra and Paṇḍu, thus becoming the grandfather of the Kauravas c.q. the Pāṇḍavas. The Vedas seem to confirm this historical placement of Vyāsa: his stepfather Śantanu is the last human being mentioned in the Ṛg-Veda, his biological son Dhrtarāṣṭra the last person mentioned in the Yajur-Veda. (The Atharva-Veda took a few generations longer, with Arjuṇa’s grandson Parīkṣit, or Vyāsa great-great-grandson, as the youngest person mentioned.)
Nadumuri teaches his Hindu readers to candidly read the historical parts of the Vedas as an account of what really happened, and to outgrow the tendency to cramped literalism that too many Hindus have come to accept as a condition of proper piety before Scripture. Thus, it is commonly believed that the Parāśara who was with his grandfather Vasiṣṭha in the early-Vedic Battle of the Ten Kings was the same man who sired Vyāsa: Vasiṣṭha sired Śakti sired Parāśara sired Vyāsa, which would mean that the dozens of generations between the early Ṛg-Veda and its final editing get reduced to just four generations. So more realistically, the Vasiṣṭha (and similarly Bharadvāja and Viśvāmitra) who is part of Rāma’s life is a descendant of but not identical with the early-Vedic sage of that name. No:
“The Early-RV Vasiṣṭha (the priest of Sudās), Śatayātu and Parāśara are mentioned as the witnesses of the Dāśarājña Battle (7.18.21). As per RV Anukramaṇi, Śakti composed the hymn RV 7.32. (…) These Vasiṣṭha, Śakti and Parāśara belonged to Early-RV. The Late-RV Vasiṣṭha composed many hymns in RV 9 & 10. The Late-RV Śakti composed the hymns RV 9.97 and RV 9.108. The hymn RV 9.97 was jointly composed by his son Parāśara Śāktya. Śakti’s descendent Gaurivīti Śāktya composed RV 10.73 and RV 10.74. Thus, there were individuals by the name Vasiṣṭha, Śakti and Parāśara in Late-RV too. The Vasiṣṭha and Śakti of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and the MBh were Late-RV and different from the Early-RV ancestors. The Late-RV Vasiṣṭha is contemporary to Aja. Vasiṣṭha’s son Śakti is contemporary to Aja’s son Daśaratha. Śakti’s son Parāśara is contemporary to Rāma and hence also to Śantanu. Parāśara’s son Vyāsa is contemporary to Rāma’s son Lava and also to Śantanu’s son Vicitravīrya. This perfectly matches with the chronology of MBh.” (p.403)
Alright, that was a long run-up before coming to our points. Firstly, according to Nadumuri, Rāma is the same person as the Rāma mentioned as a mighty one among the sponsors in RV 10:93:14, so in the very last stage of the RV. It already stood to reason that Rāma belonged somewhere in the long Vedic age, but this specification toward its very last phase is somewhat surprising. Equally surprising is that he would be mentioned in the Ṛg-Veda at all. While Nadumuri casts doubt on the assumption that Ayodhyā had been the Solar Dynasty’s ancestral home, pointing to several shifts of the capital (though possibly with retention of the city’s name), one even only some two generations before Rāma, he confirms that Rāma himself was born in the Ayodhyā that is now in eastern Uttar Pradesh, hundreds of miles from the Vedic area.
It was a common assumption that the Solar and Lunar worlds were quite separate, but here Nadumuri reminds us of serious overlaps. The Rāmāyaṇa’s geographical horizon stretches as far west as Kekaya in western Panjab, west of the Vedic area. Conversely, as described in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, it was already in the mid-Vedic period that some Vedic priests took a leadership role in exploring the east up to Videha, east of the Sadānīrā river (i.e. in northwestern Bihar), taking the fire cult that far but also using the fire materially to clear forests and thus make way for fields and meadows. They made swampy lands cultivable, the way the Christian monks would do some 3000 year later in this reviewer’s own region, the Low Countries. And this was all to the east of Ayodhyā. So, it is not proven but actually quite plausible that Rāma as a king in the powerful Solar dynasty finds mention among the patrons of the Vedic tradition.
And secondly, the aforementioned Śantanu, who flourished in the early 19th century BC, was contemporary with Rāma. While the exact place of Rāma’s birth has raised enough controversy, his date of birth has only been the object of some rival hypotheses but with no real conflict ensuing. Nadumuri proposes an estimate of 1920 BC. (p.35) Both come a few generations after the Bhārata king Kuru for whom his Kaurava descendants were so named: Śantanu because he was his descendant, Rāma because he visited the region Kurujaṅgala (“Kuru’s jungle”) named after the patriarch.
A date of ca. 1900 BC is as yet unsupported by excavations, but only narrowly: “Archaeology has reported sites as old as 1750 BCE in Ayodhyā. The archaeological gap between 1900 BCE to 1750 BCE is very short. It may get resolved in the future.” Archaeological dating is inherently uncertain, as a new discovery may suddenly change the picture. On the other hand, if Ayodhyā was still a new city at the time of Rāma’s birth (as Nadumuri will argue, cf. infra), and 1750 BC proves to be a correct archaeology-based estimate for the founding of the city, Rāma may have lived in the late 17th century BC. And if Śantanu did likewise, his great-grandsons may have waged the Mahābhārata battle in 1504 or 1478,-- the next astronomy-based dates proposed for it, viz. by Krishna Kumar c.q. RN Iyengar. The jury is still out on the exact year, but on the basis of the king-list information that Mahāpadma Nanda’s coronation (4th century BC) came 1015 to 1500 year after Parīkṣit’s birth (which was less than a year after the battle), we must at any rate look between the 19th and the 14th century BC.
The world ages
This means Rāma belonged to the final stratum of the Ṛg-Veda, and came three generations earlier than the Kauravas, Pāṇḍavas and Kṛṣṇa. That the Rāma narrative was older than the war of succession in the Bhārata dynasty is generally known; only a handful of Western scholars, a few decades ago already, wanted to reverse the order. But few would have expected them to be that close.
For the believers in a precisely-timed scheme of four world ages, it must be especially disappointing. In their “tradition” (actually hardly older than 500 AD), Rāma is the Tretā kā Thākur, the lord of the Tretā Yuga, while Kṛṣṇa’s death marks the end of the Dvāpara Yuga. This means the Dvāpara Yuga stretches over less than three generations, rather than the traditional thousands of years. Then again, Nadumuri later (p.393) also considers indications that, contrary to these indications, Rāma partly belonged to the Dvāpara Yuga; but that would still add only one generation to this hopelessly short Dvāpara Yuga. Well, all this doesn’t matter much once we realize the recentness and artificiality of the usual temporal scheme of the Yugas. While a scheme of four world ages already existed in the pre-Vedic time of Proto-Indo-European unity (hence its reappearance in Greek and Germanic mythology, viz. as Golden-Silver-Bronze-Iron Age c.q. Spear-Sword-Wind-Wolf Age), it was never linked to specific time periods.
This link appeared when the precession cycle of 25,772 years, approximated as 24,000 years, had been discovered (Hipparchus, 127 BC), providing a uniquely long cosmic cycle. It took several centuries before this knowledge, transmitted by the Indo-Greeks, had taken root in India. The next step was that the world ages were now seen as fractions of half of this cycle, in a proportion of 1:2:3:4. This arbitrary but reasonably-proportioned division was ascribed to sage Mārkāṇḍeya. In a next move, these figures were multiplied by 360, apparently out of awe for things heavenly (equating a year for men with a day for the gods), yielding the Purāṇic figures of 432,000 years and its multiples. These form an example of an “invented tradition”, a fairly recent tradition that is falsely projected back into the deep past. But if we go back to reality, these figures don’t matter, and the time-span from Rāma to Kṛṣṇa can really have been much shorter.
Ayodhyā: now you see it, now you don’t
Next, and for most of the book, Nadumuri explores the geographical detail in descriptions of which direction Rāma or Hanumān went in a certain phase of their itineraries, or how many yojanas (of which the length is disputed, but Nadumuri gives an informed guess) they covered. The first question, much highlighted in the Ayodhyā controversy, is: but was this really Rāma’s birthplace? About that, he finds no reason for doubt, but just a few generations earlier as well as later, the situation was more complicated. In the very beginning of his Rāmāyaṇa (Bāla Kāṇḍa, sarga 5-6), Vālmīki describes Daśaratha’s Ayodhyā as well as his ancestor Sagara’s Ayodhyā, and: “Sagara’s Ayodhyā was different from Daśaratha’s Ayodhyā.” (p.55).
The Solar dynasty’s capital was moved yet again just after Rāma’s death: “The probable reason for [Rāma’s twin sons] Kuśa and Lava abandoning Ayodhyā is because the Sarayū river flooded Ayodhyā. Probably the same flood ended the life of Rāma and Bharata, and perhaps also of Lakṣmaṇa. This fact is shrouded in Poetic Imagination as follows:-- Rāma, Bhārata and every citizen of Ayodhyā entered Sarayū to end their life!! The poet did capture a bit of the reality. He noted that the river Sarayū flowed in a westward direction (7.100.1). The normal direction of the flow of the river near Ayodhyā is to the east. The river made a westward turn, causing the flood that destroyed Ayodhyā.” (p.410-411)
As a consequence, the city temporarily becomes a ghost town without inhabitants nor historical importance: “Ayodhyā was missing when Śantanu’s son Bhīṣma and grandson Pāṇḍu rose to prominence. Kāśī was then a great city of Kosala. Hence, Bhīṣma chose the princesses of Kāśī as brides for his brother Vicitravīrya. They were addressed as Kausalyā (the princesses of Kosala). Ayodhyā did not feature in the military expedition of Pāṇḍu. Probably, it was being rebuilt then. The rebuilt Ayodhyā was featured in the military expedition of Pāṇḍu’s son Bhīma. It was then ruled by a king named Dīrghaprajña. Duryodhana’s son was named Lakṣmaṇa. His mother seems to be from Kosala. This was why the Kosala king Bṛhadbala sided with Duryodhana in the Kurukṣetra War. Bṛhadbala was a descendant of Kuśa. He wasn’t ruling from Ayodhyā. Bṛhadbala was killed by Arjuṇa’s son Abhimanyu in the Kurukṣetra War.” (p.419)
At any rate, the house of Rāma and the Bhārata dynasty met in combat on the Kurukṣetra battlefield.
Incarnation of Viṣṇu
After having argued that Śantanu and Rāma are contemporaneous, on p.134 Nadumuri adds a third important person to the same time bracket: Rāma the son of Jamadagni , a sage of the late Ṛg-Veda, and descendant of Bhṛgu. The Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature has popularized him as Paraśu-Rāma, “Rāma with the Axe”. (According to Shrikant Talageri, this is a corruption of the by then forgotten ethnonym Parśu, an Ānava subtribe that ended up fleeing India and becoming the Persians.) Being as old as Śantanu, he naturally became the teacher of the latter’s first son, Bhīṣma, and played a role in both epics.
This creates a problem for devout Vaiṣṇavas though. How could Rāma Jāmadāgnya be contemporaneous with Rāma Dāśaratha, yet both be incarnations of Viṣṇu? Modern reincarnation researchers might point to the fact that outside India, other conceptions of reincarnation exist, e.g. a native chieftain in Canada announced on his deathbed that he would reincarnate in a number of children, and some years later, several children did indeed report memories of having been that one chieftain. But it seems to us that a better way out of this dilemma is to take to the doctrine of divine incarnations, the Avatāravāda, less literally.
Being an incarnation of a god is just a manner of speaking. It means that a deceased mortal, when you oversee his life, has played the same role in the world that the deity plays in mythology, e.g. upholding Dharma in society replicates Viṣṇu’s role as Maintainer. It is one specific, deity-oriented form of a more general form of apotheosis, “elevation to godhood” (in Semitic Širk, “associating [a mortal with the divine]”, which became the Islamic term for “idolatry”). As Nadumuri explains: “Usually, the route to deification in Sanātana Dharma is the elevated consciousness of the individual and their antiquity. Many ancestors -- among them many Gurus, warriors, kings, and queens -- are deified and worshipped as divinities”. (p.23)
In this case, it should be understood that Rāma’s (or others’) status of incarnation of Viṣṇu was not an original part of his persona: “the core of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa is closer to RV. The remapping of Rāma as the Avatāra of Viṣṇu was a later development. Viṣṇu became a prominent divinity in the Purāṇic Period.” (p.22) This is yet another “invented tradition”, here a post-Rāma claim on Rāma, one that in this case managed to penetrate by interpolation the peripheral parts of the epic.
The geography
We have not given away any detail about the main topic of the book, elaborated so painstakingly, taking into account every single passage of the epic, by Jijith Nadumuri Ravi. Let us at least disclose that he nowhere finds Rāma or other protagonists crossing the Narmāda river. To make a very long argumentation short: while the location of Ayodhyā or nearby Citrakūṭa remains uncontroversial, his farther journey takes him into more uncertain territory: Kiṣkindhā was not in Hampi, and Laṅkā was not Śrī Laṅkā.
According to Nadumuri, the Rāmāyaṇa contains “not a single reference of Rāma ever crossing the river Narmadā! (…) This upsets the traditionally popular locations of Kiṣkindhā and Laṅkā. Kiṣkindhā is popularly identified with Hampi in Karnataka. (…) Laṅkā is popularly identified with Srilanka. However, despite these deep-rooted notions in the psyche of the believers, archaeology has found no trace of evidence for any urban culture in Srilanka during Rāma-Era. Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa describes Laṅkā city as having a Harappan-style urban culture. (…) we identified Laṅkā with the Bhagatrav island in the mouth of Narmadā where it joins the sea. (…) It matched perfectly with the prosperous city of Laṅkā.”
If you want to voice objections to this daring application of the scientific temper to a religious classic, at least go buy and read the book first, so you come to know what exactly it is that you want to object to. And if you just want to know the historical hard data underlying a fascinating epic, this book is the best you’ll find in a long time. It avoids the conventionalism of the textbooks but also the enthusiastic flights of the imagination so badly affecting the self-styled history rewriters.
Jijith Nadumuri Ravi: Geography of the Ramayana, Notion Publ., Chennai 2023.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-34801826809153402722023-02-19T07:05:00.000-08:002023-02-19T07:05:08.336-08:00India, not a nation of losers
(Pragyata, Nov 2022)
You Hindus have never done anything noteworthy, let alone brave or creative, that the foreigners who forever kept coming to subdue you, could have admired. Or at least that is the message Hindu readers, cinema-goers and schoolchildren get to consume. It is time to correct this negative self-image, as numerous observers muse, but the historians willing and able to transmute this pious intention into cold print haven’t been forthcoming in appreciable numbers.
Communal history
That is where a new generation of historians is stepping in. Foremost among them is Vikram Sampath, who made his name with a two-volume biography of Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. His newest book, Bravehearts of Bharat, is about a series of freedom fighters that might as well have included Savarkar, but stops short at India’s formal passing into the status of British colony in 1858. It starts with Lalitaditya of Kashmir, who confronted among others Junayd al-Murri, successor as Arab governor to India’s first Muslim invader, Mohammed bin Qasim, but also Tibetans, pre-Islamic Turks; and ends with Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh, who fought the British.
Note the large proportion of women among these fierce warriors, six of the fifteen whose story is narrated here. Moreover, two of them were Muslim: Chand Bibi of Ahmednagar, who fought against Akbar, and Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh, who took part in the Mutiny, now increasingly called (after Savarkar) the “First War of Independence”. This term has passed into the Congressite version of history in that it showcases a Hindu-Muslim unity against the British, as against the “communal” (Savarkarite!) emphasis on Hindu-Muslim conflict.
The reader won’t notice any religiously partisan attitude in the description of their lives by the historian whom the Left has dubbed “Savarkar’s apologist”. Nonetheless, here and there the sheer facts of history will make the reader draw his own conclusions. Thus, most readers will know the defection in 1565 of the Muslim units of the Vijayanagar force in the battle of Talikota against a Muslim coalition, which transmuted an assured victory into a lethal defeat for the last remaining Hindu empire. Even for them it may be news that this was a repetitive behaviour pattern, e.g. in 712, “about 500 Arabs who were in [king of Sindh] Dahar’s army (…) deserted Dahar as they were reluctant to attack their co-religionists”. (p.12-13)
Therefore, skeptics will doubt Sampath’s generous (or Congressite) characterization of Hazrat Mahal’s motive for engaging in the revolt of 1857: after the Indians’ defeat against the British she gained asylum in Nepal and had a “Hindustani Masjid” built there, “named in honour of the country she so dearly loved”. (p.320) Freedom Fighters like Savarkar and their purported heirs in Congress and other secularist circles like to affirm the patriotic motive, but this conceals that the Mutiny was a kind of mutual deception in which the Hindus sought to bring back the Maratha empire while the Muslims sought to re-establish the Moghul empire, which had never ceased to see itself as a foreign occupying force in a country that its founder Babar had cursed, and that was administered in a foreign language till the last. Everybody develops an attachment to his cradle-land, but was it this that motivated Hazrat Mahal, or was it zeal for the remains of a Muslim empire now dissolved by the British infidels? The one does not exclude the other.
Martyrdom and victory
The list of bravehearts was not selected for their martyrdom, though a few also tasted that. Thus, Banda Singh Bahadur, who pioneered Sikh military endeavour through the Khalsa founded by Guru Govind Singh but was at last captured and tortured to death by Moghul troops; or Rani Abbakka who ended up being captured by the Portuguese and dying in captivity, but was selected here for the more impressive list of defeats she had first inflicted on them. Most heroes here are spectacular and perpetual winners, such as Rajaraja and Rajendra Cola, or Lachit Barphukan.
Of the Colas you have at least heard the name, and perhaps even that their policy was uniquely expansionist in that they conquered Eastern India and much of Southeast Asia, a counterpoint to the usual narrative that the Hindus never colonized foreign territories (mouthed both by pooh-poohers of Hindu valour and by Gandhi-style Hindu apologists). For details about their career, you can now turn to the accomplished historian Vikram Sampath, virtually the first to deal with this episode since KA Nilakanth Sastri’s History of South India (1955).
But just as spectacular and certainly newer is his chronicle of Lachit Barphukan’s achievements. Indian schoolkids and grown-ups have been led to believe that until Shivaji in the late 17th century, Hindus had been totally helpless against the Muslim invaders. If you look at historical maps, the speed and magnitude of their conquering advances is no doubt impressive. Yet they were not infinite, sometimes because natural hurdles came in the way (thus, they failed to conquer Nepal), but often because Hindu resistance stopped them. That neither the Delhi Sultanate nor the Moghul Empire ever included Assam, was not for lack of trying. The champion of this successful resistance by the Ahom dynasty was Lachit Barpukhan (locally pronounced Borphukan), whose name deserves a similar aura as that of Shivaji (of whom he was a contemporary) or Peshwa Bajirao. He defeated the Moghul invasion force repeatedly, most spectacularly in the battle of Saraighat of 1671. Though the Ahoms ultimately fell due to an invasion, after six centuries, it was one from Burma (just like the Colas, the Buddhists too broke the stereotype with their foreign conquests), but the attempts at conquest from the Muslim-held Ganga plain were all fruitless.
Nationalism
The perspective of this book is clearly nationalist. More than the reader of his Savarkar biography will expect, Sampath does not hesitate to highlight episodes of Hindu-Muslim cooperation, not just against external enemy like the British but also against co-religionists. Secularists will hail this as proof that religion doesn’t matter, but history shows that Muslims at some point remember their religious duty vis-à-vis others whereas Hindus remain trusting of others until it is too late. To name the best-known examples: Jayachandra of Kannauj thought he could use an alliance with Mohammed Ghori against his rival Prithviraj Chauhan of Delhi, but after the victory over Prithviraj he ended up defeated by Ghori too; and Mahatma Gandhi imagined he could enlist the Caliphate movement into the Freedom Movement but only triggered the Moplah jihad against the Hindus of Kerala. That is why I see a need here to repeat that “nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns”.
Then again, the identification with India is at least a part of Hinduness. In Savarkar’s Hindu-nationalist (“Hindutva”) definition, a Hindu sees India not only as his Holyland (as a Western Hare Krishna might also do), but also as his Fatherland. For them, unlike for Muslims or Christians, India is not an area of expansion, a colony, but since forever their cradle. The Israeli historian Yoram Hazony shows in his dissident book The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) that nationalism was a great step forwards in the human evolution from a purely local viewpoint to an identification with a larger community mostly consisting of people you don’t personally know; and in India’s case, who fall outside your primary community: your caste. That is why Savarkar was a activist against caste. So from a viewpoint of social justice, this much-maligned ideology is not without its merits. It was one of the pillars of the French Revolution: the “brotherhood” pillar next to “liberty” and “equality”. So it may be a good thing if Indians, including Muslims, are reminded of their common nationhood. And of the virtues it produced, including bravery.
Vikram Sampath: Bravehearts of Bharat. Vignettes from Indian History. Viking/Penguin Random House, Delhi 2022, 334 pp., Rs.799.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-47567904281858239602023-02-16T20:43:00.001-08:002023-02-19T02:30:41.940-08:00Let the “Aryan” debate become a debate again
(13 Feb 2023, South Asia News & Bridge India)
The last thirty years, there have been plenty of lectures, papers and now online videos promising to “debunk the Aryan Invasion Theory” (AIT). Their impact has been very poor, essentially limited to Hindu students, not even Hindu politicians. But outsiders, particularly the champions of that same AIT, have barely noticed this wave of attempted refutations, and certainly haven’t felt moved by them to rethink their assumptions.
Let us first get our terminology straight. Squeamish AIT scholars are making everyone toe their line that instead of an “invasion” there was an “immigration”. They have to, for unlike in Europe, where the “Aryan” (meaning Indo-European-speaking, IE) invasion from the steppes ca. 2800 BCE was a dramatic and sometimes genocidal event, India presents no evidence at all of such foreign conquest in the period considered. So they shifted to the thesis of a subtle infiltration under the archaeological radar, yet revolutionary in its impact: unlike the Scythians, Greeks, Huns or Kushanas, these intruders succeeded in not just conserving their language and religion, but imposing both on the far more numerous natives. Well, the word “invasion” is not about the means used, but the resulting power equation: it’s an “immigration” if the foreigners adapt, but an “invasion” if they take power. And this is clearly what the supposed Aryan invaders did. So it was definitely an invasion, but we won’t insist: even with an “immigration”, it remains the “AIT”.
The IE language family was discovered by a French Jesuit living in South India, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux. In 1767, he sent a paper to the Academy in Paris in which he showed the close kinship of Sanskrit with Latin and Greek. The French freethinker Voltaire soon publicized it and concluded that European culture and its treasures had originated on the banks of the Ganga. This was taken over by other leading intellectuals like Immanuel Kant, and note that they spontaneously assumed India as the land of origin of the IE family. The Out-of-India Theory (OIT) is not a recent “concoction” by Hindu Nationalists, as widely alleged, but was thought up by 18th-century Europeans.
In India, the new insight was given currency by justice William Jones speaking in Kolkata 1786. Note about his speech what admiration he expresses for the Sanskrit language, deemed superior to Latin and Greek. Indomania was widespread at the time, best represented by Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 book Language and Wisdom of the Indians. This goes completely against the widespread Hindu rumour that IE linguistics stemmed from “racist colonialism”. Most of India was not a colony yet, and the heyday of racial thought contaminating “Aryan” studies had yet to arrive.
However, another consideration started to undermine the dominant position of the OIT. Linguists realized that Sanskrit was not the mother but merely an elder sister of the other branches. There was a distance between the putative language of origin (Proto-Indo-European, PIE) and Vedic Sanskrit, and this translated into a possible distance between the Homeland and India. Not really compelling logic, for languages can evolve while staying in the same place; but this change of opinion won through.
What made the scales tip was probably August Schlegel’s proposal in 1834 that the Homeland lay in or near the Caucasus mountains. Bible-thumpers had already thought of Armenia, where Noah’s Ark had landed: the Aryans were deemed the descendants of Noah’s son Jafeth. Successive Homeland theories after this would rarely move away sharply from the Caucasus area. Since Gordon Childe’s choice in 1926 for the Don-Volga region, this area has mostly remained the favourite, today known as the Yamnaya (“pit-grave”) culture.
But the OIT school did not give up. The defence was taken up again by Europeans living in India. The most prominent and surprising figure here is Mountstuart Elphinstone, a proverbial colonialist. After his retirement as governor of Bombay, he wrote a History of India. Among his arguments, the most compelling is that no Hindu scripture gives any indication of a foreign origin: “There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present.” (1841)
Yet this could not save the OIT. In the mid-19th century, two developments served as nails in its coffin. One was the start of Linguistic Paleontology, the “science” of discovering a language’s habitat from its vocabulary. Thus, it was realized that PIE flourished in a society familiar with wheeled transport: six words for the cart and its parts exist throughout the daughter languages and must have existed in PIE. Now for the Homeland question, it was deemed significant that there were words for cold-climate species like birch tree, wolf and bear. This doesn’t really refute the idea of an Indian Homeland, for these species also occur in India, which has islands of cold climate. Recently, OIT mastermind Shrikant Talageri has shown that hot-climate species like ape, lion and elephant are equally present in the PIE lexicon, and they are hard to reconcile with a northern climate zone. But back then, the exclusion of India as a Homeland candidate won the day.
The other factor was the appearance of Veda translations which followed the then-emerging racial paradigm. Thus, in the Rg-Vedic description of the Battle of the Ten Kings, it was commonly pretended that the enemies were “black aboriginals”. In reality, the names of the kings and of their tribes (most notably Dâsa, Dasyu) are recognizably Iranian, and their characterization as “the black tribe” is a mistranslation. The word Asiknī does not refer to a skin colour, but to the area they come from, the basin of “the Black River”, the Vedic name of the Chenab. This way, several racialist distortions, perhaps made in good faith because of the racialist Zeitgeist, created the impression that an Aryan invasion into India had been described by the Vedic composers themselves. It thus became futile to deny the AIT.
The ensuing political abuse of the AIT by the British colonialists and even by the National-Socialists could not inspire the Indo-Europeanists to a rethink. After 1945, the “Aryan” political discourse went out of fashion in the West, but in India its political use by Christian missionaries, Ambedkarites (though not BR Ambedkar himself, an articulate opponent of the AIT), Dravidianists and Nehruvians continued. In the West this has not been noticed till today. Hilariously, the few Western scholars who have heard of the OIT at all, claim that it is “a politicized concoction”, when in fact it is their own AIT that has played a poisonous role in Indian politics all along.
The OIT started a second life in 1982, when KD Sethna published the book Karpasa (cotton), showing that cotton was common in the Harappan cities (starting 2600 BCE), and in Sanskrit writings younger than them, but not yet in the Rg-Veda. He concluded that the Rg-Veda largely predated them. This high chronology is detrimental to the AIT, which postulates an Aryan invasion (importing the Vedic language) only in the 2nd millennium.
In 1984 the US archaeologist James Shaffer showed that there is zero archaeological proof for an Aryan invasion, including a peaceful immigration. Indian archaeologists became more outspoken about their findings to the same effect. Even BB Lal, long the main archaeological supporter of the AIT, shifted to the position: “Vedic and Harappan are two sides of the same coin.” Several linguists and historians joined in, and latterly some geneticists: people of the same academic rank as any pro-AIT professors you can cite.
Until the millennium year 2000, there had been many voices doubting or plainly rejecting the AIT, and contributing many little arguments from linguistics or archaeology, all indirect evidence, but a clear alternative was lacking. Shrikant Talageri, after a preparatory book in 1993, then broke through the wall of ignorance about the enigmatic Vedic age. In The Rigveda, an Analysis, and its 2008 sequel, The Veda and the Avesta, he pioneered a convincing OIT, which should henceforth count as the OIT.
This work is, as I have been able to verify at Indo-Europeanist conferences, completely unknown in the West and also in India’s AIT camp. Whereas the mere handful of OIT thinkers know the AIT quite well and often write answers to it, the well-established AIT doesn’t really get beyond derogatory comments on the OIT and stonewalls all arguments in its favour. Around the year 2000 there was a little bit of dialogue, mostly thanks to the American scholar Edwin Bryant (the coiner of the term “OIT”), but this has remained a blip.
Today, the AIT camp is a happy valley protected from the rising waters of counter-evidence by a protective dam. But the waters keep rising, and the time can't be far off when the waters will overcome the dam and drastically impact the cosy life in the valley.
Dr. Koenraad ELST, °Leuven (Belgium) 1959, is an Oriental Philologist & Historian and a prominent old hand in the “Aryan” debate.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-18858088822536310502023-02-12T03:46:00.003-08:002023-02-12T03:46:57.718-08:00Why “Itihasa” means “history”
(India Facts, 10 Feb 2023)
Physician Pankaj Seth’s article “Myth, History, Itihaasa, and the Hindu Dilemma” (India Fact, 7 February 2023) raises the question: “So how old is the Mahabharata, or the Ramayana, or the Vedas? Does it matter that we find out? Can we really find out? Should one even think about it?” The historian’s answer to each of these questions is unambiguously yes.
Each of these texts is a human artefact. This may sound a little controversial because we have a great many scripture-thumpers who swear that at least the Vedas, but in many respects even the epics (certainly parts of them, like the Bhagavad Gita), are divine revelation standing far above history. But if we stop talking about them and start looking into them, we notice their unmistakable historicity.
Human, all too human
Their language changes, from Vedic Sanskrit evolving through successive layers of the Vedas down to the Classical Sanskrit of the epics. They relate human events like weddings, wars, and the artists’ never-ending search for patronage, all far below God’s dignity. Their technology evolves, with the Rg-Veda squarely in the Bronze Age, which archaeologists date between the mid-4th and the mid-2nd millennium BCE. The Mahabharata is centred around a chariot battle, which points to a specific historical window. The first war-ready chariots found by archaeologists hardly date beyond 2000 BCE (so a Mahabharata battle beyond 3000 BCE is out of the question), and by Roman times, chariots had become a plaything, used for entertainment in the arena. But in between we have, in the later second millennium, wars involving the Mitanni kingdom, the Hittite empire and Pharaonic Egypt fought with war chariots. Recent finds point to India as the homeland of this technology, so here it may be centuries earlier, but only a few. We are also helped by contingent discoveries like the desiccation of the Saraswati river, dated to around 1900 BCE: the Rg-Veda still knows it as a mighty river, so it must be older; while the Mahabharata has Krishna’s brother go on pilgrimage to the Saraswati rivulet’s disappearing-point, so it must be younger.
Another less-than-divine aspect of Hindu scriptures is that, like all human endeavours, they are located somewhere. It mentions elephants but no kangaroos or giraffes, and describes mountains, rivers and forests of northwestern India. In the case of the Ramayana, a debate is ongoing since the 1950s (and has recently been poked up again by Jijith Nadumuri Ravi’s book Geography of Ramayana) whether the sites usually located in South India are not more to the north, such as Kishkindha near present-day Bhopal and Lanka on an island in the Narmada river’s mouth near present-day Surat. The question is still open and we won’t decide it here, but the point is that it presupposes one specific geographical location rather than another,-- like any other human event. There is no reason why we should exempt these literary compositions from the treatment given by scholars to other books: asking where and when, as also why.
The why behind the epics is fairly clear: they have a didactic value, they want to teach through illustration certain virtues: Sita’s loyalty to her husband, Rama’s loyalty to his father and to his people, Vidura’s practical wisdom, Arjuna’s overcoming his all-too-human doubts. This they would do even if the events described in them had been pure fantasy.
But they also have a historical value, basing themselves on events that really happened in the lives of characters that really existed. Whether the whole story of Rama’s itinerary (to comply with his father’s forced promise to his youngest wife, and next to recover his own abducted wife) is historical, we don’t know for sure. These are events that have happened to many (e.g. young Genghiz Khan had to go and recover his abducted bride), so a generic narrative could arbitrarily have been applied to Rama. Then again, this is unlikely, for why would they have projected someone else’s life-story upon Rama? At any rate, Rama’s very existence can be deduced from his placement in the king-lists.
Genealogies
The king-lists? Of Egypt and Mesopotamia, no history could have been reconstructed without recourse to their king-lists, yet in the case of India, many scholars pooh-pooh these as another case of chaotic Hindu fantasizing. But no, upon scrutiny, they prove to be very consistent, interwoven with and corroborated by many other data in Hindu literature. All the prominent characters in the Vedas, the epics and e.g. also the early Buddhist sources fit neatly in these genealogies.
Inconvenient for mainstream historians is mainly how far back they go. In Egypt, pre-pharaonic kings have been mentioned (e.g. the “Scorpion king”), and in India, a similar thing happens, but far deeper into the past. The oldest ancestors mentioned in the king-lists are patriarch Manu, his daughter Ila who becomes the foremother of the Lunar dynasty (including the Rishis, the Bharata dynasty and Krishna), and his son Ikshvaku who starts the Solar dynasty (including Rama, Mahavira and the Buddha). They predate the first beginning of the Rg-Veda by dozens of generations, easily beyond 4000 BC. Historians have their work cut out for them if they care to sit down and systematize the fragments of knowledge dormant in this source.
In his introduction to this article, editor Ramesh Rao laments that Hindus are constantly told how “the accounts of our past in our epics and other texts are unreliable, a mixture of myth and hagiography”, so that the only serious sources about Indian history are those by foreigners: Arrianus (Greek), Xuan Zang (Chinese), Al-Biruni (Arabic-writing Persian). This negative comment is correct in so far that there is no clear chronological system behind Indian historiographical fragments, a remarkable weakness for a civilization that was at the forefront in so many other fields. This contrasts with the situation in China, where we know the exact date of every major event from the 9th century BCE onwards. But on the other hand, where the king-lists have only a relative but no absolute chronology, they have the merit of going back much deeper in time than any comparable source in other civilizations. No, India is not that backward.
Embellished, but facts-based
In the process of writing, the narrative was ideologically streamlined and embellished with supernatural feats, but its basis was purely historical. Indeed, it was instrumentalized as a framework for teaching Dharma and Yoga precisely because the stories about momentous events were popular and thus a good vehicle for reaching the people’s minds with any ideological message you wanted to propagate.
The 19th-century scientist skepticism among academics towards ancient narratives, as if Homer’s Troy had never existed and Jesus had never lived (still popular among India’s secularists when applied to “superstitious” Hindu scripture), is an obsolete paradigm. Now we know that Homer (ca. 700 BCE) based himself on various stories about a real war over Troy that had taken place some five centuries earlier (the heyday of chariot warfare, prominent in the Iliad). And few scholars today will deny that Jesus, of whom we may doubt that he was born from a virgin or raised from the dead, had nevertheless been a really existing wandering exorcist-healer who fancied himself the Messiah/Christ (the “anointed” crown-prince, predicted to revive king David’s throne) and died on the cross. So similarly, the Kurukshetra war really happened, though the epic report on it has grown richer and more dramatic in the endless retelling.
Even before seriously investigating Pankaj Seth’s question whether “the Mahabharata war [was] a small skirmish between two branches of a family or something bigger [that] involved people and regions beyond the immediate family fiefdom”, this basic insight into the common process of magnifying events in the retelling gives us an outline of an answer. Of course the historical core of the narrative was a more modest affair than the pan-Indian war that it has become in the final version. Thus, the involvement of the South-Indian dynasties (Chola, Chera and Pandya, non-existent at the time of the Bharata war) and of the foreign Yavanas (Ionians, known in India only since Alexander) and Chinas (used as a name for the Middle Kingdom only since the 3rd century BC) are clearly an attempt by the ultimate editors, writing centuries after the actual war, to give a pan-Indian significance and a relevance for their contemporaries to what had originally been a local affair of the Saraswati-Yamuna area.
“Itihasa”
In their book Sanskrit Untranslatables, Rajiv Malhotra and Satyanarayana Dasa Babaji make much of a difference between “itihasa” and “history”. Seth does the same: “Here we must distinguish between ‘History’ and ‘Itihaasa’. The former is the modern way and its obsessive winding the clock backwards towards some mythic t=0, some big bang, some absolute creation event. This is problematic because our origins have been being wrongly portrayed and we cannot find those origins nor identity significant markers by going this route. By contrast, Itihaasa points to ‘Satya’ as our origin and identity, and which reflects reality. So, Itihaasa, by pointing away from a merely materialist history, does a very important thing.”
We venture to disagree. This is a case of over-interpretation, of reading far too profound contents in an ordinary translation challenge that professional translators would classify as a routine matter in their trade. Malhotra and Babaji think Itihasas “also contain historical facts, but are neither merely books of history, nor tales of fantasy”. Well, is “history” any different, in the premodern age? When Herodotus coined the term in the present meaning (it originally meant “investigation, inquiry”), he too produced history that falls far short of the academic requirements in today’s History Departments (or in Indian languages: Itihasa). It contained elements that we now would call fanciful or even mythical. So the difference is not between an Indian and a Western term, but between the premodern and the modern use of both the Indian and the Western term.
“Trying to force fit historicity onto the itihaasa is to misunderstand what itihaasa means. One should not literally translate ‘it was thus’ and think/believe it refers to a material history.” Oh yes, it refers to “material” history. When, in the fourth generation after the Pandavas, sage Vaisampayana recited the brief first version of the epic (called Jaya, “Victory”), it is because he wanted to eternalize the facts of what had transpired on the Kurukshetra battlefield. It was the job of ancient poets to administer “undying fame” to their heroic employers. This is not Indian or Western, not cyclical or linear, just glory. Itihasa means Iti-ha-asa, “thus indeed it was”, and this is practically synonymous with the definition given by the 19th-century father of modern historiography, Leopold von Ranke: to reconstruct matters “as they really have been”.
It all started as a historical account, “itihasa” in the modern academic sense. As the epic got bigger, more fantastic elements were added, but also very worldly elements spawned by an evolving self-interest of the class to which the editors belonged. This distorting of history has always been an occupational hazard. Thus, we see Rama fraternizing with the tribals (“monkeys”) without being troubled by any caste taboo. But in the younger seventh book of his epic, we see the blatantly casteist episode of Shambuka getting hung around the neck of a by then already divinized Rama, clearly interpolated to give divine sanction to the newly emerging caste discriminations.
Similarly, the other epic starts with the caste-free love affair of sage Parashara and ferry-maiden Satyavati (a case of what would later be called varna-sankara, “caste-mixing”), from which the sage par excellence is born: Krishna Dvaipayana a.k.a. Veda Vyasa, the “editor of the Vedas”. Yet shortly thereafter, princess Draupadi refuses to let Karna compete for her hand because she thinks he is of low caste, clearly a later interpolation from the age of emerging casteism. These two seeming contradictions are not because of some uniquely Hindu mental property, but are very down-to-earth cases of projection of a later social concern onto ancient history. Such back-projection is bad history, it is a well-known ever-looming threat to good history, but does not put these passages outside the field of history.
Myth-making
But those all-too-human elements were not the only thing that was added. Seth correctly finds cases of “mythopoesis”, myth-making in the epics. For the people who had lived through the events, these were generally the most earth-shaking experience of their lives, so they saw them through lenses of the supernatural. The next thing they did was newly apply elements from older myths to fill gaps in the story or provide causal explanations for strange developments.
Thus, a well-known mythical motif from pre-Vedic, proto-Indo-European days is the “narrowly-failed attempt to become invulnerable”. We know it is that old because we see it also appear in branches of the language family (annex literary traditions) far removed from India, too far to be explained by borrowing. Among the Greeks, Achilles is dipped in a magic potion but is held by his heel, so there he remains vulnerable and there he later gets killed. Similarly among the Scandinavians for Baldr and for Siegfried. Now, in the Mahabharata, this same motif makes two appearances: to become invulnerable, Duryodhana appears naked before his mother, whose eyes have acquired magic power after years of wearing a blindfold, but he is prevailed upon to wear a loincloth, and in that part of his body (euphemistically his “thigh”) he later gets killed. And Krishna receives an ointment from sage Durvasa, but while applying it to his skin, he remains standing on the soles of his feet, and that is where he is later lethally pierced by an arrow. These candidly mythical motifs, originating in the imagined world of the gods, are added later to make more sense of extraordinary historical events.
We see the same in the Iliad, where for example the interactions of humans are explained as moves on a divine chessboard where the gods in a heavenly conference decide the fate of the mortals below. Likewise in the Bible, otherwise a source of remarkably good historiography for its time, we see the flood getting explained by God’s wrath. In fact this must be one of the most common mythical motifs of the ancient world: that behind dramatic storms lies the unchained wrath of a thundering Indra or other god.
This way, the historical narrative based on a report of a real war, whether Homer’s collection of hearsay stories on the Trojan war or Sanjay’s eyewitness report to the blind king Dhrtarashtra on the Kurukshetra war, gets interspersed with mythical themes. These do not belong to the realm of history but are, indeed, “something which never was but always is”, as Joseph Campbell called it. Therefore neither the Iliad nor the Mahabharata can be called history in the modern sense, though they can be analysed into an approximative history plus a subsequent overlay of mythical themes.
Down with decolonization!
Finally I would like to dissent from Seth’s “decolonizing” concern: “We should not end up turning these grand epics into historical events for it would be a kind of vandalism that I hope we grow out of, something we engage in because we are trying to prove a point to westerners. We want to project history onto ‘Itihaasa’ because we have been stung by accusations that we do not have an ‘historical consciousness’.”
The decolonization paradigm, now wildly popular, greatly exaggerates the importance of the colonial role division between the West and India. As a writer of the book Decolonizing the Hindu Mind, we confess guilt in contributing to this fashionable discourse. More than 75 years after Independence, we now think it unbecoming to pose as an adolescent rising in revolt against a colonial father who, in the real world, has long gone. Genuine freedom fighters like Ram Swarup and Sita Ram Goel achieved the real decolonization in 1947 and never spoke of India’s later problems in colonial terms. For them, from then on, India was responsible for itself. If India still gives a central role to English or follows a Constitution partly based on the British Government of India Act 1935, this is not because the British or any other outsider is imposing it on you, but because Indians have chosen it that way. Indian Nehruvians who carry an idealized West in their heads all the better to disparage the culture they try to “emancipate” themselves from.
So likewise here, the critique that the epics fall short of the exacting criteria of modern historiography, is not a problem that Westerners are inflicting on you. India today has a whole corps of professional historians trained in the historical method, and they too can discern where the epics fall short of being history. Among them, nobody will insist that the epics are to be taken as literal history (though some Sanskrit professors will affirm this much). If you insist that the historical method was developed in the West and imported into India during the colonial period, we trust that it does not form part of the colonial legacy that you feel you have to rebel against and annihilate. Nor will you dismiss Indian historians who applied the historical method, like the formidable RC Majumdar, as merely “Westernized”.
If Westerners really look down on your epics for falling short of the standards of modern history (which I doubt), or if Indians really feel inferior because of this (which is an attitude fostered by the West-oriented Nehruvians), it just shows a common misunderstanding: you are comparing apples with lemons. A Western (or indeed any) history textbook may contain a chapter on emperor Charlemagne’s campaign in Muslim-occupied Spain (ca. 800) but this will not be the epic Chanson de Roland (French: “Song of Roland”, about an officer in Charlemagne’s army), though the latter is based on (essentially) the same primary reports as the former. The West deems its own epics just as much different from history textbooks. To be sure, the standards of what counts as history-writing have improved, but that too is common between India, the West and other civilizations.
So any normally educated Westerners will not expect from the Mahabharata that it be a history book. But he may distinguish between different parts of the epic. The first and most basic one, necessary to make the addition of the others possible, is the historical core. The idea that a story like that can be pure fantasy, is a modern notion, with novelists like JRR Tolkien inventing entire histories of civilizations, while in the old days stories were (at least dimly) based on real events.
But then you have several types of later addition. The most profane is the cases of “presentism” by later editors: this projects data valid during the editors’ time onto the protagonists’ time. In reality, “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. This presentism, deemed the cardinal sin in historiography, can be a case of poor intellectual rigour, but it can also be a mendacious distortion in order to create a semblance of antiquity or of the blessings by a venerable figure like Rama or Krishna to strengthen a social institution in the editors’ own time. We have given examples of the projection of later emerging caste taboos on an older and less caste-conscious society.
A possible case could also be the projection of later technologies onto ancient events (the way medieval paintings about Jesus in Palestine unselfconsciously have the house types and landscapes in the background that are typical of the painter’s own West-European location). But in the centre of the story this is very unlikely, e.g. that the Kurukshetra warriors use horse-drawn chariots can’t be a later interpolation. A glaring example of an anachronistic interpolation is the “horoscope of Rama”. While the Vedic age had its own notions of astrology, the specific discipline of individual horoscopy was brought from Babylon into India by the Greeks in the first centuries of the Common Era. The birth chart attributed to Rama gives to the perfect man the fitting planetary positions: the planets are in “exaltation” as per the rules of Hellenistic astrology. It must have been added at the very end of the editing process, many centuries after Rama and Valmiki. That some Hindus use it to establish Rama’s birth time is tragi-comical.
The other type of addition concerns the mythical contents. These may be the fruit of the poet’s imagination, e.g. in the Ramayana the flying Vimanas (a kind of helicopter, though originally a word for tower); partly borrowed from an existing array of mythical motifs shared by the editors’ culture. The above-mentioned almost-achievement of invulnerability is one example, Arjuna’s profitable son-father relation with Indra another, Sita’s similar daughter-mother relation with the Earth yet another.
Finally, we have purely didactic additions. We all know of the insertion of the Bhagavad Gita, which after its initial motivation of Arjuna concentrates on explaining the Sankhya-Yoga philosophy. It takes the form of the oldest core of the epic, with Sanjay doing his reporting to Dhrtarashtra; this could be a device by its writer to give it more authority, but the Gita happens to be very interwoven with the rest of the text. At least this reminds us of the unavoidable problem of a chronology of all the layers of a text composed over more than a millennium. Another didactic addition is the Anugita, yet another the long explanation of the Sankhya worldview in the Shanti Parva. The epic was used as the best possible conduit for a message deemed important by its writers, since the narrative had become popular shortly after its emergence.
So…
Seth asks: “How can we respond to our critics and to those who mock us as ‘ahistorical’ nonentities?”
Answer: by telling the truth about yourself. Next to the pioneering contributions of India in geometry, calculus, astronomy, hydraulic technology etc., and its unique foundational work in linguistics, it ought not to be insurmountably difficult to practise modesty and face the fact that India was less than average in history-writing. Its clumsy history-writing nonetheless goes deeper into the past than that of any other country, which is not bad at all, but its absolutely chronology is indeed disappointingly vague. What would you want? Only Allah is perfect.
But the fact that your epics are something else than history manuals, that on top of a historical foundation they built a literary masterpiece including fanciful and mythological elements as well as profound philosophical teachings, that is not something in need of special justifications, let alone self-depreciating apologies. Arise, Arjuna!
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-50925827491549328082023-02-12T03:22:00.006-08:002023-04-04T12:39:47.293-07:00What the Rāmāyaṇa tells us about itself
(Swarajya, 6 March 2023)
We are lucky that we can devote a book review to Jijith Nadumuri Ravi’s The Geography of Ramayana. A Geographical Journey into the Rama Era (Notion, Delhi 2023), a swift sequel to his geographical analysis of an earlier scripture: Rivers of the Rg-Veda (ibidem 2022). This book draws our attention to numerous geographically or historically consequential details in the epic, which often yield unexpected information. And this, the former ISRO space scientist Nadumuri does with great rigour, contrasting with the endless wishful thinking of so many self-styled history rewriters.
Nadumuri is not the first scholar who refuses to accept the Ramayana geography that has come down to us. In the 1950s already, the skeptical Marxist DD Kosambi, followed by HD Sankalia and a string of later “rationalists”, already doubted that Rāma had ever gone that far south, certainly not as far as Rāmeśvaram or Śrī Laṅkā. But precisely because of their principled skepticism, their denial of serious value to an epic poem that had become a Hindu scripture, their criticism of the traditional reading lost some of its force. A priori, Leftists tended to dismiss the epics as little more than fantasy. In the late 19th century in Europe, the scientist vogue had similarly dismissed all ancient tradition as mere invention: Troy did not exist, the Hittites mentioned in the Bible had not existed, even Jesus had been no more than a product of fantasy. This approach was still being imitated in India in the late 20th and even in the 21st century, and praised by the secularists as a refreshing contrast to Hindu obscurantism.
The epics and real history
But in fact, this approach is quite obsolete. While the academics pooh-poohed the legend of Troy, an amateur went to excavate the site that geographically corresponded to Homer’s Troy, and he found the city. Shortly after, the Hittite language was discovered and proved to explain some names of Trojan heroes. At once, the Biblical references to a hitherto unknown Hittite people (to which e.g. Esau’s two wives belonged) also proved historical. About Jesus, no serious scholar will repeat today that he didn’t exist. That he was God’s only-begotten son, born from a virgin, resurrected from the dead, the redeemer from sin, or the Messiah (“anointed one”, the heir to king David’s throne), those are items of faith, up for discussion and doubt. But that an exorcist and purported healer roamed Palestine, that he fancied himself the Messiah, and that he died on the cross, are now generally accepted as historical facts.
So, Nadumuri takes the present text seriously. This starts with genealogical data, where he makes a productive use of the king-lists. These are another such artefact from ancient literature that Indian “rationalists” mock. However, the histories of Mesopotamia and Egypt would be nowhere but for their local king-lists. In India too, these are the most reliable part of the Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature. To explain this phrase “most reliable”, it is worth quoting Nadumuri’s unassailable assessment of the degrees of soberness versus fantasy in the different parts of Hindu literature:
“Despite being poetry, RV [Ṛg-Veda] is mostly devoid of magical narratives. RV does describe boons and curses. They cause mental discomfort. But they don’t cause any physical transformations like turning a man into an animal or such magical effects found in the Itihāsa Purāṇas. The nouns that come close to the word ‘curse’ in RV are Aghaśamsa (evil wish) and Abhiśasti (blaming). The noun Śāpa appears only in RV 10 (the 10th Maṇḍala of RV) meaning evil wish, damnation, or blaming. Vara (boon) mentioned in RV has nothing magical. It represents a general blessing like that of Indra to his worshippers. Similarly, there are no divine weapons (Divyāstras) mentioned in RV. The noun Vimāna is used to poetically describe the act of the sun moving through the sky, in the sense that it ‘measures out’ the sky. In the Vedas, the Ṛṣis aspire to live for 100 years considering it as a very long life. The Purāṇic poets describe people as living for 1000s of years.” (p.29)
Many Hindu readers will be curious as to what this no-nonsense historian makes of the Vimāna, so often cited as proof of how their ancestors already had helicopters; so we will let you share in Nadumuri’s insights: “Vimāna – a vehicle that can fly in the sky based on the will of the rider -- could be a Poetic Imagination of Vālmīki himself. The imagination of flight is very ancient in human pre history, in all the cultures across the globe. Vimāna originally meant the tall towers of the cities. They contain balconies where people can stand and watch the ground from an elevation. If Vālmīki were to stand inside one of them, it could trigger the feeling that the static Vimāna is somehow flying in the sky, carrying the people standing inside them.” (p.31) He analyses the occurrences of Vimānas more closely (p.359) and concludes that in those cases where they are flying vehicles, this has all the characteristics of poetic imagination. “The concept of a flying Vimāna that can go to any place based on the will of the person using it, was thus born in the mind of the poet. This is the world’s first science-fiction.” (p.67)
Rāma and Śantanu
We see history shade over from mostly sober and factual in the Vedas to a more embellished and sometimes purely fantasized form in the Itihāsa-Purāṇas. Yet, the part that was least tampered with, that was learned by heart and arguably formed the first reason for composing quasi-historical literature, were the king-lists. We skip the flood of light that Nadumuri throws upon the genealogical information in the early Veda and the later Mahābhārata, and focus on his startling coordination of the Rāmāyaṇa with the Vedas’ end and the Mahābhārata’s beginning.
As year of the Mahābhārata battle Nadumuri takes 1783, the time calculated by Ashok Bhatnagar on astronomical grounds, and he correlates this with newer archaeological findings of Ochre Coloured Pottery (with newly-appearing hoards of weapons), certified by the Archaeological Survey of India to date to the 18th century BC, and with the known timing of the Sarasvatī’s desiccation. He thus rejects oft-cited traditionalist dates like 3139 BC, or other dates thereabouts or even millennia earlier. The great-grandfather of the Kaurava and Pāndava warriors is Śantanu. His stepson is Kṛṣṇa Dvaipayana who becomes the final editor of the Veda-TrayĪ, hence nicknamed Veda-Vyāsa. This Vyāsa is also the sperm donor who stands in for his early-deceased half-brother VicitravĪrya in order to father upon the latter’s widows the sons Dhrtarāṣṭra and Paṇḍu, thus becoming the grandfather of the Kauravas c.q. the Pāṇḍavas. The Vedas seem to confirm this historical placement of Vyāsa: his stepfather Śantanu is the last human being mentioned in the Ṛg-Veda, his biological son Dhrtarāṣṭra the last person mentioned in the Yajur-Veda. (The Atharva-Veda took a few generations longer, with Arjuṇa’s grandson Parīkṣit, or Vyāsa great-great-grandson, as the youngest person mentioned.)
Nadumuri teaches his Hindu readers to candidly read the historical parts of the Vedas as an account of what really happened, and to outgrow the tendency to cramped literalism that too many Hindus have come to accept as a condition of proper piety before Scripture. Thus, it is commonly believed that the Parāśara who was with his grandfather Vasiṣṭha in the early-Vedic Battle of the Ten Kings was the same man who sired Vyāsa: Vasiṣṭha sired Śakti sired Parāśara sired Vyāsa, which would mean that the dozens of generations between the early Ṛg-Veda and its final editing get reduced to just four generations. So more realistically, the Vasiṣṭha (and similarly Bharadvāja and Viśvāmitra) who is part of Rāma’s life is a descendant of but not identical with the early-Vedic sage of that name. No:
“The Early-RV Vasiṣṭha (the priest of Sudās), Śatayātu and Parāśara are mentioned as the witnesses of the Dāśarājña Battle (7.18.21). As per RV Anukramaṇi, Śakti composed the hymn RV 7.32. (…) These Vasiṣṭha, Śakti and Parāśara belonged to Early-RV. The Late-RV Vasiṣṭha composed many hymns in RV 9 & 10. The Late-RV Śakti composed the hymns RV 9.97 and RV 9.108. The hymn RV 9.97 was jointly composed by his son Parāśara Śāktya. Śakti’s descendent Gaurivīti Śāktya composed RV 10.73 and RV 10.74. Thus, there were individuals by the name Vasiṣṭha, Śakti and Parāśara in Late-RV too. The Vasiṣṭha and Śakti of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and the MBh were Late-RV and different from the Early-RV ancestors. The Late-RV Vasiṣṭha is contemporary to Aja. Vasiṣṭha’s son Śakti is contemporary to Aja’s son Daśaratha. Śakti’s son Parāśara is contemporary to Rāma and hence also to Śantanu. Parāśara’s son Vyāsa is contemporary to Rāma’s son Lava and also to Śantanu’s son Vicitravīrya. This perfectly matches with the chronology of MBh.” (p.403)
Alright, that was a long run-up before coming to our points. Firstly, according to Nadumuri, Rāma is the same person as the Rāma mentioned as a mighty one among the sponsors in RV 10:93:14, so in the very last stage of the RV. It already stood to reason that Rāma belonged somewhere in the long Vedic age, but this specification toward its very last phase is somewhat surprising. Equally surprising is that he would be mentioned in the Ṛg-Veda at all. While Nadumuri casts doubt on the assumption that Ayodhyā had been the Solar Dynasty’s ancestral home, pointing to several shifts of the capital (though possibly with retention of the city’s name), one even only some two generations before Rāma, he confirms that Rāma himself was born in the Ayodhyā that is now in eastern Uttar Pradesh, hundreds of miles from the Vedic area.
It was a common assumption that the Solar and Lunar worlds were quite separate, but here Nadumuri reminds us of serious overlaps. The Rāmāyaṇa’s geographical horizon stretches as far west as Kekaya in western Panjab, west of the Vedic area. Conversely, as described in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, it was already in the mid-Vedic period that some Vedic priests took a leadership role in exploring the east up to Videha, east of the Sadānīrā river (i.e. in northwestern Bihar), taking the fire cult that far but also using the fire materially to clear forests and thus make way for fields and meadows. They made swampy lands cultivable, the way the Christian monks would do some 3000 year later in this reviewer’s own region, the Low Countries. And this was all to the east of Ayodhyā. So, it is not proven but actually quite plausible that Rāma as a king in the powerful Solar dynasty finds mention among the patrons of the Vedic tradition.
And secondly, the aforementioned Śantanu, who flourished in the early 19th century BC, was contemporary with Rāma. While the exact place of Rāma’s birth has raised enough controversy, his date of birth has only been the object of some rival hypotheses but with no real conflict ensuing. Nadumuri proposes an estimate of 1920 BC. (p.35) Both come a few generations after the Bhārata king Kuru for whom his Kaurava descendants were so named: Śantanu because he was his descendant, Rāma because he visited the region Kurujaṅgala (“Kuru’s jungle”) named after the patriarch.
A date of ca. 1900 BC is as yet unsupported by excavations, but only narrowly: “Archaeology has reported sites as old as 1750 BCE in Ayodhyā. The archaeological gap between 1900 BCE to 1750 BCE is very short. It may get resolved in the future.” Archaeological dating is inherently uncertain, as a new discovery may suddenly change the picture. On the other hand, if Ayodhyā was still a new city at the time of Rāma’s birth (as Nadumuri will argue, cf. infra), and 1750 BC proves to be a correct archaeology-based estimate for the founding of the city, Rāma may have lived in the late 17th century BC. And if Śantanu did likewise, his great-grandsons may have waged the Mahābhārata battle in 1504 or 1478,-- the next astronomy-based dates proposed for it, viz. by Krishna Kumar c.q. RN Iyengar. The jury is still out on the exact year, but on the basis of the king-list information that Mahāpadma Nanda’s coronation (4th century BC) came 1015 to 1500 year after Parīkṣit’s birth (which was less than a year after the battle), we must at any rate look between the 19th and the 14th century BC.
The world ages
This means Rāma belonged to the final stratum of the Ṛg-Veda, and came three generations earlier than the Kauravas, Pāṇḍavas and Kṛṣṇa. That the Rāma narrative was older than the war of succession in the Bhārata dynasty is generally known; only a handful of Western scholars, a few decades ago already, wanted to reverse the order. But few would have expected them to be that close.
For the believers in a precisely-timed scheme of four world ages, it must be especially disappointing. In their “tradition” (actually hardly older than 500 AD), Rāma is the Tretā kā Thākur, the lord of the Tretā Yuga, while Kṛṣṇa’s death marks the end of the Dvāpara Yuga. This means the Dvāpara Yuga stretches over less than three generations, rather than the traditional thousands of years. Then again, Nadumuri later (p.393) also considers indications that, contrary to these indications, Rāma partly belonged to the Dvāpara Yuga; but that would still add only one generation to this hopelessly short Dvāpara Yuga. Well, all this doesn’t matter much once we realize the recentness and artificiality of the usual temporal scheme of the Yugas. While a scheme of four world ages already existed in the pre-Vedic time of Proto-Indo-European unity (hence its reappearance in Greek and Germanic mythology, viz. as Golden-Silver-Bronze-Iron Age c.q. Spear-Sword-Wind-Wolf Age), it was never linked to specific time periods.
This link appeared when the precession cycle of 25,772 years, approximated as 24,000 years, had been discovered (Hipparchus, 127 BC), providing a uniquely long cosmic cycle. It took several centuries before this knowledge, transmitted by the Indo-Greeks, had taken root in India. The next step was that the world ages were now seen as fractions of half of this cycle, in a proportion of 1:2:3:4. This arbitrary but reasonably-proportioned division was ascribed to sage Mārkāṇḍeya. In a next move, these figures were multiplied by 360, apparently out of awe for things heavenly (equating a year for men with a day for the gods), yielding the Purāṇic figures of 432,000 years and its multiples. These form an example of an “invented tradition”, a fairly recent tradition that is falsely projected back into the deep past. But if we go back to reality, these figures don’t matter, and the time-span from Rāma to Kṛṣṇa can really have been much shorter.
Ayodhyā: now you see it, now you don’t
Next, and for most of the book, Nadumuri explores the geographical detail in descriptions of which direction Rāma or Hanumān went in a certain phase of their itineraries, or how many yojanas (of which the length is disputed, but Nadumuri gives an informed guess) they covered. The first question, much highlighted in the Ayodhyā controversy, is: but was this really Rāma’s birthplace? About that, he finds no reason for doubt, but just a few generations earlier as well as later, the situation was more complicated. In the very beginning of his Rāmāyaṇa (Bāla Kāṇḍa, sarga 5-6), Vālmīki describes Daśaratha’s Ayodhyā as well as his ancestor Sagara’s Ayodhyā, and: “Sagara’s Ayodhyā was different from Daśaratha’s Ayodhyā.” (p.55).
The Solar dynasty’s capital was moved yet again just after Rāma’s death: “The probable reason for [Rāma’s twin sons] Kuśa and Lava abandoning Ayodhyā is because the Sarayū river flooded Ayodhyā. Probably the same flood ended the life of Rāma and Bharata, and perhaps also of Lakṣmaṇa. This fact is shrouded in Poetic Imagination as follows:-- Rāma, Bhārata and every citizen of Ayodhyā entered Sarayū to end their life!! The poet did capture a bit of the reality. He noted that the river Sarayū flowed in a westward direction (7.100.1). The normal direction of the flow of the river near Ayodhyā is to the east. The river made a westward turn, causing the flood that destroyed Ayodhyā.” (p.410-411)
As a consequence, the city temporarily becomes a ghost town without inhabitants nor historical importance: “Ayodhyā was missing when Śantanu’s son Bhīṣma and grandson Pāṇḍu rose to prominence. Kāśī was then a great city of Kosala. Hence, Bhīṣma chose the princesses of Kāśī as brides for his brother Vicitravīrya. They were addressed as Kausalyā (the princesses of Kosala). Ayodhyā did not feature in the military expedition of Pāṇḍu. Probably, it was being rebuilt then. The rebuilt Ayodhyā was featured in the military expedition of Pāṇḍu’s son Bhīma. It was then ruled by a king named Dīrghaprajña. Duryodhana’s son was named Lakṣmaṇa. His mother seems to be from Kosala. This was why the Kosala king Bṛhadbala sided with Duryodhana in the Kurukṣetra War. Bṛhadbala was a descendant of Kuśa. He wasn’t ruling from Ayodhyā. Bṛhadbala was killed by Arjuṇa’s son Abhimanyu in the Kurukṣetra War.” (p.419)
At any rate, the house of Rāma and the Bhārata dynasty met in combat on the Kurukṣetra battlefield.
Incarnation of Viṣṇu
After having argued that Śantanu and Rāma are contemporaneous, on p.134 Nadumuri adds a third important person to the same time bracket: Rāma the son of Jamadagni , a sage of the late Ṛg-Veda, and descendant of Bhṛgu. The Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature has popularized him as Paraśu-Rāma, “Rāma with the Axe”. (According to Shrikant Talageri, this is a corruption of the by then forgotten ethnonym Parśu, an Ānava subtribe that ended up fleeing India and becoming the Persians.) Being as old as Śantanu, he naturally became the teacher of the latter’s first son, Bhīṣma, and played a role in both epics.
This creates a problem for devout Vaiṣṇavas though. How could Rāma Jāmadāgnya be contemporaneous with Rāma Dāśaratha, yet both be incarnations of Viṣṇu? Modern reincarnation researchers might point to the fact that outside India, other conceptions of reincarnation exist, e.g. a native chieftain in Canada announced on his deathbed that he would reincarnate in a number of children, and some years later, several children did indeed report memories of having been that one chieftain. But it seems to us that a better way out of this dilemma is to take to the doctrine of divine incarnations, the Avatāravāda, less literally.
Being an incarnation of a god is just a manner of speaking. It means that a deceased mortal, when you oversee his life, has played the same role in the world that the deity plays in mythology, e.g. upholding Dharma in society replicates Viṣṇu’s role as Maintainer. It is one specific, deity-oriented form of a more general form of apotheosis, “elevation to godhood” (in Semitic Širk, “associating [a mortal with the divine]”, which became the Islamic term for “idolatry”). As Nadumuri explains: “Usually, the route to deification in Sanātana Dharma is the elevated consciousness of the individual and their antiquity. Many ancestors -- among them many Gurus, warriors, kings, and queens -- are deified and worshipped as divinities”. (p.23)
In this case, it should be understood that Rāma’s (or others’) status of incarnation of Viṣṇu was not an original part of his persona: “the core of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa is closer to RV. The remapping of Rāma as the Avatāra of Viṣṇu was a later development. Viṣṇu became a prominent divinity in the Purāṇic Period.” (p.22) This is yet another “invented tradition”, here a post-Rāma claim on Rāma, one that in this case managed to penetrate by interpolation the peripheral parts of the epic.
The geography
We have not given away any detail about the main topic of the book, elaborated so painstakingly, taking into account every single passage of the epic, by Jijith Nadumuri Ravi. Let us at least disclose that he nowhere finds Rāma or other protagonists crossing the Narmāda river. To make a very long argumentation short: while the location of Ayodhyā or nearby Citrakūṭa remains uncontroversial, his farther journey takes him into more uncertain territory: Kiṣkindhā was not in Hampi, and Laṅkā was not Śrī Laṅkā.
According to Nadumuri, the Rāmāyaṇa contains “not a single reference of Rāma ever crossing the river Narmadā! (…) This upsets the traditionally popular locations of Kiṣkindhā and Laṅkā. Kiṣkindhā is popularly identified with Hampi in Karnataka. (…) Laṅkā is popularly identified with Srilanka. However, despite these deep-rooted notions in the psyche of the believers, archaeology has found no trace of evidence for any urban culture in Srilanka during Rāma-Era. Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa describes Laṅkā city as having a Harappan-style urban culture. (…) we identified Laṅkā with the Bhagatrav island in the mouth of Narmadā where it joins the sea. (…) It matched perfectly with the prosperous city of Laṅkā.”
If you want to voice objections to this daring application of the scientific temper to a religious classic, at least go buy and read the book first, so you come to know what exactly it is that you want to object to. And if you just want to know the historical hard data underlying a fascinating epic, this book is the best you’ll find in a long time. It avoids the conventionalism of the textbooks but also the enthusiastic flights of the imagination so badly affecting the self-styled history rewriters.
Jijith Nadumuri Ravi: Geography of the Ramayana, Notion Publ., Delhi 2023.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-39417810488729230932023-02-12T03:22:00.005-08:002023-02-12T03:22:42.785-08:00Vedic chronology vs. the Aryan Immigration Theory(read at WAVES, 23 Dec. 2022)
Every textbook chapter or introductory article about the Vedas starts with a matter-of-fact statement about their chronology: that they started to be composed shortly after the Aryan immigration (violent or otherwise), dated around 1500 BCE. Scholars working on other aspects of Vedic literature, esp. its philosophical contents, derive their datings from it, e.g. “Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (800 BC)” is a plausible dating on condition that post-1500 BC for the start of the Ṛg-Veda and ca. 500 BC for the Buddha are assumed.
Edwin Bryant devotes a chapter to the problem of the date of the Ṛg-Veda, which remains non-committal, but he states its importance well. The Vedic Indo-Aryan contains (surprisingly few) loans from Dravidian and Munda, which are always cited as proof that these must have been picked up after an immigration into India. However:
“The various attempts made to date Sanskrit texts (the Veda) are examined in the context that if the Ŗgveda (the earliest of the texts) is at least a millennium older than its commonly accepted date, then the possibility of Dravidian and/or Munda and/or unknown linguistic influences on Vedic Sanskrit being the result of the speakers of these languages intruding on an Indo-Aryan-speaking area after the other languages had already left, as opposed to vice versa, becomes a much more serious consideration. Moreover, the relationship between Vedic and Proto-Indo-European would need to be reconsidered, and any proposal associating the overland trajectory of the Indo-Aryans with the Andronovo culture, a southern Iranian route, or any Post-Harappan culture in the subcontinent, loses value. For these and other reasons, a much older date for the Veda is foundational to the Indigenous Aryanist position; if by contrast, the oldest strata of the Ŗgveda cannot be far removed from the conventionally accepted date of 1200 or 1500 B.C.E., then the Indigenous Aryanist case loses cogency.” (Bryant: 2001:238)
The recent commotion about an alleged genetic proof of the Aryan Invasion Theory (or as some nowadays squeamishly insist, Aryan Immigration Theory, abbreviated either way as AIT) is also based on this common chronology. David Reich (2018) from Harvard has argued, and Indian Invasionist journalists like Tony Joseph (2017, 2018) have vulgarized his position, that a genetically identifiable influx into India from Central Asia and Eastern Europe took place between -2000 and -1500. Though Indian geneticists like AL Chavda (2017), Premendra Priyadarshi (2017) and Niraj Rai (2022) have argued against this, we think opponents of the AIT shouldn’t mind it because the deduction of the AIT from Reich’s findings totally depends on the vulnerable conventional chronology. If the Ṛg-Veda and therefore the presence of the Sanskrit branch of Indo-European in India predates -2000, Reich’s influx can be something like the later Scythian, Huna or Turkic invasions that left no linguistic traces, but not the fabled “Aryan” invasion that brought Sanskrit into India.
Determining the date, conventionally
According to the on-line Encyclopedia Britannica, entry “Rigveda” (consulted 15 January 2023), “No definite date can be ascribed to the composition of the Vedas, but the period of about 1500–1200 BCE is acceptable to most scholars.” An implied date for the Brahmanas at ca. -900 is also deduced. So, note that this date is deemed “acceptable”, but an evidential basis for it is lacking.
So where does this conventional chronology come from? How do they know that the Vedas were composed from ca. 1500 onwards? The estimate was made by Friedrich Max Müller in the late 19th century, but it was not based on some corresponding C-14-dated archaeological discovery (this technology did not exist yet), nor on a synchronism with an already-dated other text (where are those equally old texts?). Therefore, in his own day, Max Müller was challenged by fellow Orientalists to show the factual basis of this estimate. His own pupil Moriz Winternitz objected that the entire evolution from the early Ṛg-Veda to the Buddha was too variegated and rich to be compressed in a few centuries.
The end of it was that Max Müller threw his hands up in the air and conceded that he really didn’t know. In a bout of unnecessary pessimism, he even said that we would never know. But that was in the context of a quarrel between a handful of specialists. For the larger informed public, his estimate had already become Gospel because of his eminence. He was the Oxford-based dean of Orientalism and the editor of the Sacred Books of the East, a series of translations of philosophical and spiritual classics from the Orient. This constituted a cultural revolution, a second Renaissance, because it gave numerous philosophers and artists, as well as their audience, access to the fabled wisdom of the East. This gave his estimate an authority that would prove difficult to challenge.
Indian estimates
In India, more ambitious chronologies are extant. Attempts to date the Vedas are few, probably because of the common though unhistorical belief that they are timeless and uncreated. But an important implied chronology of the Vedas follows from the dating of the Mahābhārata, which started shortly after the Vedas reached completion. The connection between the two is the person of Kṛṣṇa Dvaipayana, better known as Veda-Vyāsa. The tradition that he edited the Vedas (or at least the Veda-trayī, i.e. minus the Atharva-Veda) and that he was the biological grandfather of the epic’s main protagonists, clearly has a historical core: the last person mentioned in the Ṛg-Veda is his stepfather Śantanu, the last in the Yajur-Veda his son Dhṛtarāṣṭra, both older participants in the epic drama. So, the completion of the Vedas narrowly predates the start of the epic. (The Atharva-Veda still manages to name Arjuṇa’s grandson Parīkṣit, sired during the battle.)
The Mahābhārata’s core, the Kurukṣetra battle between two branches of the Bhārata dynasty, is usually taken to have happened 37 years before protagonist Kṛṣṇa’s death, with the latter dated to 3102 BC and equated to the beginning of the Kali Yuga; so in 3139. The first to come up with this chronology, at least implicitly, is the scientist Āryabhaṭa ca. 500 AD, and shortly thereafter it makes its first public appearance in the Aihole inscription. It has no basis in any prior work, not even in the Mahābhārata itself. (It is thus a case of an “invented tradition”, a term coined by the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm ca. 1980 and meaning a tradition of relatively recent vintage that falsely passes as ancient.) We will therefore not be surprised when it transpires to be untenable.
A wilder but now popular variation is Nilesh Oak’s thesis (2015) that the battle took place in 5561 BC. For the reasons that follow, we cannot accept such an early dating.
Also, many cite Narahari Achar (2012)’s dating of astronomical events, mostly eclipses, mentioned in the Vedas and the Mahābhārata, taken to yield -3067 for the Kurukṣetra battle and therefore even earlier for the Vedas. However, as Talageri (2017:5) shows, these data can at best yield a relative chronology, but refer to too ordinary a phenomenon, too frequently occurring, to be of much use in absolute chronology. Only an extremely precise description of location, time and astronomical characteristics would allow us to determine an absolute date, but the epic and certainly the Vedic hymns don’t provide that.
But Talageri is too swift in rejecting this type of evidence altogether. There is one central astrofact in the epic that does provide an imprecise but decisive date, and will do likewise for the Vedas. It does this thanks to its use of the largest hand on the Sun-Earth system’s clock, the precession cycle that has the constellations move vis-à-vis the seasons at the rate of some 71 years per degree of arc, or 25772 years, to come full circle (probably discovered by Hipparchus of Nicea, working in Alexandria, ca. -127). These indications are unambiguous and easy to handle: ancient astronomical knowledge not being very sophisticated yet, even philologists without scientific training could decipher them. If a star is described as lying on the solstitial or equinoctial axis, this means a datable moment in the cycle which won’t come back for thousands of years.
Bhīṣma on his deathbed manages to postpone his death until the asterism Māgha (meaning the asterism marked by the Maghā or Regulus), which he specifies falls after the Uttarāyaṇa or Winter Solstice. Now, the star Maghā/Regulus falls practically at the beginning of this asterism and must have passed the solstice, but Bhīṣma waits till the eighth day after the month’s beginning to breathe his last (Bhīśmāṣṭamī). The principal star Regulus itself passed the solstitial axis precessionally in the -23rd century. Seven days corresponds to a precessional 500 years, so this yields the 18th century, or up to a few centuries later depending on whether Regulus had already passed the solstice by a few degrees.
We know therefore that the Kurukṣetra battle fell at least later than the -23rd century, and normally not earlier than the -18th century, such as the 1783 date argued for by Bhatnagar (…) and Ravi (2023), or -1504 preferred by … (),. For the present purpose we won’t follow the attempts at a higher precision but remain satisfied that it must be in the earlier -2nd millennium. This implies that the Vedic period ended very early in the -2nd millennium, which happens to coincide with the general social disintegration following the archaeologically attested desiccation of the Sarasvatī river. And the Vedic data will confirm this.
Vedic astrodata
The really useful astronomical data in the Vedas are only a few, but they are rather precise and entirely consistent, i.e. they never conflict with the internal chronology of the texts. The later Vedas and the Brāhmaṇas, decidedly a younger corpus than the Ṛg-Veda, contain several references to the Pleiades/Krttika on the Equinoctial axis: Atharva-Veda 19:7, Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4:4:10, Maitrāyaṇi Saṁhitā 2:13:20, Kathaka Saṁhitā 39:13, Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 2:1:2:3. This position is sharp in ca. -2250, but the then status of this asterism as the Zodiac’s number one must have lasted until its full replacement in the equinoctial zone by the next one, though. It may thus be taken to remain valid till roughly -1700, lower than -2250 but still centuries too high for the Max-Müllerian or AIT-based chronology.
The Kauśītaki Brāhmaṇa (19:37, discussed in Dash 2009:47-48) has the star Maghā/Regulus on the solstitial axis; this happened last in ca. -2250. This is mentioned in Keith and MacDonnell’s Vedic Index (entry Nakṣatra), a book that every Indologist has gone through as a student. And yet, like those writers, they all overlook this explicit dating in the source text, preferring the book’s shockingly cavalier interpretation: -800 to -600, or no less than 1500 years later. This text is late-Vedic, so if this stellar event falls in -800, it leaves enough time for the Aryans to enter India as per the AIT and first compose the Vedic hymns. Only, that is not what the text says: rather, it points this late-Vedic text to -2300, with the central Vedic Family Books implicitly dated even centuries earlier. Hock (1999:166-167) points out that the ritual described there can still be performed a month later; if the star were to move an equivalent space of some 30°, it would make a difference of more than two thousand years – even later than the AIT would imply. But again, that is not what the text says: while the time of the ritual can fluctuate, the stellar position is very definite.
Even the post-Vedic astronomical manual Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa dates itself clearly, and moreover in two different ways: the asterism Dhaniṣṭha occupies the solstice (same position, and hence similar date, in the Maitrāyanīya Brāhmaṇa Upaniṣad 6:14), the asterism Bharaṇī the equinox. This points to the -14th century, when the AIT hardly has the Ṛg-Veda being composed. The same dating is given by another astronomical work, only recently reconstructed and translated: the Parāśara Tantra (Iyengar 2013).
These data all point to a higher Vedic chronology, with the Ṛg-Veda minus its later 10th book predating the 23rd century BC, and the 10th book plus the Yajur-Veda and some of the Brāhmaṇas around 2000 BC. This roughly agrees with an earlier astronomy-based estimate by Sen 1974 to between -3500 and -2000. This is compatible with a Vedic Harappa scenario but incompatible with the AIT.
The higher chronology is confirmed by a number of archaeological data, e.g. the discovery of the Sinauli spoked-wheeled horse-drawn chariots ca. -2000 matches the mention of these chariots in specifically the Ṛg-Veda’s tenth book, whereas the older books only mention slow ox-drawn carts (Talageri 2019). That it pushes much of the Ṛg-Veda beyond the urbanization of Harappa ca. 2600 BC also matches the estimate by KD Sethna (1982), with cotton being widely attested in the Harappan cities but not in the Ṛg-Veda yet. This also answers the invasionist objection that the Ṛg-Veda can’t be Harappan because it’s more primitive: is mostly predates the Harappan cities.
Conclusion
In contrast with this sober and consistent astronomical case for a higher chronology, there simply isn’t any astronomical information at all that specifically supports the standard Max-Müllerian AIT-friendly chronology. We don’t expect ancient civilizations to be 100 % right on any scientific subject, but 100 % wrong must also be rare; yet the AIT implies the discovery of one such case. Reconciling the astronomical data with the AIT chronology would require lots of special pleading (which has hardly even been tried because most invasionists don’t realize the problem). It is far more logical and parsimonious to posit a higher chronology, with the Ṛg-Veda in the 3rd and even 4th millennium.
Bibliography
Achar, BN, 2012: ‘Chronology of Vedic Rshis’, Vedic Venues, No. 1, Delhi.
Agarwal, Vishal, 2005. ‘On Perceiving Aryan Migrations in Vedic Ritual Texts’, Puratattva (Bulletin of the Indian Archaeological Society), Delhi, No. 36, 2005–06, pp. 155–165.
Bhatnagar, Ashok, 2017. “Date of Mahabharata War Based on Astronomical References? A Reassessment.” Indian Journal of History of Science 52(4) (2017): 369-394.
Bronkhorst, Johannes, and Deshpande, Madhav, eds. 1999: Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia. Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology, Harvard, Cambridge MA.
Bryant, Edwin, 2003: The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate, New York: Oxford University Press.
Chavda, Abhijit, 2017: ‘Propagandizing the Aryan Invasion Debate: A Rebuttal to Tony Joseph’, IndiaFacts, 22 June 2017.
Dash, Siniruddha, 2009: Facets of Indian Astronomy, Rashtriya Sanskrit University, Tirupati.
Iyengar, RN, 2013, tra.: Parāśara Tantra. Ancient Sanskrit Text on Astronomy and Natural Science (Reconstructed Text with Translation and Notes), Jain University Press.
Joseph, Tony, 2017: ‘How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate’, The Hindu, 16 June 2017.
--, 2018: Early Indians: the Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, Juggernaut Publ.
MacDonell, Arthur, and Keith, Arthur, 1912: Vedic Index of Names and Subjects, Murray, London.
Oak Nilesh, 2015: When Did the Mahabharata War Happen? The Mystery of Arundhati,
Priyadarshi, Premendra, 2017: ‘ANI, ASI, R1A, and Indian Ancestral Heritage’, on blogsite aryaninvasionmyth.wordpress.com, 25 June 2017.
Rai, Niraj, 2022: “India’s Genetic History”, interview to Abhijit Chavda, Youtube, January 2022.
Ravi, Jijith Nadumuri, 2022: Rivers of Ṛgveda, a Geographical Exploration, Notion Press
--, 2023: Geography of Ramayana, Notion Press.
Reich, David, 2018: Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past, Random House, New York.
Sen, Umapada, 1974: The Rig Vedic Era, Sumitra Sen, Kolkata.
Sethna, KD, 1982: Karpasa in Prehistoric India, Biblia Impex, Delhi.
Talageri, Shrikant, 9 Dec. 2017: ‘The Use of “Astronomical” Evidence in Dating The Rigveda and The Vedic Period’, talageri.blogspot.com.
--, 2019: Genetics & the Aryan Debate: “Early Indians”, Tony Joseph’s Latest Assault, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-54106680458361553722023-02-12T03:11:00.000-08:002023-02-12T03:11:37.835-08:00Negationism, the concept
(Foreword to Prof. Em. Aruna Sinha's book *Itihās mė Nakārvād, Kyā, Kyõ aur Kaise?*, Ashir Publ., Delhi 2023)
Negationism as a word is based on the French term négationnisme, coined by social scientist Henry Rousso in 1987. It means “denial of historical facts”, specifically of the Holocaust, but also of other genocides. Let us first explain the concept’s career in Europe.
In France the term has mostly been directed against the Association des Anciens Amateurs de Récits de Guerres et d’Holocaustes (AAARGH, Association of Ancient Amateurs of Stories of Wars and Holocausts), a group around literary historian Robert Faurisson, including both rightist and leftist deniers of the Jewish Holocaust (1941-44) as well as of several other genocides with high visibility in French public opinion, notably Armenian (1915-18) and Cambodian (1975-78).
Faurisson, a specialist of the many forged pseudo-ancient narratives produced during the Romantic period to give a country a glorious past depicted in an epic of its own, like Ossian for Scotland or the Ura Linda Book for Frisia, started his negationist career with the claim that the Diary of Anne Frank was -- you guessed it -- ²a forgery. Anne Frank was a Dutch-Jewish girl who absconded from the Nazis (that’s the period covered by her diary), then was caught and taken to Auschwitz, then in the sight of the Red Army’s advance evacuated westwards to Bergen-Belsen, and there died of typhus.
In fact the standard version of what happened to Anne Frank’s family ought to have been welcomed by the Holocaust deniers, for none of them was gassed or otherwise killed: her father survived the war, staying in Auschwitz till the end, while his wife and two daughters died of disease. In fact this doesn't really prove anything extraordinary: it can perfectly be explained by the timing. This happened at the end of the war, when the Nazis were deliberately winding up their extermination project and concentrated on destroying the evidence (but negationists will keep that explanatory circumstance out of view), and when shortages of medicines and disinfectants because of logistics breakdowns made the outbreak of diseases uncontrollable.
Faurisson wanted to take it a step further, though: he denied the veracity of the diary. It was the girl’s father who, after his return in 1945 to Amsterdam, had edited the diary before publishing it, and he had left out some passages he deemed inconvenient, especially about the sexual awakening of his pubescent daughter. Even so, this petty fault-finding left the girl’s report about the persecution of the Jews entirely unchallenged. This will remain a common scenario in the negationist movement: focusing on marginal elements that are convenient and obscuring what proves the genocide. This is not uncommon among polemicists defending any cause, but the grimness of the case makes it more serious here.
Story of negationism
It is also in France that negationism as a movement took off. In 1948 its pioneer Maurice Bardèche still accepted that a systematic extermination of the Jewish people by the German National-Socialist regime had taken place. He only contrasted it with false claims by the erstwhile French Résistance that the French people as such had also been earmarked for extermination. He himself had been a Résistance fighter, but had been arrested by the Germans to spend the rest of the war in Buchenwald concentration camp. There he had not seen those fabled gas chambers that everybody post-war talked about. Extrapolating from his own experience, he questioned the existence of gas chambers anywhere, and evolving from there, he ended up questioning the attempt at extermination of the Jews as such.
When in 1961 the historian Raul Hilberg published the first scholarly study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews, he countered it with arguments that were to become classics of Holocaust denial. Thus, he explained the disappearance of so many Jews from the population figures as the consequence of a large pre-war Jewish emigration to the Americas. But such a scenario would have left a large paper trail of visa proceedings, a peak in house sales in Germany and Poland, a peak in house purchases in the US or Argentina, etc. As a mere amateur in history, at a time when coming by these foreign documents was a lot harder than today, he may be forgiven for not finding them, but in the decades since, no one else has found them either, though the same argument has been endlessly repeated.
“Liars”
It is often said that the negationists are liars. While it is not unthinkable that some anti-Semite purposely fabricates arguments for the falsity of the Holocaust narrative in order to accuse the Jews of a false victimhood narrative thought up in order to “blackmail” the Gentiles, on the whole this is very unlikely. Given the enormous social and professional cost you can expect to pay if you out yourself as a negationist, no one will accept this burden for a belief he considers untrue. Only those with a heartfelt belief in the non-existence of an extermination plan are going to express that conviction in public. Far more than lies, it is wishful thinking that explains negationism.
In particular, Germans and sympathizers with the German war generation (e.g. because most people take a liking to underdogs and losers), would prefer them not to be guilty of the Holocaust. Because of this bias, they become receptive to any argument that brings this version of the facts closer. Thus, the German-born Canadian Ernst Zündel based his negationist discourse on an unconcealed sympathy for the Nazis, as expressed in his co-authored book (with Eric Thomson) The Hitler We Loved and Why (2004).
Some deniers closely study the historical facts (in knowledge of details they often trump the mainstream historians) thinking that this can only strengthen their argument, but then find that the facts turn out to support the case for the Holocaust. Thus, in the 1960s the British self-taught historian David Irving gained himself a reputation as a connoisseur of pertinent German primary sources, then started asserting a negationist view of the genocide in the 1990s (the high tide of Holocaust denial), but twenty years later his study of SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s diary and other confidential sources threw up a privileged testimony of how the SS had organized that very genocide he had earlier denied. Once the most authoritative denier, at the end of his life he ended up providing the most compelling evidence (from the horse’s mouth) in favour of the Holocaust.
Similarly his friend David Cole from California, whose critique of the sweeping use of Auschwitz as the proverbial extermination camp had angered many of his fellow Jews, nowadays lambasts the remaining negationists. He affirms the reality of two of the three pillars of the Holocaust, viz. the killings of Jews (on the same footing as partisans) by neck shot behind the frontline during the advances in Soviet territory in 1941-42, and the killing of some 3 million Polish Jews in temporary extermination camps like Treblinka and Majdanek in 1942-43. He only doubts the cinemagenic case of Auschwitz, which was started as a labour camp with Jewish slave labour (but also including Polish labourers who after hours went back to their families every day), and of which he fails to see proof that it shifted to an extermination regime, eventhough the death rate from various causes was high. At any rate, remaining a dissident, he estimates the death toll of the Jewish genocide "only" at 3.5 million deaths rather than the official estimate of 5.3 million (usually rounded off to 6 million). But more decisively, he corroborates that between 1941 and 1944, the Nazi elite corps of the SS conducted an intentional extermination of the Jewish people.
Less quality, more quantity
The ”creative” period of Holocaust negationism is definitively over, because the leading deniers who tried to give their case a veneer of scholarly evidence have either died (Faurisson, Zündel) or ended up affirming the intentional genocide after all (Cole, Irving, my recently-deceased Danish colleague-Orientalist Christian Lindtner). The deniers' last moment of glory was the negationist conference called in 2005 by Iran’s then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Teheran. The elderly Faurisson reported on it in triumphal terms, but the triumph was only in terms of finally getting some governmental recognition, not of discovering any desired evidence that had always eluded them.
This event could be seen as a passing of the baton from the scholars to the masses: not the rare and disappearing neo-Nazis in the West but the masses in the Muslim world, including the growing Muslim community in the West. In European schools, ever more history teachers feel compelled to skip the chapter on the Holocaust, for fear of their combative Muslim pupils. These think the narrative is “Jewish-concocted”, meant to blackmail the Europeans and justify their land grab from the Arabs.
Note a difference: contrary to what the received wisdom makes the public believe, that old rightist negationism, though a problematic nuisance, wasn’t all that dangerous: it tried to live up to human-rights sensibilities by minimizing the massacre. It shared the premise that genocide is a bad thing, at least publicly (privately some deniers may have felt that "Hitler didn't kill enough of them"). The Nazis were presented as not all that bad because they had purportedly not committed a genocide, implying that they would have been bad if they "had really" been guilty of genocide. By contrast, among Palestinians and their sympathizers, the opinion is widespread that the Jewish people as such is guilty and therefore deserves the direst punishment, genocide not excluded. But on the other hand, the Palestinians are unlikely to be as effective as the Germans were, so their massacre is unlikely to go beyond stray acts of terrorism.
Therefore, in a renewed form, Holocaust negationism is still with us, in a less sophisticated but more massive incarnation. But the Muslim world, already less hostile to Israel than in the past, is increasingly open to modern information, so the argument for the historical reality of the genocide is bound to percolate there as well. The end of Holocaust denial is certain, but it may still take some time to materialize.
India
What is the importance of all this for India? There was no "Holocaust" in India, with the stated goal of wholesale extermination. (Better to call it "Hindu-hatya" or some such newly-coined native term, more distinctive than a plagiarized term from elsewhere.) The Islamic scriptures didn't envisage the physical annihilation of the unbelievers, only their acceptance of Islam or at least of a serf status under Islam's supremacy. Violence came in when the Pagans resisted this "invitation" to join Islam. Only rarely did it take the character of a genocide, latterly in East Bengal 1971, where more than two million Hindus were slaughtered.
But what the Islamic massacres of Hindus lacked in intensity, they made up for in quantity. The Holocaust lasted for less than four years and was confined to occupied Poland and the conquered part of the Soviet Union. By contrast, the massacres of Hindus started in 712 AD, covered a whole Subcontinent, and it is unlikely that we have seen the last of them.
Hindu polemicists bandy about the number 80 million for the Hindus killed between the years 1000 and 1525: Mahmoud Ghaznavi's invasions and the end of the Sultanate. This comes from historian Prof. KS Lal, who published this estimate in 1979. Though Lal was scrupulous in calculating it, such grim research findings obviously need further verification, which hasn't been tried ever since. After all, investigating the crimes of Islam has become taboo. But today the intellectual atmosphere seems to have cleared up sufficiently to make this type of research possible again.
Though the Nazi massacres in Central Europe and the Islamic massacres in the Subcontinent are different in nature, the attempts to deny them are very similar. They use the same techniques, such as highlighting marginal non-representative facts and obscuring representative facts; or when not feasible to deny events, then putting a spin on the motive behind them. That is why, unlike "Holocaust", "negationism" remains a term that can perfectly be transferred to India
But the deniers in India also have a trump card that Holocaust deniers can only dream of: the establishment supports them. Even Hindu Nationalist governments have not been effective, and generally not even seriously motivated, to change the narrative. That is why in India, negationism remains a problem to deal with.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-72790714886661236222022-09-22T05:28:00.002-07:002022-09-26T11:57:52.951-07:00 Why Indo-Europeanists have a duty to face the Out-of-India Theory
(Pragyata [on-line magazine from Delhi], 21 September 2022)
Last week, after years of Corona intermezzo, the Indogermanische Gesellschaft (German: “Indo-European Society”) reconvened for a working conference in the charming Dutch city of Leiden, since long reputed for its Oriental Studies. It was sharply focused, no parallel sessions and all papers dealing somehow with the conference theme: the “Secondary Homelands of Indo-European”. This was indeed worth a brainstorming session bringing together the best minds in the field.
Further, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (“German Orientalist Society”) has resumed its regular conferences, so after five years it is holding its Orientalist Conference right now in Berlin, which is where I am writing this article. It includes numerous parallel sessions on all parts of Asia and the Islamic World, among them a long session on Indo-European linguistics. Here there is no thematic focus, but something useful may still come out of it.
Debating the homeland
Thus far, the debate had concerned the Primary Homeland, or simply the Homeland. When the India-based Jesuit missionary Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux sent his memorandum on the kinship of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek from India to the Academy in Paris in 1767, the Indo-European language family was born (later made known in India by William Jones in 1786), and the hunt for its homeland could take off.
The Bible-thumpers insisted on Armenia. That is where Noah’s Ark had landed, and the Indo-Europeans were taken to be the descendents of Jafeth, one of Noah’s sons.
But the role of the discovery of Sanskrit in the realization of its kinship with (and the mutual kinship of) most European languages was widely taken to indicate India. Sanskrit was apparently the oldest form of Indo-European, with e.g. 8 cases of the noun instead of 5 in Greek and 6 in Latin, or 3 numbers instead of 2, with Latin and Greek having only a few relics of the missing locative and instrumental cases and of the dual number. Modern linguists would therefore call it an elder sister of the other languages, back then people concluded that Sanskrit had to be the mother of the others, the origin. The French freethinker Voltaire was among the leading European minds who welcomed the idea of an Indian origin for European culture, if only because as an ex-Christian he wanted to diminish the Church’s claim on Europe. Though the term “Out-of-India Theory” (OIT) was only coined ca. 1997 (by the American Indologist Edwin Bryant), the idea had been launched by Europeans some 250 years ago.
For about sixty years, India remained the favourite among the possible homelands. The tilting point came in the 1830s, esp. after August Schlegel had proposed the Caucasus area. The nail in the Indocentric hypothesis’ coffin came with the launch of Linguistic Paleontology ca. 1860, which located the homeland in a colder zone and to the west (on the assumption that words for cold-climate flora and fauna pointed this way, whereas in fact, India too has islands of cold climate near the mountains, and has bears, wolves, otters and birch trees too); and by the discovery of war episodes in the Rg-Veda which were interpreted as depicting white invaders subduing the dark natives (see below). In India this choice for a peri-Caucasian homeland necessitated a later influx into India, which became known as the Aryan invasion (hence Aryan Invasion Theory, AIT). Nowadays many philologists squeamishly insist on calling it an “immigration”, as if a change in language and religion of the then-largest human civilization could have come about (as the excavations indicate) without power struggle. Well, suit yourselves: after all, an invasion is also a form of immigration, so no objection to reading “AIT” as “Aryan Immigration Theory”.
Some Indians saw the bright side: the AIT upgraded them from colonial underlings to the cousins of their British overlords. In the USA, some Hindu immigrants even used it in Court to upgrade themselves from the “Coloured” to the “White” category. But still it became most popular among those Indian communities most loyal to the colonial power, most anti-nationalist, like on the one hand the Sikhs (who identified themselves with the Aryan invaders, even physically looking like how we imagine the Vedic sages), on the other the Dravidianists and the Christianized tribals (who identified themselves as the non-Aryan natives entitled to compensatory privileges). The second, anti-Aryan tendency has gained strength after Independence, while the pro-Aryan tendency has withered away, in parallel with the post-Nazi opinion shift in the West.
Many Indians remained skeptical of such an invasion (though without developing a theory of how the other Indo-European languages ended up in Europe, such as the OIT), e.g. Aurobindo Ghose and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, but this was henceforth kept out of public debate. Meanwhile many English-speaking Indians accepted it, mostly out of awe for Western scholarship which had proven itself path-breaking in many fields. This included even anti-colonial champions such as Congress president Bal Gangadhar Tilak (who thought up his own version in his 1903 book Arctic Home in the Vedas) and chief Hindu Nationalist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his still-influential manifesto Hindutva (“Hinduness”, 1924). It may be needed to emphasize this, as misinformed Westerners have been tutored to identify the rejection of the AIT with Hindu nationalism.
In 2015, Mallikarjuna Kharge, parliamentary leader of the oppositional Congress Party, scolded some high-caste North-Indian adversaries: “You Aryans don’t belong in India”, a very common rhetoric. It is often sharpened for use against the Brahman caste: Brāhmaṇ sālā, deś choḍo! (“Brahmin brother-in-law [a common term of abuse, implying: ‘I slept with your sister’], leave the country”), with anti-Brahmanism having become in many details the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism. While European scholars have delinked Indo-European history from all possible political connotations (at least consciously), in India the political misuse of the AIT has continued till today.
Political dimension
It is because of this divisive use of the AIT that when scholars ca. 1990 started challenging the AIT, the Hindu nationalist movement jumped on the bandwagon. As a result of this political embrace of the non-AIT (which need not imply the OIT), Western scholars have developed the reprehensible habit of referring to the non-AIT spokesmen and even the OIT defenders (they don’t know the difference) as “Hindu nationalists”. Thus, in an incident between Hans Hock and Shrikant Talageri which I greatly deplore, Hock, who had distinguished himself by his scholarly engagement with the OIT, scolded Talageri as, of course, a “Hindu nationalist”, as if that made his newer arguments unworthy of dealing with.
It so happens that I have written my PhD dissertation and several books about religio-politics in India, and dare to claim some expertise in the matter. The difference between the realities on the ground and the Hindu nationalist movement’s international reputation is breath-taking and certain to become a case study in academic malpractice once the power equation that has made this possible, changes. Thus, when in the mid-1990s the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bhāratīya Janatā Party, “Indian People’s Party”) threatened to come to power, terrible predictions were made about what it would do, like “throwing all Muslims into the ocean”. But in 14 years of being in Government (1998-2004 and 2014-present) nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, the hard figures about victims of religious violence, as opposed to the swollen media rhetoric, shows that the Muslims are far safer in India today than under anti-Hindu-nationalist Prime Ministers like Indira Gandhi (and a hundred times safer than Hindus in Pakistan or Bangladesh). But no fulminator against “Hindu fascism” is known to have retracted his assessment even after having been proved wrong.
Apart from stating that much here, I will leave this topic for a different occasion. It is only relevant here to explain how non-specialists in Indian religio-politics, such as the Indo-European linguists, are massively falling for a distorted view of it, with implications for their own choices within their field of expertise, i.c. boycotting the OIT. There are a few problems with this boycott, though.
Firstly the identification of the non-AIT (and a fortiori the OIT) with Hindu nationalism is not true, a consideration that ought to count for something among scholars. There is at most an overlap between the historiographical and the political position, but with many exceptions on both sides. Thus, one of the anti-AIT pioneers, Bhagwan Singh (The Vedic Harappans, 1995), was a Marxist, and the whole rejection of the AIT has an obvious anticolonial dimension. Oh, and speaking for myself: I am neither a Hindu nor a nationalist.
At any rate the OIT predated any use by any political movement. Admittedly there is this bizarre conspiracy theory abroad (equally among the rank-and-file of India’s anti-AIT camp as in the OIT camp) that a politician sits down to contemplate how to pester his opponents, and then – eureka! – comes up with the plan of concocting a scholarly theory, which moreover manages to fool and instrumentalize the legitimate scholars of the field. Perhaps academics feel themselves far above such a conspiracy theory, yet that is what they are guilty of when identifying the OIT with one of India’s political currents.
Secondly it is not relevant. Whether a position is correct or not is independent of who utters it. It is unbecoming for a scholar to attack the person behind an argument and pretend that he thereby has debunked the argument. Indeed, that is the AIT camp’s own position: they defend the AIT (that’s what they implicitly do by espousing any of the peri-Caucasian homeland theories) eventhough it was espoused and ideologically instrumentalized by both the British colonialists and the Nazis. After all, on the abstruse homeland question these worthies might have been right for once. So for what we can see, the AIT party doesn’t seem to be troubled by the political associations of the AIT, and never even to think of them. If some Indo-Europeanists misinformedly declare that the OIT is too politically tainted for their tender attention, let them reflect on the more far-reaching political uses of the AIT which they embrace without a second thought.
There is also a non-political reason for boycotting the OIT. In her review of the only book ever that brought together pro-AIT and pro-OIT viewpoints, The Indo-Aryan Controversy by Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton (eds., 2005), Stephanie Jamison lambasts the very idea of a debate: it wrongly gives a platform to a superstitious theory comparable to Biblical Creationism, the OIT camp are flat-earthers which a scholar can only ignore. This shameless advocacy of cancel culture, moreover for a theory that was long the most accepted one, is an attitude that has gained ground among professional Indo-Europeanists, as I have had to personally find out many times. A consequence is for instance that Joanna Nichols and Claus Peter Zoller have, after Shrikant Talageri pointed out the pro-OIT implications of their findings (that the pattern of lexical borrowing in West-Asian languages from Indo-European indicated that this family came from the east, Bactria or so; c.q. that the Bangani dialect in North India shows a substrate of a kentum Indo-European language similar to the family’s westernmost branches), declared that their findings remain valid but not these pro-OIT implications. In India this is being laughed at as an Inquisition-like or Stalinist-like recanting.
Europeans in India
The Indian homeland theory is not a recent “concoction by Hindu nationalists”, as ignorant opinion-makers tend to claim. It was a European invention cherished by many Europeans for linguistic and sometimes also ideological reasons.
Among them, the pioneers had been Europeans living in India (Coeurdoux, Jones), a significant detail. In Europe before 1800, India was a mystery land in the distance, not yet demoted to a mere colony, but not figuring in people’s everyday consciousness either. In the popular Mercator projection of world maps, India looks smaller than Scandinavia, though in both surface and population it is larger than Europe as a whole. It was easy to side-line and ignore India, except for those living there. Once the OIT lost ground to the peri-Caucasian Homeland theories, it was still Europeans living in India who came to its defence (most prominently Mountstuart Elphinstone, 1841). And after the OIT was revived in the 1980s, it was again Westerners living part-time or full-time in India who elaborated it, but this time along with native Indians.
This European phenomenon of “forgetting India” (as the French scholar Roger-Pol Droit calls it is his book title L’Oubli de l’Inde), even among experts of a language family that is half-Indian, was much in evidence at the Leiden conference. It was only discussed in the last 3 papers (of 30), after the actual Homeland discussions had focused on the choice between Armenia and the Yamnaya culture of the steppes. Only in the final lecture was the OIT even mentioned, but at least this mention was fair and objective.
Why the OIT was revived
It fell to Prof. Martin Kümmel, the leading light in the Indo-Iranian section of Indo-European Studies, to present an overview of the state of the art. He explained the OIT cursorily as mainly stemming from an absence of evidence for an invasion, but noted that most linguists reject the theory. This is in general accurate.
The OIT became viable again when ca. 1990 leading Indian archaeologists (and a few non-Indian ones like Jim Shaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein) went public with their finding that Northwest India, where they were excavating the Harappan cities, showed no trace whatsoever of a foreign influx, neither in the form of the battles most likely to make such a huge take-over possible, and not even by a peaceful discontinuity in material or religious culture, esp. one traceable through Central Asia. This may be contrasted with the well-attested Aryan invasion of Europe, where the influx of the cattle-raising and presumably IE-speaking populations from the steppe is marked by new pottery, burial styles and other archaeological evidence.
The dean of Indian archaeology, Braj Basi Lal (deceased last week at 101), who had supported the AIT for decades, changed his mind: he started declaring the Harappan landscape and Vedic literature to be “two sides of the same coin”. Contrary to common opinion, he found numerous similarities between the archaeological testimony from Harappa and Vedic culture. At any rate, these AIT rejecters are people of the same academic rank as the Western linguists who scorn their position; it will not do to “pull rank”.
But note that only few of these AIT-skeptical archaeologists took the next step: from negatively denying an immigration into India to positively affirming an emigration. For many Indians, their horizon stops at the Khyber Pass: they are not interested in whether anyone came from outside or went outside. Indeed, many mistrust the emigration theory as a Western ploy to somehow, even after having to give up the immigration scenario, still have a connection with India: the “foreign hand”! Most of them don’t really care; it’s just that on their home turf, they find no trace of the Indo-Aryan invasion that the Westerners are so sure about. Most of the archaeologists, including the naturalized Frenchman Michel Danino, happen to work on the already very extensive topic of the Subcontinent’s archaeology and won’t speak out about what lies outside their expertise. They are satisfied to see the greatness and creativity of India getting ever more recognition at the expense of scenarios of foreign importation.
Rejecters of the AIT may be counted in many millions, and some, like the late physicist Navaratna Rajaram, have unchained a titanic rhetoric in the effort, with lots of perceived colonial racism and Biblical superstition conspiring to deny Indians their homeland; even with a show of contempt for the idea itself of a homeland or a language family. They found an ally in the AIT-skeptical Cambridge anthropologist Edmund Leach who highlighted the colonialist background of the AIT, and more recently the Indian adaptation of the Woke wave is put to use to ideologically criminalize the AIT. Even so, Out-of-India theorists are only a handful.
For some twenty years after the turning-point of the early 1990s, the late linguist Satya Swarup Misra and the “bank clerk” and self-taught Vedic philologist Shrikant Talageri were the only Indians to develop an Out-of-India scenario. Talageri was not only to intervene in linguistic debates, lacking in specialism but making a rarely effective use of his common sense; he also, and most uniquely, made his mark by presenting the literary testimony of the RgVeda. He showed something that the Indo-Europeanists had deemed impossible, viz. that the later stages of the dispersal from the Indo-European homeland were not separated from history by a millennial abyss, but were actually described by eye-witnesses in human language. No indirect evidence from linguistics, archaeology or genetics, as others have developed, but an explicit mention by human beings like us.
While many Hindu traditionalists see the Vedas as eternal and beyond history, an actual lecture of the Vedic hymns teaches that they are very human literature, complete with intertextuality, language evolution, man addressing the gods (as opposed to the Quran or the Biblical Ten Commandments, where it is God addressing men), discernable temporal layers, and numerous references to material circumstances, wars, weddings, genealogies and the rest. They are not history books but nonetheless contain a lot of historical information.
The Orientalists Edward Hopkins and Hermann Oldenburg had mapped out the layeredness of the Rg-Veda, and Talageri takes this further. Among the few, exceedingly nit-picking attempts to counter him, the pride of place is invariably for the allegation that he is but an “amateur”. Well, those who want to lambast his reconstruction of Vedic history will first have to prove the top-ranking professionals Hopkins and Oldenburg wrong. In an extremely detailed reading of the Rg-Veda which I cannot hope to summarize here, he manages to decipher numerous aspects of Vedic tradition, such as the lexical and other linguistic changes over time, or the sequence in geographical shift. Thus, the oldest books are familiar with the Ganga in Inner India, but know nothing about Afghanistan, while the later books show a westward shift in perspective. This is the very opposite of what the AIT would make you expect.
Most linguists don’t accept the OIT, as Kümmel correctly reports. But then, most linguists by far don’t know the OIT. They rely on vague hearsay, mostly from hostile sources. The minimum that they could do is familiarize themselves with Talageri’s path-breaking work. This starts with his books The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis (2000) and The Rigveda and the Avesta: the Final Evidence (2008); but poverty-stricken or niggardly scholars can now download most of his updated or newer work from his academia.edu page (https://independent.academia.edu/ShrikantTalageri) or his blog spot (https://talageri.blogspot.com). We can have a more in-depth discussion once this essential preliminary has been fulfilled.
It is only in the last decade that Talageri is getting a few followers. Often these are academics from wildly different fields who started out by ludicrously misunderstanding the stakes of the controversy, but who have grown during the debate, e.g. the physicists Raj Vedam and Abhijit Chavda, retired bureaucrat Sanjay Dixit, or bio-medical scientist Premendra Priyadarshi. Other pioneers of the revived OIT have been Westerners, principally retired Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas from Greece. There are no departments of Indo-European Linguistics in Indian universities, and no Indian seems to have been motivated to master the subject himself, so that those who do want to speak out on the linguistic aspects often make fools of themselves. But the entry of genetics into the debate has provided a more welcoming atmosphere for the more science-savvy Indians.
The contribution of genetics
The star guest at the Leiden conference was David Reich, the pioneering geneticist from Harvard. Indians may know him from his book Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018) and its claim that an influx of genetically distinct people entered India from the northwest in 2000-1500 BC, seemingly an independent and unexpected confirmation of the extant AIT. This prestigious book was politically instrumentalized for an attack on Hindu nationalism by journalist Tony Joseph in Early Indians (2018), itself the object of a rebuttal by Shrikant Talageri: Genetics and the Aryan Debate (2019, with foreword by the present writer).
Mind you, David Reich need not have been wrong. Having now met him for a few conversations, I certainly wouldn’t suspect him either of prejudice or of incompetence; it will take a very thorough job to find him wrong. But like Martin Kümmel on Indo-European linguistics, his fault may lie in what he does not address. His Indian critics mainly hold it against him that the genes characteristic of the Yamnaya population have been found at an earlier date and in greater variety in India. (Against this, it is argued that this is true for the overarching R1a haplogroup, emerging 22,000 years ago probably in India, while the more specific R1a1 emerged outside India; I leave it to the legitimate geneticists to fight this out.)
Secondly, there may well have been a foreign influx, as there have been many in Indian history, such as the Scythians, Greeks, Huns, Kushanas and Turks. But all of them (and the Syrian-Christian and Parsi refugee communities) have linguistically assimilated, even when retaining their separateness in religion. None of them kept its language, let alone impose it on the natives. So invasionists have some explaining to do about what made these Aryan invaders so dramatically different. Anyway, one invasion more or less won’t make the difference, for the influx of a language clearly does not follow from the influx of a genetically definable human community.
And there is a third problem with the support for the Aryan Invasion Theory from genetics. We will discuss it separately at the end.
In Leiden, Reich presented more recent work, pertaining to a debate between several peri-Caucasian homelands. He sees the Yamnaya culture, generally considered the Indo-European homeland, as only a “secondary homeland”. For those who read carefully, he had cursorily already said so in his 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Yamnaya was a settlement for people coming from south of the Caucasus, Armenia or even northern Iran. At the 2017 German Orientalist Conference in Jena, linguist Paul Heggarty had already made a similar suggestion, though he thought more of Anatolia as the ultimate homeland. It just goes to show how even linguists are not too sure of their linguistically-derived homeland theories, easily disagreeing, changing their minds or giving in the non-linguistic innovative hypotheses. (The homeland of the Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan and Uralic families are also still in dispute; about the latter, a speaker in Leiden defended the Ob basin in Siberia as the homeland.) The OIT, of course, had always thought of Yamnaya as but a secondary homeland, consisting of locals mixed with immigrants from India (or from a linguistically Indianized territory to the east, esp. Bactria); but nobody here took this possibility in consideration.
The finding that made waves this time was that genetically, the Anatolians (Hittites, Luwians) proved to be related to the Armenia-based people of some 5500 years ago, but not to the Yamnaya people. So these Armenians may have moved to both Anatolia and the steppes, and in the latter mixed with locals and produced the ultimate Yamnaya type that was to invade Europe. So the Yamnayans were only a subsection of the Indo-Europeans, distinct from at least the Anatolian branch.
Many papers at the Leiden conference (less in Berlin, where the focus remained purely linguistic) took the genetic findings concerning the local populations of their topic into account. Thus, a paper on the Indo-Europeanization or Celticization of the British Islands acknowledged that linguists over generations had reconstructed a Hamito-Semitic substrate influence in island-Celtic: immigrants from North Africa or traders from Phoenicia had settled in (or remained in contact with) the British Islands, and imparted some of their language to incoming Celtic. But this was wiped off the table: no more Hamito-Semitic influence, not because those linguists had been proven wrong, but because its presence is not confirmed (yet) by the newest genetic date, which show no Mediterranean genes. Here we wonder if linguists are not going too far in subordinating their own discipline to the “harder” discipline of genetics. After all, genes don’t speak, and gene-carrying people are known to have changed language.
After 1945, all courses on Indo-European Linguistics have emphatically warned against identifying languages with physical traits. A century ago, the confusing notion of the “Aryan skull type” misled people, and after 1945 a sharp distinction between Linguistics and Physical Anthropology was maintained. But today this has resurfaced as the “Aryan gene” – that’s what Indian papers on the pro-AIT side called the Yamnaya-associated R1A1 gene during the 2018 debate over Tony Joseph’s version of David Reich’s findings. In their ivory towers Western scholars think the political misuse of the AIT is a thing of the pre-war past, but in India it certainly isn’t.
Linguists bending over backwards to please the physical anthropologists in 1900 or the geneticists today are only a particular case of a more general problem of research method. When two bodies of evidence, generated by different disciplines, point in different directions, the solution is not to suppress one type of evidence in favour of the other. It is not to make one discipline crawl and swallow its own conclusions to appease the other. All while rechecking both types of evidence to make sure that they really constitute evidence, the scholarly mind will endeavour to do justice to both and to reconcile them. If this means conceding that we aren’t there yet, and that against our grain we have yet a lot of work to do, then so be it.
The testimony of the RgVeda
In contrast with the linguists’ enthusiasm for the new science of genetics, and already longer for European archaeology, we notice a radical disinterest in several other relevant disciplines. Some Indian archaeology has been used in the past, particularly the seeming contrast of the excavated Harappan cities with Vedic culture. But more recent archaeological developments are being completely ignored.
The principal one is the absence of archaeological traces of the invasion. Certainly there are no signs of a military conquest, which is why some scholars wax indignant when others describe their position as an Aryan “Invasion” Theory. But the word “invasion” does not pertain to the manner of a take-over by foreigners, but to the very fact of the take-over. The Indo-European invaders are thought to have imposed their language and religion on the largest conglomeration of people at that time: such a feat deserves the term “invasion”. At any rate, the archaeologists find no trace of it. Even anti-OIT champion Michael Witzel admits that there is no archaeological evidence for it “yet”.
The evolution of a single person’s view on this proves important, too. Prof. BB Lal, who died last week aged 101, was the only archaeologist ever who could be cited as furnishing proof of the “Aryans” in India. In the 1950s he had explained the Painted Grey Ware that he had dug up in post-Harappan cities of Northwest India as characteristic of the Aryan invaders on their way deeper into India. Around 1990, as the rejection of the AIT became more common around him, he rethought his findings and concluded that he had only tailored (not to say force-fitted) his findings to the AIT paradigm he had interiorized from his mentor, Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He had applied the reigning paradigm but not proven it. Ever since, a number of publications of his, culminating in his book The Rigvedic People (2015), have documented the essential oneness of the archaeologically attested Harappan cities and literarily attested Vedic culture: “Harappa and the Vedas are but two sides of the same coin.”
Earlier the Indo-Europeanists considered the Rg-Veda as a goldmine of relevant historical information. Though hymns to the gods, the Vedic texts contain much historical information in passing, such as the level of technology and the surrounding natural data suggesting to place them in Bronze Age (3300-1500 BC) Northwest India. In particular, they describe several battles, and these teach us about the ethnic landscape. The early translations suggested that these battles pitted white invaders, naturally victorious, against the dark aboriginals. This became one of the nails in the coffin of the original OIT: if the linguistic evidence was non-committal on the homeland question and allowed for an Indian homeland, it nonetheless became untenable to insist on this Indian homeland if the Indians themselves testified that they had come as invaders. But at least, the indubitably good side here is that it proves the early Indo-Europeanists to be interdisciplinary: they took extra-linguistic (i.c. literary) data seriously.
But that was not the case in every relevant respect, and today less so than in the 19th century. Thus, no translator back then or today has accounted for the repeated presence of the Iranians in the Rg-Veda, esp. in the Battle of the Ten Kings and the Vārṣāgira battle. The unmistakably Iranian names of the hostile kings and tribes and the unmistakably Zoroastrian references in the description of their religion make you wonder how a whole series of translators has been able to pigeonhole them as “black aboriginals”. Even within the invasionist paradigm with its likeness to the then-ongoing colonization, scholars should have thought of the fact that the colonial powers fought each other as often as they fought the natives, so that here the enemies of the Vedic section of the supposed Aryan invaders could have been an adjoining section of the same invader group, such as the Iranians.
(And incidentally, this Vedic mention also revolutionizes our insight into the role of Zarathuštra Spitama within Zoroastrian history: not the great reformer who created the distinctive Mazdean doctrine but the hereditary court priest of king Vištāspa’s Kavi dynasty, who inherited an anti-Deva, anti-Indra and without-yajña tradition already several generations old, but who became famous by first putting it into hymns.)
This complements the Avestan data about 16 Iranian countries: these are the different regions of present-day Tajikistan and Afghanistan, plus as the second Hapta-Hendū, Sanskrit Sapta-Sindhū i.e. present-day Panjab, and as the first Airyānam Vaēja, “expanse of the Aryans”. There is no mystery about this, it is Kashmir. The Avesta describes Hapta-Hendu as too hot, and after the Sahara desert, Panjab in the dry season is indeed the hottest region in the world; while Kashmir is called too cold, and for South-Asians Kashmir is indeed unusually chilly. In Vedic literature, while the Vedic Paurava tribe lives in Haryana, their Ānava sister tribe lives in Kashmir; and after their joint and successful counter-attack against the Druhyu tribe located in Panjab, it is the Ānavas who take over Panjab, chasing the Druhyus to Afghanistan. But as the Paurava-Bhārata king Sudās encroaches on Panjab, it is these Ānavas or proto-Iranians who unite to throw him back, but are defeated in the Battle of the Ten Kings and chased in their turn to Afghanistan. Here you see two literarily attested phases of emigration from India, arguably part of the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European unity.
When I confronted Prof. Kümmel with this perpetuation of the “black aboriginals” scenario, he simply denied this. In India they would now lambast him as an incorrigible racist and all that, but I sensed this was based on something real. To be sure, in India’s Reich-triggered debate of 2018-19 I have seen numerous times how the hostile Dāsas and Dasyus (both Sanskrit versions of Iranian terms) of the Battle of the Ten Kings were still identified as the dark aboriginals. In Western popular and second-hand literature this continuation of imagery from the 19th and 20th century is also still common, and where the enemies are not identified, at least no acknowledgment or correction of the old translators’ consequential error is forthcoming. Yet there is indeed one important break-away from this old consensus within the scholarly world.
In Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton’s 2014 RgVeda translation, the recentmost of its kind, this notion of black opponents is preserved, but with reference to Hans Hock’s 1999 paper on the Vedic use of colours (a rare instance of the genuine AIT-vs.-OIT debate that took place around the turn of the millennium), the authors specify that this doesn’t refer to skin colour. As Hock points out, “black” is very commonly said of enemies. Thus, in World War II the British called the Indian freedom fighter and Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose “a black”. So it constitutes progress if the enemies are no longer describes as “black-skinned”. But the result of all these obsolete “white conquers black” translations has not been corrected, in fact it has gone completely unchallenged. It served as proof from the horse’s mouth for the Aryan invasion when that hypothesis was still in the process of being established, and now that this proof has fallen away, the Aryan invasion still goes unquestioned.
Moreover, in the specific episode of the Battle of the Ten Kings, even this correction of the meaning of “black” isn’t good enough. Here the description of the enemies as “black people” (janāḥ-asiknīḥ, RV 7:5:3) is a pun referring to the river basin where they come from: as “people from the Black River”. Asiknī is the Vedic name of the Chenab in present-day Pakistani Panjab, the river just west of the Paruṣṇī, present-day Ravi, where the battle takes place, with the Vedic Bhārata tribe coming from Haryana in the east. The mistranslation as “black aboriginals” for what is really the “proto-Iranian tribal coalition” is, given the career of the Aryan invasion of India as the paradigm of the racist worldview (explicitly espoused by Adolf Hitler in his 1920 booklet Warum Sind Wir Antisemiten?), one of the most consequential mistranslations in history.
Vedic chronology
A non-linguistic type of information full of consequence for the homeland question is Vedic chronology. Every Indo-Europeanist wanting to give an opinion on how North India “became” Indo-European ought to familiarize himself with it. Here it is well worth reviewing how Friedrich Max Müller’s estimate of 1500 BC for the fabled Aryan invasion into India succeeded in becoming the orthodoxy. It was at once criticized by Max Müller’s own pupil Moriz Winternitz, who judged it unrealistic to cram the entire cultural and philosophical evolution from early Vedic to the Buddha in a few centuries. Max Müller himself ended up admitting that it really was only a guess, and even threw his arms up in the air to muse that we would never know the date. We are skeptical of such premature pessimism, but strongly agree that 1500 BC was only a baseless guess. Yet for lack of a systematized alternative, it became the orthodoxy, and still is.
There was no relevant archaeology then, but here science has advanced. Spoked-wheeled chariots have been discovered in Sanauli near Delhi, and dated to ca. 2000 BC. They are mentioned in the Rg-Veda, but only in its latest, tenth book, which is centuries younger than the other books, quite distinct in language and worldview. The earlier books know of the slow (and often large) ox-drawn carts, but the swift horse-drawn chariot is confined to the youngest layer. So: much of the Rg-Veda can be dated to the early 3rd millennium, only the 10th book near its end.
The drying-up of the Saraswati river, since then a seasonal rivulet named Ghaggar, has been dated by geologists to 1900 BC. In the post-Vedic Mahābhārata epic, we see it in this rivulet state, with one of the heroes going on pilgrimage to the site where it definitively dries up in the desert. As a consequence of the Saraswati's dessiccation, many people have moved to the east (Greater Magadha), the west and even far west (furnishing the Sanskrit elements in the Kassite and the Mitannic language) and locally upland to smaller rivers, where they had newly founded the cities central to the epic: Hastināpura, Soniprastha, Indraprastha etc. In the Rg-Veda, by contrast, the Saraswati is still an ocean-going river, the life-artery of the Vedic civilization, praised as the river par excellence; clearly well before 1900 BC.
(The treatment of the Saraswati evidence forms an interesting case study in the stonewalling of putative pro-OIT evidence by AIT militants, typically outsiders to Indo-European studies such as comparative historian Steve Farmer: they lambast the equating of the Vedic Saraswati with today’s Ghaggar as a paranoid Hindu-nationalist concoction, when actually it was established by a string of Western scholars since the 1850s, in tempore non suspecto. A case study in how this debate has been poisoned by endless political imputations.)
A really objective measuring rod for Vedic chronology is provided by astronomy. True, archaeo-astronomical data are often injudiciously used by an intellectual fringe, e.g. the description of an eclipse would apply quite regularly, so the claim that it points to a particular date only betrays ignorance or over-enthusiasm. This is why the Indian debates about the Mahābhārata war’s astro-dating are hilarious to watch. But there is one very big hand on the cosmic clock that offers a reliable though vague chronology: the precession of the equinoxes. The equinoxes move through the constellations (or vice-versa: the stars move past the equinoxes) at the rate of 1° per ca. 71 years, full circle in ca. 25,772 years. When an equinoctial or solstitial point coincides with a particular star, it won’t do so again for the next 25 millennia.
The later Vedas and the Brāhmaṇas, decidedly a younger corpus than the Ṛg-Veda, contain several references to the Pleiades constellation on the Equinoctial axis (Atharva-Veda 19:7, Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4:4:10, Maitrāyaṇi Saṁhitā 2:13:20, Kathaka Saṁhitā 39:13, Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 2:1:2:3), which took place in the 23rd century BC. The Kauśītaki Brāhmaṇa 19:3 indicates the same period by means of a different astronomical pointer, viz. the star Regulus on the summer solstice point.
An ancillary work of the Vedas, the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa (“Veda-Ancillary of Stellar Science”, at that time meaning astronomy though nowadays used to refer to astrology), conventionally dated to 500-200 BCE, actually dates itself twice to ca. 1350 BCE, viz. by explicitating which stars are on the winter solstice and spring equinox points: Dhaniṣṭha solstitial, Bharaṇī equinoctial. Note that the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa is a manual of observational astronomy, drawing attention to phenomena your eyes can see and which have a role in the ritual you are setting up. It definitely doesn’t deal in reminiscences, as opponents have argued; moreover, a reminiscence bridging the centuries between the Vedic and the conventional Max Müller dates would point to a great astronomical acumen that would in turn support the astro-information they recorded.
This is an explicitly post-Vedic and very post-Rg-Vedic text, so the Vedic corpus was already complete by the time, some 1500 BC, when the Aryan Invasion Theory has the Aryans only arrive in India. It is one of more than a dozen precessional pointers in Vedic literature broadly defined, which prove completely consistent: the absolute-chronological astro-sequence never violates the known relative-chronological literary sequence. (Next, they also get coordinated with archaeological data like the appearance of chariots and of iron implements, two types of evidence that happen to be in flux due to new discoveries, unlike the precessional data.)
Moreover, not one of them supports Max Müllers widely-accepted chronology. We have derived some amusement from reading the mental and verbal acrobatics which conformistic scholars try out to neutralize this inconvenient evidence. The frantic attempts by leading Indian historians like Romila Thapar to refute or cancel this astronomical evidence at least shows that they realize its importance and understand the threat it poses to the conventional chronology. By contrast, Western scholars have so far preferred to ignore this pertinent evidence.
Well, not all of them. In a book that every Indology student gets to read, the Vedic Index by AB Keith & AA MacDonnell, 1912, the authors acknowledge that locating the star Maghā/Regulus on the Solstice, as the Kauśītaki Brāhmaṇa does, strictly refers to ca. 2300 BC, where indeed it belongs, but in their conclusions shift it to 800 BC, fully 1500 years later than what the Brāhmaṇa text and elementary astronomy tell us. Me thinks it is unbecoming of scholars to cavalierly shift an attested date around like this. Likewise, David Pingree, who counts as an authority on ancient astronomy, moves the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa down from 1350 BC to 500 BC or even 200 BCE, pleading that the evolution rate of language necessitates this denial of the astronomical information. So this is the ignore-the-evidence mentality that we are up against. But the astronomical data from the source text fails to support the scholars’ low and AIT-friendly estimate.
Suppose the rate of linguistic change does indeed point the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa to a date no less than a millennium later than its own chronological self-testimony. Then the scholarly attitude is to acknowledge that different types of evidence are in conflict; that the supposed linguistic evidence contradicts the astronomical evidence. Let this sink in, and next you can explore ways to either falsify one of them or to reconcile them at a higher level of understanding yet to be reached. What is not acceptable is to simply suppress one type of evidence and pretend that it doesn’t exist. Yet that is what has been done for more than a century to protect the low invasionist chronology. Against this we find that, as historical evidence goes, it provides strong support to Shrikant Talageri’s higher chronological estimate.
A consequence of this higher Vedic chronology concerns David Reich’s claim that there was a genetically identifiable influx from Eastern Europe into India in ca. 1700 BC. I know that some Indian geneticists dispute this, but not being competent in genetics, I will not press this point. Let there have been an influx. Through the Khyber Pass, so many invasions (all in the nature of military conquest) have taken place since; no big deal if one more can be identified. Note that all of them have linguistically assimilated, even when preserving their religious separateness. They lost their mother tongue, and a fortiori, they failed to impose it on the natives, quite in contrast with what the Aryans are claimed to have done. At any rate, we don’t mind an influx of people ca. 1700 BC.
But one thing we know for sure (and this is the third problem for Reich’s theory): this influx was not what brought the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European into India. With the RgVeda having been composed inside India starting more than a thousand years earlier, 1700 BC was simply too late for an Indo-Europeanization. If this comes as a shock to all those who had thought that the AIT has now finally been proved by genetics, they have the option of proving all the evidence for a higher Vedic chronology wrong. But this they will only be able to do after familiarizing themselves with this part of the OIT.
Conclusion
It is possible to pull a horse towards a pond, but not to make the horse drink. The Indo-Europeanists who have ignored the OIT challenge for decades are at liberty to continue doing so. There is no punishment even if they end up being proven wrong: the pro-geocentric near-consensus that stalled the Copernican revolution towards heliocentrism was never punished either. At most the die-hard geocentrists live on in our memory as misguided; and hardly even that, for no one ever thinks of them.
No one with what the Indian Constitution calls the “scientific temper” would want them to suddenly drop their AIT certainties and adopt the new line of the OIT. No, the invitation is for them to study the evidence for the OIT themselves and form their own judgment.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-70398914880354870802022-09-17T12:14:00.000-07:002022-09-17T12:14:56.960-07:00Prof. B.B. Lal in the major debates
(Shorter version in First Post, 15 Sep 2022)
Now that Prof. Braj Basi Lal, the Dean of Indian Archaeology, has left this world at 101, it is fitting to highlight the most striking among his many achievements. For seven decades he was in the forefront of India’s archaeological research, even charting new ground in our knowledge of the less-known Ganga Civilization (From the Mesolithic to the Mahājanapadas: The Rise of Civilisation in the Ganga Valley, Aryan Books International) in 2019, at age 98. But his place in his history has been made by two issues with an importance far beyond pure scholarship: the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy and the Indo-European (‘Aryan’) invasion debate.
In the 1980s, when the present writer studied Oriental Philology and History in Leuven University, he took Prof. Lambert Isebaert’s course of Indo-European Linguistics, and once asked him if there was any proof for the generally assumed Southwest-Russian homeland of the Indo-European language family. Isebaert said that this had been proven by archaeology. Another professor in Leuven, the leading Dutch Indologist Pierre Eggermont, spoke in the same vein, and also named his source: Prof. Braj Basi Lal’s 1950s’ exploration of the Painted Grey Ware (PGW).
This was a type of pottery that Lal explained as typical of the Aryans penetrating deeper into India (starting with Lal: ‘Excavation at Hastinapura and other explorations in the upper Ganga and Sutlej basins’, Ancient India (Bulletin of the Archaeological Survey of India), 1950-52, no.10-11, p.5-151; and ‘New Light on the ‘dark Age’ of Indian History: Recent Excavations at the Hastinapura Site, Near Delhi‘, Illustrated London News, 1952). Thirty years later, he had not fundamentally changed his mind yet (‘The Indo-Aryan hypothesis vis-à-vis Indian archaeology’, EPHCA, Moscow, 1981). So when, around that same time, I heard my professors quote him as a source of authority, they were simply reproducing the state of the art. Indeed, till today, Lal’s invasionist interpretation of his own PGW findings is still being cited as proof of an Aryan invasion, e.g.: ‘Lal considered PGW to be intrusive’ (SV Pradhan: The Elusive Aryans, 2014, p.67), and we heard the same opinion at the annual conference of the European Archaeological Association, Maastricht 2017. This decades-long exclusive appeal to Lal’s finding at least confirmed that in the intervening decades, no other ‘proof’ has materialized.
Even today, that state of the art has not been strengthened by any new evidence. The elusive Aryans fail to show up in the archaeological record. And the state of the art has evolved since then, because crown witness BB Lal realized that his invasionist explanation was only an interpretation, viz. a force-fitting of the data into the reigning paradigm, the one he had absorbed from his mentor, invasionist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Later he came to understand that he had merely developed an application of the paradigm, not an independent proof of it.
So now we have to face the complete absence of archaeological evidence for an Aryan immigration. An invasion of the military type has long been ruled out (as opposed to Europe, where an “Aryan” or Indo-European military conquest emanating from the Black Sea coast has been confirmed by all manner of archaeologically attested material and cultural innovations), but a peaceful influx under the radar yet replacing the thickly-populated Subcontinent’s language and religion as well. Even Invasionist champion Michael Witzel confirms that no archaeological proof for the Aryan invasion has been found ‘yet’. This explains why most leading Indian archaeologists are no longer shy about their skepticism of the invasion scenario.
Since the 1990s, Lal has published a number of books detailing the archaeological evidence for a full continuity between the Harappan cities, such as The Saraswati Flows On: the Continuity of Indian Culture (2002), The Homeland of the Aryans. Evidence of Rigvedic Flora and Fauna, and Archaeology (2005), and culminating in The Rigvedic People: ‘Invaders’/’Immigrants’? or Indigenous? Evidence of Archaeology and Literature, (2015, all through Aryan Books International, Delhi).
Thus far, Lal’s efforts have not yet made a dent in the dominance of the invasionist paradigm: ‘An ostrich-like attitude is perpetuating the Aryan invasion myth’. (in Bal Ram Singh: Origin of Indian Civilization, Delhi/Dartmouth MA, 2010:23-36) But the Indo-Europeanist establishment cannot keep on stonewalling the accumulating archaeological and other evidence forever. They can look the other way when their only archaeo-supporter turns away from their Aryan invasion scenario, and even when his younger colleagues, together with scholars from other fields, find new evidence against it. But the truth has a way of finally asserting itself.
We have already seen it in the Ayodhya temple/mosque controversy. In the 1970s, the same BB Lal came up with archaeological evidence for the temple, of which remains formed part of the foundations and the pillars of the Babri Masjid. This was the first scientific confirmation of a commonly accepted tradition (also by the local Muslims and the British) about a pre-existing Rama temple at the mosque site. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered Lal to keep silent about it. But once the ‘Eminent Historians’ started roundly denouncing the existing consensus, among scholars Lal’s evidence was highlighted, together with a growing body of documentary evidence. Yet, the media kept the old consensus and the new evidence for it for some more years out of view; they stonewalled Lal’s evidence just as the Indo-Europeanist establishment is still doing, or even decried him as a ‘born-again Hindu nationalist’. Unfortunately for the Eminent Historians, truth bypassed their efforts at suppressing it, and now judgments by Uttar Pradesh’s High Court (2011) and the Supreme Court (2019) have definitively confirmed that Prof. Lal had been right all along.
A similar end of the affair seems to be in store for the Aryan immigration debate. Here Lal is instrumental in a return to the assumption of an Indian Homeland of the Indo-European language family, common in Europe in the half-century around 1800. As the leading linguist from Leiden, RSP Beekes (Vergelijkende Taalwetenschap, = ‘Comparative linguistics’, Utrecht 1990, p.73), wrote: ‘When the IE family was discovered and people sought its land of origin, they at first thought of India’. The Out-of-India Theory is not some far-fetched novelty, but stood at the cradle of the very notion of an Indo-European language family. It is to Prof. Lal’s eternal credit that he has played a crucial role in restoring the true story with new evidence.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-24502608417349204742022-09-13T08:45:00.002-07:002022-09-13T08:45:43.642-07:00The non-retributive Karma theory(Abstract of my lecture at the World Conference on Logic and Religion, 4-8 November 2022)
Everyone nowadays has heard of the retributive Karma doctrine. Internationally, and among Western-influenced Indians, it doesn't have a very good reputation, for it is deemed to justify injustice.
In many classical sources, this is precisely what it does. Thus, when Śākyamuni’s friend general Bandhula and his sons are sentenced to death for high treason, his widow consoles her daughters-in-law that while their husbands were ostensibly innocent, they must have earned this punishment through a wrongdoing in a past life. This way, any injustice can be justified as the consequence of an unseen past sin.
Indeed, the very earliest scriptural introduction to the karma doctrine already does this. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad introduces jointly the doctrine of reincarnation and the doctrine of karma. It says that a fortunate birth in a high caste is the consequence of past good behaviour, an unfortunate birth in a low caste or as an animal the consequence of past bad behaviour. In all anti-Hindu literature, the link between the karma doctrine and social injustices like Untouchability is emphasized.
An even more fundamental objection to this retributive karma doctrine is that it implies that the universe is just. The conspicuous fact that many good people end in misery while many evil-doers flourish, is nullified here by the unproven hypothesis that this misery is explained by past evil and this good fortune by past good. Isn’t this wishful thinking? No sudden good fortune is innocent anymore, it all becomes part of a universe-spanning calculus of reward and punishment.
There are two alternatives to this widely-believed retributive karma doctrine. One is to preserve reincarnation but drop the "action at a distance" between good or evil acts performed in one life and attraction of good or bad fortune in a next life. Outside India, many reincarnation beliefs are ignorant of a karma doctrine, both ancient ethnic (Druze, Amerindian, Celtic) and among modern reincarnation researchers (Ian Stevensson, Erlendur Haraldsson, Hans ten Dam). Kṛṣṇa's explanation to Arjuṇa that dying is but an illusion, like taking off old clothes to put on new ones tomorrow, does strictly not posit an "ethical causality" either.
The other alternative is the non-retributive karma theory. The purpose of this paper will be to analyse and evaluate this lesser-known understanding of karma.
The non-retributive understanding of karma shares with the retributive variant that it extends the field of causality: the former gives it a psychological dimension, the second an ethical one. It fits the Buddhist theory that a life is conditioned by the quotum of desires, including negative desires, i.e. fears, with which you die. Hence the focus in some Buddhist schools on purifying the thoughts you will entertain in your dying moments: they will determine the contents of your next incarnation. For an example in a non-Buddhist source: when Ambā gets consumed with a desire for revenge upon Mahābhārata hero Bhīṣma, she is reborn in circumstances where she can join the enemy army and thus kill him.
Here your quotum of good or evil committed is of no consequence, there is no reward or punishment. (In the debate on karma and the problem of evil, as recently in Philosophy East & West, it essentially cuts short the debate, or at least is one of the extremes within it: no relation!) Yet there is a precise connection between past and next lives, viz. your sum total of desires determines the contents of a next life; that's why desire is the motor of reincarnation, and is the target for destruction in Buddhist meditation. This version of karma is a "law of conservation".
To be sure, Buddhism is not exclusively wedded to this more subtle theory of karma. Common Buddhists are just as much into the more vulgar retributive version, and even the Buddha himself was. An illustration is the Buddhist story of the Śākya-hatya. When his own tribe is being massacred by the soldiers from Kośala, the Buddha explains that this is a just punishment: in a past life, the Śākyas were villagers who heartlessly refused to throw fish that had landed on the dry during the hot season, into the remaining rivulet; so now they get punished. The soldiers back then were those fish, who now take revenge. So that is the hypothesis of reward and punishment at work. But it is not over yet. The soldiers go home and camp out on the riverside. That night, the rainy season starts, the river overflows, and the sleeping soldiers get drowned. Karmic reason: in their past lives they had begged to be thrown in the water, and now they have gotten what they had asked for. That is the "law of conservation" version of karma, a desire having effect at a distance.
But the two versions are conceptually distinct, and purists may fully reject the retributive version while accepting the non-retributive version. The modern age with its positive valuation of rationality favours such an outcome: an automatically just universe may satisfy our wishes but is unproven and unlikely, while a law of conservation might be scientifically tenable even if applied to desire.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-55359081714778996802022-09-13T08:42:00.000-07:002022-09-13T08:42:17.182-07:00Vedic sages versus the Apauruseya doctrine(Abstract of my lecture at the World Conference on Logic and Religion, 4-8 November 2022)
Most believing Hindus, some erudite ones citing the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā school or Śaṅkara for authority, will tell you that the Vedas are apauruṣeya, "non-human", super-human, of divine origin, revealed, uncreated, as old as the universe. They divide scripture into Śruti, "that which is heard (from a divine source)", viz. the Vedas in the broad sense; and the Smṛti, "that which is remembered" (and of which no divine origin is claimed, though in practice it is also treated as unquestionable authority), viz. the Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature and the Śāstras.
This is actually a mirror-image of the Islamic view of the Qur’ān: abiding since creation in God's bosom, the Qur’ān is rained down on humanity at a time and place of God's choosing. Next to the Qur’ān, the Hadīth and Sīra do not have that divine status, but function nonetheless as the basis for unchangeable Islamic law. The difference between really existing Dharma and Dīn, effective Hinduism and Islam, is not as radical as often thought.
However, this Hinduism, though making a claim on the Vedic Ṛṣis, viz. that they were passive receptacles of divine revelations, would be unrecognizable to the Ṛṣis themselves. The Vedic text itself serves to verify this. The Qur’ān (or the Biblical Ten Commandments) takes the form of God speaking to his prophet or to mankind. By contrast, the Vedic hymns take the form of a human composer addressing or describing a deity.
Thus, the very first hymn of the Ṛg Veda is Oṁ agnim ile, "I worship the Fire", i.e. man as subject, the Fire god as object. In the Gāyatrī Mantra, "we" implore the Sun god to awaken our minds. In the Mṛtyuñjaya Mantra, "we" worship the Three-Eyed One. The relation between the composer and the deity is essentially that of a suitor singing a serenade under his beloved's balcony. And yes, just as the suitor hopes to sway her and make her favour him, the poet hopes to influence the deity towards his side ("do ut des"). Thus, after the victorious Battle of the Ten Kings, seer Vasiṣṭha ascribes his patron Sudās's victory to the magical effect his own hymns have had on the battle-relevant god, storm-god Indra.
Moreover, the hymns themselves refute their eternality by regularly referring to a pre-Vedic age: to the "Ṛṣis from the past", to past battles (e.g. against the Druhyus with the help of Aikṣvāku king Māndhātā, within living memory of the Vedic project’s initiators, king Bharata and his court-priest Ṛṣi Bharadvāja), to ancestors like Manu and Ilā. The Vedas, by their own testimony, are located in history. Given the flora, fauna, rivers and the level of technology they describe, they can be pinpointed as composed in Bronze-Age Northwest-India. From there and then, a number of historical events have found their way into otherwise religious poetry.
The aim of this paper is to explicitate and elucidate how the transition was made from this human practice of poetry enshrined as an ever-growing corpus of hymns into the adoption of this corpus as a legacy from the gods and therefore a source of divine authority. This provides one of world history's best examples of an "invented tradition", reinterpreting the earlier tradition and absorbing it into a new worldview. Parallel developments in Christian and Confucian civilizations will very briefly be considered.
In practice, the Vedas derived an enormous prestige from the discipline of learning the hymns by heart, the whole edifice of their mnemotechniques and the social support by a Brahminical class set apart for it, and the fact that they became the backbone around which many new sciences grew (Vedāṅgas, Upavedas, some of them worldwide firsts, e.g. linguistics and branches of mathematics). It also made them fit as the glasses through which to see the accruing non-Vedic components of Hinduism (e.g. mūrtipūjā), serving as vault over these and providing them with a conceptual framework and technical language. As their origin disappeared on the horizon, they were elevated ever higher. By the time the illiterate Dark Age ended, ca. 300 BCE, a new tradition had been invented that divinizes the Vedas. Hindu traditionalists won't welcome this account, but on the bright side, it implies that their Ṛṣi ancestors were creative geniuses, rather than passive receptacles of voices from above.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-33850804183027117602022-08-28T19:59:00.001-07:002022-08-28T19:59:14.979-07:00Jainas and Buddhists in Ayodhya(Pragyata, 16 August 2022)
The recent upheaval about a Hindu temple for Thalaivetti Muniyappan (“Muni Baba with the broken head”) in Salem TN, apparently a patched-up and restored Buddha statue, and therefore taken away from its worshippers by Court order with the prospect of giving it to the Buddhists (see ch.25), reminds us of a similar line of argument in the Ayodhya debate of 1990-91. Then, the anti-temple party claimed that, if at all there had been Islamic aggression against Hinduism, surely the Hindu repression against Buddhism had been no better. Some even argued that the destroyed Rama birthplace temple had itself been built in replacement of a Buddhist temple.
This was just the typical tactics of the Eminent Historians or their less scholarly followers in those days: absolutely any claim (including mutually contradictory claims) that could serve as a hurdle to the Hindu rights to the site would do. They never mustered any evidence for a Buddhist or Jaina presence at the contentious site. The wealth of archaeological evidence dug up on multiple occasions since then does not contain any such evidence either.
The resulting picture is that Vaishnava, Shaiva, Jaina and Bauddha places of worship existed peacefully side by side. And all of them were destroyed on the same footing by the Islamic invaders. Thus, one of the main Jaina sites, the birthplace temple for Ādināth, the first Tīrthaṅkara, was destroyed by the general who had conquered the city in 1193, Shah Zuran Ghori. For Islam, all non-Muslims, whatever the fine distinctions between them, are equally fodder for Jihad and hellfire. This stark equality in the Kāfir (unbeliever) status and the concomitant treatment is another fact that the mendacious nitpicking about a Brahmanical-Buddhist conflict seeks to cover up.
The Jaina and Buddhist sites in Ayodhya are largely the topic of a book by archaeologist Lalta Prasad Pandey: Ayodhyā, the Abode of Rāma and the Dharmakṣetra of Lord Buddha and the Jaina Tīrthaṅkaras. A Historical and Critical Study. Published in 2009, it never received the attention it deserved. So, inspired by recent events in Salem, we will now look into it.
As an expert, Pandey is aware of the limitations on our knowledge of the city: "Archaeology depends also on chance discoveries. Therefore, without having the entire city of Ayodhyā dug on a larger scale, its antiquity and full period of life can never be known. Archaeological excavations of the bed of the Sarayū are also required, because the city, situated on the bank of a turbulent river like Sarayū, may have been washed away. (...) An aerial view of the site and its surroundings gives an impression that the course of the river has certainly shifted from its old site inundating the city situated on its bank." (p.6)
Indeed, “it is difficult to prove the exact place where Rāma was born (…) As a historian, the author would not like to stress upon this point too much. Rāma was born no doubt in Ayodhyā (…) different localities of a city move from one part of the city to the other. Constructions are destroyed by time and they are rebuilt, but they may change their places.” (p.90)
So, don’t conclude too fast that this cannot be the city that contained the Solar Dynasty’s palace, where prince Rama must have been born. There’s still so much to discover in Ayodhya. From the Śatapathabrāhmaṇa onwards, when the Vedic horizon widens from Haryana into wat is now eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, the late Vedic literature regularly mentions the kings of Kośala (Ayodhyā and Śrāvastī), starting with Para Atnāra and Kṣemadhanva in the sixty-eighth Solar/Aikṣvāku generation after Manu, or seven generations after Rama. But the city of Ayodhya itself is already mentioned in the AtharvaVeda 10:2:32 (quoted p.83, repeated in the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka), where it seems to function as the city par excellence, here serving as a model for the human body: “Nine gates (navadvārāḥ) and eight crossings (aṣṭacakrāḥ) has Ayodhya, city of the Gods.” For this proverbial usage, it already must have been a prominent city.
The Buddhist literature speaks of a flood at the site, causing emigration, and then the construction of a new town on the outskirts of Ayodhya, Sāketa, at the command of the young king of Kośala, Prasenajit, a friend of the Buddha. The renewal of a city by building a new city on its outskirts in a common event in history, e.g. Old Delhi expanded to New Delhi. Once the city was flourishing, “the association of the Buddha with this city is also known. It is stated that he had lived in its garden, called Añjanavana, many times. It is here that he had delivered his sermon called the Sāketasutta.” (p.16)
Other Buddhists too lived or visited there, already during the lifetime of the Buddha. It’s where he had discussions with Kakudha Mendasīra, Kuṇḍalīya, Sāriputta Moggalana, Aniruddha and the nun Jaṭilagāhikā. Later Buddhist philosophers who worked there include Aśvaghoṣa, Asaṅga and Vasubandhu.
Similarly with the Jainas: “The Ādipurāṇa and the Vividha Tīrthakalpa, texts of the early medieval period, describe it as one of the great centres of Jaina religion” (p.16), locating at least the first (Ṛṣabha or Ādināth, p.68) and the fourth Tīrthaṅkara there, probably five of them, while Pārśvanāth and Mahāvīra visited the town. Jaina philosophers like Acalabhānu also lived there.
Prof. Pandey details the town’s general history, like how it was occupied by the Indo-Greeks and liberated by Puṣyamitra Śuṅga, or how Kaniṣka, both I and II, waged war against the king of Sāketa. He also gives all the archaeological information, such as the apparent decline and revival of Ayodhya, or how Sāketa goes as deep as the Northern Black Polished Ware, one layer younger than the Painted Grey Ware characterizing the Mahābhārata sites and Ayodhya proper. For those prosaic data, we refer to the book itself.
Let us rather focus on what this says about the interaction between the different sects of Hinduism broadly defined. One thing we learn is how the supposedly superstitious Brahmanism is confirmed by the supposedly rational Buddhism. The Jātaka stories about the Buddha’s past life famously contain his embracing of Rama as an earlier incarnation (as well as an older relative within the Solar dynasty, the Buddha himself being a royal prince) of the Buddha. Here we see, by the way, the origin of the integration of the Buddha into the series of Vishnu’s incarnations together with Rama: far from being some Brahmanical concoction swallowing the Buddha against his will, it is actually suggested by the Buddha himself. If he is a reincarnation of Rama, and Rama is reinterpreted as Vishnu’s incarnation, then automatically he too becomes Vishnu’s incarnation. (p.35)
Less well-known is the Māndhātājātaka: the Buddha had also been the Ayodhya king Māndhātā in a past life. This Solar king militarily helped the Lunar Paurava tribe against the Druhyu tribe shortly before the oldest hymns in the ṚgVeda. This is about as deep as you can get into the Indian past. But by the Buddha’s day and later, he had merely become a proverbially powerful king and serves as such in the Puranic literature as well as in the Buddha’s own narrative. Several other kings of Ayodhya also figure in earlier-incarnation stories. This confirms that at least the Buddhist tradition was always in dialogue and interaction with the Vedic and Itihāsa-Purāṇa traditions.
To make a long story short, the really striking part of this book is what remains absent. Though Jainas, Buddhists, Vaishnavas and Shaivas lived cheek by jowl here, their debates never spilled over into violent conflict. The destruction that Salar Masud Ghaznavi, Shah Zuran Ghori and Zahiruddin Babar brought to Ayodhya over a mere religious doctrine was new to them.
Lalta Prasad Pandey: Ayodhyā, the Abode of Rāma and the Dharmakṣetra of Lord Buddha and the Jaina Tīrthaṅkaras. A Historical and Critical Study, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi 2009.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-45602342805842404452022-08-28T19:56:00.010-07:002022-09-10T06:26:06.431-07:00Open Letter to Audrey Truschke
(In late 2020, I promised women’s rights campaigner Prof. Madhu Kishwar a contribution to her debate on Audrey Truschke’s work denying Aurangzeb’s anti-Hindu atrocities and temple destructions, which in that stage of the polemic focused on the specific insults she suffered as a woman. But this half-finished Open Letter got lost in my pile of unfinished writings; sorry to all concerned. After my finally sending it in, her website manushi.in published it on 29 August 2022.)
Dear Audrey Truschke,
Welcome to the club. Welcome among those who bear the consequences of uttering their opinions.
In a paper posted on academia.edu.vom, published in the Woke magazine The Revealer (14 July 2020), you tell us of your own suffering at the hands of Hindu male Twitterati. It is called Hate Male, a rather predictable pun on Hate Mail.
About what happens at your own Twitter account I don’t know much, as you have excluded me from it, exclusively because of my unwelcome opinions (i.e. not because of foul language), but I do know through numerous other channels that you are indeed hated in Hindu circles. Ever since your whitewash of the rock-solid and first-hand evidence of Aurangzeb’s numerous temple destructions (Aurangzeb: the Man and the Myth, Viking/Penguin, Gurgaon 2017), and additionally your recent denial of the rock-solid evidence for Islam’s extermination of Buddhism in South Asia, you are now among the proverbial hate figures for Hindu activists, up there with Wendy Doniger, Michael Witzel and Sheldon Pollock.
The effect is not limited to the people who have actually read your book: they are only few and hardly overlap with those who send you hate mail and other criticism. But all of them know a few of your tweets, a quicker way to get to know your thoughts. So they know that you have tried to make Sita call Rama a “misogynistic pig”. They also know that when challenged, you attributed this to the American Sanskritist Robert Goldman’s Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa translation. Goldman himself, though not a friend of political Hinduism, had to intervene and rebuke your self-serving claim, clarifying that he had neither used the slur “pig” nor the anachronism “misogynistic”. You will understand that neither your lie about the Ramayana nor your heartfelt insult to Rama endears you to the Hindus.
Your victimhood
Then again, don't complain too much about that atrocious victimhood of yours. Compare your situation with the world around you: at the present rate of exclusion for dissidents, with even Nobel Prize winners sacked from their posts for wrongthink, you are very fortunate to have a secure US university chair and the support from your institution. Your enemies are not among the power-wielders whose actions have consequences for your career; they only consist of people you already looked down on, and who have no power to hurt you in any way. They only have foul but impotent words to trade, not good enough for turning your colleagues against you, let alone force your employer to sack you or all other employers to shun you. Even their so-called “death threats” are but verbal outbursts, ten a penny, not the kind of warning that would be given by a genuine revenge killer who means business.
There are quite a few people who face direr consequences for what they have said. The Satanic Verses affair in 1989 with death threats against Salman Rushdie and effective assaults on his translators and supporters (including a non-lethal knife attack on a Nobel Prize winner, Naguib Mahfouz), assaults on the Danish Mohammed cartoonists and the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo editorial board in 2015 showed that the West is not immune from the repression against candid freethinkers. But the problem is far more tangible in the erstwhile Third World. Assuming you are not racist, you won’t look down on those cases just because the “offending” writers weren’t white, right? Recent murders of dissident writers took place in Bangladesh, Nigeria, India and other countries.
On Krishna Janmasthami, a Muslim thought it funny to lampoon Krishna in a cartoon, bad in taste but not illegal. (This part you may not find in the general media, where an iron rule is that reporting of Hindu-Muslim confrontations must hide away any Muslim initiative and only start when Hindus react, as if a history of WW2 were to start on D-Day with the Anglo-American “aggression” against Nazi-defended Europe.) A Dalit Hindu reacted in a civilized way: not with rioting but with a counter-cartoon, viz. on Mohammed. Since the local Muslim grievance brigade couldn’t find the ad hoc cartoonist at once, they hit him in the next best way: they attacked the house of his relatives, including a Congress MLA, and set it on fire. To top it all, as punishment for being the target of a murder attempt, not the criminal attackers but the “offending” Hindu was arrested and jailed for “triggering” violence, and in the secularist media he was denounced and lampooned rather than becoming the beneficiary of solidarity. Now if all that had happened to you, with your family home set on fire and you yourself rewarded with jail time, then you would be in a position to complain. So, before you start drama-queening and throwing allegations around, I suggest you imagine going through his ordeal. What a privilege, merely having to imagine it.
[Postscript 27 August 2022: the last three months have seen seven Jihadi murders of Hindus who had merely tweeted their support for Nupur Sharma, ex-BJP spokeswoman who had been sacked by the Islam-appeasing BJP for truthfully quoting Islamic scripture. This was the implementation of an Urdu slogan faithfully summarizing Islamic law: Gustāx-i-rasūl kī ek hī sazā: sar tan se judā, “Insulting the Prophet has only one punishment: separating head from trunk”. Time to face up to your privilege that you don’t have to face such fate.]
Yours is a luxury problem, and your fury about it will come across as quite pubescent among those who have suffered real exclusion, real cancel culture, real death threats, and in some cases actual attempts on their lives, failed or successful. Thus, you end your paper waxing indignant about having to censor your acknowledgments section in order to protect your informers from reprisals by vigilantes. Well, for thirty years now it’s been a routine for me to consider whom to acknowledge, as I have found out that your Hindu-bashing tribe is very vindictive and unforgiving of dissidence, and this not through impotent tweets (or through the ephemeral blackfacing of a victim you mention, an informer of James Laine’s anti-hagiography Shivaji), but through very consequential exclusions, seconded by a non-committed but intimidated and therefore compliant bourgeoisie.
Why they have an aversion for you
But alright, let’s commiserate: it is no fun being the target of hate mail. Before evaluating it as morally wrong, or at least contrary to the gentlemanly behaviour that I was taught, let us first note that for a Hindu nationalist, it is also strategically wrong. Your camp can get away with all kinds of misbehaviour, for you will always be shielded by the establishment and the mainstream media. Hindus, by contrast, are in the middle of an uphill battle; they cannot afford mistakes, or anything that could be used against them.
It is also very counterproductive: instead of a debate on your Aurangzeb thesis, which for their camp is eminently winnable, they have only provoked a wave of renewed indignation against Hindu nationalism, especially after the public has absorbed your version of their position. Whereas the Aurangzeb skeptics merely uphold an eminently reasonable account confirmed already by prominent historians like Jadunath Sarkar and RC Majumdar, now they find themselves criminalized in the dominant account as ill-behaved trolls.
So, hate mail. This is, of course, assuming that it is genuine. Those who follow the news closely, know by now that the most conspicuous hate crimes are self-inflicted and fake. Those who follow it only vaguely are taken in by the initial scandal: front-page news and the ensuing, grimly serious panel discussions to burn the indignation against the alleged hate group into the minds of the audience. But when the truth next comes out, it is only a little article tucked away on page 13, if at all that.
Some of the hate mail you cite, esp. your opening shot with a Holocaust photograph, is just too good to be true. In contemporary Western culture, Adolf Hitler is the hate figure par excellence, without competition, and so haters on both sides have their discourse full of him. But that is mostly to paint their enemies with the Hitler brush (so-called Godwins), and thus criminalize them as deeply as possible, as indeed you yourself try to do here and on other occasions; but not to identify themselves with him. And then of all the hateful things a Hindu could have thought up against you, your critic would have chosen to identify himself with Hitler and you with his victims? I hope you don’t mind some skepticism here.
But then again, it is not altogether impossible: there are indeed some rare Hindu conspiracy thinkers who used to think up their own stories but who, ever since the internet, are swallowing Western intrigues about the 9/11 false flag operation (which actually exonerates Aurangzeb’s religion as the culprit), the illuminati-controlled “deep state”, or indeed “the Zionist world conspiracy”. So, lacking any more direct evidence, I will assume for now that your story is true.
But it remains a strange aspect of your story that this troll called you a Jew. There are some Hindus who know of your Jewish descent, if only because you yourself regularly bring it up. Among American white Christians, with their vicarious guilt trip, it would immunize you from criticism (though not among your woke African-American and Muslim companions, many of whom are brazenly anti-Semitic themselves), and we know how sensitive you are to criticism. But most Hindus situate you in another group, and unlike the Jews, this is a group all of them do mistrust: the Christian missionaries.
Indeed, in a Twitter debate about you, someone cursorily called you a Jew, and someone else restated the Hindu consensus: “She is not a Jew at all. Through marriage she belongs to a Baptist missionary family.” The subtlety of ethnic Jewry being distinct from religious Judaism, so that there are Jewish-born Christians, is lost on most Hindus. For them, your ethnic provenance is not important (though you wish you could have blamed their “hate” on that), but your subscribing to the missionary project is.
Your actual religious adherence is unknown to me, but among Hindus, you ought to know you are reputed to be part of the Christian missionary lobby. Hindus often are not very clear about these Western denominational issues, e.g. Wendy Doniger was also often accused of Christian missionary links even after she had clarified that she is Jewish. Unlike your ethnic origins, with which Hindus have no quarrel (as Israeli ambassadors to India keep repeating: “the only country where the Jews were never persecuted”), your religious adherence amounts for them to a declaration of war. What have the Baptist missionaries done in the Northeast and other parts of India? Simple: they have destroyed the native religion to make way for Christianity. This is, of course, the obverse side of the coin in which all Christian missionaries take pride and which they gladly communicate to their home sponsors: that they have turned a village or a community Christian.
[Postscript 27 August 2022: Once in the business of history denial, you have chosen to extend it to your own tribe, the Christian missionaries and their atrocities against Hindus e.g. “After whitewashing Aurangzeb, Audrey Truschke moves on to downplay the Portuguese Inquisition of Goa and atrocities committed against Hindus”, OpIndia, 6 August 2022]
As our king Clovis was told by his baptism father upon his conversion from Paganism to Christianity in 496: “Burn what you worshiped and worship what you burned.” (This was actually Christian self-flattery playing at victimhood, viz. implying that the Pagans had tried to destroy Christianity the way Christianity had been busy destroying Paganism: though not true, this was a common psychological mechanism, viz. projection.) Similarly, Christian missionaries have gone to India to burn every sign of Hinduism: in the past literally, today figuratively, but at any rate to destroy the native religion and replace it with their own. This is really a declaration of war issued by the Christian camp, no way around it, and nothing even-handed about it. If the natives react, as the Odisha tribals did after the murder of the conversion-hindering Swami Lakshmanada and his four assistents in 2008, this is not “hate” but self-defence.
But let us return to your Hitler anecdote, where we have assumed for now that what you claim is true. Even then there is not only what you say but also what you hide. Having had a ringside view of the Aurangzeb debate and the rhetorical habits of the Hindu nationalists for thirty years, I know it is a hundred times more common in this debate to hear Hitler mentioned to a very different effect than the one you bring up. The Hindu activists don’t equate themselves to Hitler, as you would like us to retain; on the contrary, they denounce Aurangzeb as a proto-Hitler, and consequently his whitewashers as Holocaust deniers avant la lettre. You do your best to keep your American audience in the dark about this well-attested fact, but in India, the likening of the Muslim atrocities on Hindus to the Holocaust is very common, and so is the likening of Aurangzeb to Hitler. Imagine one of your colleagues defending Hitler in all seriousness, and the indignation you would feel; well, that is what you look like to numerous Hindus.
You allege that “Aurangzeb serves as a dog whistle for Hindu nationalists who invoke him to rile up anti-Muslim sentiments and violence”. The name Hitler definitely serves as a dog whistle in many situations, viz. as a call to hate every “new Hitler” of the moment. The hatred against Saddam Hussein or Moammar al-Qadhafi was powered by the indignation about Adolf Hitler’s crimes and it justified invasions, occupations and mass bombings; any doubt about these disastrous policies was derided as a “new Munich”. The regular likening of Narendra Modi to Hitler by the Indian and American Left is not so innocent either. When you regularly make Nazi comparisons, it is to spew hatred and add the extra force of the Nazi reference to it.
But the fact that you are a certified hater doesn’t annul Hitler’s crimes; the Holocaust did take place. While your use of that historical reference is malafide, it nonetheless refers to real events. Likewise, whatever motives you ascribe to the Hindus, the reference to Aurangzeb's crimes is and remains correct. And denying them is like denying the Nazi crimes. You are a negationist.
Why you don’t convince them
To be sure, Aurangzeb was not all bad. By saying that, I break ranks with these numerous Hindus who tend to lose all nuance when his name is dropped. About Aurangzeb’s character, not much negative can be said. Alright, he dethroned his father and killed his elder brother, but so many rulers have done similar things (e.g. the Buddhist emperor Ashoka also killed his brother and many other relatives, generals and ministers to grab the throne for himself) that we will look the other way for now. But unlike his hedonistic and drug-addicted father and grandfather, he was a pious and ascetic man, qualities which Hindus tend to applaud. He chided his father for wasting tax-payers’ money on what Aldous Huxley was to call the “expensive vulgarity” of the Taj Mahal, and gave the good example by earning his own living with making skull-caps and calligraphing copies of the Quran. He also did charity, even in his last will, for his hunger-stricken subjects, or at least the Muslims among them.
He was to his own mind a do-gooder in the good sense of the term. Far too often, Hindus attack his character as the reason for his thousandfold temple destructions and his atrocities against the Sikh Gurus. But there is no reason for personalizing the issue, not in the demonizing sense nor in the psychobabble sense of: “Oh, what a paradox: he was a pious man, but also a bigot.” No, his asceticism and his bigotry were not contrasting tendencies, they could be traced to one and the same trait: his commitment to his religion. If that religion had been Hinduism, a pious man like he would still have been inclined to tyaj, to renunciation, but he would have had no reason for intolerance. By contrast, now that his religion was Islam, which e.g. encouraged the inter-Muslim charity that he practised, he was also bigoted and actively intolerant against Unbelievers, at least as soon as he “got religion”.
I support attempts by historians to question the received wisdom: historiography in practice is an ongoing revision of the past. You could for example distinguish between different phases of Aurangzeb’s life. In his last years (he died at 91) he had become frail, introspective and full of doubts about his own record; gone was his self-righteousness. Not that he had started feeling for the Hindus, but he repented an unforeseen consequence of his anti-Infidel policies: they had provoked rebellions and thus shaken a hitherto stable Muslim empire. Even towards the Hindus, he was no longer as fierce as he used to be: his invitation to Guru Govind Singh for talks at the court, if not a trap, was more conciliatory than what he had done to the Guru in earlier years (cfr. infra).
So there is nothing wrong in principle with your second look at Aurangzeb’s record. Only, an inspection of the data fails to support your whitewash. These unflattering data have not gone away ever since historians Jadunath Sarkar and RC Majumdar drew their less Aurangzeb-friendly conclusions.
The Hindu reaction
Some of your fans ask why, 4 years after the Aurangzeb publication, no scholarly refutation has been written yet. My position is that, in spite of the reasons that follow, a booklet in refutation is worth being written as a source of ready reference. It need not be bulky for, contrary to what your friends assume, there is little hard evidence in your book, nor even attempts thereto. It is mostly bluff about how generous Aurangzeb was, and exercises in avoiding the extant hard evidence of the opposite. Nor are your rhetorical tricks very sophisticated: whoever has followed the earlier Ayodhya debate can see through this standard secularist rhetoric right away.
Admittedly, many of your critics are equally unsophisticated. Yet there is a simple remedy for this problem. Hotheads are not leaders: militant types, instead of staging their own impotent and counterproductive verbal attacks on you and your ideological tribe, would rather have rallied around their champion,-- if there had been one. That champion in this case is whoever takes the trouble of refuting your thesis in a counter-book, full of proper quotes and references. This is what Vishal Agarwal did against Wendy Doniger’s unjustly famous book The Hindus, An Alternative History: write an equally hefty counter-book detailing Doniger’s numerous errors of fact and symptoms of bias: The New Stereotypes Of Hindus In Western Indology (CreateSpace 2015).
Hindu historians qualified to refute your work are just not sufficiently impressed with it, having seen variations on it before. I am not going to do it either, because in my life I don’t want to spend much time anymore on a simple topic like Islam. Everything about its theology and a lot about its history has already been said (partly by me), I leave it to a younger generation of historians to earn their spurs by filling the gaps remaining in Islamic history, before graduating to more interesting topics in their turn.
Scanning your book, genuine historians soon notice that its claim of giving a fresh look into primary sources and thus overturning the extant consensus on Aurangzeb’s fanaticism is only bluff. They know that primary sources attest thousands of demolitions and now see only rhetoric in your book that cannot possibly be a match for them. There is no more direct documentary evidence than Aurangzeb’s own firmāns (decrees) for temple demolitions, and no more direct evidence in archaeology than the extant temple ruins resulting from these firmans. Your bluff cannot possibly overrule them.
Thus, of Saqi Mustaid Khan’s chronicle Ma’asīr-i Ālamgīrī, you randomly claim “a noted tendency to exaggerate the number of temples demolished by Aurangzeb” (p.108), but you carefully hide that number, which is thousands upon thousands, since it is so extremely different from your own “at most a few dozen” (p.100) or even “just over a dozen” (p.107, following Richard Eaton); readers might get suspicious about your cavalier treatment of primary sources.
So, a few publications refuting your thesis have finally seen the light of day. VS Bhatnagar’s book Emperor Aurangzeb and Destruction of Temples, Conversions and Jizya (Literary Circle, Jaipur 2017) was written before your name became a household name in India, and published almost simultaneously with your book. It doesn’t address your specific claims, it addresses Aurangzeb’s record that you make claims about. And from Aurangzeb’s own Court Chronicles, it cites many more temple destructions than you would even acknowledge as possible. It wipes your book away without even mentioning it.
A long list of certified temple destructions and other acts of persecution was promptly given by Dimple Kaul and TrueIndology: “Aurangzebs tyranny and bigotry cannot be whitewashed. A counterview”, First Post, 6 May 2017. You had no answer.
Therefore you were challenged on Twitter on historical specifics by TrueIndology. So you blocked him, then claimed that he had run away from the debate, and took the worn-out pose of pulling academic rank. Like a sophomore and unlike an accomplished scholar, you avoided the actual controversy by merely boasting about your having (and he not having) an academic post. A real scholar would have developed a healthy skepticism of his colleagues’ pretences and of his own knowledge’s limitations. You added insult to injury by alleging that he did not have the academic level to meet you in the debate from which you had blocked him. Details in “Five cases where TrueIndology exposed Audrey Truschke”, MyVoice/OpIndia, 18 April 2018.
Not about the evidence itself but about your highly colonial attitude during the debate, Pawan Pandey wrote: “Dr. Audrey Truschke, western Indologists and their hidden motives”, First Post, 23 September 2020. In your woke circles this ought to carry some weight. It is indeed remarkable that the heralds of “decolonization” evince a completely colonial attitude to Hindus who take their own decolonization seriously. Busy-body, know-it-all, telling them what is best for themselves, even teaching them how to decolonize.
Among Western Indologists, you, maybe not as a controversial person (“many of my colleagues associate me with public controversy, and I must now contend with my reputation as a troublemaker.”), but at least as an anti-Hindu campaigner, enjoyed a lot of sympathy, the guaranteed reward for any position that irritates Hindus. But even there no one could help you with supportive documents that simply weren’t to be found in the Aurangzeb files.
[Postscript, 27 August 2022: Specifically in reaction to your work are:
• François Gautier: “Why the fascination for Aurangzeb ? », Sangam channel, 2020; plus the Aurangzeb exhibitions at his Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Museum in Pune.
• “Aurangzeb destroyed thousands of Hindu temples; no, he didn’t rebuild any”, MyIndiaMyGlory, 15 January 2021.
• Neeraj Atri: “Aurangzeb: Sufi or tyrant”, Sangam channel, 15 April 1921.
• Aabhas Maldahiyar: “Audrey Truschke, stop glorifying killers of Hindus”, Australia Today, 5 August 2021.
• Aditya Kuvalekar (Prof., Univ. Essex): interview on Aurangzeb by Arihant Pawariya, Vaad channel, 28 August 2021.
• Sandeep Balakrishna: “How Acharya Jadunath Sarkar wrote the majestic volumes of the History of Aurangzeb”, Dharma Dispatch, 23 April, 2022.
• Sandeep Balakrishna: “Here it is: a ready reckoner of Aurangzeb’s industrial-scale temple destructions. A partial list of Hindu temples destroyed by the Mughal king Aurangzeb”, Dharma Dispatch, 23 May 2022.
• Saurabh D Lohogaonkar: Whitewashing Tyrant, Distorting Narrative, EvencePub, Delhi, July 2022.
• Saurabh D Lohogaonkar: “Whitewashing tyrant, distorting narrative”, Sangam channel, July 2022.
• Saurabh D Lohogaonkar: “‘Aurangzeb – Whitewashing Tyrant, Distorting Narrative’: New book debunks distortions around the Mughal tyrant Aurangzeb”, OpIndia, 7 August 2022.]
The Dhimma
Seeing through your twisting of history doesn’t even require a thorough investigation of primary sources, the distortions can be of a general nature, immediately recognizable, e.g.: “Beginning in 1669, Aurangzeb levied the jizya on most non-Muslims in the empire in lieu of military service”. (p.88) This is a very common refrain among apologists: that non-Muslims were not really discriminated against, since Muslims had to render military service just as non-Muslims had to pay jizya.
No, serving in the army was prized, because it meant being part of the ruling group, and gave access to the spoils of war. Often it also wasn’t mandatory military service but volunteer armies, with the common characteristic of excluding non-Muslims. In many societies, bearing arms is a privilege of the in-group, forbidden to oppressed groups. Later, Muslim regimes also induced non-Muslims into their armies, most notably the Christian-born Jannissaries in the Ottoman empire, but only after converting and indoctrinating them.
Your attempt to whitewash this exclusion of non-Muslims from the army is not so innocent, certainly not for a historian. Under the Dhimma rules for non-Muslims, a non-negotiable rule was that it was forbidden to them to bear arms: this was not a favour to them, a relief from military service, but an element of their exclusion from power. Yours is a projection of modern equations, with conscripts unable to hope for more than to come home alive from the war, therefore trying to dodge the draft, whereas Islamic law provided the soldiers with the right to plunder. As you certainly know (though the trolls besieging you may not), the projection of modern states of affairs onto an ancient world where they didn’t obtain, is the cardinal sin in historiography. Let me remind you: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
Anyway, the importance of this passage is that you yourself indicate a cut-off year, 1669. Until then, Aurangzeb largely abided by the compromise instituted by Akbar: the Moghul empire would be a Muslim empire, but less Muslim than empire, avoiding sources of fractiousness such as an all too open oppression that would provoke revolts. It had been decided on because Akbar wanted to get ethnic and sectarian lobbies within the Muslim ruling class off his back by attracting Hindu cooperation, and had more or less been continued by Jahangir and Shah Jahan. They profited from it, for instead of suppressing rebellions they could invest in the economy and in luxuries.
Initially, Aurangzeb also continued this policy, and when he later strayed from it, aggrieved parties would remind him of it. But by 1669, he “got religion”, started to observe the Islamic rules more strictly, and therefore got harsher on the Pagans and their idolatry. As proof of his non-fanaticism, you cite a firman from 1659 prohibiting his men from further harassing the Brahmins of Benares. True, but that was still the period of Akbar’s compromise, not yet affected by Aurangzeb’s later Islamic radicalization. It cannot serve as refutation of his later iconoclastic commands.
You write about this early period, when Aurangzeb resolved to walk in the footsteps of his “great ancestors”: “In Aurangzeb’s eyes Islamic teachings and the Mughal tradition enjoined him to protect Hindu temples, pilgrimage destinations, and holy men.” (p.102) It is only in your own words that the Moghul practice of turning a blind eye to the flourishing of idolatry, the single worst sin according to Islam, is “Islamic”; you never manage to quote any Moghul as saying this. And indeed, tolerating Hindu practices was part of Akbar’s compromise, not of Islamic teachings; orthodox figures like Ahmad al-Sirhindi saw through it and condemned it. But it was a success formula, it allowed for a peaceful prosperous empire, so Akbar’s successors didn’t really question it, until Aurangzeb did, not provoked by anything the Hindus had done, but convinced by Islamic teachings that wouldn’t be side-lined forever.
At the end of his life, Aurangzeb also admitted the mistake which you try so hard to deny, viz. his anti-Hindu policies. This was not because he had suddenly developed pro-Hindu feelings, but because he realized that he had thereby provoked rebellions and thus destabilized a hitherto successful Muslim empire. On balance, he had rendered a disservice to Islam, not because he had disobeyed Islam (as apologists would like us to conclude, arguing that negative features like terrorism and iconoclasm “aren’t the real Islam”) but because in the real world, Islam has to co-exist with other forces, which ended up punishing a too principled loyalty to Islamic precepts.
The Sikh Gurus and Aurangzeb
Another significant fact about your Aurangzeb book that your more literate critics have noticed, is the absence of any mention of the Sikh Gurus contemporaneous with him: Guru Tegh Bahadur and Guru Govind Singh. When you ask common Hindus what the name Aurangzeb means to them, it is usually two things: his massive destruction of temples, among which they will notably mention the Krishna Janmabhumi and the Kashi Vishvanath, and his cruelty to the Gurus. He had Guru Tegh Bahadur tortured to death for his refusal to convert to Islam, and he had all four of Guru Govind Singh’s sons killed. Your cosy presentation is simply irreconcilable with what the Gurus suffered at Aurangzeb’s hands.
But maybe you mean that those narrations, so inconvenient to your own thesis, are untrue? Your name as a bold historian, without fear of controversy, would really have been made if you had chosen to refute these common narratives about the Gurus, and succeeded in doing so convincingly. It would have made you even more hated, but if your refutation were true, the historians’ admiration would have been assured. However, that is not what you chose to do. Instead, your entire Aurangzeb book does not mention the Gurus at all. It mentions the Sikhs as such, the Sikh rebellions and Ranjit Singh’s kingdom, but strangely not those among them who had to deal directly with Aurangzeb. You can only make your thesis persuasive by being very selective in the primary material you consider: you simply leave out what doesn’t suit you.
Very indirectly, though, you do mention Govind Singh. On p.152, you thank Heidi Pauwels (whom I personally knew in the 1980s when we were students at Leuven University) for organizing “the panels on Aurangzeb at the 2014 European Association for South-Asian Studies Conference, held in Zürich, Switzerland”. I attended those panels. They discussed several Hindi poets as writing in praise of Aurangzeb. Of course, many Soviet poets wrote in praise of Josef Stalin, and they’d better. (Your own case can be be compared with the foreign poets like Louis Aragon who, under no compulsion but through ideological blindness, equally wrote in praise of Stalin.) But their crowning exhibit in Aurangzeb’s favour was Guru Govind Singh’s letter to him, the Zafar Nama.
In spite of its name, “victory letter”, this letter is here and there quite toadyist in contents. Thus, in order to get away with his message of refusing the emperor’s invitation to the court (calculating the risk of a trap involved), the Guru had to also include some diplomatic flattery: six verses out of a hundred and eleven. So yes, he praises Aurangzeb a bit. But it takes an Islamophile Indologist to read this as a genuine expression of what Govind thought about Aurangzeb. Any normal human being would, when told of what had transpired between those two in real life, have concluded that very obviously, for the Guru, Aurangzeb was the most hated man in the world. This was, after all, the killer of his father and all his four sons.
Temple destructions
Aurangzeb gave “two orders to destroy the Somanatha temple in 1659 and 1706 (the existence of a second order suggests that the first was never carried out).” (p.107) In the first year he was not so fired up with anti-Infidel zeal yet. He did get it destroyed, though, even at the fag end of his life when he supposedly regretted his anti-Hindu policies.
“In 1672 Aurangzeb issued an order recalling all endowed lands given to Hindus and reserving all such future land grants for Muslims, possibly as a concession to the ulama. If strictly enforced, this move would have been a significant blow to Hindu and Jain religious communities, but historical evidence suggests otherwise. The new policy on land grants lacked implementation, especially in the more far-flung areas of the kingdom.” (p.105)
In those days, distances counted for something. Officials in far-flung areas calculated that they could get away with taking bribes in return for a blind eye to the continuation of idolatry. Thus, the Jagannath temple in Puri survived a commandment for demolition in exchange for a huge bribe to the Moghul Governor, and when Aurangzeb insisted, it was closed down but still not destroyed. Plus, a military crisis in the Deccan with the Marathas distracted his attention to more pressing matters. That Islamic policies were not fully carried out as decreed by Aurangzeb, does not mean that there is a milder Islam, nor that he had moments of increased tolerance, merely that there exist other factors in the world except ideology.
To sum up, you admit that “Aurangzeb also oversaw temple desecrations” and that “there were probably more temples destroyed under Aurangzeb than we can confirm”, adding an estimate: “perhaps a few dozen in total?” (p.107) That’s not what the sources suggest, but for humorous purposes it’s a cute proposal.
You really set a new record in apologetics by repeatedly asserting that Aurangzeb not only destroyed temple, but also protected many. From whom did they need protection? No one else is known to have raided Hindu temples under his reign than he or his lieutenants. Anyway, your reasoning is a great hint for trial lawyers: “Yes, Your Honour, the facts have been proven, my client did indeed commit these murders. But! Given the far larger number of people he left alive, all those people he could have murdered if he’d really had the murderer’s nature in him, you will consider his case benevolently.”
The figures in historian Sita Ram Goel’s provisional list of nearly two thousand demolished temples in India (Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them, part 1, 1990) has been around for more than thirty years already, a standing challenge to your negationist school. No attempt is in evidence to falsify even a single one of all those straightforward claims, not in others’ work nor in yours. By contrast, your claims about Aurangzeb have been challenged, both before you made them, and after.
The Ayodhya debate and Indology
The success of genuine scholarship in the Ayodhya debate, with the humiliating implosion of the anti-temple “Eminent Historians” on the witness stand during the Ayodhya trial (documented by Meenakshi Jain in her two Ayodhya books, and by Anuradha Dutt and S. Kumar: The Restoration of Ayodhya, 2020, but if you only follow the media, which have kept the lid on this episode, you may not even know about it), has made Hindu activists more self-confident. Around 1990, their Eminences rode a very high horse, making Ayodhya into the last stronghold of secularism and themselves its brave defenders. They already bit the dust in the Government-organized scholars’ debate of 1991 but were secure in the knowledge that, thanks to their captive media’s monopoly on the bottle-neck of the information-flow from India, the India-watchers worldwide would never hear about it, and that the few possible exceptions would not be willing or able to strike a discordant note. In India they continued to dominate the opinion sphere for more than a decade, forcing the political class to toe their line.
Yet, their bluff against the scholarly evidence brought together by the scholars (only one of whom was linked to the Sangh, archaeologist SP Gupta) in 1991, gradually added to later and grandly confirmed by the Court-ordered ASI excavations of 2003, was scrutinized by the UP High Court. On the witness stand, each of them (well, the really big names managed to avoid questioning) collapsed and had to admit that their anti-temple posturing was based on no evidence at all. This is what will happen to you too in an authoritative scrutiny of your claims in favour of Aurangzeb and belittling the central passion of his life, the uprooting of Idolatry.
The significance of the Ayodhya debate for the larger job of Indology and India-watching has so far been cleverly hidden. Here was a situation where practically the entire professional class was loudly proclaiming that there had never been a temple, lambasting little me for peddling a “Hindutva concoction”, yet being proven collectively wrong. After the High Court verdict of 2010 confirming the temple, two American professors privately congratulated me at the next Annual Conference of the American Academy of Religion; but nobody publicly apologized for misinforming the public on the basis of mere hearsay in their principal field of expertise.
You also prove to be a worthy representative of Western Indology with your introductory sketch of India’s political landscape: “The BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, has controlled India’s central government since May 2014, and they have pursued an aggressive agenda of transforming India from a secular democracy welcoming of all faiths into a fascist state meant for martial-minded Hindus alone. During the last six years, anti-Muslim violence has risen sharply, freedom of the press has declined ruinously, and universities have been subjected to relentless assaults. History is a primary battleground for Hindu nationalists who want to rewrite India’s diverse past to justify their present-day oppression and violence, and historians like me get in their way.”
This is indeed representative for the counterfactual image of India spread abroad by India-watchers and the media in the West. It is simply not true that the BJP has made India less secular or democratic, let alone “fascist”. While anti-Hindu violence has indeed risen (even more in Bangladesh, Pakistan and marginally the USA), the figures show that there has been no rise in anti-Muslim violence, on the contrary. In Indira Gandhi’s time there were street riots with thousands of victims; the Kalistani violence in the 1980s and early 1990s killed many thousands of Hindus (rarely mentioned in overviews of Indian communalism), many more than the death toll in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom by Congress secularists; Muslims committed an anti-Hindu pogrom in Godhra killing 59 Ayodhya pilgrims, thus triggering street riots killing some 200 Hindus and 900 Muslims. In recent street confrontations like over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in 2019, such death toll had become unimaginable.
The press is much freer than under Indira and continues its age-old number of attacking the Hindutva forces unfettered, then getting copied by the New York Times, the BBC and other media you take as Gospel. And no, the BJP had never rewritten the history textbooks. Indeed, HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar, a dyed-in-the-wool RSS man, declared on this question in 2018 that he was proud of never having changed a single chapter (“Not rewritten a single history chapter in 4 years: Javadekar”, India Today, 27 September 2018) ,-- an expression of the presently dominant ideology that your class hasn’t even noticed: BJP Secularism, distinctly focusing on burying its historical Hindu associations.
This complete contrast between India’s reality and the fantasy world of the Indological analysis of the “communal” landscape could be laid at your door and summed up as mendaciousness, and that’s what many of your Hindu critics will certainly do. But I rather have the impression that, in spite of your self-flattery of being an attractor of controversy, you are essentially a herd animal merely swallowing and reproducing the dominant narrative peddled in your academic circles. Your performance as a university professor specialized in Indian communal episodes is dismal, but far from unique.
To Hindu polemicists, I often have to point out that their view of the West suffers from anachronism, e.g. they explain the phenomenon of Hindu-bashing (with an infelicitous term: “Hinduphobia”) through the woke category of racism, flattering themselves as bold anti-colonial warriors. In reality, though racism was indeed very strong in the colonial period, anti-racism has meanwhile become the state religion in the West, and Hindu-bashing has other grounds than race. Proof: it does not extend to Indian Muslims or Christians, though they are of the same race. The reasons for Hindu-bashing are more complex than race, but lazy or conformistic minds will prefer the racial explanation.
The India-watchers suffer from a similar anachronism. Numerous papers and books keep on appearing that explain the BJP’s policies in the 2020s through some quotes from RSS leader MS Golwalker’s book We, Our Nationhood Defined, written in 1938. In 1948 the police impounded all Hindutva publications (after the Mahatma murder), and Golwalkar himself forbade its republication afterwards. So 99,9% of Hindutva men have never read it (in publishing Golwalkar’s Collected Works in 2006, the RSS even left this book out, on the mendacious ground that Golwalkar had not been its writer), it is never quoted in BJP documents, yet your tribe pompously derives BJP policies from it. By contrast, the BJP’s real ideology, in which party members receive training, is called Integral Humanism (°1964). Because this sounds too innocuous, it is never even mentioned in most of the expert literature on Hindutva; as if the Labour Party were discussed without mentioning socialism.
More generally, we could say that academic and media talk about the BJP has at its core of truth the Hindu party founded by Shyam Prasad Mookerjee in 1951, the way it was until his death in 1953. Back then it still aimed for a Hindū Rāṣṭra, but the Hindu content of its politics soon started decreasing. When party leader Deendayal Upadhyaya launched Integral Humanism, this was a correct move, presenting a kind of modern translation of the Hindu concept Dharma; but its main value for new leaders like Nana Deshmukh and AB Vajpayee was that it didn’t contain the word “Hindu”. Former party president Balraj Madhok protested against the party’s socialist and Nehruvian drift, and was thrown out. In 1977 the party merged into the new Janata Party, and when it was reconstituted in 1980 as the Bharatiya Janata Party, it shed its Hindu roots and the goal of Hindū Rāṣṭra. Significantly, it added a green strip to the party flag, an act of Muslim appeasement, the very thing the Jan Sangh had chided the Congress Party for.
Then what about the Ayodhya movement, Hindu par excellence? This movement had been started by politicians of the Hindū Mahāsabhā and the Congress Party, and Congress PM Rajiv Gandhi worked towards the building of a new temple. But in 1989 the Eminent Historians came out with an Ayodhya statement that gave cold feet to middle-of-the-road politicians, and for two years the BJP captured the issue, using it to win the 1989 and 1991 elections, and then dropping it. The truth of the relation between the BJP and Hindu agitation was laid out clearly by BJP Justice Minister Arun Jaitley to the American Ambassador in 2004, when he dismissed it as merely an electoral ploy, immediately shelved after the elections. That is why (with the exception of MM Joshi’s clumsy rewriting of the history textbooks in 2002) neither Vajpayee nor Narendra Modi have fulfilled any item of the Hindu agenda.
The seeming exception of the abolition of Kashmir’s privileged status (Art. 370) was only possible because this was formally not a religious issue, never mentioning the words Hindu and Muslim. Moreover, on the ground little has changed, contrary to promises, and stray Hindus are still being murdered there. You can check on social media that Hindus express their criticism of, or anger at, the Modi Government for its persistent betrayal of the Hindu cause.
The future
The political power equation that facilitates the partisan anti-scholarly conduct of your camp will not last forever. One day it will become feasible to do academic research on the strange phenomenon that an entire academic and mediatic guild has systematically disinformed the public about the communal situation in India, consistently for decades. Your own whitewash of Aurangzeb will serve as a significant piece of evidence.
But don’t worry. It’ll take some more time (the BJP is not working on it), so you’ll have enjoyed your career and all the perks of your office. Nobody will be interested anymore in the yellowed pages of your negationist books. The dissertation about the India-watchers’ collective decades-spanning disinformation campaign will be read by the jury members and the fresh PhD’s mother, and then gather dust. After all, this is what has already happened: the false claim that the Ayodhya temple was a Hindutva concoction got exploded, yet the entire guild that ought to have been reduced to blushing and apologizing, managed to keep the news of its massive failure out of the information circuit.
Conversely, the few of us who were proven right, will never be compensated for the slander, boycotts and cancelings we suffered. And speaking for myself, I also don’t believe in the retributive karma theory: no punishment in the next life for the negationists, no reward for those who held on to the historical truth against all odds. We’ll have to be satisfied with Benedict de Spinoza’s dictum: “Virtue is its own reward.”
I certainly wouldn’t want to be in your shoes right now. But let’s not dramatize it. As an ex-Christian, I join you in your Christian belief in conversion. You can leave your negationism behind, it’s easy. From a sinner against the principles of historiography, you can redeem yourself. There will be lots of joy in heaven.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-47714489205048860382022-08-13T08:36:00.010-07:002022-08-14T18:23:07.567-07:00A Buddhist Ayodhya? The curious case of TN's Thalaivetti Muniyappan and secular discourse
(Swarajya, 15 August 2022)
https://www.wayofbodhi.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Thalaivetti_Muniappan_Buddha_Salem.jpg
(from Wikimedia)
During the Ayodhya controversy, the Eminent Historians and their supporters tried everything to counter the ever-mounting pile of evidence that there had been a Rama temple at the site. One stratagem was to claim the site had been (apart from vacant land, a secular building, a Shiva temple or whatever) a Buddhist place of worship. Actually, before the Islamic destruction, there had been quite a few Jaina and Buddhist places in Ayodhya, they were well-known, but the contentious site was not among them. Meanwhile, the archaeological excavations have confirmed that this was not a Buddhist site. But one failure is no reason for giving up. Indeed, now that the denial of Islamic temple destruction has lost all credibility, the attraction of turning Buddhism into a weapon for use in the secularist Jihad against Hinduism has only increased.
Out of the blue, a press report appeared about a temple controversy most of us had never heard about, in the far-away Periyeri Village in the district of Salem, Tamil Nadu. The Madras High Court has decreed that the worshippers of Thalaivetti Muniyappan are to be deprived of their temple because the central Murti has been certified to have been a Buddha statue. So we learn in “Idol in Salem temple is of the Buddha, not Hindu deity: Madras High Court” (Prime Times, 2 August 2022); then confirmed in “Madras HC directs restoring temple in Salem to its original Buddhist character – Has an important precedent just been set?” (swarajmag.com, 3 August 2022); and “Tamil Nadu's Thalaivetti Muniyappan Temple is Buddhist site, says Madras HC; halts further pooja” (First Post, 5 August 2022).
So, no puja for the deity will henceforth be allowed. On Court order, the temple is secularized and entrusted to the Archaeological Survey of India, in expectation of a planned transfer to a local Buddhist society, presumably the Buddha Trust. The verdict is the result of a case filed in 2011 by a local Buddhist, P. Ranganathan, now deceased. The Court had the state’s Archaeological Department take a close look at the Murti, and it found, after cleaning away the sandal paste and turmeric, that it had the so-called Mahālakṣaṇas, the marks distinguishing a Buddha from ordinary mortals, such as elongated earlobes. It was seated on a lotus in ardhapadmāsana (half lotus pose) with its hands in dhyana-mudrā (meditation hand-pose).
The High Court concluded that “the assumption of the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowment Department that it is a temple is no longer sustainable and the control must go into the hands of some other authority. (…) it will not be appropriate to permit the HR & CE Department to continue to treat this sculpture as Thalaivetti Muniappan. (…) treating the sculpture as that of Thalaivetti Muniappan would be against Buddhist doctrines.”
Now, what to make of this? If you were to close a Shiva temple, you could cynically say to the deprived worshippers: “Go to another Shiva temple, there’s enough of them.” But Thalaivetti Muniyappan is a purely local deity. Closing his temple means depriving his worshippers of their focus of worship. Our knowledge of the law is a little vague, but is this even allowed to a Court of Law in a secular state?
No question mark is needed when we look into this verdict in the light of the Places of Worship Act 1991, freezing the character of all places of worship as on 15 August 1947. The verdict flies in the face of this Act, it is blatantly illegal. And it opens the door to similar shifts: all the mosques that proudly show off their history of temple destruction by containing a part of the temple in their architecture (such as the already contentious Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi), could readily be forced to re-become Hindu, overnight.
Back to this particular case. What exactly is the relation between Thalaivetti Muniyappan and the Buddha? We find more details in a Buddhist article about recovered Buddha statues in South India: “Ancient Buddha Statues of Salem and Dharmapuri” by Yogi Prabodha Jñana and Yogini Abhaya Devi (21 October 2020, published on the wayofbodhi.org website). It explains:
“About a hundred years ago, someone found this broken Buddha statue with its body and head separated. The statue also had its nose broken. Someone affixed the head to the body but not in a proper way. The affixed figure looked odd, with its head slanting to the left. The nose that was added to the statue didn’t come out well. The outcome looked a little wrathful, unlike the usual Buddha statues. The eyes were also later painted in a wrathful way. So people consider it as some fierce local god and worship him that way with animal sacrifice. Thalaivetti means with a cut head.”
And Muniyappan is a Tamil way of saying: Muni Baba. This is not some mischievous Brahminical cover-up from Ambedkarite mythology, but a very open reference to a well-known Muni: Siddhartha Gautama, the Shakya-muni (“hermit of the Shakya nation”), after his Awakening also called the Buddha (“awakened one”). So this deity is “the Muni with a cut head”. After his material recomposition, he looked wrathful, different from the standard Buddha, so he got a somewhat distinct persona. That’s how it goes in polytheist cultures, like that of these Tamil villagers.
This is something the secularists in the media, the Courts and the Dravidianist parties won’t understand. Illiterate in religious matters, through their English-language textbooks they borrow some basic concepts from the Christian worldview. There, the word “religion” means a box-type division of the ideological landscape, excluding any other. Thus, when the Heathen Frankish king Clovis converted to Christianity in 496, his baptism father commanded him: “Now burn what you worshipped.” No compromise or half-way stance is possible, you have to burn all bridges with your former religion. This view was unknown to, of all people, the Buddha, who recommended the continuation of the existing sacred sites, festivals and pilgrimages, and who integrated the Vedic gods and Rishis in his discourse. (The very first “conversion” to Buddhism, and where the converts were to “burn what they worshipped”, was BR Ambedkar’s in 1956; though most of his followers continued to have a variety of Hindu gods on their house-altar.) But it was this view of religion that informed the unforgiving Christian and Muslim policy of iconoclasm: annihilate all reminders of Paganism.
Thus, the Islamic destruction of Buddhist monuments from Bamiyan to Nalanda originated in the conviction that the true religion could not tolerate any expression of a rival religion. That attitude, well-attested in Muslim history vis-à-vis Hinduism (including Buddhism), is then projected by the secularists onto Hinduism, or more precisely “Brahmanism”, vis-à-vis Buddhism. After all, “all religions are basically the same”, as even many unthinking Hindus will parrot after them.
Well, no, that breezy equation does not stand up to scrutiny. Thus, when the Muslim armies appeared in Nalanda Buddhist University, it was all over in no time; this after 17 centuries when the Buddhist institutions had flourish unperturbed under Hindu rule for 17 centuries. Is that no difference? Let’s listen to another passage in this Buddhist article:
In the nearby town of Thiyaganur, the villagers worship a “majestic Buddha statue of 6ft height recovered from a field. We found it placed inside a beautiful meditation hall made by the collective effort of the villagers. A farmer donated the land, and the villagers pooled in money to build the meditation hall in 2013. They also constructed a lotus seat inside and installed the Buddha on that. Here, the Buddha is regarded according to his teachings and not as a God. This new home for the ancient statue exemplifies how to preserve ancient statues most beneficially.”
Look, that is how Hindus treat icons: they don’t break them, they worship them. They don’t even ask questions about its identity, and the difference between the formal name “Buddha” and the descriptive name “Thalaivetti Muniyappan” is inconsequential to them. It is nonetheless on this flimsy difference that the whole verdict depends.
It is now secularist discourse (and the Court verdict is entirely part of it) to claim that the Islamic treatment of other people’s gods merely follows an existing Hindu practice, equally intolerant. If so, then it shouldn’t be difficult to find numerous cases of Muslims installing statues of Shiva, Krishna or indeed the Buddha for worship. Any takers?
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-35256408671448610532022-08-13T07:48:00.000-07:002022-08-13T07:48:20.093-07:00Talageri’s RigVeda(9 July 2022)
This article is a very brief comment on the main position of Shrikant Talageri in his review of Jijith Nadumuri Ravi’s digestion of Talageri’s over-all Out-of-India thesis, and on Talageri’s sharpened position on the chronological layeredness of the RigVeda. Both can be found on Talageri’s blogspot:
talageri.blogspot. com, on 19 Aug 2020: “The chronological gulf between the old RigVeda and the new RigVeda”; and on 10 March 2022: “A review of Rivers of the RigVeda by Jijith Nadumuri Ravi”. For all the details and references, see there.
Talageri emphasizes throughout his work that the RigVeda (let alone the other Vedas and the ancillary literature) contains successive layers, as already pointed out by the late-19-century US and German Orientalists Edward Hopkins c.q. Hermann Oldenburg. This then allows for a chronological classification: with Family Books (2-7) at the ancientmost top, the books 1, 8, 9, 10 at the end, and further subdivisions like books 3, 6, 7 at the older extreme and book 10 at the youngest end, centuries later than the others. So far this seems uncontroversial enough, right?
For whomever sees the Vedas as a key to history, a repository of factual data, this type of chronological division is a matter of course. We may still differ on which part precedes which other part, but it is only logical that in such a diverse corpus, age is only one of the factors of diversity. Yet it turns out that two very different groups object to it. One group is very large and its objections already old and deep-seated. The other group is small and its objections opportunistic.
Millions of Hindu traditionalists feel very uneasy about this tinkering with their Vedas. Better to leave them in one piece. Even when they learn that for Talageri, this analysis of the Vedas happens to contribute to the demonstration of an east-to-west gradient, with the older parts proving more easterly and the later more westerly, thus disproving the Veda-belittling Aryan Immigration scenario, they still feel uncomfortable with it. In the traditional view, India was central; in the newer Immigrationist view, it was only an expansion zone of a culture centred outside of it; but in Talageri’s view it regains that centrality, or is at any rate freed from the stigma of being a foreign dependency. All true, yet they would rather be free from that modernist Immigrationism, in which they had never seriously believed anyway, without this self-abnegating exercise of cutting up their own scriptures. So, Talageri receives occasional hate mail from traditionalists, not seriously threatening but still unpleasant.
Discovering temporal layers in the text means that it was not created at one go. Instead, it implies that the Old Books were already in existence while the final Book 10 was still totally unheard of. For ordinary creations this is but normal but is this also true for the Vedas? Well, the Vedic Sages themselves would not have been uptight about it. They formulated their poems as their own creation, of very human and temporal origin, directed to rather than received from the gods. They were neither believers in nor preachers of the entirely post-Vedic doctrine of a supernatural or Apaurusheya origin.
But sclerotic adherents to the post-Vedic and quasi-Quranic doctrine of a divine origin, find it more logical that the Vedas were created all at the same time in heaven, waiting for an eternity until a Mantradrashta, a “seer of Vedic verses’, would captivate them. Just as the Quran has been waiting since creation until God cared to send it down through the Prophet. This belief seems to be a common weakness of the religious mind, which in Islam has made it into the core of the theology and in Hinduism at least in the customary assumptions of many. One can imagine that as the RigVeda got completed, enjoying the prestige of public declamations, institutions guaranteeing transmission, and a surrounding culture of auxiliary sciences (linguistics, astronomy, mathematics), people lifted it ever higher into the sky and started divinizing it.
That is why many Hindus insist that there are no historical data in the RigVeda: no personal names, no rivers or mountains, certainly no names of battles. Then again, it is not a history book, but any book will off-hand give some details about its circumstances. This way, the RigVeda is, through its landscape names and technological level, fauna and flora, unambiguously an Indian Bronze Age text. This realization has percolated rather widely, and many traditionalists hold an unstable half-way position.
Another consequence is that many Hindus like to trace their own Hindu Dharma back to the RigVeda. They think everything Hindu proceeds from the Veda. One example is yoga, which Western scholars deduce from other, older sources, rightly or wrongly. Here, Talageri strongly disagrees: the Vedic tradition is a creation of the Bharata clan, itself part of the Paurava tribe, itself part of the “five tribes” (two of whom he leads out of India where they become the ancestors of many nations), itself part of the people of the great patriarch Manu, a fundamental Hindu by any account. That is why he objects to Ravi’s attempts to derive all Hindu communities through migration from a Vedic Northwest. This goes down well with Veda-centric Hindus, but there is no indication of it. Not only is there no reason to assume that India was ever empty and in need of migrations, but there was no Vedic conspiracy behind all the Hindu sects either, regardless of where they are.
Alright, so much for one very large demographic reluctant to accept the RigVeda as a historical product, resulting from intense human activity in Bronze-Age Northwest India. Another group tries to profit from the common belief in oneness of the entire RigVeda. Consider the chronological implications of the statement that “the RigVeda contains evidence of the spoked wheel”, with spoked wheels not predating, say 2300 BCE. Many still use this as an argument against a high chronology: the book can’t be older that this terminus postquem. So, Talageri makes a distinction: those references are in the tenth Mandala, which as the RigVeda’s youngest book may indeed be limited to that time bracket; but it can’t constrain the earlier books, which may well be a thousand years older. That is incompatible with the Aryan Immigration paradigm, hence the desire among some Immigrationists, otherwise modern and rational, to pretend that the Rigveda is a unit and that conclusions about its last book also count for its first book.
Well, that sums it up. Scholars reluctant to face the revisionist consequences, will not keep the acceptance of history within and behind the RigVeda off for very long. The objections of the traditionalists may be a tougher nut to crack. But that has never prevented Shikant Talageri from being candid about where the evidence is leading us.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-70921707441026138992022-07-23T05:14:00.000-07:002022-07-23T05:14:02.068-07:00The Eminent Historians' guilt
(This is a never-published reaction to an article about archaeologist KK Muhammed correctly allotting the blame for the Ayodhya affair to the Eminent Historians; presumably KA Antony's "Left historians prevented resolution of Babri Masjid dispute, says KK Muhammed, former ASI regional head", First Post, 21 January 2016.)
Last week a few marginal media reported that archaeologist KK Muhammad had a startling revelation on the responsability for the Ayodhya controversy and all its concomitent bloodshed.
Young people may not know what the affair, in the years around 1990, was all about. So, briefly, Hindus had wanted to build proper temple architecture on one of their sacred sites, the Rama Janmabhumi or "Rama's birthplace". So far, the most natural thing in the world. However, a mosque had been built in forcible replacement of the temple that had anciently adorned the site: the Babri Masjid. Not that this should have been a problem, because the structure was already in use as a temple, and the site was of no importance to the Muslims. Unlike millions of Hindus, Muslims never go on pilgrimage there. So, Rajiv Gandhi's Congress government was manoeuvring towards a compromise allotting the site definitively to the Hindus all while giving some goodies to the Muslim leadership. This was not too principled, just pragmatic ("horse-trading"), but it had the merit of letting nature take its unimpeded course and allowing a Hindu shrine on a Hindu place of pilgrimage. And especially: it was bloodless.
Unfortunately, this non-violent formula was thwarted. An unexpected factor came in between. It stimulated and hardened Muslim resistance and especially, it made politicians hesitant to move forward on Ayodhya. Though the contentious site had no special value for the Muslims, it suddenly became the Mecca of another influential community: the secularists. Not that they would go on pilgrimage there, they never move too far from their posh cocktail parties. But they made it the touchstone of secularism's resistance against "aggressive Hindu fundamentalism".
As a weapon against Hinduism, and as a way to whip up Muslim emotion, they proposed the allegation that the Hindu claimants of the site had been using false history. They insisted that there had never been a temple at the site, and that what the Hindus targeted for replacement with a proper temple was an innocent mosque, now symbol of India's "composite culture". Then already, it was known from written testimonies (Muslim and European) and from BB Lal's partial excavations at the site that a major temple had existed at the site. Moreover, until the 1980s, the forcible replacement of the temple by the mosque had been a matter of consensus, as when a 19th-century judge ruled that of course a temple had been destroyed, but that after centuries it was too late to remedy this condition. The British rulers favoured an uneventful status-quo, but agreed that there had been a temple, as did the local Muslims during the trial. It is allowed for historians to question a consensus provided they have new evidence, which here they failed to produce.
In a statement of 1989, JNU's "eminent historians", turned an unchallenged consensus among all parties into a mere "Hindutva claim". After that, the Indian mainstream politicians did not dare to go against the judgment of these authorities. The international media and India-watchers were also taken in and shared the hatred of these ugly Hindu history-falsifiers. Only, the Court-ordered excavations of 2003 have fully vindicated the old consensus: of course the temple remains were found underneath the mosque. Moreover, the eminences asked to witness in Court had to confess their incompetence one after another (as documented by Meenakshi Jain: Rama and Ayodhya, 2013): they had never been to the site, they had never studied any archaeology, etc. Abroad this news has hardly been reported, and experts who know it make sure that no conclusions are drawn from it.
But for twenty years, the false and disproven narrative of the eminent historians has reigned supreme. No one has bothered to set the record straight. It is symptomatic for the power equation in India and in Indology that this is a repeating pattern. Thus, the identification of the Vedic Saraswati with the Ghaggar in Haryana had first been proposed in 1855, had been a consensus among scholars since then, but has recently been ridiculed by secularist academics and their foreign dupes as a "Hindutva concoction".
For close observers, this news was not surprising. I had spoken on it in passing in my paper "The three Ayodya debates" (St-Petersburg 2011, available online), and in an interview with India First (8 Jan. 2016: "... the secular intelligentsia felt so self-confident that they could blow this issue out of all proportion. They could reasonably have taken the position that a temple was indeed demolished to make way for a mosque but that we should let bygones be bygones. Instead, they went out of their way to deny facts of history. Rajiv Gandhi thought he could settle this dispute with some Congressite horse-trading: give the Hindus their toy in Ayodhya and the Muslims some other goodies, that will keep everyone happy. But this solution became unfeasible when many academics construed this contention as a holy war for a front line symbol of secularism."
But easy dismissals that are sure to be tried against me. They will be harder when the allegation comes from an on-site archaeologist, moreover a Muslim.
The media had allotted an enormous weight to the Ayodhya affair: "Secularism in danger", "India on the brink" and similar headlines were daily fare. When the Babri Masjid was demolished by impatient Hindu youngsters on 6 December 1992, the Times of India titled its editorial: "A requiem for norms", no less. Given all the drama and moralistic bombast with which they used to surround this controversy, one would have expected their eagerness to report KK Muhammad's eyewitness account. But no, they were extremely sparing in their coverage, reluctant to face an unpleasant fact: the guilt of their heroes, the "eminent historians".
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-50192625662430013742022-06-06T06:35:00.000-07:002022-06-06T06:35:43.109-07:00Long-term fall-out of the Mahatma murder
(FirstPost, 27 May 2022)
+
The +topic of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of Nathuram Godse on 30 January 1948 still comes up regularly for discussion. Mostly this is +to embarrass the RSS and the party associated with it, the BJP, which was actually founded in 1980, that too as reincarnation of the Jan Sangh, wh+ich had equally been founded after the murder, in 1951. This then is the best-known long-term effect: the unrelenting allegation that anything s+melling of Hindu nationalism, and certainly the RSS, necessarily leads to such crimes. But are we missing something?
+
Chitpavan massacre
The first conseque+nce of the murder was immediate: Godse’s own community, the Chitpavan Brahmins, was targeted for mass murder. The comparison with the mass kil+ling of Sikhs by Congress secularists after Indira Gandhi’s murder in 1984 is fairly exact, except that that massacre is well-known (even ecli+psing the memory of the larger number of Panjabi Hindus murdered by Sikh separatists in the preceding years) whereas this one has been hushed up.+ The New York Times first drew attention to it, reporting 15 killings for the first day and only for the city of Mumbai. In fact the killing we+nt on for a week and all over Maharashtra, with VD Savarkar’s younger brother as best-known victim.
Arti Agarwal,+ who leads the research in “Hindu genocide”, estimates the death toll at ca. 8,000. On mass murders, estimates are often overdramatiz+ed, but here we must count with a countervailing factor: the Government’s active suppression of these data, as they would throw a negative li+ght on Gandhism. But research on this painful episode has now started in earnest, and those presently trying to get at the real figures include Sa+varkar biographer Vikram Sampath.
Crackdown+
The secon+d consequence came right after: the Government’s crackdown on the Hindu Mahasabha and the RSS. Their offices were closed down, their office-b+earers imprisoned for a year or so, their stocks of literature impounded. It clipped their wings for years to come. The Hindu Mahasabha lost it+s president Shyam Prasad Mookerjee, who went on to found the Jana Sangh. The HMS would never recover from this blow. Its last MP was to be Mahant+ Avaidyanath, best known as a leader of the Rama Janmabhumi movement and as Guru of present UP CM Yogi Adityanath, defected to the BJP in 1991.+
By cont+rast, the RSS did survive quite well, and even generated a whole “family” of like-minded organizations, including a new political party. In a nume+rical sense, it was to thrive; but in two other senses, it paid a high price.
The t+hird consequence was a drastic change in the political landscape. After Partition, the Hindutva movement had the wind in the sails. All Cong+ressite assurances that warnings against Islamic separatism were mere British-engineered paranoia, had been refuted by reality. Gandhi’s pro+mise that Partition would only come over his dead body, had proven false. The new-fangled ideology of secularism stood discredited at its bi+rth. And yet, overnight, the Hindutva current was marginalized and Nehruvian secularism started its triumphant march. By his murder, Godse had s+mashed the window of opportunity of his own political movement.
+
Amputated backbone
Finally, the fo+urth consequence would only materialize over the long term: the Hindu movement began to lose its defining convictions. Rather than continuing to +see India as an essentially Hindu nation, it bought into the secularist notion of a mere “Hindu community” juxtaposed to “minority communities” +that were endowed with equal rights and increasingly with privileges vis-à-vis the Hindus.
When Jawahar+lal Nehru was widely criticized for having facilitated the Chinese invasion, the RSS halted the publication of a Nehru-critical serial by Sita Ram+ Goel in Organiser: Rather than clamouring that its guest author’s judgment of Nehru stood vindicated, it feared that if anything were to happen +to Nehru, the RSS would again get the blame. As the Gandhi murder had shown, it wasn’t necessary to be actually guilty to still incur the punis+hment, viz. by “having created the atmosphere” for the crime. The RSS bought into the secularist narrative that the Hindu ideology had caused t+he murder and started amputating its own ideological backbone.
When in+ 1980 the BJP was founded, the party flag it adopted was significantly divided in orange and green, in the communal sense (no, not green for gr+eenery). Not only the nation was to be partly Islamic, but even the Hindu party itself. This prefigured Mohan Bhagwat’s 2018 statement that a Hindu Rasthra is not complete without Islam. The RSS founded within its ranks a Muslim Morcha, abandoning its founding belief in national unity for c+ommunal appeasement. It became the RSS family’s most successful member, not by spreading the national idea in the Muslim community but by serv+ing the latter’s sectional interests.
Ind+eed, under Narendra Modi, minorityism, once the BJP’s bogeyman, became the party’s principle of governance. All kinds of schemes of state la+rgesse favour the minorities; no, not real minorities like Parsis and Jews, but the India chapters of the Christian and Muslim multinationals. I+n its publicity campaigns, the party boasts that it has done more for the minorities than Congress ever has. The 1990s’ eminently secular BJP slogan “Justice for all, appeasement of none” has been given up in favour of: “I am better at appeasement than you!”
If Nathuram Godse had foreseen these consequences of the act he contemplated, he might have thought twice about going through with it.
+
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-91042238492448918532022-05-26T08:41:00.016-07:002022-07-09T05:59:36.284-07:00Ayodhya, Mecca: same struggle! (What if Rama and Mohammed were born elsewhere?.)
(First offered to First Post on 19 May 2022, but deemed too controversial in view of the erupting Nupur Sharma affair; then published by Pragyata magazine, Delhi, on 7 July 2022)
This week we’re not going to write about the Kashi Vishvanath, except for remarking that its claim to historicity is weaker than that of its counterparts in Ayodhya and Mathura. It is obvious that historical characters including Rama and Krishna, later deified but originally just human beings born from a womb like everyone else, had a birthplace. We can still argue about its location, but that some actual birthplace lurks somewhere is unavoidable. That Shiva sent down a Jyotirlinga to Kashi, however, will be dismissed by rationalists as just a story, a mere manner of speaking without any factual historical dimension. Just as they make fun of the belief that Yahweh sent down the Biblical Ten Commandments or that Allah sent down the Quran.
For secular legislation regarding sacred sites, this possible absence of a solid foundation to these beliefs is totally immaterial. Places of pilgrimage are protected regardless of whether the reason for their sacredness can be proven. The Israeli government facilitates pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre where Jesus supposedly lay buried, and to the Al-Aqsa mosque. Yet it is not impressed with the revelation of the Sepulchre’s location to Constantine’s mother Helena in a dream. Nor with the Islamic tradition that the Prophet flew to Al-Aqsa on a winged horse. The French governments, often militantly secularist, have had a good laugh at Catholic beliefs about the Virgin Mary’s apparitions in Lourdes, yet they facilitate a pilgrimage there. So, the fact that worshippers of Shiva, Rama and Krishna venerate specific sites in Kashi, Ayodhya and Mathura is enough for officially recognizing and protecting them.
When?
Nevertheless, historians still have the liberty to be curious about the factual basis of these beliefs. Regarding Kashi, they tend to consider the Jyotirlinga belief as outside history. Regarding Mathura, they see no reason to doubt the belief about Krishna’s birth. But regarding Ayodhya…
In her recent book about the Ramayana, Sanskritist Neena Rai compares the measurements of the relevant sites and distances in Valmiki’s Ayodhya with those actually found in today’s Ayodhya. She opines that this may not be the same town. In my judgment, too hastily, for even Valmiki may have been mistaken. Apart from the trivial demythologizing option that he may have been wrong, or that as a forest-dweller he could only describe the city from hearsay, he may not have foreseen geographical changes. Indeed, a river-bed can gradually or dramatically shift location, so even if he was truthful and accurate in locating a building "by the riverside", it may be far from that riverside today.
The present town is already more than three thousand years old according to archaeologists, and houses a Hindu religious site deemed Rama’s birthplace. But was this the palace of the Solar Dynasty to which Rama's father Dasharatha belonged?
According to Valmiki, Rama was born in the very palace built by his distant pre-Vedic ancestor Manu. Here, a possible problem with Rama’s own chronology becomes really acute. Whether Rama’s epic adventure was historical or not, he himself was at any rate a historical figure, appearing in the Puranic king lists. (For those faux skeptics who think these are just myth: there would be no history of Mesopotamia or Egypt extant but for their king lists.) But when did he live?
This much we know for certain, that it was earlier than the Bharata dynasty’s war of succession, which refers to Rama's story as a fact from the past. The report about this war, much embellished, became Vyasa’s Mahabharata epic (just like Homer’s Iliad from ca. -700 was dimly based on a historical war from ca. -1200). Bypassing the traditionalists who insist that this war took place ca. -3139, which is a chronology invented only ca. +500, we stick by the modern sciences and their convergence on a much less spectacular date, roughly -1500.
It so happens that -1500 is about the farthest we can stretch the known archaeology of the Rama Janmabhumi site. During the Ayodhya agitation ca. 1991, India’s legendary archaeologist BB Lal, still active today at age 101, gave a lecture to an audience of Sadhus. He explained that his team had found temple pillars on the contentious site, and the Hindu claim on it was thereby assured. This much, they liked; but they were disappointed when he continued. Digging deeper, Lal's team had found human leftovers as early as the -2nd millennium. To the Sadhus, even Krishna lived in the -32nd century, and Rama still earlier; so archaeology had not confirmed this? When they protested, Lal famously replied: “I am not saying this, but my spade tells me so.”
You might yet save the day by observing that Lal had excavated only a small part of Ayodhya; or by accepting the Aryan Immigration chronology (which BB Lal rejects). This holds that after entering in -1500, the Aryans in Haryana wrote the Rg-Veda, and among their nephews in Ayodhya, Rama was born in -1200 or so, and Krishna in Mathura still later. This would narrowly put Rama within the period identified by archaeology. Yet even then it would not be satisfactory. Human habitation at the site should spread thousands of years farther back, as it was no less than the palace of the already-ancient Solar dynasty.
Maybe the Solar Dynasty was not that static? This is suggested by the detail that Rama’s father Dasharatha organized a population transfer within his domains. That the townfolk vacated the city after Rama’s passing also indicates a more mobile view of Ayodhya. And when centuries later, the city was rediscovered and revived, presumably by Vikramaditya, he may simply have been mistaken in his choice, or he may have had a reason for deliberately locating his favourite city elsewhere. So it is possible that the real capital of the Solar Dynasty is still waiting somewhere underground for excavation.
On the other hand, Rama’s background may be less glorious, but his modest birth location may be exact. When the Ayodhya debate raged thirty years ago, I sometimes thought to myself: there is, in spite of the ongoing peak in research, much on Ayodhya that we don’t really know yet. Common people including the many Twitter polemicists are quick to pronounce their proposals “proven”, but historians should be more hesitant in passing judgment.
This doubt regarding Ayodhya brings to mind another sacred city with a far more controversial location: Mecca. In the Ayodhya controversy, the lead in disputing Rama's birth location was given by the secularists, not the Muslims, but just to spite the Hindus, many Muslims followed suit. They wouldn't have done so if they had been more aware of the problems surrounding Mohammed's birthplace.
The Saudi government has initiated big construction projects in Mecca with considerable demolitions. When this happens in old cities, say Kashi, the archaeologists come flocking, for the diggings by the construction company throw up many old artefacts that will interest them. Well, in Mecca they find nothing. On pre-Islamic maps, Mecca finds no mention. The Quran’s description of the city layout and the landscape, with a river and olive trees and a Kaaba surrounded by idol temples, do not correspond to the Mecca we know. It is unfit to be a crossroads of caravan routes. That's way exactly during the years of the Ayodhya conflict, Danish historian Patricia Crone concluded that in Mohammed's lifetime, Mecca did not exist.
Even in the first century of Islamic history, the mosques were not directed towards Mecca. Islam itself admits that the original Qibla (direction of prayer) was more to the north, which it identifies as Jerusalem, but another city nearby could also do.
Indeed, another city fits the bill, as mapped out in great detail by the Canadian historian Dan Gibson: Petra, in modern-day Jordan. This place also had a Kaaba housing a Black Stone, a meteoric rock fallen from heaven and therefore held sacred (essentially like Kashi's Jyotirlingam). A half century after the Prophet's death, one Abdullah ibn-al-Zubayr rebelled against the Ummayad Caliphate of which he had been an official. He spirited the Black Stone away from Petra and installed it in a backwater in the Arabian desert (where no existing townfolk could lay claim to it), where a new sacred site then sprang up. Then he made his own rebellion part of the power play of a Mesopotamian clan that would later become the Abbasid Caliphate. Summing up: in this emerging scenario, the Prophet was not born in Mecca at all, but was relocated there long after his death as part of the upcoming Abbasid clan's rewriting of history.
To be sure, Muslims argue against these discoveries. They resist modern insights in the same way that the Ayodhya Sadhus resisted archaeology as an independent source of chronology. In the real world, this debate will go on, just like the search for the early Solar capital will resume. But in a secular state this won’t matter: the sacredness of all sites with a religious meaning is guaranteed.
Also reassuring for the Hajjis (pilgrims to the Black Stone) is that the object of their pilgrimage is not something contingent like Mohammed's birthplace. Even if this is accepted to be near Petra, many miles away from Mecca, the actual object of the Hajj is still verifiably present in Mecca: the Black Stone. This way the beliefs underpinning the Muslim pilgrimage may be saved by Islam's only idol.
Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-16580050716788329792022-05-13T09:53:00.004-07:002022-05-20T14:04:24.922-07:00Does India really need a Uniform Civil Code?
(First Post, 13 May 2022, under the title: UCC can wait! First fight anti-Hindu discriminations in education and temple management)
For decades already, you occasionally hear voices clamouring for a Uniform Civil Code in India. It is mentioned in the Constitution’s wish list, the Directive Principles. In 1995, the Supreme Court asked the Government about the progress towards this goal; in vain. This January, they summoned the Government again on this; let’s see. Today, 75 years after Independence, all matters pertaining to marriage, family and inheritance are still governed by separate law codes for Hindus, Muslims, Christian and Parsis. Are there good reasons to abolish this arrangement?
India's ruling politicians clearly think not, for they have never challenged it. They wouldn't mind meddling in the Christian law system: ever since starting as a nervous minority in the mighty Roman empire, Christians have conformed to secular laws not of their own making. In Britain, France or the US, Christians and non-Christians obey the same laws, and nowhere have Christians reacted with an indignant movement of legal separatism. It is not the Christians who keep the politicians from enacting a UCC. Come the modern Republic, the Christian community would have been absorbed into a UCC regime along with everybody else, were it not for the Muslim community.
What the politicians fear in case they were to enact a UCC is the reaction of the Muslim community. Unlike Christianity, Islam has a defining law system, the Shari'a. It prevails in most Muslim-majority countries, and in many others there are demands for introducing it. Mohammed was not a preacher whose reign was not of this world, like the Buddha or Jesus, he was the founder of a state with a law system. Abolishing it might provoke a reaction from every mosque and madrassa in the country. The theological reason is moreover strengthened by a personal reason: every individual Muslim cleric stands to lose a lot of power within his community if his area of expertise is made irrelevant. The BJP has already developed cold feet about implementing its hard-won Citizenship Amendment Act, which only very tangentially impacts the Muslims, so it won't have the stomach for implementing a UCC. It is too Islamophobic for that: "afraid of Islam".
Most countries have a UCC as a matter of course. But would they support India if it introduces the same thing? Compare with the normalization of Kashmir's status in 2019. Save for Pakistan, all countries accepted this without any ado. Not only was it an internal matter, but it abolished something that they themselves would never accept either: a separate status for one of their provinces, excluding their citizens from owning property there. Yet, the international media still portrayed it as an anti-Muslim act of oppression, adding to their usual narrative of poor hapless Muslims being constantly persecuted by the ugly vicious Hindus. The issue was not important enough for swaying Governments against India, but regarding UCC this may be different. It is likely that both Indian and foreign media will raise a storm if the separate Islamic law is threatened; and that the ruling party is not ready to take this heat.
Apart from the real reason, better-sounding reasons are brought up. It is often assumed that Hindus only demand a UCC because they fear that under Shari'a Muslims take four wives and outbreed them. On social media you do indeed encounter that argument, and secularists always seek out the weakest formulation of a Hindu position, some Twitter troll's outburst, to save themselves the trouble of answering the real Hindu case. So they make fun of this clumsy Hindu argument, distracting from more serious ones.
It is true that the Muslim birthrate is always higher than the Hindu one, but in that, the right to polygamy is only a minimal factor. Monogamous Muslim households are still more procreation-oriented: because Islamic culture provides more immunity against Governmental birth-control propaganda and Westernized lifestyles, because the Islamic status of women is more resistant against women opting for a career instead of family, because the Islamic divorce arrangement (with the children entrusted to the father) encourages repudiated women to start a new family, and because of the Prophet's own exhortation to be more numerous. In countries with a UCC, the Muslim birthrate is higher too. Those who see that as a problem, will need to find other solutions.
More problematic with this inequality is inequality. And this in two senses: Hindu and Muslim laws differ contentswise, but also differ in their relation to the state. Hindu law does not result from a decision by a clerical Hindu body, but from state intervention: the Hindu Code Acts 1955-56. A UCC was part of the modernization process of most countries: ancient feudal privileges for nobles or clerics were abolished. All citizens became equal before the law.
This is a defining trait of secular states: equality before the law regardless of one’s religion. It is claimed ad nauseam that “India is a secular state”, but it isn’t. A UCC is not a matter of Hindu Rashtra or so, it is a requirement of secularism. Next time you meet a secularist, ask him what he has done for instituting a UCC. It is his job, not that of the Hindus. No premodern Hindu state had a UCC, and Hindus were fine with that. But Hindus have adapted to the modern age: it is discriminatory to treat Muslims as unfit for this modernization. So, long live the UCC.
Is this a call to the Government to take up Civil Code reform forthwith? Not really. There are issues far more urgent, far more consequential for the life chances of Hindu civilization, and far easier to achieve. These issues are the complete abolition of the existing anti-Hindu discriminations in education and temple management. Any sensible leader will take up these issues first, rather than banging his head against the wall by implementing a UCC and provoking the foreseeable reactions. They are desirable in their own right for all who value equality. Moreover, they may give Hindu society more self-confidence and thus prepare the ground for, one day, a UCC.Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-59973292893151172872022-04-18T00:56:00.000-07:002022-04-18T00:56:03.782-07:00Sita Ram Goel: The man who exposed Nehruvian fallacies and won our hearts with his mind.
A 100 years ago, Sita Ram Goel was born in a poor family, and through his sheer hard work and intellect, exposed the hollowness of the Left at a time when it seemed invincible
Koenraad Elst
October 16, 2021 10:58:16 IST
Sita Ram Goel: The man who exposed Nehruvian fallacies and won our hearts with his mind
Sita Ram Goel was born on 16 October in the Haryana village of Chhara. Image Courtesy: http://indiafacts.org/
On 16 October 1921, at 8:34 pm, in the Haryana village of Chhara, Sita Ram Goel was born. Though belonging to the merchant Agarwal caste, his family was quite poor but found sustenance in Vaishnavism and especially the devotional poetry of the local 18th-century Sant Garib Das. Possibly this is what made him such a friendly and generous man, always attentive to the needs of others. When growing up, he came under the influence of Arya Samaj reformism and of Mahatma Gandhi. During his student days he was a Gandhian activist. He obtained an MA in History from Hindu College, Delhi University.
In the last years of the freedom struggle, he became friends with a group of young intellectuals with a great future, from Times of India editor Girilal Jain and philosophy author Daya Krishna to Planning Commission member Raj Krishna and arts tsarina Kapila Vatsyayana. But the most important and lasting influence was economics graduate Ram Swarup (whose centenary we celebrated last year), who in 1944-47 led the debating forum Changers’ Club. Though they were “progressives” at the time, we find in their pamphlets already some themes that would become prominent in Goelji’s writing career.
In 1948, Goel had almost become a Communist Party member, but under the influence of Ram Swarup and of reading the communist classics, he swiftly evolved into an articulate anti-communist. In Kolkata he set up the Society for the Defence of Freedom in Asia, which during the 1950s was the leading anti-communist think tank in the Third World. It published a series of factual studies about the atrocities and the dismal socio-economic performance of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic, much appreciated (but, to lay a nasty rumour to rest, never financed) by prominent foreign anti-communists and by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Chiang Kai-shek.
Meanwhile, he rediscovered Hindu-Buddhist spirituality and also found the time to write several historical novels in Hindi, as well as preparing Hindi translations of classic works of philosophy and history.
In 1957, he stood as an independent candidate on the Jana Sangh (later BJP) ticket for the Lok Sabha elections in the Khajuraho constituency. This was an arrangement with Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s budding anti-Communist Swatantra Party, India's main opposition party in the 1960s. It had wanted Goel in Parliament because he had the mettle to stand up to then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, but the election gods were not favourable.
In 1961, Goel published a series of articles critical of Nehru in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh weekly Organiser. It was discontinued on orders of the RSS high command, which feared a backlash against the RSS if anything were to happen to Nehru, as had been the case after Mahatma Gandhi’s murder. It was not the last time he got disappointed in the Sangh Parivar.
In the 1960s and ’70s he left the political struggle behind to build up his own publishing business. But after retiring, in 1981 he started writing several series of articles in Organiser and its Hindi counterpart Panchjanya. These were then published as booklets by a new publishing outfit he created, first of all as a conduit for Ram Swarup’s books, but also for his own ideological writings: Voice of India.
He opened the very first one, Hindu Society under Siege, with an analysis that said it all: “Hindu society is the only significant society in the world today which presents a continuity of cultural existence since time immemorial. Most other societies have undergone a traumatic transformation due to the invasion and victory of latter-day ideologies — Christianity, Islam, Communism. Hindu culture can meet the same frightful fate if there were no Hindu society to sustain it. This great society is now besieged by the same dark and deadly forces. And its beneficiaries no more seem interested in its survival because they have fallen victims to hostile propaganda. They have developed towards it an attitude of utter indifference, if not downright contempt. Hindu society is in mortal danger as never before.”
Or in his Defence of Hindu Society (1983): “Hindus have become devoid of self-confidence because they have ceased to take legitimate, well-informed and conscious pride in their spiritual, cultural and social heritage. The sworn enemies of Hindu society have taken advantage of this enervation of the Hindus.”
This outlines a task that would determine the remainder of Ram Swarup’s and Sita Ram Goel’s writings: Detailing the history and ideological motivation of Hinduism’s enemies, and showing the contrast with what Hinduism has to offer. This work is fascinating through its combination of fearless analysis of unpleasant questions with a passion for the benefits of ancient dharma and of the contemporary real-life Hindus. It takes up the ideological struggle so as to avoid the physical struggle, and is thus humane par excellence. As Goel’s son Pradeep said after Goel’s passing in 2003: “They won our hearts with their minds.”
Goel himself would soon become a victim of this Hindu loss of nerve. In 1985, the RSS leadership again intervened to have his article series in their papers banned. This time it was Islam that they wanted to spare. Not because they feared a terrorist attack in revenge (they already had an anti-Muslim reputation), but because any Islam-critical writing might “keep Muslims from coming to us”. At the time, the Sangh Parivar still clamoured against “minority appeasement” in public, but in private the rot had already set in.
Goel’s best-known work will remain his two-volume Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them? (1990-91). In it, he gives a very incomplete but already impressive list of nearly 2,000 forcible displacements of temples by mosques, of which not one has been challenged since. But its most important part is the summary and analysis of the theological justification of this centuries-spanning (and continents-spanning, think of Istanbul’s Aya Sophia or even Mecca’s Kaaba) record of iconoclasm. This was the key to understanding the Ayodhya controversy, but remark that in the Ayodhya campaign and its judicial proceedings before the UP High Court, it was kept out of view: The RSS-BJP campaigners preferred superficial emotions about the temple to a serious understanding of the theological background.
Today, Sita Ram Goel’s work is without influence on government policy. Thus, his critique of the many falsehoods in the Nehruvian history textbooks have not made Narendra Modi’s Cabinet take up the need of correcting them. But his influence on the new crop of online Hindu media is profound. This outreach to the Hindu mind and to a new generation is an important step, but a civilisation under siege can ill afford to leave it at that.Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6138082354348831474.post-41084606846017827472022-04-18T00:47:00.001-07:002022-04-18T00:47:48.783-07:00“I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history”Koenraad Elst: “I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting distorted history”
(interview by Surajit Dasgupta- 5 June, 2016, Swarajya)
5
In this exclusive e-mail interview with Swarajya’s National Affairs Editor Surajit Dasgupta, the Belgian Indologist and writer calls the bluff of leftist historians while urging Indian students of history to pursue the subject with more rigour and scientific temper. Excerpts:
While Swarajya has published articles exposing how Marxist historians hound peers who disagree with them out of academic institutions, we have got news from different sources that you are finding it difficult to get employed even in Belgium. What precisely is the objection of your detractors?
I do not wish to offer much detail here. Firstly, I am not privileged to know the details of decision-making instances that lead to my own exclusion. Even when sending an official “regret letter”, they would not give in writing the real reason behind their decision (as anyone experienced with job applications knows).
Secondly, even though no law was broken, going into this still has the character of an allegation, and that requires proof. Some cases of deliberate exclusion or disinvitation were simply obvious, but my standards of proof are higher than that. So, I just want to close this chapter. Let’s not bother, everybody has his problems, and these career hurdles are mine.
In fact, I have had quite a bit of luck in my life, including help from individual Hindus whenever the need arose (air tickets paid, hospitality etc), so any fussing about this boycott against me would be disproportionate. Let’s just assume I missed those opportunities because I was not good enough. Or karma, whatever.
The topic in general is important, though. The Leftist dominance of the Humanities departments in India, often amounting to total control, results from the wilful and systematic “ethnic cleansing” (to borrow Madhu Kishwar’s term) of any young scholar suspected of pro-Hindu sympathies. Exceptions are the people who entered on the strength of ideologically neutral work, or of initially toeing the line, but coming out with pro-Hindu convictions only after getting tenure.
This cleansing of enemies stems from the old Marxist mentality: a war psychology, treating everyone with a different opinion as an enemy inviting merciless destruction; and a boundless self-righteousness rooted in the belief of being on the forward side of history. Marxism is waning even in India, but that attitude is still rife among the anti-Hindu forces, both in India and among Western India-watchers.
You refer to Indian Marxist historians sarcastically as “eminent historians”. Why that particular term?
“Eminent historians” is what they call one another, and what their fans call them. When they don’t have an answer to an opponent’s arguments, they pompously dismiss him as not having enough “eminence”. So when Arun Shourie wrote about some abuses in this sector, he called his book Eminent Historians. It is also a pun on an old book about prominent colonial age personalities, Eminent Victorians.
“Eminence” in this case refers to their position and relative glory. The Communists always made sure to confer position and prestige, as opposed to the Sangh Parivar, which fawns over people with position but doesn’t realize that those people have only acquired their position by toeing the anti-Hindu line. In a way, you have to concede that the Left has honestly fought for its power position. But half their battle was already won by the Hindu side’s complete absence from the battlefield.
One example of the Sangh’s ineptness at playing this game. In 2002, the supposedly Hindu government of A.B. Vajpayee founded the Chair for Indic Studies in Oxford. The media cried ‘saffronization’. However, the clueless time servers at the head of the BJP nominated a known and proven opponent of Hindu nationalism, Sanjay Subrahmaniam, who thus became the poster boy for ‘saffronization’. This way, they hoped to achieve their highest ambition in life: a pat on the shoulder from the secularists.
That pat on the shoulder, already begged for so many times, remained elusive, but the tangible result was that they had conferred even more prestige on an “eminent historian”, all while denying it to their own scholars.
What would you tell your peers who say that the “Out of India” Theory (OIT) is a fringe theory?
Of course it is a fringe theory, at least internationally, where the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) is still the official paradigm. In India, though, it has the support of most archaeologists, who fail to find a trace of this Aryan influx and instead find cultural continuity. As for the situation abroad: most scholars assume the invasionist paradigm, but only very few also argue in an informed manner for the invasionist theory, not many more than those who argue against it.
But anyway, this ‘fringe’ aspect doesn’t impress me at all. When Copernicus put the sun rather than the earth at the centre of the solar system, he was in a minority of one, very ‘fringe’ indeed; but he won the day.
What is the evidence against the Aryan Invasion Theory?
First of all: there is no evidence in its favour. Archaeologists have spent a century of well-funded excavations looking for a trace, any trace, of the Aryans moving into India. Even the invasionists concede that “as yet” no such thing has been found. The new genetic evidence, while still immature, generally goes in favour of emigrations from India and, while leaving room for immigrations too, is emphatically failing to pinpoint an invasion coinciding in time with the hypothetical Aryan invasion.
Meanwhile, the written record clearly points to an emigration scenario. That the Iranians lived in India and had to leave westwards is reported in the Rig Veda, a text thoroughly analysed and shown to support an “Aryan emigration” by Shrikant Talageri. It can equally be deduced from the Avesta. Even earlier migrations are mentioned in the Puranas. These are of course very mixed and unreliable as a source of history, but it is a bad historian who discards them altogether. Their core, later fancifully embellished, consists in dynastic lists. Keeping that ancestral information was the proper job of court poets, and they devised mnemotechnical tricks to transmit it for many generations. In this case, it too does convey a basic scenario of indigenousness and emigration.
Finally, there is the linguistic evidence. Many Indians believe the hearsay that it has somehow proven the invasion. It hasn’t. But permit me to forego discussing those data: too technical for an interview.
Of late, the Marxist historians have revised ‘invasion’ to ‘migration’. They say that there might not have been a war when the so-called Aryans arrived here, but they have no doubt that the ancestors of today’s North Indians, especially the upper castes, by and large migrated from Central Asia into India. In other words, the Marxists say that we Indians were originally not Indians—invasion or no invasion. Does this ‘revision’ satisfy you?
Exasperated at not finding a visible trace of this invasion, conformist scholars have theorized an alternative that doesn’t require such visible remains: a migration under the radar. Often, when they try to give details, they still mean a military invasion rather than a gradual migration, since they bring in the military advantage of horses and chariots to explain how such a large and civilized Harappan population could be overrun by a handful of outsiders.
But even if they genuinely mean a migration, it still amounts to the same scenario as an invasion, that the Vedic Aryans came from abroad and the natives took over the language and religion of the intruders.
So, anyone who thinks that the migration theory is a breakthrough away from the invasion theory really shows he doesn’t understand the issue. ‘Migration’ effectively means ‘invasion’ but avoids the burden of proof that the more dramatic term ‘invasion’ implies.
To be sure, it doesn’t much matter who came from where. The so-called Adivasis (a British term coined circa 1930) or ‘natives’ of Nagalim in the North East have settled in their present habitat only a thousand years ago; which is fairly recent by Indian standards. So, ironically, they are genuine ‘immigrants’ or ‘invaders’, yet no Indian begrudges them their place inside India.
Many countries have an immigration or conquest of their present territory as a proud part of their national myth: Madagascar, Romania, the Siberian part of Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, etc. If the Indo-Aryans, or indeed the Dravidians (theorized to have come from Iran or even Central Asia), had really immigrated, that would then have been a pre-Vedic event, at least 3,500 years ago, and that time span ought to have been enough for integration into the national mainstream.
So this ‘homeland’ debate ought to have been a non-issue, only of interest to ivory tower scholars. But different non- or anti-Hindu forces decided to politicize it. Abroad, these were the British colonialists, white supremacists in the US and Europe, and among them the Nazis, who considered the AIT as a cornerstone and eloquent illustration of their worldview. Inside India, first of all the Christian missionaries, followed by the non-Brahmin movement, the Dravidianists, Nehruvians and Ambedkarites, followed in turn by their western supporters.
The AIT was used to break up Indian unity and pit upper castes against lower castes, non-tribals against tribals, and North Indians against South Indians. After this massive politicization, the partisans of Indian unity finally decided to give some feeble support to the fledgling Out of India (OIT) theory.
Yet, scholars rejecting the OIT because of its alleged political use have no qualms about espousing the AIT, politicized since far longer, in many more countries, and not as a pastime of a few historians but as the basis for government policies.
On the one hand, the unaffiliated or apolitical Indian student loves your theories; your passages are quoted widely in debates on ancient Indian history. On the other, you do not seem to get along well with the so-called right wing historians of this country either. You have written a blog against them.
Well, I have nothing but good to say about some Indian researchers, both naturalized ones like Michel Danino and natives like Meenakshi Jain or Shrikant Talageri. But then, there are others too. Certainly the name P.N. Oak rings a bell? In the second half of last century, he spread all these theories that the Taj Mahal was a Shiva temple; that the Kaaba was built by Vikramaditya as a Shiva temple; that the Vatican (originally the Roman “Poets’ Hill”) is really “Veda-Vatika”; that my mother tongue, Dutch, is the language of the Daityas (demons), etc. The bad thing is that numerous Hindus have run away with these stories, and even some NRI surgeons and engineers of my acquaintance believe in diluted versions of the same.
In a less extreme manner, this disdain for historical method is widespread among traditionalist Hindu “history rewriters”. They frequently put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder.
Many of these rewriters thought that with Narendra Modi’s accession to power, their time had come. I know, for instance, that many of them sent in proposals to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). None of these was accepted because they ignored the elementary rules of scholarship. Any student writing a thesis knows that before you can develop your own hypothesis, you first have to survey the field and assess what previous scholars have found or theorized. But these traditionalist history rewriters just don’t bother about the rest of the world, they are satisfied to have convinced themselves. Their horizon is not larger than an internet list of like-minded people. In itself, it is not a problem. People can learn. Unfortunately, they are too smug to do that. They actively misinform Hindus by claiming that the Aryan Invasion Theory has long been discarded. They also do a lot of harm to the bona fide historians with whom they get juxtaposed. So it is true that I have lost patience with them.
Since the Modi government came to power in 2014, has there been an effort to revise the depiction of Indian history in academic curricula, which, many in India believe, is politically motivated? Has the Indian government approached you with the request of being a part of any such initiative?
No, there has been no request at all. However, I myself have sent in an application to the ICHR, but that has run into technical difficulties, mainly to do with my foreign passport. So, the situation is and remains that institutionally, I have nothing to do with the Indian history scene.
The version of history taught by the Nehruvians was politically motivated. The feeble Hindu attempt to counterbalance this (‘saffronization’) circa 2002 was confused and largely incompetent. Humbled by that experience, the BJP today is not even trying to impose its own version. Contrary to the Nehruvians’ hue and cry, allegations about the BJP’s interference in history teaching or more generally in academe are simply not true. We are only talking of changing some lines in the textbooks, and even that seems a Himalayan effort to the BJP. Yet, what is really needed is a far more thorough overhaul. Except for some scholars without any power, nobody is even thinking about this very-needed long-term job.
“Many Hindu ‘history rewriters’ put out claims
that would make legitimate historians shudder.
Like the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple.”
“Many Hindu ‘history rewriters’ put out claims that would make legitimate historians shudder. Like the Taj Mahal was a Hindu temple.”
Could the reason be that RSS-affiliated historians and you are not particularly fond of each other and this government is influenced by the Sangh?
Sangh-affiliated historians would not need me to arrive at their positions or to devise a policy if called upon to do so by the present government. But again, I am not aware of any governmental interest in correcting the distorted history propagated by the Nehruvians. I would welcome it if it happened, but so far the BJP, still begging to be recognized as ‘secular’, only has its eye on ‘development’.
I am happy to report that there are some as-yet-insignificant private initiatives, though. Once they achieve results, there will be more to say on them.
Would you say or agree that the Indian government, regardless of the political party that runs it, would be uncomfortable appointing or commissioning an academic who is perceived as being anti-Muslim?
Certainly. Though it never had any problem with anti-Hindu candidates to even the highest post.
Does the genesis of your problem with anti-left historians in India lie in the fact that on the issue of Babri Masjid, if you do not agree with the left, you do not agree with the right wing either?
On Ayodhya, there has never been a conflict with any non-Left historian. To be sure, I have my disagreements on some minor points, but they have never been the object of a controversy. So, no, on Ayodhya, I may have minor and friendly differences of opinion with ‘right-wing’ historians, but no serious quarrel. In that debate, the longstanding quarrel has been with the “eminent historians”, their supporters in media and politics, and their foreign dupes. They were on the wrong side of the history debate all along, and it is time they concede it.
In the case of the “eminent historians”, it is also time for the surviving ones to own up to their responsibility for the whole conflict. The then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was on course towards a peaceful settlement, allotting the site to the Hindus and buying the militant Muslim leadership off with some typically Congressite horse trading. Not too principled, but at least with the virtue of avoiding bloodshed. It is the shrill and mendacious declaration of the “eminent historians” in 1989, amplified by all the vocal secularists, that made the politicians back off.
Not only have they falsely alleged that no Rama temple ever stood on the contentious site, their more fundamental lie was to bring in history at all. Ayodhya belongs to the Hindus not because it was their pilgrimage site a thousand years ago, nor because of ‘revenge’ for a temple destruction effected 800 or 500 years ago, but because it is a Hindu sacred site today. No Muslim ever cares to go to Ayodhya, and in spite of being egged on by the “eminent historians”, enough Muslim leaders have expressed their willingness to leave the site to the Hindus.
This whole controversy was unnecessary, but for the Nehruvians’ pathetic nomination of the Babri Masjid as the last bulwark of secularism.
If all the archaeological findings from Ayodhya are arranged chronologically, what story of the disputed plot of land does one find? Did a temple of Lord Rama stand there, which Babar’s general Mir Baqi demolished to build the mosque? Or, did Mir Baqi find ruins on the spot?
That a Hindu temple was demolished by Muslim invaders is certain, on that we all agree. But there is less consensus around, or even awareness of, the fact that this happened several times: by Salar Masud Ghaznavi in 1030 (the rebuilt Rajput temple after this must be one of the excavated pillar bases), by Qutbuddin Aibak’s troops in 1193, and by Mir Baqi on Babar’s behalf in 1526.
“The Ayodhya site should belong to the community that holds it sacred. Muslims do not, and the Rama worshippers do. Case closed.”
“The Ayodhya site should belong to the community that holds it sacred. Muslims do not, and the Rama worshippers do. Case closed.”
What it was that was replaced by Babar’s mosque is not fully clear. I speculate that in the rough and tumble of the collapsing Delhi Sultanate, Hindus had managed to take over the site and started worship there, even though the building they used was a mosque imposed on the site. That was exactly the situation in 1949-92, and I think it also applied towards 1526.
Babar destroyed a Hindu pilgrimage centre, a Hindu presence at the site, but not the Rajput temple from the 11th century of which the foundations were excavated in 2003. Was the temple’s demolition just an odd event, or was it the necessary materialization of an ideology, repeated many times and in many places? When Mohammed Shahabuddin Ghori and his lieutenants conquered the entire Ganga basin in 1192-94, they destroyed every Hindu temple they could find. Only a few survived, and that is because they lay out of the way of the Muslim armies, in the (then) forest, notably in Khajuraho and in Bodh Gaya. But all the Buddhist universities, all the temples in Varanasi etc were destroyed. Ayodhya became a provincial capital of the Delhi Sultanate, and it is inconceivable that the Sultanate regime would have allowed a major temple to remain standing there.
So, the narrative propagated by the Sangh Parivar, that Babar destroyed the 11th century temple, cannot be true, for that temple was no longer there. When Babar arrived on the scene, Hindus may have worshipped Rama in a makeshift temple, or in a mosque building provisionally used as a temple, but the main temple that used to be there had already been destroyed in 1193. See, Ayodhya’s history becomes more interesting once you discard the lies of the “eminent historians” as well as the naïve version of the Sangh Parivar.
The controversial part lies herein, that the persistence of the temple all through the Sultanate period would have implied a certain tolerance even during the fiercest part of Muslim rule. In reality, the demolition of Rama’s birthplace temple was not an odd and single event, but a repeated event in application of a general theology of iconoclasm imposed by the Prophet.
Was it a temple of Lord Vishnu rather? Or, were they quite a few temples of one or more deities built in different periods by different kings?
In her 2013 book Rama and Ayodhya Prof Meenakshi Jain has detailed all the scholarly evidence and the debate around it, including the embarrassing collapse of the “eminent historian” case once they took the witness stand in Court. She shows that the Rama cult had already left traces more than 2,000 years ago. Attempts to make Rama worship a recent phenomenon were just part of the sabotage attempts by these historians.
Also, the site of Ayodhya, though probably older, is at least beyond doubt since Vikramaditya in the first century BC. All indications are that the disputed site was already visited by pilgrims as Rama’s birthplace well before the Muslim conquest.
So, this was a longstanding pilgrimage site for Rama. Against the utter simplicity of this scenario, anti-Hindu polemicists of various stripes have tried all kinds of diversionary tactics: saying that Rama was born elsewhere, or that the temple belonged to other cults. This Vishnu-but-not-his-incarnation-Rama theory, or the claim of a Shaiva or Buddhist origin, were some of those diversionary tactics; they are totally inauthentic and artificial.
Alright, among historians we can discuss every possible hypothesis. But from the very relevant viewpoint of Islamic iconoclasm, all these distinctions don’t matter: all those sects were false, leading men astray, away from the one true religion, Islam, and therefore they all, and certainly their idols and idol houses, were to be destroyed.
Whatever be the true story, which community do you believe has a greater right of ownership over that disputed site?
The community that holds the site sacred. Muslims go through all this trouble to travel to faraway Mecca, why don’t they go on a cheap and easy pilgrimage to Ayodhya instead? It seems they have made their choice. So let us respect their choice, and also the choice of the Rama worshippers who do care for Ayodhya, by leaving the site to the latter. Case closed.
Do you hate Muslims or Islam?
No, I do not hate Muslims. They are people like ourselves. Having travelled in Pakistan and the Gulf states, I even dare say I feel good in Muslim environments. And if I desire the liberation of Muslims from Islam, that is precisely because I like them. Suppose you discover that a friend of yours still believes in fairy tales: wouldn’t you consider it your duty to set him straight and confront him with the true story, precisely because he is your friend?
And I do not ‘hate’ Islam either. If a teacher uses his red pencil to cross out a grammatical mistake in a pupil’s homework, we do not say that he ‘hates’ the mistake. He simply notices very dispassionately that it is wrong. The use of the word ‘hate’ in this case stems from an attempt to distort the debate and misrepresent the argument by means of emotive language. The belief that someone heard the word of God, dictating the Quranic verses, is just one of the many irrational and mistaken beliefs that have plagued mankind since the beginning.
I have been part of a massive walk-out from the Church. For intellectuals, the decisive reason was the dawning insight that Christian belief was irrational. But for the masses, it was mainly that it was no longer cool to be a believer. People started feeling embarrassed for still being associated with this untenable doctrine, and are none the worse for having left the beliefs they were brought up in.
I wish Muslims a similar evolution, a similar liberation. I do not wish on them anything that I have not been through myself.
How do you view the recent terrorist attack on Belgium? To what extent do you think is migration from Islamic countries responsible for terrorism on European soil?
As Ché Guevara said, a guerrilla fighter is among the masses like a fish in the water. In this case, the jihad fighters had found safety and comfort in the Muslim community. So the demographic Islamization of some neighbourhoods i000n Brussels (due to our own silly policies) has indeed played a role. But I expect you to retort that there were also other factors, and that is true.
How do you react to the Muslim refrain that the terrorists in their community are a creation of America and NATO’s flawed foreign policy and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc?
It is simply not true that Ghaznavi or Aurangzeb took to jihad and iconoclasm in reaction to British colonialism or American bombings. They were inspired by an older source—the Prophet’s precedent, Islam. However, it is true that many contemporary jihad fighters have indeed been fired up by a specific circumstance—western aggression against Muslim countries. Assenting to Quranic lessons about jihad is one thing, but actually volunteering for jihad it quite another. In most people, it needs a trigger. The illegal invasions of Iraq or Libya, or footage of an Afghan wedding bombed by American jets, provided such a trigger.
I am very aware that being bombed is just as unpleasant for wedding guests in Kandahar as for commuters in Brussels or Mumbai.
Right now, even little Belgium has five bomber planes in Iraq as part of the US-led war effort against IS. These bombers must already have killed, along with some jihad fighters, more civilians than were killed in the terrorist attacks in Brussels.
In Belgium, I have drawn some attention with my defence of the Syria volunteers: young Muslims grown up in Brussels or Antwerp and going to fight for the Islamic State. Our politicians call them ‘monsters’, ‘crazy’ and other derogatory names, but in fact they are pious idealists. They may be misguided in their beliefs, and I daresay they are, but they do have the courage of their conviction. Without any pressure on them, they volunteer for putting their lives on the line in the Syrian desert. You cannot deny them bravery and self-sacrifice.
The western invasions and bombings in Muslim countries have brought nothing but misery, and I have opposed them all along. What the Muslim world needs is not more civil wars, sectarian wars, foreign military interventions, which all serve to polarize the minds, to freeze them in existing antagonisms. What it needs is a thaw.
Here again, I speak from my own experience: the post-war climate of peace and prosperity in Europe has allowed a genuine cultural revolution, an emancipation from the stranglehold of Christianity. The Muslim world will only evolve if it attains a modicum of peace and stability.
Note that the military interventions have nothing to do with Islam criticism, nowadays slandered as ‘Islamophobia’. On the contrary. Without exception, all the politicians ordering interventions in Muslim countries have praised Islam, calling it “the religion of peace” that is being ‘misused’ by the terrorists. Not a single word of Islam criticism has ever crossed their lips. A legitimate Islam critic like the late historian Sita Ram Goel has never harmed a hair on the head of a Muslim. Islamophiles such as these politicians, by contrast, have killed many thousands of innocent Muslims.
How would you advise Indians to fight terrorism?
Security measures and repression are neither my field nor my favourite solution, but I understand that sometimes they are necessary. So I want to spare a moment to praise the men in uniform who risk their lives to provide safety. However, this approach won’t provide a lasting solution if it is not accompanied by a more fundamental ideological struggle. That is what I am working on.Koenraad Elsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02503713923882807510noreply@blogger.com0