Ever
closer to Bhāropīyasthān
State of the Art of the Out-of-India Debate
(Published in the Festschrift/tribute for my erstwhile professor
of Indo-European linguistics, Lambert Isebaert: Etudes Classiques
vol.88, Université de Namur 2020, p.85-108. I apologize to the publishers for
not waiting a whole year with this online republication, as they had requested:
since the volume is almost entirely in French, none of my American or Indian friends
or colleagues will buy it, so I make my own paper directly available.)
Résumé. — Assez courante vers
1800, l’hypothèse selon laquelle le berceau de la famille de langues indo-européennes
se trouvait en Inde n’était plus prise en considération pendant près d’un
siècle et demi, avant de resurgir dans les années 1980. Elle rivalise désormais
avec le paradigme dominant d’une immigration « aryenne » en Inde. Les
tentatives récentes (surtout à partir de 2006) d’étouffer le débat, qui se
déroule malheureusement dans une atmosphère particulièrement acrimonieuse, sont
regrettables en l’état actuel des données.
Abstract. — After having been widely assumed ca. 1800, the
Out-of-India scenario of the Indo-European family’s genesis went dormant until
its revival in the 1980s. It is now the main challenger to the dominant
scenario of an “Aryan” immigration into India. Unfortunately, the debate has
been hampered by acrimony and, certainly from 2006 onwards, by stonewalling,
But the evolution of the evidence does not warrant this.
1. Shifting
homelands
In the 1980s, when attending Prof.
Lambert Isebaert’s course of Indo-European (IE; in modern Sanskrit: Bhāropīya,= Bhārat + Yuropīya) Linguistics at Catholic
University of Leuven (then KUL, now KU Leuven), we once asked him if there was
any proof for the dominant Steppe Homeland Theory that he seemed to assent to.
With no idea yet of the recently revived Out-of-India Theory (OIT), we already
knew that the homeland search had had a chequered history, so we wondered: what
did the Steppes have that the other homeland candidates did not? To the best of
our memory, this was literally his answer: “That has been proven”.
Perhaps our memory has become a
little vague about the sequel: “… by archaeology”. But that is the answer that
we received from numerous back-bench Indo-Europeanists whom we met and asked
the same question at successive scholarly conferences.
Another professor of ours, the
leading Dutch Indologist Pierre Eggermont, spoke in the same vein, and also
named his source: Prof. B. B. Lal’s 1950s’ discovery of the Painted Grey Ware
(PGW), a type of pottery that he explained as typical of the Aryans penetrating
deeper into India[1]. Till today, that finding is still being
cited as proof of an Aryan invasion, e.g.: “Lal considered PGW to be intrusive”[2].
For any non-specialist in
archaeology, this reliance on an external authority should be acceptable, and
at the time, it reflected the state of the art. But that state of the art has
evolved since then.
The lone archaeological witness
to the Indo-European (IE) immigration into India, Prof. B. B. Lal, has changed
his mind. During the last two decades, he has published several books in which
he disowns his old interpretation of his PGW discovery[3],
culminating in a hefty tome dedicated to a reasoned argumentation in favour of
the OIT, including a refutation of the counter-arguments already given by then,
where he pleads that “the civilization that prevailed in the Sarasvati valley
from the 5th millennium BCE to the 3rd millennium BCE is
indeed that of the Rigvedic people”[4].
He explained to us in 2017 how, as a junior scholar, fresh from studies under
the pioneering invasionist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, he had force-fitted his
findings into the dominant paradigm, but had later come to understand that his
explanation was merely an application of the paradigm, not a proof of it.
B. B. Lal’s is a modern return to the
assumption of an Indian homeland common in Europe in the half-century around
1800: “At the time when the Indo-European family was first discovered and
scholars began to speculate on their probable place of origin, their initial
thoughts were directed toward India because of the evident antiquity of
Sanskrit”[5]. The
OIT is not some far-fetched novelty, but stood at the cradle of the very notion
of an Indo-European language family.
This was, though not logically
compelling, an economical hypothesis given the central role of Sanskrit in the
discovery of Indo-European. It was considered the language closest to the
putative ancestral language or Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and from linguistic
closeness, geographical closeness was inferred.
It helped that there was a slight
Indomania in Europe’s cultural climate. In a 1775 letter, Voltaire (apparently aware of Gaston-Laurent Cœurdoux’s
first mapping of the Indo-European family, sent as a Mémoire to the
French Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres in 1767) already
speculated that the “dynasty of the Brahmins” taught the rest of the world: “I
am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges”[6].
In that same phase of intellectual-cultural development of Enlightenment
Europe, Immanuel Kant suggested: “The culture of the Indians, as is known, almost
certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the
game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India”[7]. The battle hymn of
this temporary Indocentrism was Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 book Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (‘Language
and Wisdom of the Indians’).
But gradually, the difference between
PIE and Sanskrit came into sharper focus. Thus, the distinction between the vowels
a/e/o in Greek was collapsed into a in Sanskrit, arguably not the other
way around; and Greek k more or less continued
the PIE consonant, whereas the Sanskrit c/ś/ṣ had to be an evolved
form. Thus, Greek ὀκτώ (‘eight’) was deemed true to the PIE original, whereas
Sanskrit aṣṭa came to be considered as an evolute or “deviation” from
the original. It was deduced, plausibly but not logically compellingly, that
this linguistic distance between PIE and Sanskrit should translate into a
geographical distance between the homeland and India.
Together with the background influence
of India’s ongoing decline from an exotic trading-partner to a mere colony,
this caused a shift to what Indians still call the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT):
locating the homeland in Bactria, Russia, Anatolia or Europe, so that the
presence of Sanskrit in India could only be explained through an invasion. In
1834, August Schlegel (Friedrich’s brother) located the homeland around the
Caucasus mountains. From there, the putative homeland would travel a bit, but
in recent decades stabilize again in the peri-Caspian steppes.
In India, the AIT never caught on
except among the discourse-dominant part of the anglicized minority, best
exemplified by Hindu nationalist B. G. Tilak’s hypothesis of a homeland in the
Arctic[8] (often
cited as evidence from the Indian tradition itself for the AIT); Jawaharlal
Nehru’s evocation of the Aryan riders storming down the Khyber Pass in his book
The Discovery of India[9]; and archaeologist V. S. Agarwal’s suggestion
(made famous by Sir Mortimer Wheeler) that as the Aryan war-god, “Indra
stands accused” of destroying the Harappan civilization[10].
Those anglicized intellectuals who
objected to it, like Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (who, to the
chagrin of his followers, articulately rejected the AIT[11])
or Guru M. S. Golwalkar, were a bit subdued about it because of “the blind
belief in the fallacy that linguists have established that the original
homeland of the Indo-European family of languages was located outside India”[12].
There was in decades only one book that tried to argue the case against the
AIT, invoking the traditional Sanskrit grammarians, and it got no further than
proving that Ᾱrya never had a linguistic or racial meaning[13],
already a consensus among post-1945 linguists. Only traditional Pandits fully
rejected the AIT, or had simply never heard of it, as it is not indicated in
the Vedas.
In the 1980s, the OIT began to reassert
itself. The opening shot was fired in the book Karpāsa in Ancient India
by K. D. Sethna (1982), a Parsi and the elderly former
secretary of Sri Aurobindo. He found that karpāsa (‘cotton’) had been
absent from the Ṛg-Veda (RV) but present in the Harappan cities in the
same area, mainly the Sarasvati basin. He concluded that the RV (perhaps minus
its 10th book, which is centuries younger), predates –2600, when the
high tide of Harappan city culture started. A sceptic nonetheless admits that it
“discussed in an outwardly rational fashion, without
overt signs of nationalism or chauvinism”[14].
The rejection became a big movement by
the mid-1990s. It attracted the cooperation of Western scholars like Professors
Edmund Leach, Georg Feuerstein, Klaus Klostermaier and Nicholas Kazanas, while
the archaeologist duo J. Shaffer and D. Lichtenstein[15] had not waited for this opinion wave.
In India, it caught the attention of the Hindu nationalists, and the negative attention
of political movements drawing on the AIT (cf. infra). For a short while around 2000, it enjoyed a
fairly friendly interest from the Indo-Europeanist establishment, mainly
several papers in G. Erdosy (ed.) (1995) and in J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande (eds.) (1999), Edwin Bryant’s doctoral
research into the debate and its publication[16],
the fall/winter
2002 issue of Journal of Indo-European Studies hosting a pro-OIT paper by N. Kazanas (2002) with comments, and finally E. Bryant and L. Patton (eds.) (2005).
The pivotal year was 2000, when a book
was published that changed the terms of the debate. Till then, the AIT was
confronted by its opposite, the non-AIT, which saw the Indo-Aryans as native to
India but showed no interest in the non-Indian IE languages (with the exception
of the linguist S. S. Misra [1992], improved in 2005). The term OIT,
launched by Edwin Bryant around the same time, was a bit flattered: Westerners
thought that any choice of PIE homeland implied a scenario for bringing the
other branches to their historical habitat, but most Indians never thought that
far.
With the book The Rigveda, a
Historical Analysis, by Shrikant Talageri, a self-taught historian, the AIT
came to be challenged by a fully equipped alternative: North India had been the
homeland whence the non-Indian branches emigrated, and it was the Ṛg-Veda that
contained a memory of the first emigrations plus an actual description of the
last emigrations. This implies a high chronology: third millennium BCE and even
beyond, based mainly on the internal logic of the literary data and on
coordination with archaeological data.
In India and among Non-Resident Indians,
the persuasion caught on that the AIT had been refuted and “nobody believes in
it anymore”. Hindu nationalist mathematician N. S. Rajaram declared the debate
over. He presented a “Sanskritic” decipherment of the Harappan script[17] but
provoked only sceptical and debunking reactions, culminating in the scathing “Horseplay
at Harappa” cover-story in the Marxist fortnightly Frontline (October
2000)[18]. This
critique contained the false allegation of “fraud” when he had only been
deluded by wishful thinking: he saw a horse in a defaced bull on a Harappan
seal (just as a top Indologist had read a contrived Aryan invasion reference in
a Vedic text[19]),
but as a demolition of his anti-invasionist narrative, it was otherwise pertinent.
This deluded triumphalism further led
to a tragi-comical overreach by NRIs[20]
in the California Textbook Affair of 2005-2007 (about amending the history
textbooks in a less anti-Hindu sense), triggered by their claim that ‘the AIT
has been discarded” and ending in their total defeat[21].
This episode featured a breath-taking hatred on both sides, and after that, a
distinct hostility has remained throughout an otherwise uneventful decade.
The parties to the debate
The majority opinion in the West today
takes a steppe homeland for granted but is temperamentally agnostic. Scholars
consider the whole controversy obsolete: questions of origins remind them of
the Biblical or feudal emphasis on ancestry. Also, they vaguely know that the homeland
quest has been tainted by politics, first in Britain, then in Germany, and even
now in India, and they do not want to be implicated in this (but cf. infra). This is one of the
reasons for Western Indo-Europeanists’ irritation at many Indians’ deadly
serious insistence on rejecting the AIT, even before going into the merits of
the rivalling theories.
Among Westerners, advocates of an OIT
are a mere handful. In India too, it is actively pursued only by a handful of
people: apart from a few amateurs, most notably “the bank clerk” (as his rank-pulling
enemies never fail to emphasize) Sh. Talageri, we note archaeologists,
historians, Sanskritists, now also geneticists. Our insiders’ testimony that
even in India the OIT is a minority view may come as a surprise, given all the
noise made on internet forums by Indian AIT opponents.
An AIT sceptic is something else than
an OIT advocate. Many reject that the “Aryans” came from across the Khyber
Pass, but are just not interested in anything that happened beyond it: no
migration towards India but neither an emigration from India. They just do not
want anything Indian to be related to anything external: it might be a
neo-colonial ruse by “the foreign hand”. They ignore or even deliberately
reject the very notion of an IE language family.
Though complete outsiders, they
pontificate that Comparative and Historical Linguistics is only “a
pseudo-science”, where “a conjecture is turned into a hypothesis to be later treated
as a fact in support of a new theory”[22]. They
contend that Sanskrit is not more akin to Greek than to Dravidian, and that all
Indian languages should together count as one language group, distinct from all
non-Indian languages; if there are any similarities with these, it must be due
to transmission[23]. Thus, typifying how in the absence of
philological professionals, amateurs grab the microphone, a surgeon elaborately
derides reconstructed PIE through comparison with the failed Phlogiston
hypothesis[24].
Sh. Talageri (2000), p. 403, lists 5 problems in
this anti-AIT party: (1) rhetoric rather than analysis; (2) hyperfocus on the
early Orientalists’ alleged motives; (3) answering invasionist arguments by
evasion; (4) not understanding the issues; (5) blind glorification of the Vedic
Aryans. This list is practically echoed by several Western critics in E. Bryant and L. Patton (eds.) (2005). To the second point:
the association of the AIT with colonialism (or indeed of the OIT with Hindu nationalism)
is now the biggest hurdle for meaningful debate. To focus on ancient events, we
seem to need a moratorium on discussion about recent opinions.
Not only AIT advocates have a negative
impression of many AIT denouncers. The latter’s arrogant smugness has even put
off non-Indian OIT defenders, such as Nicholas Kazanas, Igor Tonoyan-Belyayev
(who has argued for lexical exchanges between PIE and its neighbour Tibetan,
thus establishing PIE’s presence in North India[25])
and Aleksandr Semenenko (who has matched many Harappan findings with Veda
passages and offered genetic evidence for a westward emigration[26]).
Indeed, A. Semenenko, who had founded a Facebook group for discussion of OIT
evidence, decided after a year to throw hundreds of vocal Hindu nationalist members
off and change the name to an unambiguous “Anti-Hindutva RigVedaSamhita without
any trash under the name ‘Vedic’”.
Many of these history rewriters
thought that with Narendra Modi’s accession to power in 2014, their time had
come, and they sent in “research proposals” to the Indian Council of Historical
Research (ICHR). None of these was accepted because they ignored the elementary
rules of scholarship. Any thesis student knows that before developing your own hypothesis,
you must first survey the field and assess what previous scholars have found,
but these traditionalists couldn’t be bothered. Contrary to a rumour about a
Modi conspiracy against proper history-writing, they were given short shrift.
At the same
time, though supporting the OIT, the Hindu nationalist establishment
invests strictly nothing in the scholarly legwork needed to buttress it. Contrary to Western fantasies about
“fanatical Hindus”, this movement’s leaders are just time-servers with a strong
anti-intellectual prejudice and limited ideological commitment[27].
Thus, Human Resources Development Minister Prakash Javadekar declared he was
proud of “not having rewritten a single chapter in four years” in the history
textbooks (India Today, 27 Sep. 2018). While formally controlling the
Republic’s educational and research institutions, the government does nothing
to promote its own agenda through university nominations, grants, or setting up
research projects. Instead it uses its power to give posts in
the ICHR as rewards to lethargic and incompetent gerontocrats.
So,
committed scholars simply try to make the most of whatever little opportunity
they get. When history professors Meenakshi Jain and Saradindu Mukherji and
archaeology professor Michel Danino (French-born naturalized Indian)
fortuitously gained a temporary position in the ICHR (2015-2018), they used it
to organize a top-notch conference, “Indian History: Emerging Perspectives” on
5-7 March 2018 in Delhi, and purposefully invited the leading Out-of-India
theorists; proceedings forthcoming.
As shown
by the example of B. B. Lal, valorized by the AIT camp as long as he was their
sole source of hard “evidence”, most OIT advocates are people of equal academic
rank as their lambasters. But one would not think so if one saw the scatology,
not otherwise allowed, in which OIT defenders get covered in cursory media of
Western academe (Religion in South Asia list, Indo-Eurasian Research
list, Indology list, or the Facebook group PIE). Indians interpret
these double standards as evidence of racism. Probably race has little to do
with it anymore, but in a time of assuaging or revaluating non-Western
cultures, this behaviour is nonetheless anomalous.
We do not consider it appropriate to quote from this informal discourse,
but a published text that has benefited from the author’s leisurely reflections
and an editor’s attention should be allowed as an example of the steep
inequality assumed by the AIT party between themselves and the OIT party.
A still
mild but very representative example is H. H. Hock (1999b):
all while producing a rare serious argumentation against the OIT, Hans Hock
systematically identifies the invasion sceptics as “Hindu Nationalists”; which
is not logically of consequence (people can have political or other commitments
yet speak the truth), but happens to be untrue. For one counter-example: the
present writer is neither Hindu nor nationalist. Nor are the Western scholars enumerated
above. And for those who are, it is still unpleasant to be pigeon-holed in
their ideological corner instead of criticized for their scholarly conclusions.
We see here in a nutshell the same conspiracy theory as among Indian
polemicists: a (racist-colonial c.q. Hindu nationalist) politician sits thinking
how to fool everyone, shouts Eureka, and comes up with a scholarly
theory (AIT c.q. non-AIT). Both parties are mistaken in thinking
that a theory can simply be “concocted”.
A sharper example is Stephanie Jamison’s review of E. Bryant and L. Patton (eds.) (2005),
which includes chapters by several indigenists: “[…] the
parallels between the Intelligent Design issue and the Indo-Aryan ‘controversy’
are distressingly close. The Indo-Aryan controversy is a manufactured one with
a non-scholarly agenda, and the tactics of its manufacturers are very close to
those of the ID proponents mentioned above. However unwittingly and however
high their aims, the two editors have sought to put a gloss of intellectual
legitimacy, with a sense that real scientific questions are being debated, on
what is essentially a religio-nationalistic attack on a scholarly consensus”[28].
This is flatly untrue: the OIT never posited a supernatural intervention.
A number of scholars have no national or religious dog in this fight. It is no
less rational than the Anatolian Homeland Theory, found wrong but taken
seriously; the eccentric location of its chosen homeland is not stranger than
the undoubted eccentric homelands of Austronesian, Bantu, Russian, or Arabic;
and a thickly-populated homeland is likelier than the thinly-populated steppes.
In practice, this was an explicit call to what has become, from the
contemporaneous California Textbook Case onwards, a general policy of the AIT
camp: contemptuous stonewalling. The OIT school was henceforth treated as
flat-earthers on whom no breath or ink should be wasted.
The OIT
party can be harsh on its opponents too, but in a different sense: they
highlight alleged polemical malpractice. At the ICHR 2018 conference, Danino’s
paper was titled: “Fabricating Evidence in Support of the AIT”. Sh. Talageri
regularly lambasts “the joke that
is Western Indology”[29],
not sparing even the biggest names in detailed critiques. Thus, he makes fun of
the “radical damage control measures” and “weird about-turns” by the AIT party,
such as the “Stalin-era-like” retraction by Johanna Nichols of her plea for an Asian
origin of linguistic features in West-Asian languages, attributed to “peer
pressure”[30]. She had, in her own
words, first contributed “a beautiful theory that accounts elegantly for a
great deal of the dynamic and linguistic geography of the IE spread” which “still
stands”[31];
but now she disowns the logical conclusion of her own still-standing research,
allegedly because it adds evidence for an eastern homeland.
“Invasion”
Let us
clear the air about an unnecessary quarrel that further bedevils even the mere restart
of a debate. Many Indo-Europeanists refuse to engage with the Out-of-India
school, citing the objection that the description of their own position as “invasionist”
is inaccurate, unfair and partisan. Is it?
We do not
mind reading “AIT” as Aryan Immigration Theory, if that can serve some
diplomatic purpose; but we will still know that what the AIT people mean, is
really an invasion. First of all, the term is historically accurate. As soon as
the wellspring of IE was relocated to a territory outside India, its intrusion
into India, like that into Europe, was conceived of as a military conquest. For
a generation that remembered a World War or had learned how entire continents
were hispanized or anglicized via conquest, this was natural.
The narrative was given an
ideological colouring: the Aryans were warlike and patriarchal, their Old
European and Harappan victims peace-loving. Marija Gimbutas and the Feminists
took the latter’s side whereas Rightists threw their weight behind the Aryans, thinking
these had a Darwinian right over their weaker adversaries. In spite of opposing
sympathies, both parties had a conquest in mind.
This scenario was explicitly
defended by Bernard Sergent, son of a Résistance couple. He acknowledges
the attempt to outgrow the old-school view of history as a series of battles: “This
is healthy, I say, because in doing so, one takes into account the slow
movement in history, the long term, whereas the heuristic value of the event is
superficial”[32].
But: “Unfortunately,
the result of this tendency […] is the
refusal, sometimes systematic, of an explanation of brutal historical change
and of the very notion of invasion. […] In that
case methodical doubt and prudence have inverted themselves into dogma. Yet in
the case of India and many other countries, history […] teaches
the reverse, namely the frequency and essential role of invasions”[33].
B. Sergent counts nine invasions
into India from the 6th century BCE to the 5th CE. None
of those, nor the later Arab, Turkish and Afghan conquests, nor the peaceful
settlement of the Jews, Syrian Christians and Parsis, led to displacement of a
native language, nor even to maintenance of the immigrants’ own language.
Though infusing their genes in the Indian population, they all assimilated
linguistically. Same for the parallel case of Mesopotamia, where we
note the Aryan-like “imperceptible influx of pastoral people” but also
“outright invasion by motley groups of border peoples” such as “the Guti,
Lullubi, Kassites, and Mitanni”[34].
Whether invaders or infiltrators, they all lost their languages, much in
contrast with the putative Aryan immigrants.
Though AIT-minded archaeologists looked
for signs of a non-violent immigration into India, they still have not found
them: “the so-called ‘invasion’ of IA speakers is not (yet) visible in
the archaeology”[35]. If it had become visible, this would have been highlighted in cover-stories,
in India if not in the West. Quod non.
Moreover, emphatic immigrationists often turn
out to be invasionists once they reconstruct their immigration, e.g. describing
the horse and chariot, supposedly Aryan imports, as a military advantage.
Several battles mentioned in the RV, foremost the Battle of the Ten Kings
(chiefly RV 7:18, 33, 83), are still generally presented as Aryan against Native: “Indra subjected the aboriginal tribes of the Dāsas/Dasyus to the Aryans”[36].
Or: “The Vedic Aryans made their way, fighting, into the Indian subcontinent”[37].
A recent paper speaks of “the Bharatas’ trail of conquest” and “the Vedic
conquerors”[38].
What makes an immigration into an invasion is
not the means used but the end achieved: after an “invasion”, the former
outsiders are not merely in, they are also in charge. If the
newcomers end up imposing their (religious, linguistic) identity rather than
adopting the native identity, the result is like after a military conquest: the
natives become second-class citizens in their own country. In the case of the
hypothetical Aryan invasion, the result clearly is that North India got
Aryanized. Allegedly they even subjugated the natives permanently through caste.
It is entirely reasonable to call this an “invasion”.
While this
concept fully applies to the AIT, its materialization is completely absent in
India, which contrasts with the situation in Europe. As B. Fortson (2010),
p. 48-49, notes: “But in the period 3100-2900 BC came a clear and dramatic
infusion of Yamna cultural practice, including burials, into Eastern Hungary
and along the lower Danube. With this we are able to witness the beginnings of
the Indo-Europeanization of Europe”.
The Aryan immigration into Europe was the kind of “clear and dramatic
infusion” that scholars have been looking for in India, in vain. Science
journalist Colin Barras summarizes: “Five thousand years ago the Yamnaya people
started a violent conquest of Europe […]. Genetic research shows that the old Britons who built Stonehenge must have
disappeared soon after”[39].
Archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen postulates that the
coming of these Indo-European speakers “must have been a kind of genocide”[40].
The last few years have seen a wave of enthusiasm among AIT supporters
for geneticist David Reich’s (2018) interpretation of his own findings as confirming their “immigration”
scenario. That genes “immigrated” into India is in itself no problem: what else
did the Shakas, Greeks, Huns etc. do before they adopted the native language? But
the pro-AIT journal Scroll.in reports “the aggressive nature
of Indo-Aryan migration into India”[41].
D. Reich himself is
quoted as confirming with understatement that this encounter between the Steppe
pastoralists and the Harappans “cannot have been entirely friendly”[42]. Till
now, the AIT party might have hoped that, unlike the Shakas and Hunas, the
Aryans were successful in maintaining and imposing their language precisely because
they did not “invade”, instead immigrating peacefully. That, however, is not what
D. Reich has in mind; he clearly means conquest. What the AIT party is
applauding for, is purported evidence for an invasion. The term “immigration”
on which they nowadays insist, is but a weasel word for “invasion”.
India shows great material and cultural
continuity even in the period when an Aryan invasion with its dramatic shift in
language should have caused great discontinuity. Plus, the wide presence of
Harappan produce in Central Asia, Mesopotamia, and the trading outpost in
Bactria (Shortugai), show the existence of Harappan trade networks there, hence
a familiarity with this area, facilitating an emigration into their backyard when
the need arose. Already in 1995, G. Erdosy noted “the gulf still separating
archaeology and linguistics”[43],
i.e. between evidence favouring the OIT and a near-consensus around the AIT.
The Asiknī
For many people, the word “Aryan” makes an
alarm bell go off because of a non-linguistic connotation: racism. This
political overtone is partly rooted in a linguistic mistake: a mistranslation.
This was not a deliberate “concoction”, as Indian polemicists allege, but a
side-effect of the racial prejudices common around 1900, that acted as coloured
glasses through which translators read the Vedas.
The RV repeatedly refers to “black” entities.
Sometimes this innocently refers to natural phenomena
that are actually black, e.g. kṛṣṇa tvac,
RV 9:41:1, ‘the black cover’, may signify the night. But mostly, this
usage follows the universal tendency to represent enemies
as black: “When there is sufficient context for interpretation, we find that
the notions can at least equally well be read as an ‘ideological’ distinction
between the ‘dark/black’ world of the dāsas/dasyus and the ‘light/white’ world of
the āryas”[44].
Indeed, as late as World War II, the collaborators with the Axis were called “black”, the resisters “white”,
e.g. in British reports, Subhas Bose’s soldiers counted as “black”[45].
So, the racial interpretation of “black” has now partly been discarded in
scholarly circles, at least consciously.
One case where an
innocent designation as ‘black’ is racially interpreted, is asikni characterizing a military enemy
in the Battle of the Ten Kings (RV 7:5:3, repeated in 9:73:5). Combined with viśa,
it is translated as ‘the dark-complexioned races’ (H. H. Wilson [1997 [1866]]), ‘the dark-hued races’
(R. Griffith [1991 [1889]]), ‘die schwarzen Stämme’ (K. F.
Geldner (2003 [ca. 1928]]), and even very
recently ‘dark clans’ (S. W. Jamison and J. P. Brereton [2014]). Moreover, Vedic priest Vasiṣṭha and the Vedic Tṛtsu
clan happen to be described as śvitya,
‘white-clad’ (RV 7:33:1 and 7:83:8), which some translators render as ‘white-complexioned’
(thus H. H. Wilson [1997 [1866]]). This battle
description became the crowning evidence of the grand AIT narrative, where the
white Aryan invaders defeat the black aboriginals.
But in fact, this is a pun on the enemies’
provenance: Asiknī, ‘the black
(river)’, is simply the Sanskrit name of the river whence they come, the Chenab
(to the west of the Vedic tribe’s Ravi). So, ‘the Chenab crowd’. The
enemies are led into battle by a king with an Iranian name, Kavaṣa. Their tribal names and nicknames
are all known from Iranian and Greek sources to refer to Iranian communities. Their
religion is described as having distinctively Mazdean characteristics: without Indra
or Devas (who have been demonized) and without fire-sacrifice (because
fire is elevated so far as to taboo throwing things into it). Obviously, the
enemies of the Vedic people at that time were Iranian, not “black aboriginal”.
This is attested from so many angles that one wonders how this mistake could
have been made at all.
The mistake was reproduced by numerous authors,
including many without ideological agenda. Thus, “the śūdras were an-ārya,
‘non-Aryan’, referring to the darker-skinned elements of the population (the
Sanskrit term for ‘caste’, varṇa,
means ‘colour’)”[46].
In fact, varṇa means ‘one in a
spectrum’: a colour in the visual spectrum, a letter in the sound spectrum
(hence varṇamāla for ‘alphabet’), and
a class in the social spectrum. The identification of a social class with a
colour is a fossilized metaphor. The same symbolic meaning counts for Avestan pištra,
roughly ‘caste’ but literally ‘colour’[47].
Today, the dominant
egalitarian paradigm projects the same categories onto ancient texts: “The
Dalit [‘broken’, the Untouchables] were the original inhabitants of
India and resemble the African in physical features”[48], but
with the opposite valuation: now the “black aboriginals” count as the good
ones, entitled to compensation, the “white invaders” as the bad ones, summoned
to discharge their historical guilt. Fanciful racial notions continue to divide
India.
Political dimension
The Indian rejection of the AIT makes an Indologist protest “to what
degree the question of Indo-Aryan origins has become politicized”[49]. But seen from India, this
makes you wonder what planet the scholar has been living on; probably “the West”,
where they know nothing about AIT’s much older divisive effect on India. And
even inside the West, the Indo-Europeanist research itself has been
deconstructed as a deeply politicized undertaking[50]. It
is comical to find academics, as if blushing virgins, run away from the OIT
because of its alleged political taint, while having 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 gory government policies. Political applications of the AIT include:
·
the colonial
justification of rule by the British pure Aryans over the upper-caste mixed
Aryans and the lower-caste non-Aryans;
·
the perfect
illustration of the Nazi scheme of rule by the pure Aryan race and the
degeneracy through race-mixing with a lower race, in spite of a commendable
effort to prevent this through caste apartheid;
·
post-war, a galaxy
of Rightist groups in the West still use the AIT to buttress their identity
project, see e.g. the relevant “Survive the Jive” Youtube videos by historian
Thomas Rowsell, or the periodicals Terre et Peuple, Éléments and Nouvelle
École; some even attribute the successes of the IE family to an
intrinsic European superiority: “What then does account for the remarkable
conquests of the Indo-Europeans? […] The simplest explanation is that the original
speakers of PIE possessed, on
average, considerably higher intelligence than most of the people they defeated”[51].
·
anti-Brahminism, an
Indian replica of anti-Semitism (“Brahmins, go back to Central Asia”);
·
Dravidianism, a Tamil
cultural separatism, from 1947 till 1962 also political;
·
the Dalit movement
a.k.a. Ambedkarism;
·
the
British-cum-missionary construction of the Tribals as Ādivāsīs (‘Aboriginals’), an ancient-sounding neologism from the early
20th century, pregnant with the message that the non-Tribals are
intruders[52].
One ideology associated with the AIT was
National-Socialism. In order to justify the untouchability of the OIT, invasionist
polemicists sometimes try to link it to Nazism, and this not just on Twitter
and in yellow journalism, e.g. that Brahminism resulting from the AIT was the “father
of Fascism, Racism, Nazism”[53].
This swollen rhetoric is even used among top academics[54]. Possibly
these scholars do not realize what they are saying, but this is really not
innocent: in contemporary Western culture, association with National-Socialism
is the single worst allegation possible. Yes, AIT skeptics have behaved
impolitely; but none of their swearwords can match this level of incrimination.
Yet, there is nothing Nazi about the OIT, on the
contrary. It is the AIT that served as the perfect paradigm of the Nazi
worldview, and that was taught in the history textbooks under Nazi control: “In
the Third Reich, even schoolchildren knew from their textbooks that this race
had spread from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around”[55].
The Nazi top “race scientist”, Hans F. K. Günther, thought that the Indo-Europeans had penetrated the
north of the Indian Subcontinent some centuries BCE[56].
Among Adolf Hitler’s
own rare utterances on the Hindus, each of them negative, was a racial
interpretation of the AIT: “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”[57].
He even followed the now-fashionable use of “immigrant” (Einwanderer)
instead of “invader”.
In India, this racialized AIT is still very alive. In
November 2015, Congress leader Mallikarjuna Kharge shouted in a parliamentary
debate: “You Aryans are from outside India!” A press comment radicalized this
perception: “The only indigenous people in India are the adivasis”[58]. The
non-Indo-Aryan-speakers are pitted against the Indo-Aryans, and most of all,
the Tribals/“Ādivāsīs” against the
non-Tribal “invaders”. In less extreme form, this racial vision still informs India’s
caste-based reservation policy. This way, the 19th-century racial AIT
interpretation serves as a poison injecting division and resentment into Indian
society even today. That is why the Hindu nationalists clutch at any possible
refutation of the AIT.
Linguistics
Linguists
are rather modest about their ability to prove the location of a homeland: “Our
knowledge of these migrations [that broke
PIE unity] is very limited. On a linguistic basis, little can be said about
them”[59].
If the anti-AIT party were to care for reading dusty linguists, it would quote
this with glee.
In the already limited
circle of OIT advocates, linguistically capable people are even fewer. One of
the rare linguistic arguments offered to refute the OIT concerns the isoglosses, i.e. the changes commonly
affecting some IE member languages but not others, indicating that the affected
languages have gone through a common development after the dispersal of the
common ancestor language. In Hans Hock’s opinion, the pattern of isoglosses is
incompatible with the distribution of languages necessitated by an Indian
homeland[60].
Sh. Talageri responded to this argument at length[61], as did N. Kazanas[62], and K. Elst[63]. It is outside the
purview of this paper to discuss the arguments; but do note that, after the
demise of S. S. Misra, these are the only names one needs to remember in this
respect.
Another
linguistic topic, first raised by Sri Aurobindo in a lecture on the Vedas ca.
1915 (published 1956)[64],
is the deeper rootedness within Sanskrit. The word wolf/vṛka is taken to
be related to the verbal root vṛk- ‘to
tear’ (whence vṛkṇa ‘a cut, wound’),
so ‘wolf’ would really mean ‘the tearer’, whereas elsewhere it only means
‘wolf’[65].
Likewise, it is claimed that only Sanskrit can deduce the pan-IE term name from a verbal root: nāma from nam-, namati ‘to greet’[66].
N. Kazanas (2015), p. 43-124, worked out an annotated list of 393 such roots. Thus
while Latin pater seems isolated,
Sankrit pitā, pitṛ can be interpreted as an agent noun from pā-, pāti ‘to protect’; and
unlike Greek θυγάτηρ or English daughter,
Sanskrit duhitā, duhitṛ finds
an explanation within the language itself, cf. duh-, dugdha ‘to milk’ (i.e.
‘milkmaid’)[67].
This would indicate that the other languages have creolized somewhat, mixing
each with the local substrate language of their respective newfound habitats.
N. Kazanas (2015), p.
43, concludes: “Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves
much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the
general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European and that,
since this could only happen in sedentary conditions, the Indoaryan speakers of
Sanskrit did not move (much) from the original homeland”.
Here he
reiterates the case he had earlier made in Comparative Mythology: the Vedic
pantheon has a completeness in comparison with the bits and pieces in other
branches, which often cannot be connected with one another except by bringing
in the Vedic version as middle term, so: “This then I call the Preservation
Principle […]: the
people or culture that has preserved most, ceteris paribus has moved
least”[68].
We could
extend this principle to another finding in Comparative Mythology. Nick Allen,
who never questioned the AIT, has left us a discovery that arguably supports
the OIT. Seeing numerous similarities between Homer’s epics and the Mahābhārata,
he realized the latter had yogic elements that are missing in the corresponding
Homeric passages. N. Allen argues that the proto-narrative already contained
yoga features, which were lost in the Greek version: “Either the proto-journey was like the Greek and contained nothing
relating to yoga, in which case the
yogic aspect of the Sanskrit story was an innovation […]. Or the proto-journey was like the
Sanskrit and was quasi-yogic or proto-yogic in character, in which case Greek
epic tradition largely or wholly eliminated that aspect of the story. […] I argue that
some significant and fairly precisely identifiable features of yoga go back to the culture of those who
told the proto-narrative – who […] may well have been proto-Indo-European speakers”[69].
The logical but
missing explanation stares him in the face: this dimension was lost by the
Greeks in the rough and tumble of the trek westwards. Just as in a decomposing
corpse, the brain disintegrates fast while the skeleton remains, the most
precious elements in a tradition get lost most easily. They need constant
nurturing, which is more difficult during a long-distance migration in
premodern conditions. Only the Indians had the comfort of a stable situation
where they could preserve them.
Other linguistic topics investigated
include the loanwords into Sanskrit (or their absence where they had been
expected, as in the Northwest-Indian hydronyms), the loan pattern between
Indo-Iranian and Uralic, and linguistic palaeontology. This work is among the
least read in the world: no reviews, no response papers, not even quotations.
On social media and other forums, the “Aryan Invasion” is actively debated,
e.g. to connect Vedic literary data with Harappan archaeological discoveries,
or now to digest new genetic findings, but the linguistic dimension is either
starkly ignored or filled up with fantasies.
Some Indian linguists do apply the
comparative and historical methods to the relation between the Indian languages[70],
but the Indo-European level is somehow beyond their research interest. Most AIT
sceptics treat it with disdain or hostility, thinking that Linguistics is
necessarily linked to the AIT. The most negative book reviews (now lost in
cyberspace) of K. Elst (2007) and Sh. Talageri (2008) were not by invasionists but by
their bête noire, N. S. Rajaram.
Literary evidence
Most Indo-Europeanists assume some two
thousand years between the disintegration of PIE and the first literary
testimonies of Hittite, Mycenaean Greek and Vedic Sanskrit. What Sh. Talageri (2000 and 2008, summarized and updated
2020) gathered from the Vedic and Avestan corpus will remain his major claim to
fame (for the OIT party) or ridicule (for the AIT and anti-AIT parties): the
surprising thesis that literary evidence reaches back far enough to provide
information on PIE’s disintegration.
Here, the Vedic
tradition evolved in the 3rd millennium BCE and even beyond, within
the Paurava tribe based in the Sarasvatī basin. The RV still remembered
their coexistence with the Druhyu tribe until it largely emigrated under
duress (RV 1:107:8, 6:46:8, 7:18, 8:10:5, 10:134),
then describes co-existing with the Ānava
tribe in the northwest until it, too, emigrates under duress; and also with
other tribes east and south. These were not daughters but sisters of the Vedic
community, so the Vedic traditions represent only one line within the
commonwealth of Hinduism, whereas both Hindu nationalists and AIT-minded
outsiders commonly assume the Vedas, composed near the supposed invaders’ entry
point, to be the source of Hinduism.
The Druhyus went
northwest to Central Asia, shed their Tocharian branch on the way (Anatolian
may represent an even earlier emigration) and imposed their dialects on the
steppe region, whence their mixed progeny conquered most of Europe, yielding
Italo-Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic. The Ānavas also
went northwest and their Scythian branch was to equally fill up the steppes,
but most Iranians and the ancestors of the Armenians, Phrygians, Greeks and
Albanians took the route south of the Caspian Sea.
The steppes
certainly were a secondary homeland, a staging-ground for the “Aryan invasion”
of the European subcontinent, but not the ultimate homeland of PIE. In the
words of E. Callaway (2015): “Less clear is whether
all Indo-European languages derive from this group, or whether just a subset
do, says Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He suspects that the Yamnaya people spoke a
language that later developed into Slavic, Germanic and other northern European
tongues, but he doubts that they imported the predecessor of southern European
languages such as ancient Greek, or those of eastern Indo-European languages
such as Sanskrit”.
Exactly. In
Sh. Talageri’s reconstruction, most languages of Europe derive from the Druhyu
tribe’s emigration, which settled in Russia and mixed with the locals,
linguistically assimilating them, before intruding into Central Europe[71].
The Greeks, Albanians and Armenians, by contrast, were peripheral groups in a
largely Iranian Ānava tribe and
emigrated in a second wave still described in books 7 and 4 of the RV[72].
An even later emigration – issued from the stay-behind Paurava tribe – yielded the Sanskrit traces in Kassite and
Mitannic.
An uncontroversial Indologist theory by
Hermann Oldenberg about the layeredness of the Vedic text (resented by traditionalists
as “reducing a divine revelation to mere history”) yields a sequence of the
different chapters. This shows that the older chapters mention eastern rivers,
fauna, etc., and the later chapters more westerly ones, so that the RV describes
an east-to-west gradient, just the opposite of what the AIT posits. The most
Afghanistan-oriented chapter is the late 8th, not the oldest
chapters as the AIT would imply.
A closer analysis of verse forms and
name types proves that the Sanskrit-speaking founders of the Mitanni culture
are of a piece with the youngest layer of the RV. This in turn allowed for
absolute chronological information: the late RV predates by centuries the
Mitanni kingdom of the mid-2nd millennium.
Astronomical
evidence confirms Sh. Talageri’s relatively high chronology. The useful
references in the Vedas are few and far between, sometimes hard to interpret
with precision[73], but still numerous
enough, and consistent: not a single one of them supports the low AIT-implied chronology.
Most point
to the asterism Kṛttikā on the spring equinox or the asterism Maghā
on the summer solstice, both timed by their precessional movement at ca. 2300.
They concern the RV’s 10th book, the Yajur and Atharva Vedas
and the Brāhmaṇas, implying a higher
age for the Family Books: up to and even beyond 3000 BCE[74].
One cannot explain them all away as either just wrong and confused, or as mere
reminiscences of past observations[75].
Such special pleading can work once, but not in every instance; Occam’s razor
applies.
The Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa, a post-Vedic manual of
observational astronomy, definitely not dealing in reminiscences, is
unambiguous. It dates itself in two different ways (Dhaniṣṭha solstitial, Bharaṇī
equinoctial) to ca. 1300 BCE, a time when the AIT hardly has the Ṛg-Veda being composed. It “gives very
precise information on all four solstitial and equinoctial points corresponding
to the late 2nd millennium BCE, and this text is very much later
than the Brāhmaṇas. These data are as valid evidence for an early date for the Ṛg-Veda (which long preceded all these texts) as any evidence brought forward
to promote a later date”[76].
This latter proof is then said to pertain to the existence of chariots and iron
implements, two types of evidence that happen to be in flux due to new
discoveries, unlike the precessional data.
It is unbecoming of scholars to cavalierly shift this date down to 500
or even 200 BCE, as is common, pleading that the evolution rate of language
necessitates this denial of the astronomical information (what if this soft
linguistic evidence, predicated on low Vedic dates, is circular?); or to put a
position of Maghā on the Solstice at 800 BCE, as A. A. Macdonnell and A. B. Keith (1912 [1982]), p. 422-424,
did, fully 1500 years later than what the Brāhmaṇa text and elementary astronomy tell us. So, as historical evidence goes,
the astronomical data provide strong evidence for Sh. Talageri’s high chronological
estimate.
Genetics
Educated Indians,
steadfast in their willful illiteracy in linguistics, are more on their home
turf in the hard sciences. Strictly, these have at most a minor impact on the
linguistic homeland question: “Racial movements allegedly traced on the basis of
genomes and haplogroups cannot help us trace the history of the
Indo-European language migrations”[77].
This is but a modernized variation on what we all learned about skull-type
Indo-Europeanism in our IE courses: it was a pre-war mistake to identify physical
groups with linguistic communities. Yet somehow the AIT school, after having totally
avoided taking cognizance of the advancing OIT case for more than a decade,
suddenly turned jubilant over certain findings by geneticists.
The bygone identification of a
race with a language is hailed again, though now defined by genotype.
Invasionist polemicists argue in all seriousness about the evidential value of
the “Aryan gene”, R1a1[78]. Genes, like skulls, do not speak:
while a human migration may be proven by a sufficient number of such findings,
we still would not know what happened to their language.
Yet, genetic discoveries favouring migrations
out of India exist but have been passed over in silence. Thus, S. Sharma, E. Raj and R. Jena (2009) claim to show that R1a1, widely
present in Central Siberia, Eastern Europe and North India, has its origin in
the latter[79].
But now that research by David Reich (2018) seemed to support an AIT
scenario, this made headlines. It was applauded among pro-AIT scholars and
their political followers worldwide[80].
The recent AIT applause for D.
Reich was centred on his claim of the R1a1 genes’ eastward movement. This does not
impress the Indians anymore, they claim solid evidence for the reverse: “The
haplogroup R1a* originated in India approximately 15,450 – 18,500 years ago. […] The westward Indo-Aryan
expansion is a plausible explanation for the male-mediated demic expansions of
R1a1a (R-M17) into Europe beginning around 2,500 BCE, which, to a large extent,
replaced indigenous European males and their Y-chromosome strata”[81].
Impeccable
scientists have shown lots of migration from India, affecting both the human
and in their wake several non-human species (even mice, see P. Priyadarshi [2012]). Thus,
genetic evidence for Indian cows’ genes in Ukrainian cows shows an Indian
presence on the steppes: “However, in some areas of the Eurasian continent,
phenotypically humpless cattle are known to have been influenced by historical
admixture from zebu cattle […]. This
study suggests that the Ukrainian and the Central Asian regions belong to
hybrid zones where taurine-zebu crossbreds have existed”[82].
So, accompanying human emigrants, Indian cattle migrated all the way to
Ukraine. By contrast, there is no sign that Western cattle were brought into
India: the Aryan invaders were cowherds without cows.
Indologist Giacomo Benedetti (2012) comments: “Then,
the presence of zebu genes and representations in Asia and
Europe seem to be […] a confirmation that there was an
important movement from South Asia to the West”.
The genetic debate has technical
aspects that exceed our competence. What we can report, though, is the much increased
self-confidence in the new generation of OIT-minded researchers. After the AIT
crowd has thrown the gauntlet regarding genetic evidence, they are meeting the
challenge quite well. As we witnessed at the conference “Bharat beyond Aryan Invasion Myth
in the Light of Recent Discoveries” (Hyderabad, 7 December 2019, organized by Indic Academy and
Pragna Bharati), they still wax indignant about Western “manipulations of
evidence”, but they also provide excellent counter-evidence.
Conclusion
The polemicists for and against the
AIT have a lot in common. They attribute political motives to their opponents
and deduce from these imagined motives a justification for ignoring the
evidence presented. Not that the debate is entirely symmetrical: though the AIT
sceptics talk in the same vein, a few of them nonetheless do provide
responses to all the opposing argumentations that reach their attention. This is much less the
case in the other direction: “An ostrich-like attitude is perpetuating the
Aryan invasion myth”[83].
So, we plead against this rhetoric
of excluding opponents from the debate. It is unbecoming of scholars to declare
themselves above pertinent evidence, even if coming from a school alleged to
have unpleasant motives. Moreover, given the fast-shifting international power equation,
this attitude of Western scholars ignoring their Indian counterparts, or at
best talking down to them, strikes us as increasingly anomalous.
Koenraad ELST
Indus University, Ahmedabad, India
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[1] Starting with B. B. Lal (1950-52), Id. (1952), and still Id. (1981).
[2] S. V. Pradhan (2014), p. 67.
[3] B. B. Lal (2002), Id. (2005).
[4] B. B. Lal (2015), p. 125.
[5] R. S. P.
Beekes (2011),
p. 48. For the original Dutch version, see Id. (1990), p. 73.
[6] “Je suis déjà entièrement de votre avis qu’il
n’est pas possible que différents peuples se soient accordés dans les mêmes
méthodes, les mêmes connaissances, les mêmes fables, et les mêmes
superstitions, si tout cela n’a pas été puisé chez une nation primitive qui a
enseigné et égaré le reste de la terre. Or il y a long-temps que j’ai regardé
l’ancienne dynastie des brachmanes comme cette nation primitive. […] je suis convaincu que tout nous vient des bords du Gange, astronomie,
astrologie, métempsycose, etc.” (letter to M. Bailly of
December 15, 1775; see A.-J.-Q. Beuchot [1834], p. 447-448).
[7] Quoted in C. Hale (2003), p. 61. German original: “Die
Gelehrsamkeit der Indier namentlich rührt mit ziemlicher Gewißheit aus Tibet
her, so wie dagegen alle unsere Künste aus Indostan hergekommen zu sein
scheinen, z.B. der Ackerbau, die Ziffern, das Schachspiel u.s.w.” (I. Kant, Physische Geographie [1802], Zweiter Abschnitt: Vom
Lande, § 37).
[8] B. G. Tilak (1903).
[9] J. Nehru (1946).
[10] R. E. M. Wheeler (1947), p. 82.
[11] See K. Elst (1993), p. 15-30, Sh. Talageri (2000), p.
384-397, A. Sharma (2005).
[12] Sh. Talageri (2000), p. 384.
[13]
Cf. K. S. Rao (1957 [2015]).
[14] M. Witzel (2006), p.
208.
[15] J. Shaffer and D. Lichtenstein (1995) and Id. (2013).
[16]
E. Bryant (2001), a model of “scholarly fair play”
according to J. P. Mallory’s blurb.
[17] N. Jha and N. S. Rajaram (2000).
[18] Details in K. Elst (2018a), p. 210-214.
[19] M. Witzel (1995), p. 321, debunked in K. Elst (1999), p. 164-167; human psychology
allows for more options that “truth” vs. “fraud”.
[20] NRI = Non-resident Indian [editors’ footnote].
[21] Details in K. Elst (2012), p.
145-155.
[22] N. S. Rajaram (1995), p. 217.
[23] It is to them that Sh. Talageri addressed
his paper explaining the notion of language family; in vain (Sh. Talageri [2017b]).
[24] Sh. Sastry (2018), answered by K. Elst (2018).
[25]
See I. Tonoyan-Belyayev (2017) and Id. ( 2018).
[26]
See A. Semenenko (2019).
[27]
See K. Elst (2015), p. 160-170.
[28] S. W. Jamison (2006), p. 256.
[29]
Sh. Talageri (2017a).
[30] Sh. Talageri (2017c).
[31] J. Nichols in a note
preceding the academia.edu version of her 1997 paper.
[32] B. Sergent (1997), p. 153 (my translation).
[33] B. Sergent (1997), p. 153 (my translation).
[34] M. Witzel (2006), p.
213.
[35] M. Witzel (2006),
p. 213.
[36] T. Elizarenkova (1995), p. 36.
[37] F. Staal (1996), p. 154.
[38] R. Stuhrmann (2016), responded to by Sh. Talageri (2017a).
[39] C. Barras (2019b), p. 41 and 45.
[40] Quoted by C. Barras (2019a).
[41] Sh. Daniyal (2019).
[42] Sh. Daniyal (2019).
[43]
G. Erdosy (1995), p. xiii.
[44] H. H. Hock (1999b),
p. 154.
[45] Quotes in G. D. Bakshi (2019a), p. 67 and 153.
[46] J. Puhvel (1989), p. 45.
[47] Cf. H. H. Hock (1999b), p. 155.
[48] V. T. Rajshekar (2009), p. 43.
[49] L. M. Fosse (2005), p. 434.
[50] See e.g. S. Arvidsson (2006) and J.-P. Demoule (2014). This is not to say, however, that the
views of these authors should be uncritically accepted. On
J.-P. Demoule’s ideologically motivated misrepresentation of Indo-European
linguistics and historical linguistics in general, see A. Pereltsvaig (2015), R. Garnier (2015-16),
and especially the systematic refutation of his arguments by Th. Pellard, L. Sagart and G. Jacques (2018).
Another recent attempt (by Angela Marcantonio) to deconstruct the Indo-European
hypothesis is equally unconvincing (see I. Yakubovich [2011], p. 227-228).
But it does say that the PIE hypothesis itself has proven as vulnerable to this
political explaining-away of scholarly theories as is now being tried on the
OIT.
[51] M. Hart (2007), p. 187.
[52] See Sh. Talageri (2016).
[53] V. T. Rajshekar (1994).
[54] E.g. R. Zydenbos (1993), unpacked in K. Elst
(1999), p. 57-78; Sh. Pollock (1993), rebutted by R.
Grünendahl (2012) and by K. Elst (2018), p. 97-105; and M. Witzel (2006),
p. 227.
[55] Savitri Devi Mukherji (1976), p. 273, quoted
in K. Elst (2001), p. 561. She
was née Maximiani Portas, French-Greek, married
to Asit Krishna Mukherji from Kolkata, both Hitler admirers.
[56] H. F. K. Günther (1987), p. 122. But see
also H. F. K. Günther (1934), p. 25: “"Die
Zuwanderungen der Inder nach Nordwestindien haben wahrscheinlich das 15. und
14. Jahrhundert erfüllt; einzelne erste Zuwanderergruppen mögen Nordwestindien
vielleicht schon vorher erreicht haben”.
[57] A. Hitler (1920), reproduced in E. Jäckel and A. Kuhn (1980), p. 195 (my
translation).
[58]
M. Guruswamy (1995).
[59] R. S. P. Beekes (1990), p.
70 (my translation). Cf. also R. S. P. Beekes (2011), p.
46: “Linguistic information offers us no basis for determining the moments of
time at which the Indo-European peoples began to inhabit the areas where they
eventually settled”.
[60] See H. H. Hock (1999a), p. 13-17.
[61] See Sh. Talageri (2000), p.
266-282; Id. (2008), p.
205-236; (2020).
[62] See N. Kazanas (2013), p.
110-163.
[63] See K. Elst (2007b), p. 29-35.
[64] Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1956).
[65] According to mainstream IE
linguistics, this hypothesis can no longer be maintained since PIE *wĺ̥kʷos ‘wolf’ contained a labiovelar
whereas the root ‘to tear’ ended in a pure velar; see M. Mayrhofer (1956-76), vol. III, p. 240, and Id. (1986-2001), vol. III,, p. 571.
[66] This may be no more than a
folk etymology, however. On the problem of the etymology of PIE ‘name’, see M. Mayrhofer
(1986-2001), vol. II, p. 36, and especially S. Neri (2005), p. 212-213, fn. 50.
[67] Although such speculation
on the origin of IE kinship terms in *-ter-
as agent nouns can boast a long history and has not yet died out, it is rarely
taken seriously today; cf. the thorough discussion – not devoid of sarcasm – by
G.-J. Pinault (2009 [2010]),
p. 27-28, who concludes that “tous les rattachements supposés à des racines
verbales sont aussi vains que ridicules” [p.
28] and also provides a detailed rebuttal
of the often attempted derivation of PIE *dhugh2-tér-
‘daughter’ from the root *dheugh-
[p. 30].
[68] N. Kazanas (2002), p.
300. It must be noted, however, that N. Kazanas’ methodology, if
better known, would be considered misconceived because there is no natural
relationship between the degree of archaism of a given language and its
geographic proximity to the original homeland of the language family to which
it belongs (see I. Yakubovich [2011], p. 231-232, in a review of an earlier publication by the same author).
[69] N. Allen (1998), p. 3; about whom, see K.
Elst (2020).
[70] E.g. G. N. Jha (2013), p. 19-38.
[71] Sh. Talageri (2000), p.
269-282; Id. (2008), p.
223-225 and 246-250.
[72] Sh. Talageri (2000), p.
163-231 and 267-270.
[73] As shown by
H. H. Hock (2005), p.
295-303.
[74] Cf. U. Sen (1974).
[75] “Information
from much earlier times can get embedded in ritual and through this channel
continue into later times” (R. Thapar [2006], p. 27).
[76] E. Bryant (2002), p. 348.
[77] Sh. Talageri (2018).
[78] As cited by, e.g., G. D. Bakshi (2019b), p. 172.
[79] Cited by G. D. Bakshi (2019b), p. 200, as “never refuted”.
[80] E.g., for the Nouvelle
Droite, P. Bouts (2019); and in India, T. Joseph (2018), responded to in Sh. Talageri (2019).
[81] A. L. Chavda (2017).
[82] J. Kantanen et al. (2009), p. 404.
[83] B. B. Lal (2010).
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