Nick Allen, more seer than is realized

 

Nick Allen, more seer than is realized

 

(Swarajya, 25 May 2020)

 

Prof. Nick Allen (1939-2020) was a scholar of Anthropology and Indo-European (IE) Studies who taught from 1976 until his retirement in 2001 (and informally, till his death) at Wolfson College, Oxford. He had done the fieldwork for his doctorate in Nepal, and did research about the near-extinct Kafir religion of Nuristan. On the IE heritage, he belonged to the school of Georges Dumézil, perfecting and correcting the latter’s doctrine of Trifunctionality (an application of the Triguna scheme), and elaborating his emphasis on the common descent of the various IE mythologies from a common Proto-Indo-European (PIE) template. I met him a number of times at conferences in Oxford and in Louvain-la-Neuve. He died on 21 March 2020, fittingly on Spring Equinox.

 

 

Comparative mythology

 

In Nick Allen’s work, what first drew my attention was his 1998 paper “The Indo-European prehistory of yoga” (International Journal of Hindu Studies, vol. 2, p. 1-20). It discusses one of the many similarities between Sanskrit and Greek mythology, apparently inherited from a common PIE source. Allen zooms in on one of them, analyses it deeper than anyone had hitherto done, but that far, he only elaborates an instance of a generally accepted paradigm, viz. that, like the IE languages, the IE mythologies descend from a common PIE source. But then he adds a momentously new insight, as we shall see.

 

For an example of this general paradigm, we find many versions of the story of a hero obtaining immunity from wounds except in one spot, and later getting killed through that spot. Thus, Achilles is dipped into a magic potion at birth, but his mother holds him by the heel, so that is where he is later shot; Duryodhana appears naked before his mother, whose eyes have acquired magic power by always being blindfolded, but he wears a loincloth, and there (prudishly: “in his thigh”) he gets mortally wounded; in Germanic mythology, similarly, the sun-god Balder acquires immunity from all plants except the mistletoe, and is shot by an arrow made of mistletoe; and the hero Siegfried bathes in the blood of the dragon he has slain, but a leaf falls on his shoulder, and there he later gets shot.

 

Or to take this example of dragon-slaying: it is widely done by the thunder-god or his son: Indra, Zeus, Siegfried, Beowulf, and others. Even outside the IE world (which is only part of an even older and larger family), the Babylonian god Marduk slays the dragon Tiamat.

 

Another property of thunder-gods, or gods in general, across the Indo-European world is the power to take any shape. On this established understanding of the gods, the poets have the thunder-god, a paragon of masculinity, take on other shapes useful in seducing a desired women. Thus, Indra seduces Ahilya by masking as her lawful husband Gautama; Siegfried (son of the thunder-god Donar/Thor) seduces Brunhild by taking the shape of her husband Günther; Zeus often takes shapes to seduce his many paramours, e.g. he becomes a bull to seduce princess Europa. These are perhaps jocular variations invented by the poets to illustrate this fundamental divine power, but the deeper essence reveals itself later in the philosophical doctrine of Maya, which sees the world as a fictional shape taken by the Supreme Being.  

 

A final example from the Indo-European mythologies is the motif of four world ages of descending quality. The Hindu notion of Kṛtā, Treṭā, Dvāpara and Kali Yuga is not substantially different from the Greek notion of a Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron age, or the Germanic notion of a Spear, Sword, Wind and Wolf Age. Even in non-IE cultures as far as Mexico, variations on this motif appear. So, Hindu civilization is challenged to come out of its cocoon and realize its specific place within the larger genealogical tree of mankind’s ideas and myths. That will then emphasize the differences too, where Hinduism has built on a common heritage but taken it further. Thus, several mythologies attribute to gods the power to take shape, but only Hindu civilization has developed it into the Vedantic doctrine of Maya.   

 

In the case of Homer’s Odyssey, which we are going to discuss, a few examples of similarities with the Sanskrit hymns are these. While Odysseus is away from home for 20 years, his wife Penelope is getting increasingly besieged by suitors; ultimately they number 108, which in Hinduism is the sacred number par excellence. They are put to a test: drawing Odysseus’ bow. But only Odysseus (who has just returned to his home island, in disguise) can draw it, just as only Arjuna can draw the bow during the contest for Draupadi’s hand (and just like Rama when competing for Sita’s hand). Or for something very different, when camping on sun god Helios’ island, Odysseus and his men are sworn to abstain from eating his cows; but his men defy his orders, kill and eat the cows, and get divinely punished for their cow-slaughter by drowning to death.

 

It is my observation that, while some mindless Hindus only get elated by this because “it proves that ancient Hindus conquered the world”, many orthodox Hindus don’t like these international similarities, neither in mythology nor in language. For them, it detracts from the unicity of Sanskritic tradition. They fear that positing any relation at all between things Indian and things non-Indian, whether through an invasion from a foreign Homeland or even through an emigration from an Indian Homeland, is a ruse by “the foreign hand” to belittle Hinduism and deprive it of its greatness and originality. Yet, hold your horses, because acknowledging these similarities turns out to do great honour to the Hindu version.     

 

 

The hard journey to bliss

 

So, as part of this project of discovering ancient common motifs that manifest in both Sanskritic and Greek traditions, Allen discusses the commonalities between Odysseus’ journey from the nymph Calypso’s island Ogygia to the blissful island of Scheria belonging to the god-like Phaeacan tribe, and Arjuna’s journey from the Dvaita Forest to the Himalaya and ultimately to Indra’s heaven. They are no less than 23 in number:

“_{1. Larger journey. For both heroes, as we know, the transit in question is part of a much longer round trip. The Pândavas set off from their royal capital before their exile and will return there. Odysseus sets off from Ithaca before the Trojan War and will likewise return.}

_{“2. Stasis. Before the transit both heroes are, as it were, becalmed. The Pândavas have spent thirteen months in Dvaita Forest and show no signs of moving. Odysseus has spent seven years in Ogygia, and Calypso hopes to keep him there indefinitely.}

_{“3. Depression. The Pândavas are deeply depressed and lament their situation at length. Odysseus spends his days weeping on the shore of Ogygia.}

_{“4. Visitor with instructions. Vyâsa arrives unexpectedly with instructions for the whole party to move on and for Arjuna himself to go to heaven (3.37.20). Hermes arrives unexpectedly with Zeus' instructions for Odysseus to depart (5.77).}

_{“5. Intermediary. Neither visitor speaks directly to the hero. Vyâsa deals only with Yudhisthira (Arjuna's eldest brother), Hermes with Calypso.}

_{“6. Female's farewell. Draupadi and Calypso both make touching good-bye speeches.}

_{“7. Uneventful start. Arjuna goes north to the Himalayas, traveling alone and fast until he is well into the mountains. Odysseus sails alone before a favorable wind for seventeen days until he comes in sight of Scheria.}

_{“8. Unwearied. Arjuna travels night and day without fatigue. Odysseus does not sleep for the seventeen days.}

_{“9. A complex ordeal (we shall come back to its detailed structure later). Arjuna undertakes four months of tapas. Following a change of scene while the sages visit Siva, the story returns to earth for the fight, after which god and hero are reconciled. As for Odysseus, his raft is progressively destroyed by the storm. Then comes a lull. The hero's sufferings resume as he faces the problems of landing, until his final success at the river mouth.}

_{“10. Emaciation. Though most manuscripts ignore it, some refer, reasonably enough, to Arjuna's emaciation following the tapas. The sages worry, but the god reassures them, and they rejoice. During the lull Odysseus rejoices, and his joy is compared to that of a group of sons worried about their father. The father has suffered a long emaciating illness, and when, at last, the gods relent and the father mends, the sons rejoice. This rapprochement, like some others (e.g., 13), is between the Sanskrit main story and a Homeric simile.}

_{“11. Divine enemy and supporter. When Siva comes to earth, he initially treats Arjuna as if he were an enemy. When Poseidon becomes aware of Odysseus, he treats him as his enemy. However, in both cases, the divine enemy is balanced by a divine friend, for during his ordeal Arjuna receives support from Indra disguised as a Brahmana and when Poseidon has departed Odysseus receives help from Athene.}

_{“12. Painful bodily contact. Arjuna's battle with Siva starts with an exchange of arrows and progresses to wrestling. Odysseus is thrown by a wave against a rough rock and clasps hold of it as the wave rushes past. [Note that this motif of wrestling with a god also appears in the Bible, where Jacob wrestles with Elohim, thus becoming Israel, “wrestles with God” (Genesis 32:28).-- KE]}

_{“13. Lump of flesh with injured extremities. Siva reduces Arjuna to what looks like a lump of organic matter, a pinda, with damaged limbs. The wave which throws Odysseus against the rock rebounds from the cliffs and plucks him off again, stripping the skin from his hands. He is like an octopus dragged from its hole with pebbles adhering to its tentacles.}

_{“14. Unconscious. Arjuna falls to the ground unconscious in front of Siva. Odysseus falls to the ground unconscious on landing.}

_{“15. Prayer. Arjuna revives and prays to Siva, begging for forgiveness. Just before he lands, Odysseus prays to the river god, begging for his kindness.}

_{“16. Offering. Arjuna makes a clay image of Siva and offers to it a garland, which the god takes and puts on. Odysseus gives to the river god the veil of the goddess Ino, which he has been using as buoyancy aid. The god returns it to Ino, who duly takes it in her hands.}

_{“17. Restoration. Arjuna is physically restored by the touch of Siva. Odysseus is physically restored by Athene's hypnotherapy.}

_{“18. Cardinal points. After his encounter with Siva, Arjuna meets the four Lokapâlas. During the storm, Odysseus is buffeted by the four wind gods, Euros, Notos, Zephyr, and Boreus, who are linked with east, south, west, and north, respectively.}

_{“19. Three-plus-one structure (a point we shall come back to). The four Lokapâlas include Indra, but the king of the gods stands apart from the other three in various particulars. Among the four winds, Boreus, who is 'king of the winds' (Pindar 4.181), stands apart, for when Athene calms the other three winds she lets Boreus continue blowing until the lull.}

_{“20. City with park. Indra's heaven contains a divine city Amarâvati, inhabited by gods, with blossoming trees and a park. The Scherian city (unnamed) belongs to the Phaeacians, who are near kin to the gods (agkhitheoi gegaasi; 5.35), and it contains Alcinous' park and his ever-fruitful trees.}

_{“21. Wheeled vehicle. Arjuna goes to the city in a chariot belonging to Indra, its king. Odysseus walks to the city behind the mule-cart that Nausicaa borrowed from her royal father.}

_{“22. Throne. Arjuna shares his divine father's throne in his palace. Odysseus is seated next to the king on a throne which has just been vacated by Alcinous' favorite son.}

_{“23. Disappointed nymph. In heaven the Apsaras Urvasi is misled by Indra into thinking that she will enjoy sex with Arjuna, which indeed she wants to do. Nausicaa is misled by Athene into thinking that she will very soon be getting married; and when she meets Odysseus, she hopes it will be to him.}” (Allen 1998: 5-7)

 

This list gives an idea of what kinds of similarities are possible here. But more importantly, in the aggregate they get evidential value: “_{In parts of their careers, Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so numerous and detailed that they must be cognate figures, sharing an origin in the proto-hero of an oral proto-narrative. For present purposes many questions about this proto narrative can be left unanswered. Was it told in prose or in verse or in a mixture of the two? Was it told in the Urheimat or original homeland (whatever the location and date of that logically necessary zone of space-time), or did it diffuse somewhat after the dispersal began? It does not matter. The similarities cannot be explained either by chance, or by Jungian archetypes, or by diffusion of the Homeric epics from Greece to India; and if they are as striking as I think then, one way or another, they must be due to common origin in a proto-narrative.” (Allen 1998:2)}

_.

 

_Diffusion

 

One explanation, explored by the Spanish philologist Fernando Wulff Alonso (The Mahābhārata and Greek Mythology, 2008 in Spanish, translated 2014), is that the similarities are due to recent borrowing, via the post-Alexandrine Indo-Greeks. Many things Indian have been attributed to Greek transmission, e.g. Nyāya logic from Aristotelian logic, the Buddha statue copying the Apollo statue, astrology (or at least horoscopy) borrowed from Babylon and immediately passed on to the Hindus, the art of theatre and even the sari have been claimed as presents from the Greeks. In some cases, this proposed transmission might even correspond to historical facts, but in the case of the epics and background of ancient mythology, this is extremely unlikely.

 

Such an extensive literary borrowing can hardly have taken place without leaving a trace, such as the borrowing of words and names. Even Wulff Alonso cannot pinpoint any unmistakable borrowing. The first Hindu treatises on astrology have the names of the Zodiac in transcribed Greek, they were translated only later, and some technical terms passed from Greek into the normal Sanskrit lexicon, e.g. kentron/kendra; but no such loans can be found in the epic, except for Yavana, “Ionian, Greek” itself, common in general usage. The wars around which both the Mahābhārata and the Homeric epics were woven, took place a thousand years before the Indo-Greeks. Their causes in the respective epics are very different, as is the cast of protagonists. Whereas a number of literary motifs are parallel, the historical core is very different, no imitation there. Finally, even Alexander, by definition earlier than the Indo-Greeks, had already heard that the Hindus too have “an Iliad”, i.e. a war epic.   

 

Far more likely is an explanation ultimately developed by Georges Dumézil and elaborated by Nick Allen: the two have a common source. The narrative got reapplied to historical events in the -2^nd millennium, but was in outline older, as were the myths at the background. They belong to a common PIE heritage. So, instead of a diffusion from historical Greece to historical India, we have a diffusion from the PIE homeland to all the IE branches, including India and Greece.

 

 

Śiva and _Poseidōn

What we have come to know in Caesar’s account of the Gaulish War as the Interpretatio Romana, meaning the understanding of Celtic gods as corresponding to Roman gods, is in fact quite common in polytheistic cultures, attested since the Sumerians, and still visible in the corresponding names of the week days (Dies Jovis = Thursday = Guruvār). Since Sumerian times, people routinely assumed different pantheons (which, after all, represent the same universe) to correspond. In the same vein, the Greeks interpreted Śiva as Dionysos and Indra or Kṛṣṇa as Hēraklēs.

The obvious drawback was that less obvious differences were overlooked. While acceptable in everyday practice, such inaccuracies were not good enough in comparative-mythological research. Therefore: “Sir William Jones in his essay ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’ (1784) already resisted such identifications”, and he would be immune to the tendency of “insisting that such a God of India was the Jupiter of Greece; such, the Apollo; such, the Mercury.” (Stoneman 2019:81) Nonetheless, this purism is a minority position. We will have to make do for now with the correspondences that the ancients posited, explicitly or implicitly, and that has gained citizen’s rights.

We are not aware of any acknowledged correspondence between Śiva and Poseidōn; but if needed, we will posit one ourselves. Both are, among other things, gods of the underworld. The historical differentiation of Greeks and Hindus has had its effect on these two: Śiva is not particularly associated with the sea, as is Poseidōn. This is probably due to geography: Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh, where the Mahābhārata is set, is land-locked, whereas seafaring was a way of life for the Greeks. Yet, both are, among other things, gods of the underworld, and both are depicted with a trident (an object allotted by the Church to that more recent underworlder, Satan). Both put our heroes, Arjuṇa c.q. Odysseus, to the test during their journey.

But there is a difference, as Allen observes: “_{Arjuna's journey is in several senses a yogic undertaking: for a start, the hero is explicitly 'yoked to Indra's yoga'. In ancient Greece one finds hints of yoga-like religiosity, especially in Pythagoreanism, but there is nothing obviously yogic or Pythagorean about Odysseus' journey.”} 

_{Thus, Odysseus is repeatedly thwarted by Poseidōn because he has provoked the god’s anger. Arjuṇa, by contrast, has to contend with Śiva in a yogic challenge, which he meets by ascetic exercises. These include the weeks-long practice of the oldest described Haṭha Yoga contortion, viz. the Vṛkṣāsana or Tree Pose. These are completely absent in the Odyssey. Śiva is the ideal yogi, and is depicted as a typical ascetic, sitting in meditation pose, and with the fruit of meditation: the enlightened Third Eye. Poseidōn is not, though Jungian psychologists still associate him with a second-best option: altered states of consciousness, depth psychology and the subconscious, which is compared to an ocean full of exotic life forms.}

_{Poseidōn does without a Third Eye, but his son Polyphēmos has one: a single eye, for that is how people who have forgotten about yoga, distortively remember this esoteric concept. Once this non-comprehended remnant of a symbol starts leading its own life, story-tellers weave playful anecdotes around it, such as Odysseus poking his single eye out. And that is then the rather mundane reason why father Poseidōn is angry with our hero. So, in India we have a consistent and lofty symbol, Śiva as the ideal yogi, and in Greece only a remnant, a similar character with similar symbols (trident, relation to the Third Eye through his son’s single eye).}

_{Allen comments that: “}in parts of their careers, Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so numerous and detailed that they must be cognate figures, sharing an origin in the proto-hero of an oral proto-narrative. (…) _{So, if both stories descend from a proto-narrative, there are two possibilities. 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 that developed in the Indian branch of the tradition. 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 shall argue for the second scenario, claiming both that the proto-narrative shared certain features with yoga and that the telling of such a story makes it likely that there already existed ritual practices ancestral to yoga} as we know it_. (…) 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.”

 

_{Implications for the Homeland debate}

 

A suspicion arises that needs to be verified further, viz. that after comparison, the myths indicate the anteriority or greater authenticity of the Indian version. Nick Allen has repeatedly shown that in many parallel motifs in the Mahābhārata and in Homer’s epics, the Indian version contains a spiritual element lacking in the European version. _{So, yoga existed in the Indo-European Homeland, but the Greeks lost it.}

The logical explanation, which stares him in the face but which he as an invasionist fails to draw, is that this dimension was lost in the rough and tumble of the trek _{to their historical habitat.} The most precious elements are the ones that get lost most easily, such as in a corpse, where the brain starts disintegrating at once whereas the skeleton can last for centuries. Similarly, the twists in the story were more or less preserved but the subtle yoga teachings in it were gradually forgotten, with only a remnant like the Single Eye reminding of it.

In that case, India was their common Homeland, but only the stay-behind Indians had the comfort of a stable situation where they could preserve the most subtle layer of their stories.

The invasionist explanation would be that the Aryan barbarians did not have this profound layer to their narratives, but reinterpreted these once they interiorized the native Indian tradition of yoga. This is not impossible, but in that case they would not so much have added a new content to their old stories, but adopted the appropriate aboriginal stories that transmitted the yoga doctrines.

This promising first impression needs to be verified in closer research, informed by a knowledge of Indian spirituality. At any rate, we must thank Nick Allen for this extremely important paper.

 

 

_{////////////////////////////////////}

_{Creatively applying Nick Allen’s method}

 

_{By focusing on Comparative Mythology, Prof. Nick Allen from Oxford showed that yoga dates back to the Proto-Indo-European phase and to the language family’s Homeland. Unintentionally, as an inertial believer in the prevalent invasionist paradigm, he thereby added an argument for the case of India as the Homeland. Further, he showed in passing that the idea of yoga is Vedic and in fact even pre-Vedic.}

 

 

_{The problem with Comparative Mythology}

 

The main hurdles for warming Hindu students to Comparative Mythology are these two. Firstly, it receives very meagre attention in Indian university programmes, and unknown makes unloved. This is ostensibly because earlier generations of education policy-makers deemed it unimportant. And indeed, it is in itself not that important (though it can temporarily help in the current debate over the Indo-European Homeland), India has more urgent needs to take care of.

 

But it so happens that Western Orientalists, by contrast, are normally equipped with the basic references because before studying India with its wealth of mythological material, they had already acquainted themselves with Greco-Roman mythology in their secondary schooling, and being mostly people with this kind of interest, also with their own people’s (Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Finnish etc.) mythical lore. So before even purposely studying Comparatism, they can’t help linking Achilles’ non-immune heel with Siegfried’s non-immune shoulder and then, upon discovery of the Indian stories, extending this motif to Duryodhana’s non-immune pudic zone. Due to historical circumstances, Hindu students don’t have this stepping-stone towards studying Comparative Mythology.   

 

The second, more ideological reason is that many Hindus perceive highlighting these links with foreign traditions as threatening to belittle Hindu tradition. They fear it is only a ruse by the Foreign Hand. The reason for this is that it shows how the Vedic and other Hindu traditions are only late versions of an older component of pan-IE or even pre-IE tradition, with sisters or cousins in other branches. As Michael Witzel has tried to show, all myths of the different ethnic sections of mankind can be placed on a genealogical tree, with roots many thousands of years into the past.

 

This posits a very fundamental problem having to do with Hindu self-perception and self-definition. Very briefly, quite a few Hindus adhere to the non-Vedic doctrine that the Vedas are eternal, of supernatural origin, “revealed” to the Rishis (like the eternal Quran with Allah addressing Mohammed, or Jahweh addressing Moses and the Israelite nation in the Ten Commandments), and the source of everything Dharmic. The Vedic hymns themselves, by contrast, are always in the form of man addressing a god, and refer to earlier, pre-Vedic Rishis already from hymn 1.1 onwards. They locate themselves squarely in history, specifically in Bronze-Age North India. The supernatural origin of the Vedas is a post-Vedic invention, probably within the second generation of the Mimansa school of philosophy, and the devotional spirit of the masses easily picked it up. As the Vedic hymns receded into the past all while becoming socially ever more prestigious, they were extolled into the stratosphere and divinized. But this invented tradition about the non-historical nature of the Vedas has become the orthodox view, and many get angry if you dare to question it.

 

Comparative research militates against this rosy belief. It finds that Vedic Sanskrit has sisters in Proto-Slavic, Proto-Germanic etc. (and nieces in Russian, English etc.), meaning that they have a common mother, Proto-Indo-European, by definition older than its daughters, including Vedic Sanskrit. And this proto-language is itself a later evolute of Nostratic or some such ancestral language, which itself was a sister of the Proto-Australian, Proto-Amerind and Proto-Khoisan (Hottentot-Bushman) languages; so no, Sanskrit is not the oldest language nor the mother of all languages. Contrary to what invasionists think, a rejection of the Aryan Invasion Theory does not automatically entail the espousal of an Out-of-India Theory: the vast majority of AIT rejecters don’t know or care about an Out-of-India scenario. They feel freed from any link (“concocted by colonialists”) to outsiders by proving the invasion scenario wrong and don’t feel like reintroducing this link through an emigrationist scenario.

 

And what is true for languages, also counts for mythology: it is much against the liking of Hindu traditionalists that we find the Sanskritic myths to be  cognate with Greek, Germanic or other foreign myths. Yet, this kinship with foreign myths can have its uses in Hinduism’s struggle for survival.

 

 

The Puruṣa Sūkta in comparative perspective

 

For example, enemies of Hinduism such as the Christian missionaries and the neo-Ambedkarites routinely highlight the Puruṣa Sūkta, a famous hymn from the youngest part of the Rg-Veda. They allege it underpins the caste system and is uniquely Hindu, thus stamping Hinduism as uniquely anti-egalitarian and oppressive. Their case is strengthened by the at least 2000-year-old habit of Hindu traditionalists to claim the same Puruṣa Sūkta as a divine justification for caste, setting the superior layered civilization of the Hindus apart from the chaotic societies of the Mlecchas. But the anti- and pro-Hindu discourse both show a very narrow, Indocentric viewpoint, which would make way for a more relaxed interpretation if the horizon is widened.

 

In reality, while the hymn does teach the division of society in four functions, it completely lacks the two defining elements of caste: endogamy and hereditary profession. It could apply to any advanced society. And, to bring Comparative Mythology into the equation, it is not unique at all.

 

The central doctrine of the Puruṣa Sūkta is called corporatism, i.e. “body-like view”, “body metaphor”; both societal corporatism and cosmic corporatism. This means that it likens the little whole of the human body with the larger wholes of society and of the universe. In society, it likens the head, upper body, lower body and legs with the priestly, martial, business and productive functions. In the universe, it makes the heavenly vault metaphorically into a skull, sun and moon into the two eyes, the mountains into the bones, etc. This originates as part of a myth of primeval twin-brothers, Manu and Yemo (> Sanskrit Yama, Germanic Ymir, “the twin”): Manu sacrifices Yemo to create the world and assigns his victim’s body parts to become the parts of the larger whole.

 

We find variations on this myth in various branches of the Indo-European world and far beyond. The giant Ymir is a very literal application of this cosmic corporatism: his body parts become the elements of the universe. In China, the giant Pangu is similarly divided into the constituent parts of the universe, with the added detail that the flees on the giant’s skin become the human beings on the surface of the earth. In Rome, this creation of the world becomes the founding of the city, by Romulus and Remus (< Yemo, with the initial consonant assimilated to “Romulus”), during which Remus dies. In Central America among the Mayas, a jocular variation has two twins make a living as entertainers, with one splitting up the other and then reuniting the pieces and reviving the reconstituted body. The gods whom the twins hate for having murdered their parents, ignorantly ask them to do it to them (splitting up, then reassembling and reviving), so they happily cut the gods in pieces, then leave it at that. That is why ever since, “God is dead”.

 

The doctrine of corporatism outgrew its mythical origin in the explanation of societal inequality by the republican statesman Menenius Agrippa. In -494, to revolting lower-class people, he argued that the classes are like body parts: mutually interdependent. (As part of the reconciliation, he conceded to them the office of popular tribune.) The same simile was used by Socrates’ disciple Xenophon, by Cicero, and by Saint Paul in his Letter to the Corinthians. From the latter, the Catholic Church actualized it in 1892 in the Social Teachings of the Church, as laid down in the Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum. This provided the harmony model of the relation between the classes, the Catholic answer to the upcoming Socialist model of Class Struggle, and became central to the Christian-Democratic movement.

 

In their turn, the Socialists criticized it as a hypocritical way of covering up the natural conflict of interest between the labour class and the capitalist class. This is the same critique formulated by the Indian Left against the Puruṣa Sūkta with its implied harmony model and the coexistence of the different societal classes. This is very useful to know if you need to defend Hinduism with its Puruṣa Sūkta against its enemies with their casteist rhetoric. See? It can serve Hindu interests to use the findings of comparative studies.

 

   

Indo-European yet non-Vedic elements in Hinduism

 

Another problematic insight is that many elements of Hindu thought and religion are identifiably of Indo-European origin yet are not found in the Vedas. Thus, many elements of the Mahabharata are in common with Greek etc. stories, yet are not to be found in the Vedic tradition. This is a large subject; for now we will only point to an example already given: Duryodhana who, like Achilles and Siegfried, narrowly misses his chance to become wholly  immune from injury, with fatal consequences.

 

This seriously reduces the importance of the Vedas even within Hinduism. As a whole, Hinduism unites in itself different traditions: goddess cults, most in evidence in the Northeast, but present in every village; worship of trees, animals and other features of nature, occasionally highlighted by e.g. the Govardhan episode extolling mountain worship; idol worship in temples, most articulate in the Peninsula; asceticism and renunciation, concentrated in the Himalayan foothills and Bihar; and the Vedic tradition of hymn recitation and fire sacrifice, from Haryana and surroundings. This Vedic tradition has exceptional merits, spawning or gathering around it disciplines like grammar, mathematics and astronomy, with India’s main claims to fame in the global history of science.

 

Yet, that does not make the Vedas into the source of all of Hinduism, of which they are only a part. And it does not even make them into the whole of the Indo-European part of Hinduism. Both in linguistics and in mythology, we find elements identifiable as Indo-European and linked with Roman, Slavic or other branches, yet not with the Vedas. This state of affairs has been well explained by Shrikant Talageri, suffice it to say here that his identification of the Vedas with the Paurava tribe leaves the non-Vedic northwestern tribes of the Druhyus and Anavas to emigrate and spawn all the foreign branches of Indo-European; and the southeastern Iksvakus, Yadavas and other Indo-Aryan yet non-Vedic branches to populate other parts of India.

 

Nick Allen writes that later Hindu lore, like the Mahābhārata, “must have already been current in some form (…) as many have realized, the Vedic texts relate only a small part of the culture of the Vedic period. But it is much less recognized how much comparison can do to fill out the picture, and identify the material that bypassed the Vedas.” (Allen: “Why the Telemachy? Vyasa’s answer”, Nouvelle Mythologie Comparée, 2016)

 

Where these motifs turn up in the common IE heritage but not in the Vedas, we can indeed speak of a “bypassing” of the Vedas. This “bypassing” may be resented by Veda fundamentalists who fail to understand the historicity of the Vedas, i.e. their being inscribed in a larger history older than themselves. This ideological distrust of comparative studies transcending India’s boundaries is one of the reasons why anti-AIT scholars rarely bring up the comparative perspective in the Aryan debate, or even resent it when others do so. As the Quran says: to them their religion; to us, ours.

 

 

Woden the batman

_{We will give one more instance of a comparison between Indian and foreign motifs which confirms the central role of India as the homeland, and the antiquity of yoga and Śiva worship. I}n the Germanic branch of Indo-European, split off from the Indian branches more than 5000 years ago (and too far removed to explain any similarities through a late transmission by the Indo-Greeks), we know of a deity called Woden, possibly better known in the Norse form Odin.

 

Woden is one-eyed, just as Polyphemos in the Odyssey, already discussed. Polyphemos was the son of the trident-wielding sea god Poseidon, and shares in his _Śivaite symbolism. Though in the Odyssey, his single eye only appears as a freaky detail, made fun of in the episode where Odysseus pokes this eye out, we think we can trace it to another well-known _Śaiva symbol: the Third Eye. Polyphemos’ eye is located on the forehead between the eyebrows, the place of the Third Eye. Also, when Polyphemos asks for Odysseus’ identity, the latter famously answers: “My name is Nobody.” This may be irony, but now that we get to see the story through _Śivaite lenses, it may be a jocularly reapplied yogic expression: I am Nirguṇa (without properties), I am Emptiness.

 

In the case of Woden, the rough and tumble of a long migration from India has eroded the symbolism of the Third Eye too, but still preserved more. Thus, the Third Eye becomes a single eye, but it remains associated with a higher consciousness: the poets’ story becomes that he has plucked one eye out as a sacrifice in order to obtain wisdom. This is a distortion, but one that still links the single eye to the yogic achievement of wisdom, which in yoga is imagined as the Third Eye.

 

In order to achieve this boon of wisdom, Woden hangs in a tree for 9 days and nights. This number 9 is a sacred number throughout much of Eurasia, in Hinduism associated mostly with Durgā; and the number of the magic square. It reappears in Woden’s symbol, the Valknut (“knot of the fallen”, but unlike the symbol itself, this name is only recent), which consists of 3 intertwined triangles. These three correspond to an Indo-European tripolar scheme, known in Sanskrit as Triguṇa, “the three qualities”: one above (like Sattva, the lightest of the 3 poles, transparency), one below (the dark, inertial Tamas pole), and one to the side (the red dynamic Rajas pole: handed/partisan, i.e. either left or right; creating a circular movement, counterclockwise c.q. clockwise). That way, the element 3 of Śiva’s trident is also present, though the trident is not. Just as the three eyes have become one eye, the three-pronged spear or trident has become a one-pointed spear.

But the really remarkable aspect about this tree-hanging is that this is a form of penance or self-disciplining, something gods rarely do outside the yogic context. This hanging upside down from a tree is one of the earliest Haṭha Yoga postures: the bat pose. (Another early one, practised for a month by Arjuna to please Śiva, happens to be the vṛkṣāsana or tree pose.)

 

 

Inspired

 

Woden is etymologically cognate to Latin vates, “inspired poet” (wherefrom Collis Vaticanus, “poets’ hill”, which became the Vatican), and with the Dutch word woeden, “to rage”: for in the primitive shamanic stage he was associated with stormy excited states of consciousness. As Mircea Eliade and many others have opined, yoga or the achievement of silent “enstasy” is an evolute of the widespread shamanic forms of spirituality, achieving an uproarious “ecstasy”. This history may well be summarized in the evolution from the stormy unpredictable Rudra to the dignified yogi Śiva.

A left-over in Śiva’s imagery of this shamanic stage is the drum he carries: playing the drum induces a trance state and is there called “the shaman’s horse”. For the same reason, he is associated with psychedelia and sometimes depicted as a cilam-smoking renunciate. Later the Buddha would include abstention from all narcotics as one of his five basic rules, but in the distant past, there was a grey area between this yogic sobriety and the earlier shamanic reliance on mind-altering substances. 

 

The name Woden is also related to Sanskrit Vāṭa, “wind”, one of the Vedic atmospheric gods. (The number of Vedic gods is most often put at 33. Their names can vary, but their number is more important: Heaven and Earth are 2; the heavenly gods or Adityas are 12, the Zodiacal number; the atmospheric gods or Rudras are 11, a number impossible to construct as an equal division of the circle, unseizable like the wind; and the earthy gods are 8, the cubic number.) These are collectively called Rudras, and one of them individually is also called Rudra, “the screamer”, “the frenzied one”, incidentally a description of Woden’s companions, the Berserkrs (origin of the English expression “to go beserk”).

 

Woden is depicted as accompanied by a band of young warriors, the Wild Horde, who correspond to Rudra’s unruly martial companions, the Maruts; and in real Indian life, to the wrestler-monks. These Berserkrs got themselves into a trance by using the fly agaric, which made them feel big and perceive the battlefield enemy as inconsequential (a property to which a mushroom-eating scene in Alice in Wonderland alludes). This fly agaric is one of the candidates for the identity of the Vedic Soma brew, after whom Śiva is named Somanātha, “lord of the moon” but also “lord of the brew”.

 

Woden brings the atmospheric imagery along, for he is depicted on an 8-footed flying horse. In comic-strips, doubling or tripling someone’s legs means that he is running, and here too it may indicate fast movement, like the wind. This symbolism has made it through Christianization and the Christian age, in the form of a saint much venerated in the low countries, Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas, in America transformed into Santa Claus). It is a matter of consensus that he is Woden in disguise. He is dressed in red and rides a white horse through the sky, and his black companions (Zwarte Piet, Black Pete) dole out toys through the chimneys. They can also punish you with their rod and take you away in their bag, a symbolism that is often read as referring to the age when the Moors ruled Spain and hunted for slaves farther north, but that arguably goes back much farther, to the Berserkrs/Maruts.

 

Because Rudra is understood as terrifying, he is flattered with an apotropaeic nickname: Śiva, “the good one”. He is surrounded by 4 or more animals, and as such is called Śiva Paśupati, “lord of the animals”. In Woden’s case, limited by the greater animal monotony of Northern Europe, these are 2 wolves and 2 ravens.

He is the lord of the fallen. His symbol is the “knot of the fallen”, and on the battlefield, the souls of the fallen are collected and brought to the Valhalla, the “hall of the fallen”, by his daughters, the Valkyrie maidens or “choosers of the fallen”. Likewise, in the Hindu trinity, Śiva is (after creation/Brahmā and maintenance/Viṣṇu) the pole of dissolution and destruction. On the sunny side, destruction concerns the ties which cease to bind us, but that dimension has become less obvious in his younger incarnation as Woden.

 

So, Woden is not identical to Śiva, but arguably an evolved and roughened form of Śiva. What counts here is the same as what Nick Allen wrote about the kinship between Odysseus and Arjuna: “The similarities are best explained by postulating a common origin within the Indo-European-speaking world.”

 

 

Read more!

Genetics and the Aryan invasion debate

Pragyata, 24 June 2017

After some fifteen years, we may be witnessing a revival in the debate between the Aryan Invasion Theory (OIT) and the Out-of-India Theory (OIT). The AIT camp has been completely stonewalling any attempt at debate from the OIT camp for years now, though in the late 1990s some of its tenors did briefly try to refute the pro-OIT arguments then doing the rounds on the brand-new internet forums. But it went into smug hibernation, having decided that on second thought, the whole OIT was too flaky and too politically tainted (even more than the colonialist-cum-Nazi-tainted AIT) to dirty its hands on. Meanwhile, save for a handful of busy bees, the OIT camp was equally smug, deluding itself that it had disproven the AIT long ago. 

Now however, one Tony Joseph, veteran business journalist, gate-crashes into the Aryan origins debate via an article in The Hindu: “How genetics is settling the Aryan migration debate” (16 June 2017) This in turn is an interpretation of the impact of a scientific paper by Marina Silva et al.: “A genetic chronology for the Indian Subcontinent points to heavily sex-biased dispersals” (Evolutionary Biology BMC, March, 2017; the team was led by Prof. Martin Richards). Joseph claims that the AIT was put in doubt by earlier genetic studies but that this paper and other recent findings have firmly decided the debate in favour of an invasion. (Well, he uses the weasel word “migration”, like most AIT champions who lack the courage of their conviction; but like most “migrationists”, he turns out to mean not a migration of families in wagons, but an entry of all-male bands of warriors who end up fathering plenty of children upon native women; a scenario ordinarily known as an “invasion”.)

The Aryan invasion question is correctly formulated as: “Did IE language speakers, who called themselves Aryans, stream into India some time in 2000-1500 BC?” Joseph’s triumphal answer is: “Genetic research based on an avalanche of new DNA evidence is making scientists around the world converge on an unambiguous answer: yes, they did.”

The strictly genetical parts of his thesis, I will leave to legitimate geneticists to answer. For starters, two excellent rebuttals have come to my notice: by Anil Kumar Suri (https://swarajyamag.com/ideas/genetics-might-be-settling-the-aryan-migration-debate-but-not-how-left-liberals-believe) and by AL Chavda (http://indiafacts.org/propagandizing-aryan-invasion-debate-rebuttal-tony-joseph/#). In the present article, I have mainly tried to put the highly partisan piece by Joseph in the context of the broader Aryan origins debate and of India’s culture wars.

Linguistic or racial invasion?

As a reader of internet media, much lambasted by the mainstream media, I am aware of the genetic studies in recent years that were welcomed as disproving the AIT. I was sceptical: the initial generation of genetic studies had to be taken with a big pinch of salt because it suffered of childhood diseases. More fundamentally, genes, much like archaeological findings, don’t speak. You cannot tell from genes, nor from excavated artefacts, what language the people concerned spoke. I frowned when I saw genetic findings being mustered as proof against the linguistic AIT.

Confusing language movements with demographic movements was a childhood disease of Indo-European linguistics before 1945. Especially after Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), race thinking came to dominate the Humanities. There were warnings from Indo-Europeanists, including the much-maligned Friedrich Max Müller, to maintain the distinction, but the public and many professionals started speaking of “the Aryan race”, not in the vague sense common earlier (race = any group of hereditary belonging, from family to nation and race to humanity, Sanskrit jāti), but in the biological sense. After 1945, this went completely out of fashion in the West, but in India, not encumbered with the guilt about Nazi racism, time has stood still.

That is why Joseph can assert that a genetic study has disproven a linguistic theory. Strictly speaking, that alone should stamp him incompetent for the Aryan debate. Then again, let us face the fact that among Indians, this confusion is also quite common, as it was among Europeans of an earlier generation. In principle this makes sense: you continue both the genes and the language inherited from your parents. But while your genes can’t be traded in for others, people do change language in the course of their lives, not as a rule but as a sufficiently frequent exception. Before the colonial age, which imparted European languages to a number of colonial populations, white Europe and brown India represented about a half each of the Indo-European-speaking population, thus vividly demonstrating that their language had crossed a racial frontier: either brown to white or white to brown. So, genes and language are different thing, partly related and partly not.

For an invasion as dramatic and rich in consequences as the Aryan influx is deemed to be, with a complete switch in language and culture of a highly civilized and densely populated country, it is nonetheless unlikely that it would leave no traces at all. In those days, there were no internet courses that allowed you to learn a language spoken at a great distance; for imparting a language to foreigners, it was necessary to go to their country. There must have been some kind of sizeable migration demonstrable in the archaeological and genetic record. In this respect, archaeology is completely disappointing the AIT party, for it consistently refuses to throw up any trace of this fabled Aryan invasion. But they have their hopes up anew: perhaps the genetic record can fill in the blanks?

Given that pattern of expectation, studies refuting the invasion theory, for whatever they were worth, were very welcome. They dampened the usual arrogance of the AIT camp,-- at least to the extent that people heard of them. The dominant media largely kept the lid on them. If they reported them, it was in measured, or what Joseph calls “nuanced”, tones; nothing like the triumphalism with which he himself claims that genetics has proven the AIT.

Now that at least one scientific paper has been presented as supporting the AIT, the reaction among activist Hindus was initially one of unpleasant surprise, sometimes panic, for many of them had always harboured a secret fear: “What if the scholars do manage to prove the AIT?” But this was followed by a resolve among some of them to revisit the evidence and get serious about the debate again.

Other activist Hindus, by contrast, feel vindicated in their long-standing support for the AIT. Indeed, there exists a casteist-racist fringe among Brahmins who feel flattered by the claim that they descend from foreign conquerors and that they imposed the caste system as a racial Apartheid system. Outsiders including Joseph may not know about this, but any defence of the AIT plays into the hand of the most regressive elements of Hindu society. In the West too, the AIT is not only an unassailable orthodoxy in academe, it also serves as ideological backbone for some remaining racist ideologues.

Apart from those fringes, the healthy reaction among more sober Hindu activists is the resolve that they, or at least those among them who are equipped for it, should return to the Aryan debate and win it once and for all. This promises to be an interesting cup final, for the opposing camp is self-assured and in no mind to give in.  

How does a language invade?

The origin of the Indo-European languages in India, starring Sanskrit, is principally a linguistic scenario, which must have come about on the waves of historical developments, and these may have left traces in the genetic record. Joseph is neither a linguist nor a historian nor even a geneticist, and in my quarter-century in the thick of the Aryan debate, I have never encountered his name. That need not be an obstacle, for by their own effort, people can become self-taught experts in a specialism in which they have no degree, even after a career in a different field, including business journalism. But they still have to satisfy the same criteria as the certified scholars or scientists whose equal they aspire to be. This, then, is what is missing in this article. Joseph doesn’t have a grasp of some basic issues in this debate.

This is not so exceptional. Many geneticists themselves don’t properly understand the Aryan debate, already two centuries old before genetics became a useful instrument in reconstructing migrations in history. The first studies in this field, finding e.g. that some genes were strikingly common between North India and Eastern Europe, contained conclusions that were at best not in conflict with the Aryan invasion scenario but did not prove it at all. In casu, they may at that stage have shown up grounds for either an India-to-Europe movement or a Europe-to-India movement without being able to decide between the two. Yet, they concluded in favour of the AIT because they retrofitted their own newfound data into the theory that, they heard, had already been proven by the linguists.

This is the so-called “circular argument of authority”: first you feed an expert a story, then he himself comes out with that same story, and then you can claim that your own little story has been confirmed by a world expert, thus giving it more authority. For example, when Indian “secularists” invoke the positions of Western India-watchers (about Kashmir, the supposedly secular Constitution, Hindutva etc.), the latter invariably turn out to have first swallowed the biases of their Indian “secularist” sources. So the Indian secularists are really only quoting themselves, though embellished with the academic jargon that Western graduates are so good at.

In the Aryan debate, the same thing has happened: the AIT viewpoint is first fed to experts from other fields, such as genetics, and then these view the data in their own field through the glasses which their partisan friends have put on their noses. The geneticists quoted here, both in their original papers and in the quotes from interviews, clearly have no independent grasp of the Aryan debate.

Thus, the quoted paper by Silva et al. states: “Indo-European has been frequently connected to the so-called ‘Indo-Aryan invasion’ from Central Asia ca. 3,5 ka, and the establishment of the caste system.” There never follows a critical second thought about this received wisdom. Not having studied this debate, they fall back on hearsay from their Orientalist colleagues, who all teach the AIT. What other influence would they have? Those capable of situating and defending the OIT can literally be counted on your fingers; none of them has functioned as an information source for geneticists. Though the geneticists certainly live up to the scientific method when it comes to handling genetic data; when they approach the AIT as possible explanation, they become mere followers of convention. 

Nevertheless, we should not use this circumstance as an escape clause from the debate. For meanwhile, Joseph does report on a development among geneticists that may well prove as important as he asserts.

Invaders

Joseph claims he is part of a bold dislodging of an established orthodoxy: “The dominant narrative in recent years has been that genetics research had thoroughly disproved the Aryan migration theory.”

Oh yes? Where are the schools and institutes that teach the demise of the AIT? The truth is that these studies never made a dent in the pro-AIT orthodoxy. The mainstream media chose to talk about them only minimally, the textbooks never mention them at all. The only people excited about these findings were the OIT adherents, and if you listened in on them, you might have gottenthe impression that the time was ripe for the acceptance of the OIT.

What has suddenly happened, according to Joseph, is this: “Until recently, only data on mtDNA (or matrilineal DNA, transmitted only from mother to daughter) were available and that seemed to suggest there was little external infusion into the Indian gene pool over the last 12,500 years or so. New Y-DNA data has turned that conclusion upside down, with strong evidence of external infusion of genes into the Indian male lineage during the period in question.”

In itself, it is no big deal that Joseph misinterprets the “mt” as “matrilineal” instead of “mitochondrial”, but again it suggests he is unfamiliar with his chosen topic. In journalism you often have to deal with unfamiliar subjects, but relative to the tall claims he makes in this article, he ought to have done his homework better. Nonetheless, he whets our curiosity for his evidence on the Y-chromosome data.

“The reason for the difference in mtDNA and Y-DNA data is obvious in hindsight: there was strong sex bias in Bronze Age migrations. In other words, those who migrated were predominantly male and, therefore, those gene flows do not really show up in the mtDNA data. On the other hand, they do show up in the Y-DNA data: specifically, about 17.5% of Indian male lineage has been found to belong to haplogroup R1a (haplogroups identify a single line of descent), which is today spread across Central Asia, Europe and South Asia. Pontic-Caspian Steppe is seen as the region from where R1a spread both west and east, splitting into different sub-branches along the way.”

Note the AIT-serving claim, appearing out of the blue, that the Pontic-Caspian steppe “is seen as” the region of origin. This expression is a sure give-away of hearsay, of a borrowed opinion. It is not based on the geneticists’ R1a research.

Frankly, I had understood that the jury is still out concerning the origin of R1A, and that it is strikingly in evidence among some “aboriginal” Indian tribes. But not being a geneticist, I will not argue too forcefully about that. At any rate, the paper by Silva et al. does not say that it found earlier studies to have been mistaken about this, and is altogether more nuanced and temperate than the tall and abrasive claims by Joseph.

In that paper, “16 scientists led by Prof. Martin P. Richards of the University of Huddersfield, U.K., concluded: ‘Genetic influx from Central Asia in the Bronze Age was strongly male-driven, consistent with the patriarchal, patrilocal and patrilineal social structure attributed to the inferred pastoralist early Indo-European society. This was part of a much wider process of Indo-European expansion, with an ultimate source in the Pontic-Caspian region, which carried closely related Y-chromosome lineages… across a vast swathe of Eurasia between 5,000 and 3,500 years ago’.”

That is something else altogether. Their evidence concerning an origin in “the Pontic-Caspian region” will have to be studied, of course. But note that the scientists admit that they have not studied the link between their genetic data and the identification of the purported migrants as Indo-European: this is only “attributed” and “inferred”, meaning “borrowed on trust from our Indo-Europeanist informers”, all of them wedded to the AIT. They do not make a professional claim for the AIT, that is only a speculative afterthought, merely for genetically attested movements.

“In an email exchange”, of which doesn’t tell us the leading questions, “Prof. Richards said the prevalence of R1a in India was ‘very powerful evidence for a substantial Bronze Age migration from central Asia that most likely brought Indo-European speakers to India’.”

Their identification as Indo-European is, in his mouth, not more than hearsay, by definition not corroborated by genetic data, nor by the archaeological data, which show up no such dramatic discontinuity, as even AIT partisans admit. “Bronze Age” is also but a vague name for a long and ill-defined period. But we retain that, if rendered correctly, he does insist on a real influx from Central Asia still showing up in 17,5% of the Indian Y-chromosomes.

Central-Asian invaders in Hindu historiography

If this claim proves correct, there are a number of other explanations. An influx from Central Asia is roundly admitted by Indian tradition. Shakas, Kushanas and Hunas came in the historical period, just before and just after the time of Christ. Long before that, since the onset of the Ice Age, many northerners escaped the barren north and migrated south, hence e.g. the many blondes described by the Egyptians among their western neighbours; India too must have been among their destinations. And between those chronological extremes, there must have been more. 

Though their incursion was considered dramatic at the time, with Vikramaditya of Ujjain hailed by Indians as the defeater of the Shaka invaders, it remained inconsequential culturally, as these invaders dissolved in the Indian population and assimilated the language and religion of their hosts. Only their genes remained, till recently in hiding, but now accessible. Today they must form part of those 17.5%.

A second consideration is that an inflow does not prevent a movement in the other direction. If the Silva paper is sensational, it might be because of passages like this one, about the Bronze Age: “Gene flow at this time was clearly bi-directional, as seen in the expansion west of lineages M5a2a4, U2c1b + 146 and M3a1b + 13105. This is reflected in the genome-wide ADMIXTURE analysis (…), where the autochthonous South Asian component (…) appears at low levels in Iran.”

For readers of The Hindu (please note, foreigners, that this name is a historical relic, and that since decades it is a left-wing anti-Hindu paper), it may come as a surprise that a paper claimed to prove the AIT actually documents a bit of OIT. Others will be less surprised by this confirmation of the emigrations from India, in line with extant archaeological findings and with the general drift of earlier genetic studies,-- which Joseph’s article was meant to counter.

Another possibility, tailor-made for the Hindu reader, is a compromise. Come to think of it, it is surprising that none of those synthesis-enamoured Gandhians raised this possibility before: a scenario that approximately satisfies both the AIT and the OIT camps. Here, there was an influx from Central Asia, which with the help of linguistics we could pinpoint to ca. 4000 BC, the farthest estimate of the fragmentation of Proto-Indo-European. Only, this influx did not bring Indo-Aryan, the exclusively Indian branch of Indo-European (distinct from other branches such as Greek, Celtic, Slavic etc., that “remained” in the west), as the AIT holds, but all of the branches, still united in their foremother, Proto-Indo-European.

As Shrikant Talageri has shown, Hindu tradition envisages all of “Aryan” history as the life and times of the descendents of Manu, the founder-king who landed with his Flood-survival ship in Manali and set up his court in Ayodhya. A descendent of his was Yayati, whose sons Druhyu and Anu must have been the ancestors of the non-Indian branches of Indo-European, destined to leave India in the pre-Vedic period c.q. in the middle Vedic period. Greek ambassadors after Alexander reported a Hindu tradition that Manu had come into India from the west. Like their estimate that Manu was crowned in precisely -6776, this may be a garbled reconstruction of hazy traditions; but for what it is worth, it might correspond to the alleged genetic findings of an early influx. After all, though India may be the cradle of all branches of Indo-European (exactly the OIT), nothing has been claimed about where the Proto-Indo-Europeans originate. It could be outside India, all while leaving the OIT untouched.

As even Silva et al. acknowledge, “genetic data have provided no clear evidence for the ‘Indo-Aryan invasions’ so far, and their very existence is challenged by many archaeologists.” Tony Joseph has a long way to go before the AIT can be accepted as proven.

Globalization

In spite of the foregoing, let us appreciate why got Joseph so enthused about recent developments in genetics: “The robust conclusions of Professor Richards and his team rest on their own substantive research as well as a vast trove of new data and findings that have become available in recent years, through the work of genetic scientists around the world.”

That is not true for the identification as Indo-European, which would at best be plausible, but otherwise I acknowledge Richards must be a pioneering scientist in a fast-progressing research field. The argument of authority implied in “around the world” is also exaggerated, for the really pioneering genetic research is confined to a few countries. China has recently joined the front group, and India is catching up, but if you see exotic names among the authors, they are mostly at American or European universities; witness all the Portuguese names under the quoted research paper produced in the UK. But this much is true: whereas the Indo-European origins question holds a certain fascination for people of European descent, the new research yields very similar new insights in the demographic history of other cultures.   

Joseph quotes David Reich, geneticist and professor, Harvard Medical School: “What’s happened very rapidly, dramatically, and powerfully in the last few years has been the explosion of genome-wide studies of human history based on modern and ancient DNA, and that’s been enabled by the technology of genomics and the technology of ancient DNA. Basically, it’s a gold rush right now; it’s a new technology and that technology is being applied to everything we can apply it to, and there are many low-hanging fruits, many gold nuggets strewn on the ground that are being picked up very rapidly.”

Thus: “(…) many studies mentioned in this piece are global in scale, both in terms of the questions they address and in terms of the sampling and research methodology. For example, the Poznik study [David Poznik, cfr. infra] that arrived at 4,000-4,500 years ago as the dating for the splintering of the R1a Z93 lineage, looked at major Y-DNA expansions not just in India, but in four other continental populations. In the Americas, the study proved the expansion of haplogrop Q1a-M3 around 15,000 years ago, which fits in with the generally accepted time for the initial colonisation of the continent. So the pieces that are falling in place are not merely in India, but all across the globe. The more the global migration picture gets filled in, the more difficult it will be to overturn the consensus that is forming on how the world got populated.”

About that, we can only rejoice and join Joseph in his enthusiasm. And we may at once point out that a vaguely similar though more gradual development is taking place in the highly relevant field of linguistics, with the increasing sérieux of the once-flaky subdiscipline of megacomparatism. So far, Indo-European studies including the Aryan origins debate focused on what happened after Proto-Indo-European, once the fragmentation had set in. But now we can look beyond that, and explain the long-existing suspicions of a kinship with Semitic, or the newly-realized kinship with Dravidian. This too is a heady evolution, though encumbered by the 19^th-century impression of bookishness when genetics has all the glitter of futuristic science.

R1a

More controversial is another big name he invokes: “Peter Underhill, scientist at the Department of Genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, is one of those at the centre of the action. Three years ago, a team of 32 scientists he led published a massive study mapping the distribution and linkages of R1a. It used a panel of 16,244 male subjects from 126 populations across Eurasia. Dr. Underhill’s research found that R1a had two sub-haplogroups, one found primarily in Europe and the other confined to Central and South Asia. Ninety-six per cent of the R1a samples in Europe belonged to sub-haplogroup Z282, while 98.4% of the Central and South Asian R1a lineages belonged to sub-haplogroup Z93. The two groups diverged from each other only about 5,800 years ago.”

Note that 5,800 years ago is about the time estimated by legitimate experts in linguistics for the initial fragmentation of Proto-Indo-European. It could for instance be the time when an Indo-European-speaking population left its Indian homeland.

“Dr. Underhill’s research showed that within the Z93 that is predominant in India, there is a further splintering into multiple branches. The paper found this ‘star-like branching’ indicative of rapid growth and dispersal. So if you want to know the approximate period when Indo-European language speakers came and rapidly spread across India, you need to discover the date when Z93 splintered into its own various subgroups or lineages.”

From these data about Z93, it does not follow that “Indo-European language speakers came” to India. Here you see a vivid illustration of how the interpretative framework in terms of an Aryan invasion is merely borrowed on trust from people whose bias the geneticists don’t even realize.

Nonetheless, Joseph takes this as a sufficiently strong launching-pad for an unwarranted jump: “This clear picture of the distribution of R1a has finally put paid to an earlier hypothesis that this haplogroup perhaps originated in India and then spread outwards.”

This is not the expert speaking. Note indeed that in spite of Joseph wanting Dr. Underhill to say that, and no doubt trying to make him say it, the professor is not quoted as saying it. All that the quoted text says, is that these genes have a common origin, and that they split up when spread over sizable distances. The OIT has no quarrel with that. Then, he adds the AIT as possibly explaining his findings, but that part is not his expertise as a geneticist speaking. His findings are just as compatible with the OIT, but that is just not part of his mental horizon.

According to Joseph: “This hypothesis was based on the erroneous assumption that R1a lineages in India had huge diversity compared to other regions, which could be indicative of its origin here. As Prof. Richards puts it, ‘the idea that R1a is very diverse in India, which was largely based on fuzzy microsatellite data, has been laid to rest’ thanks to the arrival of large numbers of genomic Y-chromosome data.”

But even with the data now claimed, R1a is still more diverse in India than in Central Asia and Europe. If the former is therefore incapable of being the homeland, so are the latter. Nonetheless, our AIT activist goes full steam ahead:

“Now that we know that there WAS indeed a significant inflow of genes from Central Asia into India in the Bronze Age, can we get a better fix on the timing, especially the splintering of Z93 into its own sub-lineages? Yes, we can; the research paper that answers this question was published just last year, in April 2016, titled: ‘Punctuated bursts in human male demography inferred from 1,244 worldwide Y-chromosome sequences.’ This paper, which looked at major expansions of Y-DNA haplogroups within five continental populations, was lead-authored by David Poznik of the Stanford University, with Dr. Underhill as one of the 42 co-authors. The study found ‘the most striking expansions within Z93 occurring approximately 4,000 to 4,500 years ago’.”

Here we see no link with an immigration, perfectly unnecessary for a genetic differentiation. And if there was one, it apparently took place 4,500 years ago, still a thousand years before the established Aryan invasion scenario.

But at least we note with satisfaction that Joseph has belatedly accepted that nothing points to the once-orthodox scenario of the Aryan plunderers ruining the Harappan civilization: “This is remarkable, because roughly 4,000 years ago is when the Indus Valley civilization began falling apart. (There is no evidence so far, archaeologically or otherwise, to suggest that one caused the other; it is quite possible that the two events happened to coincide.)”

Then, Joseph makes another jump: “The avalanche of new data has been so overwhelming that many scientists who were either sceptical or neutral about significant Bronze Age migrations into India have changed their opinions. Dr. Underhill himself is one of them.”

If true, such conversion among experts would count as prized secondary evidence. Thus, leading archaeology professor BB Lal’s and Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas’ conversion from AIT to OIT have been functioning as serious arguments of authority, especially in the absence of such conversions in the opposite direction. But let us look more closely:

“In a 2010 paper, for example, he had written that there was evidence ‘against substantial patrilineal gene flow from East Europe to Asia, including to India’ in the last five or six millennia. Today, Dr. Underhill says there is no comparison between the kind of data available in 2010 and now. ‘Then, it was like looking into a darkened room from the outside through a keyhole with a little torch in hand; you could see some corners but not all, and not the whole picture. With whole genome sequencing, we can now see nearly the entire room, in clearer light.’”

Impressive progress, yet that does not make Underhill find genes moving into India. Though certainly trying hard, Joseph has not managed to extract a statement from Underhill that his earlier research was wrong.

Joseph is very good at making the most of what comes under his hand, and of shading over nuanced expert findings into his own blatantly partisan narrative. However, our interest is not in finding fault with Joseph; indeed we thank him for drawing our attention to this new scientific development. Our interest is in what genetics really has to say on the Aryan origins question.

North-South divide

Joseph claims another convert from OIT to AIT: “David Reich, geneticist and professor in the Department of Genetics at the Harvard Medical School, is another one, even though he was very cautious in his older papers. The best example is a study lead-authored by Reich in 2009, titled ‘Reconstructing Indian Population History’ and published in Nature. This study used the theoretical construct of ‘Ancestral North Indians’ (ANI) and ‘Ancestral South Indians’ (ASI) to discover the genetic substructure of the Indian population. The study proved that ANI are ‘genetically close to Middle Easterners, Central Asians, and Europeans’, while the ASI were unique to India. The study also proved that most groups in India today can be approximated as a mixture of these two populations, (…)”

Westerners will only be mildly excited by this, but in India, the racial interpretation of the linguistic division between Indo-Aryans and Dravidians is so vividly kept alive by Dravidianists, Ambedkarites and their missionary shepherds, that others there will heave a sigh of relief at news of the “admixture” between the two populations.

In the same vein, Indian patriots rejoiced that the study found “the ANI ancestry higher in traditionally upper caste and Indo-European speakers”.

Well of course: speakers of Indo-Aryans live predominantly in the north, so they have a higher incidence of northern genes. As for the higher castes, it doesn’t take any invasion scenario to understand that they must be more from the north, as per the written Hindu tradition. Especially in Tamil Nadu, hotbed of Dravidianism, this is striking, with Bania castes originating in Rajasthan and Gujarat, and Brahmins imported from the north by kings who wanted to endow their dynasties with Vedic prestige. So obviously, in Dravidian areas, upper castes will stand out by their more northern genes. But only gradually, for even here there is an “admixture”.

Hence this comment quoted from a prominent Indian researcher involved in this study, geneticist Lalji Singh: “But at some point in time, the ancient north and the ancient south mixed, giving birth to a different set of population. (…) This paper rewrites history (…) there is no north-south divide”! A newspaper headline made it even more sensational: “Aryan-Dravidian divide a myth: Study”.

(The linguistic state of the art on this is that Dravidian is related to Elamite in Southwestern Iran, a reasonable theory insufficiently verified but largely based on trust in the very few scholars who have investigated these data. An anti-India bias predictably deduces from this that Dravidian must have come from Elam, not the other way around. And then, after having entered India and developed in Gujarat, Dravidian expanded to the south, where a more primitive native population adopted the language. To the dismay of Dravidian chauvinists and separatists, this means that Dravidian is not native to South India, but that it is native to India. The political unit they ought to be defending is not “Dravidasthan”, but India. Moreover, Dravidian is related to Indo-European on a par with Uralic, Semitic et al., descending from a common grandmother-language some 15,000 years ago, “Nostratic”, as distinct from more distant languages like Munda, Tibetan, Andamanese etc.)

ANI and populations to the west

Joseph’s misunderstanding of the whole Aryan issue is again clear from this claim: “By itself, the study didn’t disprove the arrival of Indo-European language speakers; if anything, it suggested the opposite, by pointing to the genetic linkage of ANI to Central Asians.”

That North-Indians and Central-Asians are related, as the genetic linkage between them implies, is true in any serious scenario, certainly also in the OIT. Being closer to Central Asia, it is perfectly normal for the ANI to have more in common with it than the ASI. The only narrative that throws up a problem here is not the OIT, with speakers of Indo-Europeans streaming out of India into Central Asia and thence into Europe, but a purely reactive alternative to the AIT, viz. the non-migration scenario. When Europeans first thought up the AIT around 1820 (after having espoused the OIT for half a century) and then took it to India, many Indians simply denied that anyone had come from anywhere, and pointed out correctly that nothing amounting to what is known as the Aryan invasion (with the importation of Sanskrit from outside) is described in scripture.

No, but the Rg-Veda and the Puranas do describe a hoary emigration from India, viz. of the Druhyu and Anu tribes. Therefore, knowledgeable Indians have adopted the OIT, which necessitates commonalities between India, Central Asia and Europe as much as the AIT does.

But I have no doubt that Joseph’s dialogue partners in Aryan origins discussions included many who saw no need to explain the linguistic commonalities between Indo-Aryan and the languages further west, and simply settled for the static and unimaginative non-migration narrative. Those people reject the very concept of an Indo-European language: to them, Greek, Germanic and other European languages are not related to Sanskrit, and so there is no need for any migration either way to explain how they came to be in their present habitat. If at all you confront them with similarities, they make bold that these are just loanwords.  

This is part of a larger problem, that explains why the OIT has made no headway at all in terms of international acceptance. Most Indians don’t have their heart in the OIT, a non-Indian term launched by the American Hare Krishna follower Dr. Edwin Bryant ca. 1996. In describing the Aryan debate, he took ample account of a vocal Indian vanguard that understands the basics of the Indo-European question, viz. that one language straddles the Hindu Kush, and that therefore half its speakers must have crossed this border either in eastern or in western direction (AIT c.q. OIT). But far more weighty and numerous in India are those who merely want to be left alone, who don’t want to be bothered with the AIT and all its concomitant politics (colonialist, Nazi, Dravidianist, Dalit). They simply have no specific theory about the non-Indian Indo-Europeans: these are simply not within their mental horizon, which stops at the Khyber Pass. The question whether they migrated, and whether they really speak a cognate language, is simply of no interest to these AIT-rejecting laymen.

Western participants in the debate may have debated some OIT sophisticates from a distance, but they have also interacted with Indian-born colleagues from, say, the Medical or Engineering Department of their university, who are bright but have never studied the Aryan question. These far more representative Indians often have strong opinions about the “breaking India” implications of an Aryan invasion but not the necessary knowledge to argue this point, often even rejecting the whole notion of an Indo-European family. They are “under-informed but over-opinionated”. Meeting such people makes Western Indo-Europeanists sceptical of any Indian contribution to this debate, and by extension of any pro-OIT contribution even by Western colleagues. Both Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas (Athens) and myself have many anecdotes up our sleeves of how any Homeland debate in which the OIT figures, is being stonewalled by AIT-leaning linguists.

Genetics and linguistics

Now, Tony Joseph is going to teach us reason: “However, this theoretical structure was stretched beyond reason and was used to argue that these two groups came to India tens of thousands of years ago, long before the migration of Indo-European language speakers that is supposed to have happened only about 4,000 to 3,500 years ago.”

For that, no “stretch beyond reason” is necessary, for the two phenomena, the genetic division in ANI and ASI and the linguistic division in Indo-European, Dravidian and others, are unrelated. Even if the ANI people came from outside, any “reasonable” scenario has them mingle with natives and take in lots of their genetic heritage, rather than commit genocide on them and replace them wholesale with a different genetic type. Then again, this genocide does exist, viz. as part of the Dravidianist mythology, especially in its missionary version, because of overcompensation for the real genocide of natives in the Americas that accompanied their Christianization.

If I have understood anything of these genetic discussions, it is that chronological estimations of genetic events are possible (much as in historical linguistics, though this “glottochronology” is in fact highly controversial). Apparently, the split of the Indian people in a northern ANI and a southern ASI dates a lot deeper into the past than the fragmentation of Indo-European and than the “Bronze Age migration” discussed in Silva et al.’s paper, and need not even result from a migration, as Joseph had assumed. And if there was a migration at all, it may not have been the Aryan invasion, or may have nothing to do (causally nor chronologically) with the division of Indo-European.

The concepts of ANI and ASI were developed by geneticists untrained in linguistics and never visibly bothering about a coordination between their own data and those of historical linguistics. So, it is not so scandalous if the two sets of data are greatly at variance.

Conspiracy by association

In some reactions, Tony Joseph has been attacked on account of the company he keeps. Look whom he quotes: “In his column for Discover magazine, geneticist Razib Khan said this about the media coverage of the study: ‘But in the quotes in the media the other authors (other than Reich that is -- TJ) seem to be leading you to totally different conclusions from this. Instead of leaning toward ANI being proto-Indo-European, they deny that it is.”

Contentswise, we have a repeat of Joseph’s just-discussed mistakes: (1) he identifies the genesis of ANI with an immigration, as if such genetic development could not originate in a vast area like the subcontinent; and (2) he identifies this unsubstantiated migration with the supposed Indo-European migration. But the interesting thing here is not what Khan says, but who he is.

It is rumoured, in some reactions below Joseph’s article as well as elsewhere, that Khan is a right-winger, has published on the “race-realist” website Vdare (after Virginia Dare, the first white person born on American soil), and has been sacked as a columnist by the New York Times. This is “guilt by association”: Joseph’s position is blackened by association with the company he keeps, and Khan’s position on Indian genetics is blackened by association with his writing outlets. This type of gossip is very popular among illiterates who lack the habit of serious debate on issues, and of seasoned debaters who realize that in a given case, no argument ad rem will succeed, and who therefore resort to an argument ad hominem.

A quotation that deserves repetition in almost every debate on the Aryan question, and many other debates besides, is: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” It is often flatteringly ascribed to Eleanore Roosevelt but is traceable farther back, at least to Theology professor Samuel Miller in 1827. It contains part of the reason why AIT skepticism has made no headway.

A few of us have tried to present the arguments for the OIT, but our discourse was drowned out by the shouting and cackling of numerous vocal Hindus against famous upholders of the AIT: “The British concocted the AIT as part of their divide-and-rule policy!”, “William Jones was a colonial agent!”, “Friedrich Max Müller was a missionary agent!”, “Michael Witzel is a professor of Harvard, started as a theology school!” This has greatly put off serious scholars who didn’t know better than the AIT and would have given a fair hearing to the OIT if it had not been associated with this miserable conspiracy discourse (as well as with Hindu Nationalism).

Not that their camp is much better. There too we have “guilt by association” thinking. AIT pamphlets often contain phrases like: “The OIT is defended by people like PN Oak, NS Rajaram, Koenraad Elst…” (This, incidentally, is untrue: the late PN Oak deduced everything everywhere from India or Hinduism, with no special role for Indo-European, and NS Rajaram rejected the AIT but equally pooh-poohed the OIT and any other concern about any non-Indians, including the claim that they came from India.) This is mere juxtaposition, but in the real world it functions as association and achieves the target of putting all the people mentioned outside of polite society.  

All these associators on the anti-AIT side can shout all they want, because they only speak to their own side, never interact with the AIT camp and never suffer any (healthily correcting) consequences. The consequences are for us, who live in the real world and interact with real opponents. I have been disinvited at several conferences (and no doubt silently excluded from speaking there at many more) because, though my abstract was judged interesting enough, someone up there was briefed about my views and associations, and intervened to my detriment.

Another aspect of the backbiting against Razib Khan concerns its relevance. Those who cite the incriminating opinions about him, should tell us what difference such contemporary facts make to the truth or otherwise of the AIT, which pertains to events that took place thousands of years ago. It is irrelevant chronologically. At least if your goal is not to win an ongoing debate with Joseph by making him look bad, but to disprove the AIT. I guess small minds don’t aim that high.

It is also irrelevant logically. The truth of a proposition is independent of its formulator’s record or character. Surely you can find writing-pads from Adolf Hitler’s childhood in which the devil himself writes: “1 + 1 = 2”. Does this suddenly become untrue just because an unsavoury character agreed with it?

As an extra, I would like to learn whether the purported boycot of this alleged brown racist is a policy that our AIT disbelievers advocate. Attempts to shut down debate and impose left-wing control are as much a problem in Berkeley as in Jawaharlal Nehru University. The people who call this Khan a “right-winger” are the same who attack Hindus with the same allegation. Hinduism is deemed a racist religion, with Brahmin Aryan invaders oppressing the native Dalits and Dravidians. American liberals, in this case strange bedfellows with the Evangelists, consider the struggle against caste and untouchability and against its justifying ideology, Hinduism, as a noble and necessary struggle, a new frontline now that slavery has been abolished elsewhere.

So, this Razib Khan may have unsavoury opinions or associations, and he may be downright wrong about the AIT, but he is entitled to having his comments on a genetics debate discussed in an Indian left-wing paper. To that extent, he deserves our support.

 Symmetrical migration

Let us return to genetics and quote Joseph again: “Let’s (…) ask what Reich says now, when so much new data have become available? In an interview with Edge in February last year, while talking about the thesis that Indo-European languages originated in the Steppes and then spread to both Europe and South Asia, he said: “The genetics is tending to support the Steppe hypothesis because in the last year, we have identified a very strong pattern that this ancient North Eurasian ancestry that you see in Europe today, we now know when it arrived in Europe. It arrived 4500 years ago from the East from the Steppe...”

Yes, there was an Aryan invasion, but it was not the one usually meant. In Central Europe in the -3^rd millennium, the material culture changed drastically. In some areas, the population was entirely replaced by newcomers, in others too the percentage of newcomers was sizeable. By culture and physical type (now mapped and understood more precisely thanks to genetics), they were the same people later identified as Celts, Germans, Romans. There, in Europe, we really have an invasion of Aryans moving in from the east. And now that we know what a real Aryan invasion looks like, we note that it is completely missing in India.

Speaking of which: “About India, he said: ‘In India, you can see, for example, that there is this profound population mixture event that happens between 2000 to 4000 years ago. It corresponds to the time of the composition of the Rigveda, the oldest Hindu religious text, one of the oldest pieces of literature in the world, which describes a mixed society...’ In essence, according to Reich, in broadly the same time frame, we see Indo-European language speakers spreading out both to Europe and to South Asia, causing major population upheavals.”

Note that Reich doesn’t describe an invasion, at least not in the passage Joseph chooses to quote here. He describes an admixture of different populations, something that can easily be imagined as internal to a large territory such as India, not needing foreign immigrations. Instead, it could have to do with the migrations triggered by the dessiccation of the Saraswati basin, for instance. It is only Joseph himself who interprets Reich’s statement as “in essence” a matter of Aryan invasions.

Also note that Joseph has “the Indo-European language speakers” spread from the steppes to “both Europe and South Asia”. While this is not impossible, it rarely happens. Migrations are mostly very asymmetrical because the reasons why humans migrate are rarely symmetrical.

Thus, the Bantu languages were carried forward by the Neolithic innovation, agriculture, and ended up being dominant in half of Africa, all starting from somewhere in sub-Saharan West-Africa. Why did they only expand in a southeastern direction, and not north? Because you cannot practise agriculture in the desert.

Similarly, Austronesian has spread south from Southeast China, not north, because to their north was a numerous and well-ordered society that would assimilate any immigrants; southwards, they could find a niche in Malaysia and Indonesia, and virgin territory in islands from Madagascar to New Zealand and Hawaii. For the same reason, Russian could expand eastwards all the way to Alaska, but not westwards. In the case of Arabic, no such reason can immediately be identified (Iran could just as well have been arabicized as Egypt), yet fact remains: Arabic spread from Arabia westwards all the way to Morocco, and not eastwards at all.

Also, the steppe does not support large populations, whereas India was a demographic heavyweight, then already. It is not impossible for (all-male) bands of steppe warriors to conquer centres of civilization, but leaving a lasting imprint is rarer. The Huns invaded China, India and Europe and did not leave their language anywhere; in fact, we are not even sure which it was (Attila was a Gothic nickname; after much research, the dominant estimate now is that they spoke Chuvash, a para-Turkic language marginally surviving in Russia). The Mongols invaded Central and Western Asia, Eastern Europe, and China, yet except for marginal Kalmukkia, they did not leave their language anywhere. And such invaders should have completely changed the linguistic and cultural landscape of mighty India?

Parting shot

The final paragraph is merely an exercise in slamming open doors. Or so it seems, for several in-your-face assertions are built into this innocuous piece of journalistic emptiness:

“What is abundantly clear is that we are a multi-source civilization, not a single-source one, drawing its cultural impulses, its tradition and practices from a variety of lineages and migration histories.”

This is a phrase absolutely no one will disagree with; though it conceals the more pressing question how weighty the different contributions are, and the false implication that these are all equal. Yet, it is here for a reason, part of The Hindu’s editorial line: it is meant as a punch in the face of the Hindu Nationalists, who stress unity. Not racial unity, as is here falsely intimated, but still some kind of pan-Indian sense of national unity, translating today in e.g. the conviction that Kashmir belongs with India. Therefore, among secularists, it is always welcomed if an anti-unity statement of any kind is smuggled in.

“The Out of Africa immigrants, the pioneering, fearless explorers who discovered this land originally and settled in it and whose lineages still form the bedrock of our population”.

That “bedrock of the population” phrase may not be so innocent, as it is probably meant to exclude the Brahmins and thus forms part of the dominant anti-Brahmin discourse. But it is not said in so many words, so let that pass. Anyway, Joseph already refrains from saying that Indian indigenousness is confined to the tribals (some 8%), whom the missionaries ca. 1930 have started flattering as Adivasis, a pseudo-traditional Sanskrit coinage meaning “aboriginals”, like the Amerindians in America.

Nevertheless, against the “Aryan invaders”, he still tries to affirm their superiority by calling their entry from Africa more than 50,000 years ago “fearless”. Exchanging lion territory for tiger territory must indeed be courageous and certainly “pioneering”, but peopling an empty land is not braver than invading a human habitat. The Aryan invaders may never have existed, but if you do postulate them, as Joseph does, you have to at least credit them with the bravery required for defeating a vastly more numerous native population. If you care to look at the details, his bias is showing.

“[T]hose who arrived later with a package of farming techniques and built the Indus Valley civilization whose cultural ideas and practices perhaps enrich much of our traditions today”.

Here we get the bulwark part of the secularist view of ancient India: the Harappan population spoke a different language than the Northwest-Indian population today, mostly taken to be Dravidian; and their civilizational innovations starting with agriculture had been borrowed from abroad, viz. from West Asia. This latter point is important to stress, as Hindu Nationalists might get the pretentious idea that some inventions had been done in India and even by Indians; Allah forbid!

But at least Joseph recognizes that the Harappans, deemed non-Aryans, “arrived” from somewhere else. We are talking of what was then the largest demographic concentration on earth, so it is hard to imagine how they all came from the surrounding mountains and deserts. Nevertheless, the core of truth here is that Dravidian, deemed to have been the language of Harappa, arrived from somewhere. The aboriginality of Dravidian, which Dravidian chauvinists take for granted as a logical counterpoint to Aryan foreignness, deserves questioning.

“[T]hose who arrived from East Asia, probably bringing with them the practice of rice cultivation and all that goes with it”.

The Mundas, tribals whose language must have been spoken all around the Bay of Bengal, speak an Austro-Asiatic language related to Vietnamese. However, the jury is still out on whether their homeland (as well as the homeland of rice cultivation) was in India or in Southeast Asia.

“[T]hose who came later with a language called Sanskrit and its associated beliefs and practices and reshaped our society in fundamental ways”.

This phrase, affirming the foreign origin of Sanskrit through the Aryan Invasion Theory, is the raison d’être for this whole paragraph. Tony Joseph may not be a geneticist, nor a historian or linguist, but having been editor of the Business Standard, he is a first-class journalist. The occupational hazard of this vocation is that you have to talk about any topic that may come under your hands, often very much outside your area of expertise; such is the case in this article about the genetic evidence for an Aryan invasion. But a strength of this professional group is their mastery of simple rhetorical devices. Case in point: writing a conciliatory final paragraph full of empty phrases amounting to an all-together-now chumminess, and yet, inside it, burying a dagger aimed at your usual target: “Aryans”, Brahmins, Hindus.

“[A]nd those who came even later for trade or for conquest and chose to stay, all have mingled and contributed to this civilization we call Indian.”

Though not the topic of the article, this phrase is nevertheless highly welcome to drive home the usual concern of any secularist paper: affirming that Muslims and Christians are equally entitled to whatever India has to offer. Note however that in crucial respects, unlike earlier immigrants such as Shakas and Hunas, who have dissolved their identities in the ambient population and culture, Muslims and Christians have not “mingled”.

“We are all migrants.”

What an enlightened phrase, meant to reassure his secularist friends of his own virtue and to exercise moral pressure on status-conscious Hindus that they should shed this backward attachment to the nationalism-infested Indian homeland theory. Yet, do you think that all the anti-Hindu and anti-Brahmin activists who now go around triumphantly quoting Joseph’s article, intend to say: “We too, we are but migrants, as much as the invading Aryans”?

Conclusion

By now, Tony Joseph may wish he had never written this piece. He presents a blatantly partisan interpretation of a recent research paper in a field he visibly doesn’t master. At least he could have had it proofread by a legitimate geneticist. His bias pertains to the Aryan origins question, and that too he hasn’t thought through.

Then again, I understand that he felt the normal journalistic urge to let the world know about a new development that he considered very important. For a definitive account, you do not go to journalists, their role is not that of experts, merely of messengers: “Something is happening over there; now go see for yourself what is really is.” At the present state of the art in genetics, however, developments are not as dramatic as he seems to have thought.

Nonetheless, we had better look into them. The geneticists he has quoted here may not be the publicity-seeking types who like to make bold statements. Nonetheless, their belief in an all-male incursion into India that has left traces in the Y-genes may well have substantial ramifications for Indian history, even by implying an Aryan invasion. And while none of them has been quoted as actually having proven, through his research, an Indo-European invasion, it is still possible that some of them do think so. Or, because of the present commotion over Joseph’s article, they may step back to make up their minds, now with a better grasp of the Aryan origins question, and finally conclude that what they have proven, does imply the Aryan invasion. It will take argumentative acumen and a serious research effort to convince them otherwise.

Hindus have long acted as if it is enough to convince yourself in order to be entitled to declaring yourself as winner of the debate. In fact, it is necessary to convince others before you can rest on your laurels. Therefore, we must thank Joseph for spurring us into more and better research. After two centuries, let’s get this invasion nuisance over and done with.

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