The Indogermanische Gesellschaft organizes a
conference every year. It must be one of the few international conferences
where German is still spoken, along with English. I don’t know why I had never gone
there, but this time (29-31 July 2013) I did. It was held in Leiden in the main
building of the university administration, on the second floor. The painting on
the back wall showed the liberation of the city by the Sea Beggars, breaking a
one-year siege by the Spanish troops in the 16th century. That is
where the successful rebellion against the Spanish king Philip II took off,
ending with the independence of the Dutch Republic.
The topic was the Indo-European vowel system,
a rather technical subject with which I will not bore my readers. Anyway, I
didn’t go so much for the papers being read but to see the scholars face to
face whom I knew from reading their works or discussing with them on-line. I
came away with a very positive impression of people like Vaclav Blazek, Pjotr
Gasiorowski and others.
What I
really wanted to find out was the degree of penetration of the Out-of-India
Theory (OIT), i.e. the idea that most European languages can be traced back to
an origin in India. Most scholars had never even heard of it. They didn’t know
better than that the homeland of the language family was somewhere in Russia
and the Indo-Europeans from there invaded India: from an Indian viewpoint, the
Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT). So, rather than believing and parroting that
“nobody believes in the Aryan Invasion Theory anymore”, a smug and lazy
position, Indians had better start the difficult work of informing and
convincing the specialists.
Others knew
it but had a negative opinion on it. Politically, they had vaguely heard of its
association with “Hindutva” (Hindu nationalism), at least since its revival in
the 1980s. Earlier Hindutva stalwarts, such as VD Savarkar who launched the
political notion of Hindutva with his book of the same title in 1923, had been
believers in the then-prevalent opinion, viz. the AIT. It is not necessary for
a nationalist to believe that his ancestors were native: conquest can also form
a good backdrop for the birth of a nation. I recognize the influence of Michael
Witzel, indeed named as source by some of these scholars, in incorrectly
identifying the OIT with Hindutva. Of course, nobody knew anything of the
pernicious role which the AIT has been playing in India since the 1840s.
They also
vaguely knew that “the Russian homeland (so, the AIT) has been proven”. One of
them had heard of the work of Nicholas Kazanas, but had not studied it
sufficiently to agree or disagree with its pro-OIT conclusions. As linguists,
they thought that linguistics has proven it and refuted the OIT: just like the
Hindutva dimwits who think that linguistics should be outlawed because it
intrinsically supports the AIT. I can confirm that most people at the
conference work within the Russian homeland framework, but that is different
from having proven it.
They had
also heard that genetics had provided the proof. As Michel Danino has shown,
the extant genetic studies, while by no means final, rather support an Indian homeland. I
particularly like that paper on cow genetics showing that the Ukrainian cows
have a fair percentage of Indian cows among their ancestry. Migrant Aryan
cowherds will have taken along their livestock, so this findings supports the
reverse movement from what the AIT teaches. Some of the earlier studies of
human genetics readily assumed the AIT and then used it in interpreting their
findings, but that was no real proof either.
Finally,
they had heard that archeology had furnished the evidence. I told them that
many Indian archeologists reject the AIT precisely because, after 150 years of
being the well-funded official theory, it has failed to come up with any proof
on anything Aryan actually moving into India. But they took heart when I
admitted that these archeologists have failed to come up with the converse
evidence, viz. something Aryan moving into Central Asia, as their horizon
totally stops at the Khyber Pass (the frontier between historical India and
Afghanistan). They deny and claim to
have refuted the AIT, but have not developed an OIT.
Anyway,
these Indo-Europeanists swore by the work of Elena Kuzmina: The Origins of the Indo-Iranians (Brill,
Leiden 2007), which assumes and works within an AIT framework, rather than
proving it. But since it may contain elements of such much-prized proof, I
availed of the 50% conference discount to buy a copy. I promise to offer a
comment.
I also
purchased Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic
by Alan Bomhard, the elaboration of a macrofamily including Afro-Asiatic,
Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Elamo-Dravidian, Eskimo-Aleut,
Sumerian and Etruscan. The inclusion of Afro-Asiatic is much debated, that is
why I greatly appreciated Blazek’s presentation of a new isogloss between
Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. Bomhard locates its homeland in the Mesolithic
(pre-agriculture, maybe 15000 BCE) fertile crescent, particularly Northern
Mesopotamia. A subfamily containing Uralic, Altaic and Indo-European developed
in what is now Northern Aghanistan and Tajikistan, whence Uralic and
Indo-European went westward in a parallel movement, but in the latter case also
southward to India. I would say that India and Afghanistan are close enough,
and that Bomhard, like everyone else, is conditioning by assuming the AIT
beforehand. Well, no matter, I hope to meaningfully contribute to this
ambitious debate. The idea of a genealogical tree of language families, ultimately
uniting Nostratic with Sino-Caucasian and Amerind, and finally with the African
and Australian languages, certainly offers an exciting perspective. Nostratic
would also mean that the Aryans, along with the Dravidians, did invade India,
though possibly much earlier than in the AIT. Unless the fertile Indus Valley
itself can be shown to be the Nostratic homeland: a demographic concentration
of people in South Asia at a time when much of Eurasia was not or hardly
inhabitable, makes sense, as well as their northwards expansion after the Ice
Age. In that case, the whole discussion starts again, ten thousand years
earlier.
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