Koenraad Elst's books reviewed by Navaratna Rajaram

This book review by the late NS Rajaram of my books Asterisk in Bhâropîyasthân and Return of the Swastika must be from 2007 or 2008. More precise publication data are welcome. RajaramReview > > Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan, Koenraad Elst, Voice of India, Rs 325 > > Return of the Swastika, Koenraad Elst, Voice of India, Rs 400 > > Koenraad Elst's 'new' books, Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan and Return of > the Swastika, are filled with reproductions of extensive quotes from > his own earlier writings and opinions, which in turn might themselves > be quotations of still earlier quotations. Sadly, I could not find > anything new and pathbreaking in either of the two books. > > The first book deals with the Aryan invasion theory, which is now a > dead issue. The second, on the other hand, is a collection of > commentaries (vyakhyanas) on miscellaneous issues, including personal > disputes. The result of his approach is "commentaries multiplied > beyond necessity to the point of opacity". > > Elst's Asterik... is supposed to be an updated version of his earlier > Update on the Aryan Invasion Debate. It is somewhat idiosyncratic and > excludes major developments like: (a) maritime symbolism in the Vedas, > now supported by marine archaeology; (b) the impact of findings in > natural history and genetics on prehistory; and, © the Vedic-Harappan > relationship of which Harappan language and script are a part. > > Those unfamiliar with the field may believe that Asterisk... > represents the latest research on the subject. It is, however, not the > case. The book is a commentary mainly on topics that engaged > researchers some 50 years ago. Part of Elst's agenda seems to be to > rescue philology (or IE linguistics) from oblivion. This puts him > squarely in the Witzel-Farmer camp. > > This agenda is doomed to fail. First, Elst must answer the question > raised by statisticians Kruskal, Dyen and Black in their 1978 paper > that demolished the classification scheme used by Witzel-like > linguists. (See my book Saraswati River and the Vedic Civilisation, > 2006, Aditya Prakashan, for a brief discussion. The just released > book, Hidden Horizons, by David Frawley and Rajaram, has more on > natural history.) > > What we need today is a "natural history" of the evolution of language > and not just rehashing of old IDEAS with new terminology and clever > rhetorical flourishes. This cannot come from soft fields like > linguistics and IE Studies with their pseudo-discipline called > historical linguistics. > > Again, I want to highlight the fact that despite its tone, Asterisk... > skirts important questions while discussing issues that have been > either demolished or made irrelevant. For those interested in a more > scholarly discussion of these issues by workers actively engaged in > research, I recommend the two-volume Early Harappans and the > Indus-Saraswati Civilisation. (Kaveri Books, New Delhi.) It was > sponsored by the National Museum, New Delhi, and edited by DP Sharma, > head of the Harappan Gallery in the National Museum. It has articles > by a wide range of experts approaching from different angles. > > Since Asterisk... is concerned with the Aryan invasion question, it is > surprising that Elst has completely missed the main point that the > subject now is no longer the invasion but the Vedic-Harappan > relationship. This has been the subject of several conferences and the > two-volume work referred to earlier. Natural history and genetics have > shed a great deal of light on the pre-Harappan and even pre-Vedic > periods, going back to the Ice Age, but there is no hint of it in > Elst's writing. > > With this blind spot, Elst has also completely missed the obvious - > that the Harappan language and script question is part of the > Vedic-Harappan relationship. If Harappan archaeology is part of the > Vedic milieu, how can the language be something totally unrelated to > each other? Elst's comment that he finds the readings in our book (The > Deciphered Indus Script, Jha and Rajaram) "too solemn" to be > convincing, is little more than prejudice. By this I suppose he means > it is too full of religious symbolism. The same is true of the > Harappan iconography, which invariably accompanies the writing on the > seals. > > In the face of this preposterous position, the writer's views on the > language and script are worth nothing. Not that it matters, for he has > no competence in the field. Several eminent individuals and > organisations are taking our account of the evolution of writing, and > not just the decipherment, more seriously. (In addition to the > two-volume work mentioned earlier, one can refer to Peter Watson's > book, IDEAS.) > > Strangely, Elst has little substantive to say on the Vedic-Harappan > relationship, to which we devoted three full chapters in our book. > This makes me suspect that he has only selectively scanned a few words > and sections of that book that he can use to support his preconceived > positions. This too puts Elst squarely in Witzel's camp, though I have > to admit that Steve Farmer is more thorough, despite being stubborn at > times and often taking wrong stand on important issues. > > The two books will appeal to those who like Elst's discursive and > polemical style of writing, but one must not expect anything new in > them. Repeating old IDEAS and arguments, he is generally out of depth > when it comes to primary sources and new data. > > At the same time, this takes nothing away from Elst's earlier work on > Ayodhya and negationism. They remain valid and valuable. > > -- The reviewer, a scientist and historian, has recently written, > along with David Frawley, a book, Hidden Horizons: 10,000 Years of > Indian Civilisation >
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Rajaram, Witzel, and Racism

  

 

 

What follows is a comment on the article “Recycled racism in a new bottle” by Navaratna S. Rajaram, published on 10 February 2014 by Vijayvaani.

The Kozhikode workshop

But first a correction to a recent post by the Professor who is attacked in the article. Harvard Sanskrit professor Michael Witzel has published a report on the Vedic workshop in Kozhikode, January 2014: http://vedagya.blogspot.be/2014/03/report-on-6-th-international-vedic.html. In it, he mentions me as “a ‘reformed’ Hindutva writer”, and says that I questioned two speakers “insistently and even a bit aggressively” about the Aryan debate. While this is not an important issue, the contentious Aryan question implies that even small mistakes can develop into dramatic rumours, so I’d better set them straight.

The two questions I asked in sessions where he was present (and which I didn’t intend to be “aggressive”), in fact pertained to the famous Rg-Vedic hymn 1.164, where a lowing cow and her calf are repeatedly mentioned, as well as “the syllable”, hinting at but not really affirming a connection between the two. I cited Witzel’s own jocular comment on his own Indo-Eurasian Research list that this meant the syllable Aum really was an alternative vocalization of “Mooh” (which I consider quite likely), and asked the scholars what the conclusion of their own research was. Both remained non-committal, calling it possible but not really bringing any progress to the debate. In the parallel sessions however, which Witzel laments as necessitated by the too large numbers of papers, I did ask two speakers, who based their conclusions partly on the Aryan Invasion Theory, whether they had any evidence for this theory. Both refrained from offering any hard evidence, one said that it is established well enough and not seriously questioned, the other cited a few authorities to this effect, most of all Witzel himself.

I was at the workshop genuinely to listen, to assemble information on the current thinking among a large number of scholars specialized in ancient Indian culture. I had no intention or expectation of convincing anyone, though I was pleased to find that a number of younger scholars sought me out to know more about the Out-of-India Theory. Publicly, the Aryan question was not discussed at all. For Witzel, the reason was that “it is a purely political and not a scholarly topic”. And this is also exactly the opinion of Witzel’s fiercest opponent, Dr. Navaratna S. Rajaram.

Both of them, probably very surprised to find each other in the same bed, assert that the Aryan debate is over and has been definitively decided. Both think that this debate only shows signs of life once in a while because of its political interest and in spite of its scholarly resolution. Only, Witzel thinks that the AIT has won the debate and its denial only survives because it is politically useful to the Hindutva forces, while Rajaram thinks the AIT has been refuted and only survives because it is politically useful to anti-Hindu forces as well as to various other political movements, including racism. It is this motive that he also discovers in Witzel, as he explains in the VijayVaani article.

 

Rajaram’s position

We summarize Rajaram’s central contention: “Following the Nazi horrors and the American Civil Rights Movement race is now a dirty word.” Yet: “Some writers, even academics at supposedly prestigious institutions, continue to produce works advancing racist positions behind thinly veiled sophistic arguments while avoiding overtly racist terms.” Namely, Harvard Sanskritist Prof. Michael Witzel’s latest book: “The Origins of World Mythologies is the latest addition to this dubious genre by a singular scholar.”

He presents Witzel as “more activist than scholar”, and lists as proofs his interventions to thwart Hindu proposals to eliminate the Aryan invasion theory from the chapter on Hindu history in California schoolbooks, and to ban Dr. Subramanian Swamy, after the latter’s anti-Muslim utterances, from teaching economics at Harvard.  

Not that physicist Rajaram has to teach lessons about Sanskrit studies. He writes for instance that Witzel “claims to have found dialectic changes in the Rigveda around 1200 BC soon after the non-existent Aryan invasion”, but this observation was already worked out in the 19^th century to explain the archaic and non-standard language of the Vedas. Rajaram repeatedly and unknowingly displays his unfamiliarity with the field. Moreover, in his publications including this very article, he passes as a “scientist and historian”. He has a diploma and a career as scientist to his credit, but as if that were not good enough, he also claims to be a historian. This, he is not.

We do not believe in diploma fetishism, so we accept that someone without a history diploma can still be a historian, namely if he does the work of a historian, applying the historical method. This, however, Rajaram haughtily refuses to do. Case in point is his dogged rejection of the very basis of the whole Indo-European theory, even preceding the question of the Homeland, viz. the linguistic finding of a kinship between most Indian and European languages. For him comparative and historical linguistics is a “pseudo-science”.

For this reason, he rejects any quest for a homeland, even if it is India, and therefore also rejects the so-called Out-of-India Theory as detailed by Shrikant Talageri. For years already, he has been saying that the Aryan debate is over and has been won by the AIT skeptics. It is this reputedly authoritative assertion that was believed by the unsuspecting California Hindus and led to their defeat in the textbook affair.   

His scholarly contributions confine themselves to refuting the Aryan Invasion Theory, without proposing an alternative explanation for a linguistic kinship that he rejects. In this respect, his discovery of the relevance of the Seidenberg findings about the anteriority of Baudhayana’s mathematics to Babylonian mathematics (which dates Baudhayana’s late-Vedic writings dramatically earlier than hitherto assumed) remains pivotal in the Aryan debate. But for a presentation of the whole Aryan problem, he simply and willfully lacks the knowledge.

 

Racism

Though not comprehending the scholarly basis of the Aryan debate, Rajaram must be gifted with telepathic powers, for he can read other people’s motives, even where they haven’t expressed them. He can see through any “camouflage” and identify people’s true reasons. Thus:

“Witzel’s latest book looks at world mythologies, going back 100,000 years when the first anatomically modern humans were identified in the African Rift Valley. From there he claims to trace two tracks of mythological development - the Gondwanian and the Laurasian. But this is just camouflage, for his agenda is ultimately racist.”

Oh yes, Witzel must be a racist: as a German, he has it in his blood. But Rajaram’s telepathy loses some of its shine when he claims mere hearsay as his source of authority: “As Tok Thompson of the University of Southern California exposes (as do others), Witzel claims that these represent two races in the world, distinguished by both myth and biology.”

How would he know? I am a witness to the genesis of this claim. On an improvised e-group of some thirty people, functioning in December 2013 to February 2014, only two had read this book, an Indo-American computer scientist and myself. Both had read the book from cover to cover and both asserted at this point that they had not come across any racism. Rajaram and his allies, who are now spreading this article of his, had not even seen the book. He does not know what Witzel said in that book and merely relies on two book reviews: mine (http://koenraadelst.blogspot.be/2013/03/globalization-of-mythology.html), which doesn’t have this accusatory slant, and the said Tok Thompson’s (http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2014/01/a-racist-book-by-witzel-harvard.html).

Rajaram makes his readers believe that he is quoting Witzel, when in fact he is quoting Thompson’s review: “As seen by Witzel, ‘…the dark-skinned Gondwana are characterized by ‘lacks’ and ‘deficiencies’ … and are labeled ‘primitive’ at a ‘lower stage of development’, while the noble Laurasian myths are… the only ‘true’ creation stories, and the first ‘complex story’, which the Gondwana never achieved. On the face of it, the common African origin of modern humans is acknowledged, but the sting is in the tail: the dark-skinned Gondwana never progressed beyond their primitive stage to catch up with the ‘noble Laurasians’ -- their superiors in biology as well as intellect and character.”

The “superiority in biology” is purely Thompson’s addition, and the offending references to race are not in evidence in Witzel’s book, a fact which gives the lie to Thompson’s claim that Witzel’s text is “explicitly racist”. He still has to prove his effective allegation that it is implicitly racist, but it certainly is not “explicitly” racist – otherwise he would certainly have quoted the racist statements in it. The racism allegation is now a cheap way of capturing the moral high ground in the West, where anti-racist egalitarianism has become the state religion (a development that has escaped the notice of many Hindu nationalists, who tend to wallow in anachronism), and I have seen it used numerous times to destroy people, on a very slender factual basis or even against the pertinent facts.

Witzel never calls the Laurasian myths “noble” and never speaks about skin colour, which is not what defines his Gondwana-Laurasia dichotomy: the Tamils are as dark as Nelson Mandela, yet they are Laurasians. The Chinese or the Mayas are not white either, but they are Laurasians. He observes that Gondwana mythology “lacks” some Laurasian themes, such as the dragon-slayer or the end-time; but that does not mean it is objectively “deficient”. Girls “lack” what boys have, but it is to be hoped that Tok Thompson doesn’t deduce therefrom that they are “deficient”: their sexual apparatus, including their distinctive capacity to bear children, is less obvious, but is as valuable and necessary as that of the boys.

Finally, Rajaram has also pointed out common themes and universals that transcend his bifurcation. Thus, the Kundalini doctrine, which exists in the “Laurasian” culture of India (and, I may add, in recognizable form also China), also appears among the Gondwana shamanisms of the Australian Aboriginals and the San (Bushmen). On the improvised e-mail list, several Hindus got angry with me for citing the kinship of a venerable Hindu doctrine with these “Bushmen”.

 

Mythology

Thompson then goes on to challenge the truth of Witzel’s division of the world’s myths into two types, citing some Laurasian peoples of North America (which he himself has studied) as not having the typically Laurasian myths of the dragon-slayer, the end-time etc. This may be true: bifurcating mankind culturally after millennia of interaction and ever new waves of emerging or changed stories is an ambitious claim, and Witzel may have reached too high. Or he may not have, that remains a matter for debate among specialists. At the end of his book, Witzel himself admits his own limitations in studying the whole world’s myths and solicits mythographers to volunteer corrections.

What I find very valuable in Witzel’s thesis is his charting a world tree of myths. Of course a first attempt is bound to be seriously imperfect, and the very nature of the reconstruction of ancient myths and their development necessarily has parts which history has made invisible and irretrievable. But unlike Rajaram and Thompson (as very partially known to me through his review), he dares to project verifiable trends deep into the past. Thus, in linguistics, Witzel espouses (and Thompson lambasts) the notion of “Nostratic”, the putative ancestor of many Eurasian and North-African languages. It is simply obvious that the historically attested fragmentation of languages also took place for dozens of millennia before the invention of writing, and that conversely, the reconstruction of ancient languages from a comparison of their modern daughters can in principle be projected into prehistory. Similarly, the principle of a global family tree of myths is impeccable even though its actual reconstruction is only at its beginning. Moreover, this universalism emphasizes the unity of mankind, a position which I had learned to consider anti-racist.

On 15 May 2014, Witzel comes to London to lecture on this debate, and I will reserve my definitive judgment on Thompson’s critique of his book until hearing his own defence.

As for Rajaram, he is back in telepathy mode: “If supported, the notion of the superior white and inferior dark races will be scientifically validated. This is the real agenda of the book, but its ‘science’ is rubbish; it does not even rise to the level of pseudo-science. Mythology is just a camouflage to push this prejudice that is simply not worth spending time over. What interests us are the history and motives lurking behind the book.”

Exactly: the book doesn’t interest him, he will pass judgment on it without even reading it. This is like those Western AIT-espousing philologists who denounce Shrikant Talageri’s work all while accidentally spilling the beans that they haven’t read it (for a recent example, see his fresh discovery of Hans Hock’s ill-informed denunciation). Incidentally, while Western academics have lambasted Talageri as well as myself, the most fiercely negative reviews of both his and my latest book on the Aryan question (The Rigveda and the Avesta c.q. Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan) were written by Rajaram. At the time I decided to ignore it, but hostile as well as anti-scholarly attittudes have accumulated so badly in circles I used to consider friendly, that at least I now have to acknowledge the fact.

 

Indra  

Undaunted, Rajaram keeps denouncing Witzel’s unread book: “Except for the terminology, its arguments are indistinguishable from those of Houston Chamberlain (Inequality of Races), Arthur de Gobineau and other race theorists who provided justification to the Nazi idea of the superior Aryan race. It is important to note that their source was not Indian but European, more specifically Teutonic German. They worshipped Teutonic deities like Thor and Odin, not Vedic ones like Indra and Varuna. Their Swastika was also the German Hakenkreuz (‘hooked cross’) not the Indian svasti symbol.”

The swastika existed in Europe at least since Roman times, so the Nazis didn’t need India to make it their own. Neither Gobineau nor Chamberlain was German, though they did indeed represent the peak of racism as an ideology. Gobineau, like the Nehruvian secularists, adored Sufism, which he saw as an expression of the Iranian genius. Of Chamberlain, I assume he may have picked up some ideas from his adopted German environment, including the Heathen revival which predated his own work. Pagan revivalism has came up in Sweden in the 16^th century with the Storgothic movement, in the 17^th in England with the neo-Druid movement (of which Winston Churchill became an ordained officiant) and the 18^th in Brittany and Germany. It was mainly a form of cultural archaeology, not really Pagan and anti-Christian, hence the preponderance of Christian priests and vicars among its researchers and propagators.

I have said and written many times that “nationalism is a misstatement of Hindu concerns”. Here we have another illustration of my thesis. Germanic religion was closely akin to Vedic religion. For Christians, the followers of both will go to hell. For scholars, Varuna corresponds roughly to Odin, and Indra quite precisely to Thor. For nationalists, however, they are very different: Odin and Thor, like Jesus, are non-Indian, while Varuna and Indra are Indian. Like many so-called Hindu nationalists, Rajaram doesn’t care two hoots for difficult theological issues like the exact difference in worldview between the different religions, and prefers the much easier division in national and foreign. His attack on Odin and Thor will be applauded by Christians, since they will recognize it as an attack on Varuna and Indra. We already saw Rajaram agreeing with his enemy Witzel, and now we see him do the work of the Christian missions.

 

 

Rocket science

More vintage Rajaram, the telepath who can divine the unseen agenda behind an unread book: “Ideas once central to the Aryan myth resurfaced in various guises under labels like Indology and Indo-European Studies -- and now as mythology. Witzel’s book is only the latest exercise in this attempt to prove the superiority of one race over others; supposedly a study on world mythologies, it has a hidden race-based agenda.”

Indology and Indo-European Studies existed before race thinking became dominant in the second half of the 19^th century. Indo-European reconstruction followed into the footsteps of the reconstruction of the Uralic family in the 18^th century, and ran parallel with the reconstruction of the Afro-Asiatic family tree. The basic finding of Indo-European Studies, viz. the kinship and ultimately equality between the then Indian underlings and European masters, was welcomed by many Indians as a ground for emancipation, just as it was used by the colonizers as a justification for their presence in India. So, the political uses of a theory could vary widely, but the correctness of the theory is not decided by the uses made of it. “E = mc²” is not invalidated by its use in the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. Any “scientist” should know that.

Thus, rocket science was quite literally developed by the Nazis. The American space organization NASA was led by the erstwhile Nazi Wernher von Braun. By Rajaram’s reasoning, rockets are Nazi. Rocket scientists such as himself, who has worked as a consultant for the NASA, must also be gravely tainted with the Nazi brush. If he calls Indo-European Studies or its practitioners racists, then by his very own criteria, he stands exposed as a Nazi. Of course, I am not saying that, but he himself is implying it. 

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What have I done? (2)

 

(In December and January 2013-14, I was a member of an ad hoc list of some 35 people selected by Prof. Vijaya Rajiva, prominently featuring Dr. S. Kalyanaraman and Dr. NS Rajaram. Since they are public figures whose general positions can easily be verified on the internet, I do mention their names below; for other members, I will use X and Y. Soon, this list sank to a terrible level of narrow-minded chauvinism and smugness. The said doctores also made plans to get Prof. Michael Witzel’s book on global mythology, OUP 2013, which they hadn’t read but of which they applauded a review lambasting him as “racist”, banned from sale in India; and to get Harvard and OUP to somehow punish him. They also exhausted themselves in the choicest abuse of Shrikant Talageri and myself, and declared both the Aryan Invasion Theory and the Out-of-India Theory nonsense. I left this madhouse on 1 February 2014 with the following post.)

 

 

Dear all,

In spite of everybody having had his say, I have not seen any answers to my questions. Rajaram has not told us who those worthies are who accept his decipherment, after it has been laughed out of court for the past fourteen years. Much less has he apologized for his false allegations against me. Nor has he or Vijaya Rajiva or S. Kalayaraman told us why they know it all better than Yajnavalkya or Shankara in choosing to substitute censorship and repression for open debate. We have only gotten to see a very ugly face of Hindu nationalism.

Anyway, it is clear by now that this is not the forum that will get us anywhere. So, before leaving this list, I will merely set the record straight on a few matters raised here.
 

 

"The Aryan debate is over"

NS Rajaram persists in error by declaring that the Aryan debate is over, and even that it doesn't exist. For him indeed, the debate has never existed, for he has never faced an opponent. He has only preached to the uninformed (like, on his own admission, Prof. X) and the like-minded. He has misinformed gullible audiences that didn't know the subject. But he has never entered the debating arena, though he has often lambasted prominent scholars past and present in less than diplomatic terms.

This led directly to the California textbook disaster (2005-9). The California parents were mostly engineers, doctors and businessmen. Not being historians, they relied on those whom they deemed historians, people like the author of several books on the Aryan question, physicist dr. NS Rajaram. To be sure, Rajaram was not a historian either, nor an archaeologist or Sanskritist, he had no professional qualification to pass judgment on the competing theories of ancient history; no Adhikara, as people here would say. Nonetheless, his assurance that "the Aryan debate is over" and that "nobody believes in the Aryan Invasion Theory anymore" had spread through his books and become the received wisdom among common Hindus.

To be sure, I am not a diploma fetishist, and I don't want to draw any conclusion from the fact that he wasn't qualified while, for instance, I do have a PhD and two MA diplomas in History & Philology. He may have chosen to master the discipline of History at a later age and informally, but amateurs should abide by the same rules of the discipline as diploma-holders. His attitude to the very relevant discipline of Historical Linguistics, which he has always curtly dismissed as a "pseudo-science", does not indicate a willingness to learn. His conduct as an amateur-historian has certainly not contributed to a favourable attitude among real historians towards amateur interlopers.

It fell to me to warn the California Hindus that the AIT was very much alive, and that asserting otherwise would not succeed, would wake sleeping dogs and even jeopardize the other textbook edit proposals. And this is exactly what happened. If they didn't want to listen to a foreigner (since many of you here value ethnicity more than truth), there were many Indians and born Hindus who could have told them the same.

Thus, History professor Vinay Lal, admittedly a secularist, wrote in 2003: "There is, on the whole, more scholarly consensus on the issue of an Aryan migration to India than on any other subject". (The History of History, OUP, p.138) The theory may of course be wrong, as has happened so often in the history of science, but he accurately notes that it is the dominant theory, directly in conflict with Rajaram's claim. About Rajaram, he notes that Michael Witzel and Steve Farmer in their Frontline cover-story "Horseplay in Harappa" (30-9-2000) "demolish Rajaram's arguments", and in their later rejoinders "similarly savage Rajaram". Lal also cites a "devastating critique of Rajaram and his ilk" by historian Shereen Ratnagar. (p.137-138) While this doesn't decide right and wrong in this debate, it does testify to the dominance of the AIT paradigm, as well as to Rajaram's status as an international laughing-stock.

To sum up: Rajaram has misinformed his readers including the Hindu parents in California, and they have paid dearly for that. Instead of making progress, the Hindu cause has been thrown back for  many years, and all educational authorities are henceforth wary of any Hindu amendments to history and religion textbooks. This does of course not decide about the correctness of Rajaram's (originally the late Natwar Jha's) decipherment, which may still be partly or largely correct. Unfortunately, Rajaram, who has repeatedly struck a haughty pose of ignoring this and disregarding that, behaves like he has abandoned his own decipherment.
 

 

Cosy

For another statement by Rajaram: "It is not worth worrying about Elst. This is not the first time he has abused colleagues, even in print. He doesn't seem to understand that abuse is not argument and self-praise is no recommendation."

 

No participant in the present discussion has been more abused than me. According to Rajaram, my detractors should realize that "abuse is not argument". I am unaware of any self-praise, I have merely factually and verifiably asserted that I have debated many times with the other side, while most of you have not. This contrasts with the self-praise widely indulged in by Hindu chauvinists, who earn the ridicule of the world with their claims of Hindu superiority and ancientness, all without waiting to hear the reaction of the outside world.

 

This, incidentally, is why it is so funny that Vijaya Rajiva "uninvitedly" diagnoses the Elst problem as follows: "The problem with Elst is that he lives in the closed very closed world of the Aryan debate. This is unhealthy." So, in other words, it is unhealthy that I live in the real world, where there are different and clashing opinions, while she and most of you live in a cosy world of mutual praise, incestuous and shielded from unhealthy interaction with other opinions.

 

 

My record and my lack of status

 

Rajaram further belittles me: “A problem with Elst is he has no standing as an academic being only a freelancer. He was lucky in having Sita Ram Goel promoting him but he never moved beyond that. He was also lionized by Hindu groups during the Ayodhya dispute where he did some useful work, though nothing fundamental like BB Lal or Harsh Narayan who went to the primary sources.” 

 

Yeah, people believe in status, far more than in truth. This counts for most people, but more than usual for the Hindus (and here I am deliberately generalizing): because of their Muslim- and British-inflicted inferiority complex, they crave a pat on the shoulder. So, they want status for themselves and their children, and judge others in terms of status, not of such a trifle as the truth of their opinions. So yes, I am only a freelancer, barred from any semblance of academic status. Not that this is innocent: it is the enemy who decides which persons are rewarded with status for their correct opinions, and which persons are punished with untouchability for their dissident opinions. So, Rajaram is saying that I am being punished for my stated views by the enemy, and that this is a "problem". Objectively, he is siding with the dispensers of status and non-status, viz. the secularists.

 

In Hindu activist circles, this can go quite far. It has always been a practice of the Sangh Parivar to invite enemies with status rather than friends without status. Thus, in 2002, when the BJP was suspected of planning the "saffronization" of education, it created a chair for Indian Studies in Oxford and nominated one of its known critics, the militantly secularist professor Sanjay Subramaniam, to show just how secularist it was. Imagine: the poster-boy for "saffronization" was a known anti-Hindu. Living in a fool's paradise, the party genuinely expected to be applauded for this act of secularism, yet none of the secularists gave up lambasting the BJP as "a threat to India's secular fabric", least of all its own nominee. But at least he had status...

 

I was indeed very lucky in meeting Sita Ram Goel, but he did not exactly save me from my lack of academic standing. Here, Rajaram has his chronology backwards. When I met Goel, everything was still possible, the future smiled upon me. But then, like Goel, I started arguing in print against Muslim causes, and even against Islam itself. At the time I didn't think about career prospects, but I was soon to find out that in India and in all India-related circles, all doors henceforth remained closed to me. And while I had thought that Europe remained comparatively free, the early nineties were characterized by a very fast switch to the same situation as in India, where Islam had clamped an Emergency on society. So I became a target of exclusion, but I soldiered on in spite of social and professional (and increasingly also medical) problems. This too was a situation which I have lived through, while most of you have not.

 

During the Ayodhya controversy, I am said to not have done any "original work". Fair enough, but I never sought to do any original work. I saw many valid arguments based on good original research, only it was not communicated well, largely because the Sangh Parivar was conditioned by its long-standing choice against opinion-building. So I took it upon myself to communicate these findings, just as Rajaram's valuable work on the Aryan question consisted mainly in putting together and communicating other people's findings, such as Seidenberg's thesis on the Indian origins of Babylonian mathematics.

 

But I did something more: to the extent possible and necessary, and with my then level of knowledge, I put these Ayodhya findings in the argumentative framework which they were sorely lacking. It had been made insufficiently clear just what was proven or refuted by which finding. Some Hindus are very good at harvesting all logical implications from a given fact (this especially is the strength of Shrikant Talageri), but among the aged gentlemen who had discovered or dug up the Ayodhya findings, this was lacking somewhat. So, Sita Ram Goel was asked by the Vishva Hindu Parishad to sew together the array of Ayodhya data, and being in Delhi at the time, I got to do most of this work. Just as there is a difference between a pile of car parts and a functioning car, there is a difference between a pile of data and a structured body of data geared for confrontation. A scientist ought to know that. Then, having learned the ropes of history at work, I moved on to do original work, such as my contributions in two books, seven papers in collective books and a number of articles on the Aryan question.  

 

 

Bluff

Prof. X praises Vijaya Rajiva: "Well done, dear lady. Standing up at last to Elst's pontification and hectoring." I don't really mind him using loaded words for what is just criticism of misconduct. His choice of words says more about him than about me.

  

And more from Prof. X: "I am sure you and the others in the list remember my cousin Nikhil Bhaduri giving Elst, a few weeks ago, a dressing down that the fellow richly deserved. His ego is Himalayan; in a debate or a dialogue, he just does not show any respect for others." 

 

This is the first thing I hear about a "dressing down". Of course I receive a lot of denunciations in my mail-box, or what the enemy calls "hate mail". Most of it I immediately forget, including the name of the sender. This "dressing down" seems to have been in that category.

 

But this bluff, this crowing over a non-existent victory, fits into an existing pattern. Thus, on Rajiv Malhotra's list, a member recounted the Hindu American Foundation’s campaign to "take back yoga", i.e. to thwart attempts by Westerners to play down the Hindu origins of yoga. While it was laudable that Hindus mobilized for this cause, the "digestion" of yoga in the general society simply continued. Some time later, another member asserted the strength of the American Hindus and gave as proof: "We took back yoga." Oh really? And the biggest example is of course the Aryan debate, where some of the present list's members already dance on the AIT's corpse since at least fifteen years, whereas in the real world the AIT is quite alive, thank you.  

 

The professor also praises Rajaram en Kalyanaraman for discussing the Aryan issue "without using pejorative terms". You can go through the record of this very debate to see for yourself how mightily they have refrained from using "pejorative terms". And worse than just "terms", it is not merely a matter of language, but includes calls for thwarting the debate and censoring unread books.

 

Grandstanding

 

Then the cousin himself, Mr. Y: "Now, to get back to Elst. What gets my goat about this man is his insufferable grandstanding. Dr. Rajaram has suitably dealt with this form of  vainglorious egoism. And a few others have also similarly written about this aspect of the man. Some well-wisher/s of his should advise him that it is not really kosher to run down the others in your team all the time. He seems to think he is the real McCoy, while the vast majority in his camp are completely sub-standard. This is simply not on, Elst." 

 

In the two books, seven papers etc. mentioned above, I have hardly (and recalling from memory, never at all) criticized anyone "from my own team". But perhaps they were too tedious for Mr. Bhaduri to read. In those, I modestly accepted the burden of proof, all the different items of evidence that we are honour-bound and logic-bound to furnish to the enemy side. But I found myself interrupted by other AIT skeptics who took the "grandstanding" position that my efforts are in vain as the Aryan debate has already been won long ago. And now, I begin to wonder whether the people concerned really belong to the same team. While we are arguing against the Aryan Invasion Theory, they are declaring the Aryan debate over. While we are on the battlefield fighting, they are powdering their noses for the victory parade. Is this still the same team?

 

At any rate, my "hectoring" is aimed at getting Hindus out of their smugness and convincing them to do what it takes and bridge the small distance between the present situation and victory. By contrast, the smugness of the others has already proven to be really harmful for the Hindu position, costing them humiliation in the "Horseplay at Harappa" incident and defeat in the textbook cases. Clearly, Mr. Badhuri prefers defeat to victory.

 

 

Flemish

 

Paradoxically, those who attack individuals rather than argumentative positions, prefer to attack groups rather than individuals. After all, an individual can still develop his very own opinion, which is too complicated to attack. It is easier to reduce him to his membership of a group, and then attack the group. So Mr. Y says: "Some of you Flemish types sometimes think you are in the Belgian Congo in the 1930s."

 

The really bad time for the Belgian Congo was when it was not Belgian yet, but King Leopold II's private property, around 1900. He defeated the Arab slave-traders and freed the black slaves, as promised to certain international stake-holders; but then exploited the natives in novel ways that were little better than slavery. His policies led to the death of over a million people, which in the British propaganda became more than ten million. Some Indians have the sepoy mentality and reproduce the British propaganda faithfully (and I predict they will indignantly maintain the propaganda version and decry my stating the facts). Anyway, we Flemish like it that Leopold is such an international hate figure: the worse for Belgium, the better for Flanders.

 

But this is intra-Belgian politics, of which Mr. Y understands little. I don't mind that, for the topic of Belgian politics is supremely unimportant. However, if you don't want to take the trouble of studying it, then spare us your ignorant opinions. On this topic as on many others, Rajiv Malhotra has a point when he calls his Hindu flock "under-informed but over-opinionated".

 

Further, the Flemish in Belgium are in exactly the same position as the Hindus in India: a numerical majority but a political minority, with many internal enemies and a hostile media both internally and internationally. These media and the outside "experts" like to pontificate about an overbearing majority, when that majority owes its lack of power precisely to its dividedness and gentleness. If you still want to denounce the Flemish, please go ahead, but then don't complain when the Hindus receive the same treatment.

 

 

Honest advice

 

Finally, some honest advice from Mr. Y: "Learn to give respect to others in your group. By all means, point out the flaws in their approach and prevent them from committing mistakes.  But, cut down on your hectoring. And talking down to others.  Quite often, you sound (and appear) to be a wayward rabble-rouser against Hindus and Indic movement members."

Well, my lack of civility has easily been outdone by the lack of civility evident in the discourse of some on this list, routinely shouting doctoral terms like "trash", "scumbag" or "chamcha". You people are what Arun Shourie has called the "mimophant". Like the centaur, the mimophant combines two creatures in one: the mimosa and the elephant. It is hypersensitive like the mimosa when it comes to having its own tender feelings respected by others; and it is blunt and insensitive like the elephant when it comes to respecting other people's feelings.

But OK, I admit that sometimes I have really lost patience. I apologize for those occasions. I don't think loss of temper can ever be justified. But it can nonetheless be made understandable.

I live in the real world, you people don't. I actually suffer consequences for any misbehaviour by "my team". You guys can scream that "ancient Hindus colonized the world" or that "Rama lived a million years ago", or similar nonsense, and then sleep soundly; but I see my name wholly undeservedly appear in juxtaposition with that of crackpots; I see doors closed in front of my nose. That is partly due to the enemy's lack of discrimination (not to mention his wilful attempt at "guilt by association" as a substitute for arguments), but it is also due to "my team" giving the enemy a handle for this tactic. 

I also used to believe that activists want their cause to be victorious. It was at first a surprise and then quite frustrating for me to find that you people have other priorities. At one time I practised Japanese martial arts. Part of the training was to withstand humiliation, and to just mutely accept it when the teacher gave you a "dressing down". It is at first an unpleasant surprise, but ultimately it makes you very strong. Though not in full, I have retained something of that attitude. Though I am sure that Indian Akharas function on the same principle, and Hindu self-denial cultivates a similar attitude, the Hindu warriors against the AIT turned out to be far too tender for this healthy harshness. I thought that criticism would be welcomed when it serves to improve your performance, but I had to learn that you people don't want to improve your performance, in spite of the defeats inflicted by the enemy.


Genetics

 

Just now my inbox got enriched with a youtube video showing a talk by NS Rajaram. It is introduced thus:

"Dr. NS Rajaram talks about how Aryan Debate no longer exists now. He says, 'It's not a debate anymore'. Sharing latest research on Genetics and Human migration -- he claims that Aryan Invasion never happened in India. He shares that Africa is the original homeland of Human (homo sapient) from where humans have migrated across the world. This new Genetic research shows that how first few migrations from Africa brought Humans in India where it give rise to great Indic civilization."

 

Well, well. That genetics has confirmed the emergent migration story, with humans trekking from Africa to India and thence to Australia some 70.000 years ago, and a few thousand years later inland from India, is well-known. We already knew that amateur historian Rajaram has said nothing new, though his synopsis may have made a difference; here, amateur geneticist Rajaram is again offering a synopsis of others' findings. It is shared by the AIT believers, and does nothing at all to refute the AIT. To say that the genetically attested migration from India some 60,000 years ago has anything at all to do with the Indo-European or Aryan migration some 6000-5000 years ago, only shows that whoever thinks so, has not understood even the most elementary data of the Aryan debate. There was simply no Proto-Indo-European language yet 60,000 years ago.

The human and non-human genetic findings as presented by Premendra Priyadarshi are suggestive of migration but they still don't have a sufficiently precise time resolution, and anyway they don't speak. Some migrants impose their language while others adopt the language of the natives, and neither archaeology nor genetics can tell the difference. The AIT came about as a linguistic theory and only linguistic evidence can confirm or refute it.

Rajaram's video recording is advertised with one of his favourite phrases: "A paradigm change from the eurocentric approaches to civilization studies." Oh, well, ever since the phrase "paradigm change" saw the light of day, it has suffered a mighty inflation. Many titles of undergraduate papers and theses sport a "paradigm change". Many more are proposed to have such a title, but at the supervisor's prodding, the student climbs down from his ambitious proposal. In particular, the supervisor will generally observe that a new hypothesis within the same conceptul framework (or paradigm) is not the same thing as a change in paradigm. What the non-AIT schools propose, is a new hypothesis (or rather, a renewed hypothesis, for the Out-of-India Theory was already thought up by the much-maligned white-skinned Orientalists in the 18th century), not a new paradigm. What Rajaram hopefully wants to propose, is a new hypothesis. But what he risks proposing, I'm afraid, is indeed a new paradigm: the paradigm of fantasy replacing the paradigm of science.

 

 

What I have done

 

According to Rajaram, I "haven't had any new ideas in the last fifteen years". OK, let's take the millennium as the cut-off date. In 2001, Rupa published the bulky book version of my PhD thesis, and reported to me that it became a bestseller. It is not the usual RSS self-praise but not the usual RSS-bashing of the "experts" either. In that year, I also brought out the two-volume The Saffron Swastika. On the Notion of ""Hindu Fascism", the only book in the world to analyse this much-used line of discourse (except for my sequel from 2006, Return of the Swastika), both by foreign India-watchers and by the Indian secularists; and Gandhi and Godse, the analysis of the reasons for the Mahatma murder through the murderer's self-justification speech.

 

Outsiders all learn two facts about the Hindu movement: that one of its members killed the Mahatma, and that Guru Golwalkar declared himself a Nazi. You can hide your head in the sand all you want and declare smugly that you don't have to care about these outsiders, but the hostility against the Hindu movement is very much a fact and determines the world in which that same movement has to function. It explains why successful Indians play down their Hinduism, why Narayan Murthy finances American anti-Hindu Sheldon Pollock's Sanskrit studies instead of many more competent Hindus, why the BJP hires secularists and when in power fails to pursue a Hindu (so-called "communal") agenda, etc. So, I have taken it upon myself to give a fair account of the Gandhi murder and Nathuram Godse's speech, and to analyse (and refute) the Nazi allegation against Golwalkar. There are 7 billion people on earth, yet in both these crucial cases I am the only one to have done so.  

 

Admittedly, I have done the scholarly work, but the expected political consequences never materialized. In particular, my comprehensive refutation of the usual reading of the Golwalkar quote was starkly ignored by the main interested party, the RSS. Instead, the RSS chose to tell the lie that Golwalkar never wrote the book in which the quote appears (We, 1939). It published the "complete" works of Golwalkar without that book. This is plainly ridiculous: anybody can verify that he was the author of the book. The RSS already doesn't have a very truthful reputation, and here it explicitly and wilfully covered itself with a notoriety for mendaciousness. While the enemy sees through the lie and has his own channels of information, the only dupes of this lie are the RSS followers themselves. I gave the RSS a weapon for winning the Golwalkar debate, but they chose an assured and ignominious defeat. So, if I seem a little prickly at self-defeating Hindu tactics and Hindu self-deception, it is because I have repeatedly experienced such cases of high-level Hindu buffoonery.

 

Then came Who Is a Hindu?, about whether tribals, Buddhists etc. are Hindus, also an item with important ramifications. I zoomed in on Buddhism in my Dutch book De Donkere Zijde van het Boeddhisme ("the dark side of Buddhism"), half of which is an analysis of the relations between the Buddha and Hinduism. This is a very consequential matter, as the Buddha has become a weapon against Hinduism and most scholars assume the "Hinduism bad, Buddhism good" principle. Again, I am the only one in the world to have thematized this issue.

 

Ayodhya, the Case against the Temple, analyses the debating tactics in the Ayodhya controversy, gives an overview of the evidence, discusses parallel cases like Bodh Gaya, and dicusses the work of Mitsuhiro Kondo, Sanjay Subramaniam, BN Pande and others. It draws attention to an anomaly in the Ayodhya debate, viz. that the mosque party always demands pro-temple evidence but is never asked to present its own evidence. 

 

None of you seems to have read any of my papers on the Aryan question. That is your privilege, but it implies that you are not up-to-date on the Aryan debate, which in turn indicates that you are not serious about this debate. Increasingly, they focus on the one aspect of the debate that may yield the answer, viz. the linguistic evidence. My second book on the Aryan question, Asterisk in Bharopiyasthan, contains many relevant things which none here has refuted, of course. One of its chapters is devoted to refuting Witzel's discourse, and he also doesn't come out shining in the astronomy chapter. Still, Rajaram demolished this book in his review. Witzel-Rajaram, same struggle! 

In several other recent books, I have criticized various aspects of Islam, including the psychopathology of the Prophet; and of Christianity and secularism. I have crossed swords with Mira Kamdar, Christophe Jaffrelot, Meera Nanda, Amber Habib, MF Husain as well as his critics, DN Jha, Harbans Mukhia, Wiliam Dalrymple, Edward Said, Ramachandra Guha, Ashish Nandy, Edward Luce, Vikas Swarup, Martha Nussbaum etc. The record shows that I have not limited myself to the gullible and the already-converted.

 

Admittedly, I could have done more. Thus, if I had had a position like Prof. X, with a high and secure income, with status and prestige, with a talking and publishing platform, I could have done more. Or if I was born with a golden spoon in my mouth, like the grandson of the Mysore Maharaja's last Diwan (Prime Minister), I could have done more. But then again, I have been fortunate in many ways, and I just owed it to my good fortune to give my best. So: “Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention.” I admit to some shortcomings, but I also claim the merit of my limited writings, which exist in cold print. 

 

So, you may continue to throw mud at me. But I trust that through all this mud, an inconvenient fact will shine through: I have done only this much, but at least I have done it. You may try to give a dirty twist to it by calling it "insufferable grandstanding" or, even worse, "white skin". But when all is said and done, a simple fact remains standing: I did it, you did not.  

 

 

Precession

 

Vijaya Rajiva wants to know why I say that "Indian astronomy" is borrowed from the Greeks. Though she piles on each other all manner of purely imaginary motives attributed to me, I will very briefly answer her -- because the subject can indeed be settled very briefly.

 

As NS Rajaram has rightly observed, Seidenberg traces Babylonian mathematics and astronomy to Indian models. He suggests the Kassite dynasty (18th-16th century) as the channel of transmission, as the Kassite language has an Indo-Aryan substrate. This is eminently reasonable. Thus, Babylonian astronomy  divided the ecliptic in 18, yet by the first millennium it had adopted a division in 12, the same as existed in Vedic culture, where a nightly division into 28 lunar houses was complemented by a daily division of the ecliptic in 12 half-seasons (Madhu, Madhava etc.), and where the rishi Dirghatamas introduced the first-ever division of the circle into 12 and 360. Till today, the division into 360 is explained in textbooks as a Babylonian invention, but the earliest mention is Indian.

 

While in Babylon, the division into 12 was filled up with the symbols now known as the 12 signs. These were taken over by the Greeks (already before Alexander's conquest of Babylon, see Euctemon's Athenian calendar in the 5th century BC) who communicated them to India. Contrary to what I earlier thought, these are not attested in Vedic literature. They appear in an interpolated part of the Ramayana, viz. Rama's horoscope, which is an ideal horoscope fitting the ideal man. It dates from the final editing, when the Hellenistic zodiac had become known.

 

The adoption of Hellenistic astronomy and astrology in India dates from 2000 years after the Kassite regime in Babylon. Confusing those two, such as by claiming that the one phenomenon refutes the other (as numerous Hindus do, including Vijaya Rajiva) shows a defective sense of time-depth. Orientalists have berated Hindu civilization for its defective history, and I try to paint a more positive picture of Hindu historiography; but these Hindus insist that, indeed, Hindus may tell stories set in the past but are allergic to real history.

 

Evidence of the Hellenistic origin of Hindu (now sold as "Vedic") astrology is manifold. Many texts refer to Mediterranean names, like the Yavana-jataka, Romaka-shastra and Paulisha-shastra. Or they refer to branches and terms of Hellenistic astrology, like Hora-shastra (after what is still called horary astrology), drekkana (from dekanos) etc. The names of the twelve signs were originally Sanskrit transcriptions of the Greek names (Varahamihira) before becoming Sanskrit translations of the Greek names. Some techniques of Hindu astrology, even techniques now lost in European astrology and thus distinctive of Hindu astrology, can be traced back to Hellenistic techniques existing in the 3rd century BC, such as the "harmonic horoscopes" (navamsha, dvadashamsha) or the "planetary periods". Aside from those, there are also truly distinctive techniques of Hindu astrology, either developed in the course of ca. seventeen centuries of Hindu horoscopy, or borrowed from the internal but different tradition of Vedic astrology.

 

Hindus use the term "Vedic astrology" wrongly by applying it to Hellenistic astrology, but there was indeed a pre-Hellenistic Vedic astrology, though not an individual birth-based horoscopy. The rishis employed the 28 lunar houses (also used in China and Arabia), which later became 27 to accomodate the 12-part Babylonian-Hellenistic Zodiac. These houses were used to determine good times for a ritual, the founding stone of a house, or a wedding. The auspicious times for marriage are its most important remnant in modern India.

 

As for the precession, I am willing to consider whatever arguments Vamadeva Shastri is offering in his new edition of the Vedic Aryans book. Until then, I abide by the version of all scientists the world over, viz. that its discovery was due to Hipparchus in ca. 150 BC. If you have proof for an older date, you can become famous overnight. Leave out all the baggage of the Aryan debate etc., just write a paper purely on the precession and prove your point: knowledge of the precession long predated Hipparchus, the Vedic rishis already had it. I wouldn't ask any better: firstly because I sympathize with the Vedic cause, secondly because by temperament I tend to applaud reversals in received opinion. If you don't want to do that, just smugly keep on claiming a theory for which you don't want to publish the evidence, I have no reason to believe you have proof for this revolutionary revision of history.

 

On several forums I have already explained this Hellenistic element in Hindu astrology. I hope it has convinced some third parties, but the reaction among my Hindu traditionalist interlocutors was usually: "Colonial!", "Trash!", "Conspiracy!", the typical chauvinist cackling. Well, I won't stay around for your reaction. Please scrap my name from the addressee list.

 

Kind regards, and goodbye,

 

 

Dr. Koenraad Elst

 

 

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