The Vedas as Influential Literary Achievement

(Summerhill [bulletin of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies], summer 2023, paper version of a lecture I have given at the IIAS in autumn 2022) Abstract: Most Hindu traditionalists claim that the Vedas are a revealed scripture, not made by human hand, apauruṣeya. This is an object of ridicule for modernists, both outsiders and Hindu reformists. But for devout Hindus too, it can be problematic, for a closer look at the content of the Vedas shows that the Ṛṣis themselves didn’t see it that way. History vs. blind belief Most Hindu traditionalists claim that the Vedas are a revealed scripture, apauruṣeya, “not made by human hand”. Some of the great Hindu thinkers, such as Śaṅkara, insist on this divine origin very much. In this respect, even the egalitarian anti-caste Ārya Samāj, socially reformist, was traditionalist. Generally it is not known as traditionalist but as fundamentalist: its “back to the Vedas” as an instance of the common viewpoint of all fundamentalists, “back to the sources”. Unlike the traditionalists, it rejected post-Vedic practices, such as idol-worship and untouchability, and scriptures such as the Purāṇas. But it didn’t think through the fundamental assumptions of Hinduism, which then were mostly traditionalist. So, it equally continued to assume the revealed origin of the Vedas. This contrasts with the view of the Indologists and of everyone who would stumble upon a book full of hymns: these hymns are poetry written by human poets. In the disastrous attempts by California Hindus to introduce more Hindu-friendly amendments in the state’s social science textbooks in 2005-6 (see Elst 2012:137-155), one demand was to replace the term “poetry” for the Vedas with “scripture”, on a par with the Bible and the Qur’ān. “Scripture” is a status that the believers attribute to a book, whereas “poetry” as a characterization of the Vedic hymns is just descriptive, factual. Even if revealed, they visibly remain poetry. But alright, it then also has the status of scripture. Yet, if Hindus claim their religion to be “scientific”, as they often do, they ought to do better than such primitive a-dime-a-dozen claims for a supernatural origin. Why should we take issue with this belief? The first reason is the one behind every scholarly paper: la verité est bonne (French proverb: “Truth is a good thing”), it will do no harm to set the record straight on a belief that animates millions. Let’s find out the true story and let the chips fall where they may. The second reason is the one that triggered this research: we have noticed that this belief is the enemy of historical investigation of Vedic society and culture. In reply to Shrikant Talageri’s historicization of the Vedas (Talageri 2020a), Prof. Narahari Achar argues from scripture that neither the Vedas nor other ancient sources give a historical analysis. Mostly they don’t, and even those few that deliberately did try to write a historical account (say, Thucydides, or Kalhaṇa), still fell short by modern standards. From a poetry book, a fortiori, you wouldn’t expect any better. Historians are the last to read religious poetry as a factual account, yet they remain interested in it. What they hope to find in there are meta-data, historical information not intended as such by the writer but nonetheless present because all writers unwittingly let on much about their circumstances. Traditionalists, however, are allergic to historical readings of Vedic episodes. The Ārya Samāj’s translations avoid all history-related word meanings (discussed in Talageri 2000:406-412). Followers of Sri Aurobindo too prefer profound symbolic readings. Hence the Hindu protests against the first Orientalist translators of the Vedas and now against Shrikant Talageri for their mining the Vedas for historical data. Thus, Talageri (2000, 2020b) notes that most traditionalists reject not only the notion of “pre-Vedic” but also the discerning of successive historical layers within the Vedas, the key to lots of data about the geographical east-to-west gradient crucial in the “Aryan” homeland debate. Traditionalists pull up their noses for something as mundane as the early history of the Indo-European languages, a mere 6000 years ago. This language family’s homeland location, a question not arising from Vedic literature itself, is at most a very fleeting concern. It didn’t exist until the 18th century and won’t survive the 21st, given that the advances in linguistics and archaeology and the emergence of genetics have brought the resolution to this question very close – in all, too ephemeral to sacrifice the belief in the supernatural Vedas to. This argument would be unassailable if the supernatural provenance of the Vedas were true; but we will show reason why, even for Veda devotees, this hypothesis is baseless. Apauruseyatva imputed to the Vedas Let us first verify how believing Hindus say that the Vedas are apauruṣeya, "non-human“. This means that they are of super-human or divine origin, revealed, uncreated, as old as the universe. Thus, a cathechism-style introduction to Hinduism teaches: “The real name of our religion is Vedic dharma. In ancient days it was just called Dharma. Our religion has its roots in the Vedas, which are our original scriptures. (…) Another name for our religion is Sanatana Dharma.” (Vedalankar 1978:7) Sanātana (Dharma) means “eternal (normative system)”, and if it is deemed synonymous with “Vedic”, it implies that the Vedas are eternal. The position of this paper is just the opposite: Hindus carelessly use the two terms interchangeably, but they are different in meaning: “Vedic” refers to a literary corpus that can be located in a specific time and place, non-eternal. For modern outsiders to the Vedic tradition this will not be very sensational, but we will argue that even for Vedic practitioners this ought to be evident as soon as they look into the Vedas’ contents. Note that if “our religion” is Hinduism, it is quite an assertion to say that its real essence is “Vedic dharma”, for this is not so obvious. If you visit a Hindu home or temple, you will see a lot that is not Vedic, starting with mūrtipūjā, idol-worship. In spite of lavish lip-service, few Hindus know the Vedas. In terms of books (or their derivative plays, dances, music and films), their favourites are the epics, the fable collections and the Purāṇas. And even the specialists of Vedic recitation have rarely contemplated the contents of what they recite. The Vedas are the most prestigious tributary to the Hindu stream, but it would be very partisan and unhistorical to reduce Hinduism to Vedic dharma. Anyway, this is how the author (of Ārya Samāj persuasion) pictures the mechanics of this divine revelation: “The Vedas have not been created by men. In the very beginning God revealed unto the Rishis the knowledge of the Vedas. (…) When these Rishis sat in meditation, God gave them the knowledge of the Vedas.” (Vedalankar 1978:32) Traditionalists divide scripture into Śruti, "that which is heard (from a divine source)", viz. the Vedas in the broad sense (Saṁhitā, Brāhmaṇa, Āraṇyaka, Upaniṣad); and Smṛti, "that which is remembered" (and of which no divine origin is claimed, though in practice it is also treated as unquestionable authority), viz. the Itihāsa-Purāṇa literature and the Dharma Śāstras. According to Annie Besant and Bhagavan Das: “The Śruti, consisting of the four Vedas, is the final authority in the Āryan religion, and these four Vedas form in their entirety the Veda, the perfect knowledge, revealed by Brahmā, seen by the ṛṣis, and clothed in words by them to benefit the Āryan peoples.” (Besant & Das 2000:2) In this view, the Vedic composers or Ṛṣis were not Mantrakāra, “verse maker”, but Mantradṛṣṭā, “verse seers”. Modern authors often show a certain embarrassment about this apparently irrational claim, yet try to save it. Thus: “The rishi or rishika received the revelation of wisdom from the supreme plane termed as parame vyoman in RV and transcribed it into poems with appropriate words and metres. Thus there is no contradiction between the traditional view that the Veda is apaurusheya, not composed by a human being, and the modern view that the rishis are the poets of RV since the verses came out of their mouth. This is clear from the RV itself.” (Kashyap 2012:12) What follows are a few claims by 20th-century authors like Sri Aurobindo, and only one from the Veda itself: the phrase“dadarśa vācam”, “he saw the word” (RV 10.71.4), from the fag end of the (literally millennial) composition span of the Ṛg-Veda. This Vedic phrase is not a straightforward description of the genesis of Vedic verses. The entire hymn is, at any rate, a human composition addressed to the “god” Jñāna, “wisdom”, though poet Bṛhaspati Aṅgiras also addresses himself. He never pretends that some divine source is putting words into his mouth or that he himself “sees words”. He only makes the point that some see a word, some hear a word, but don’t “get” it, while a rare individual seizes upon “her”, the word, who then “gives herself like a loving wife to her husband” (in itself a beautiful way to describe the poet’s extraordinary openness to inspiration). In case this verse does describe the way a Vedic poet encounters the words he puts in verse, it only fits the scenario we envision to reconstruct the slow evolution from purely human poetry via this late-Vedic verse to the post-Vedic belief in revealed hymns. A rather authoritative commentator is the late Kanchi Shankaracharya, Sri Chandrashekharendra Saraswati. He explains: “The Vedas are called anādi – without a beginning in terms of time. That is to say, anything previous to it or older than it does not exist.” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:3) But he starts by doubting this: “How can this be accepted? A book has necessarily to have an author; at least one, if not more.” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:3) This sounds promising, but the sequel doesn’t lead to the answer modern rationalists expect. The choice is only between “as old as” or “older than” creation: “If the Vedas came into being with the first creation, they cannot be said to be without beginning.” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:5) He finds the solution for this strange conundrum in a late-Vedic verse (Western Orientalists limit the term Veda or Śruti to the Saṁhitās, but Indians include the Upaniṣads in them): “Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.4.10 says the Vedas are Īśvara’s exhalation.” So “they coexist with Him” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:6), the Vedas inhere in the Divine every moment of its eternal existence. But since we didn’t create our breath, it existed from as soon as we were born, and likewise the Vedas exist for as long as God exists: “even He cannot be said to have created them. They have always existed together.” (Chandrashekharendra 1991:6) So, sort of eternal. By the way, having been written long before a wave of theistic devotionalism submerged Hinduism, this Bṛhadāraṇyaka phrase doesn’t contain the word Īśvara which a 20th-century commentator imputes to it. It merely says that, the way smoke emanates from fire, the Vedas together with the natural sciences have all emanated, but doesn’t say whence. If this late-Vedic verse had made a distinction between the Vedas on the one hand and on the other hand history, the natural sciences and all compositions agreed to be of human origin, we could have categorized it as typical for the transition period between the fully creative Vedic period and the static exalted post-Vedic belief in apauruṣeyatva. But we don’t even have to that: in spite of the 20th-century attempt to enlist it in the apauruṣeyatva doctrine, it actually fails to exalt the Vedas above the undoubtedly human compositions. It treats all books as essentially the same kind of composition, viz. by a human author. Philosophical basis The term apauruṣeya is usually translated as “non-human”, “impersonal”. It does not come from the Vedas themselves, not at all, but from the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā school of philosophy, centuries younger than the youngest book that could reasonably be called Vedic: “The Mīmāṁsakas hold that the Veda is self-subsistent, eternal and ‘Śruti’ or divine revelation.” (Anirvan 2018:11-12) In the intervening centuries, the Vedas had been extolled, with a class of people set apart just to memorize them and pass them on unchanged to the letter; with the best of sciences (grammar, mathematics, astronomy) growing up around them; and with kings in distant parts of India invited Brahmin communities and settling them in privileged agrahāras to add Vedic lustre to their dynasties. If anything in the surroundings of an ancient Hindu approached the divine, this was it. The idea of divinizing them or at least their provenance caught on among intellectually unsophisticated minds, and finally also among the cream of Hindu philosophers, Śaṅkara and the others. So the authority for the apauruṣeyatva belief can be traced back in writing at least some 2200 years: to the Pūrva Mīmāṁsā school, the most Veda-centric of the Hindu philosophical schools. In the foundational Pūrva Mīmāṁsā Sūtra, sage Jaimini sets out to prove: “The unquestionable validity of ‘Vedic injunction’ as the only means of knowing Dharma.” (PMS 5) Yet he admits something that was already opined by (no, not ugly ill-wishing foreigners or incomprehending Orientalists, but) his Hindu contemporaries: “According to some people, the Vedas are the work of human authors; being, as they are, named after man. Also because we find (in the Veda the mention of) many non-eternal things.” (PMS 27-28) He waves these objections off by breezily claiming: “But the eternality of the word has already been established.” (PMS 29) So let’s check the preceding passage he refers to. They merely assert (questionable) claims about the word, as a generic category, never specifying Vedic as distinct from other texts: “(The word) must be regarded as eternal.” (PMS 18) But none of the reasons given for this bizarre claim is convincing. Thus it is asserted: “What is perceptible [by the ear] is not what is spoken of.” (PMS 22) In modern linguistic terms (incidentally inspired on Pāṇini): the signifier (le signifiant) differs from the signified (le signifié). Of course the word “water” does not equal the element water, but linguists don’t deduce the eternality of any object from this. Or because the word exists before it is uttered and still exists after having been uttered. (to sum up PMS 13) By this standard, your car is eternal, for before you take it out on a ride, it already existed, and after you park it, it goes on existing. Or: “We meet with (texts) indicative of the eternality of words).” (PMS 23) We don’t think that highly of the longevity of texts, but they can indeed last longer than their composition or recitation. More pertinently, though, by making a claim about “the” word, any word, this fails to differentiate between fleeting human compositions and the supposedly very special, divine Vedas. If this proves the Vedas are uncreated, it does the same for all profane writings. The Qur’ān as apauruṣeya This apauruṣeyatva doctrine is actually a mirror-image of the Islamic view of the Qur’ān: abiding since creation (if not earlier) in God's bosom, the Qur’ān is rained down on humanity at a time and place of God's choosing. Next to the Qur’ān, the Hadīth (traditions about the Prophet’s sayings and doings) and Sīra (the Prophet’s biography) do not have that divine status, but function nonetheless as the basis for unchangeable Islamic law, Šarī’a. In Hinduism the Śāstras have a similar status. The difference between really existing Dharma and Dīn, effective Hinduism and Islam, viz. Śāstra and Šarī’a, is not as radical as often thought. The exclusive claim of Islam has no counterpart in Vedic tradition, that much is radically different; but its attitude to the supernatural is similar. Part of its scripture has a supernatural origin; and part of it has a human origin (and is thus a bit more negotiable) but is nonetheless normative. And this did not come about under Islamic influence, but stems from a common layer in human nature, a pan-human tendency to idealize and absolutize anything deemed spiritual, a tendency well-attested in many cultures throughout history. Yet, the difference is unmistakable for those who care to read the source texts. The Qur’ān (or likewise, the Biblical Ten Commandments) takes the form of God speaking to his prophet or to mankind. By contrast, the Vedic hymns take the form of a human composer addressing or describing a Deity. Ṛṣis are not receptacles Traditionalist Hinduism makes a claim on the Vedic Ṛṣis, viz. that they were passive receptacles of divine revelations. However, this assertion would be unrecognizable to the Ṛṣis themselves: they created these “revelations”. The Vedic text itself serves to verify this. Unlike Mohammed for the Qur’ān, at least according to Islamic doctrine, the Ṛṣis were authors of the Vedic hymns. They all mention themselves as the agentive minds behind the hymns and the worship proceedings which they captured in words or in which they were employed. The very first hymn of the Ṛg-Veda is Oṁ Agnim ile, "I worship the Fire” (RV 1.1.1): The poet as subject, the personified Fire or the Fire god as object. Likewise hundreds of others, e.g.: “I worship Heaven and Earth, parents of the Gods.” (RV 7:53:1 and again 7:43:1) The first hymn was probably put first on purpose, but is not considered the oldest. Since Hermann Oldenberg (1888), and made widely known in India by Shrikant Talageri (2000:38), not the first but the sixth book is considered the oldest. The hymns within the book are not necessarily in chronological order, but its first hymn belongs at any rate to the oldest generation of hymns. Well, its composer Bharadvāja starts with: Tvaṁ hyAgne prathamo…, “You, Agni, are truly the first…” (RV 6.1.1.) God spoken to, man speaking. His second hymn, likewise directed to Agni, likewise opens with Tvam hi… , “You truly”, and credits him with giving na, “us”, our food and all the rest. (RV 6.1.2) In the third hymn, the poet describes his own devotion to “you, Agni”, and implores Agni for protection. (RV 6.1.3) (Of Bharadvāja we don’t have much biographical detail except in much later post-Vedic literature, esp. in the notoriously fanciful Purāṇas. The extant contemporary writings on the Vedic Ṛṣis, such as Sastry 1980, Nagar 2012:86-96, and Mishra 2022, are typically based on these divergent later accounts and conflate the original sages with their descendants who carry the same name; they lack a critical investigation of what we can reliably know about these sages. Anyway, we plead for more scholarly attention to the individual histories of the Vedic sages, esp. Bharadvāja as the first of them, given their crucial importance for Hindu history.) For some more stray examples from later hymns, consider one showing how the composers valued their compositions as precious gifts to the deity addressed: “Agni, Creator, to you who are wise, acquainted with the past, I address, oh sage, these soliciting mysterious words, ever-to-be-recited poems, together with praises and prayers.” (RV 4.3.16) Or they illustrate the principle of “feeding the gods”, how it is sacrifices by humans that give life to the gods: “For you, Agni, these sweetest words; for you, may this invocation be a blessing to the heart. You are the one these songs fill with power.” (RV 5.11.5) Or they ask “you”, the deity, to purify “our” thoughts: “God Savitā, impel the ritual! Impel for good fortune the lord of ritual! Divine Gandharva, purifier of thought, purify our thoughts!” (YV, Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4.1.7) Witness especially the two most famous Vedic hymns: in the Gāyatrī Mantra, “may You, the rising Sun, awaken our minds” (RV 3.62.10); or in the Mṛtyunjaya Mantra: “we worship the tryambaka deity” (RV 7.59.12). The composers are sometimes quite explicit about their own effort to complete and perfect their poems: “A thought have I imagined, like a workman.” (RV 3.38.1) This refers to the craftsmanship needed, and the hard work of fashioning verses: as any poet knows, composing poetry is one part inspiration and nine parts perspiration. Ṛṣi Vasiṣṭha even praises himself for having, through his perfect hymns, swayed the god Indra into supporting his employer, king Sudās, so that the latter wins the Battle of the Ten Kings (in the only hymns that takes a living human being as presiding deity, viz.: Vasiṣṭha and his sons): “Vasiṣṭhas, through your prayers did Indra defend Sudās in the War of the Ten Kings.” (RV 7:33:3) The hymns themselves regularly refer to a pre-Vedic age, impossible if they are uncreated. Thus, to the "Ṛṣis from the past” (RV 1.1.2); to past battles, e.g. against the Druhyu tribe with the help of Aikṣvāku king Māndhātā (RV 1.112.13, RV 8.39.8, RV 8.40.12). within memory of the Vedic project’s initiators, king Bharata and his court-priest Ṛṣi Bharadvāja; or many times to more distant ancestors like Manu and Ilā. For a final example, consider the concluding verse of the Īśa Upaniṣad: “Oh Agni, lead us along the auspicious path to prosperity, oh god who knowest all our deeds. Take away from us deceitful sins. We shall offer many prayers unto thee.” (IU 18) The Upaniṣads, the philosophical prose concluding the Vedas, though later and from a period when the Vedic hymns were already being idealized, continue the position taken by the hymns: when mentioning a deity, they do not pretend to be spoken by this deity (1st person), but instead are human utterances about (3rd person) or towards (2nd person) the deity. Criticism For the modern scholarly view, we can start in the introduction to philosophy by Prof. Chandradhar Sharma, who says point-blank that “the orthodox view that the Vedas are authorless and eternal (…) cannot be philosophically sustained”. (1987:16) One indication is human fallibility, presumably not applicable to God. The Vedas do contain mistakes. Not many, but enough to prove their humble human origin. Thus, the Maitrāyaṇīya Upaniṣad (1.4) evokes an impression of increasing chaos, a familiar lament. As an example how not only sinful men but even the stars have started disobeying natural law, it mentions that Dhruva (Thuban or Alpha Draconis), the Pole Star in ca. 2800 BC, is falling away from the North Pole. The name Dhruva, “fixed”, was clearly given at a time when it was indeed on the Pole and didn’t seemed to move in a night time, whereas the other stars all circled around the Pole. But because of a perfectly natural movement called the precession, less visible than daily rotation or yearly revolution, no Pole Star is forever. Precession is a cycle of around 25772 tears, or 1° per ca. 71 years, so it takes sophisticated astronomical knowledge to become aware of it. The Maitrāyaṇīya writer clearly hadn’t, so he give a wrongly negative interpretation to a movement that was perfectly compliant with ṛta, natural law. Would God have made this mistake? One of the proofs is the intertextuality (quotations and other deference to earlier texts) present in Vedic literature, possibly even with the oldest hymns quoting passages of irretrievable pre-Vedic texts, but at any rate verifiably with later Vedic texts quoting earlier Vedic texts. This is sometimes to repeat their meaning, sometimes to give novel interpretations to old phrases set in stone, and sometimes even to disagree with what some ancestor had said. Prof. Daya Krishna (1990:63-94) gives a number of examples of later hymns borrowing from earlier hymns, or the Yajur-Veda and Atharva-Veda reproducing mantras from the Ṛg-Veda, or the Upaniṣads from the Saṁhitās. Thus, the Puruṣa section of the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (3.11-21) is an obvious and explicit reference to the Vedic Puruṣa Sūkta (RV 10.90). It partly restates the hymn’s verses literally, but also shifts the focus to the deity Śiva, equated with the cosmic man, and the typically Upaniṣadic concept of the colourless Self (Ātma). Another famous passage from the Ṛg-Veda concerns two birds: “Two birds associated together and mutual friends take refuge in the same tree, one of them eats the sweet fig; the other, abstaining from food, merely looks on.” (RV 1.164.20) This imagery is copied in the Mundaka Upaniṣad 3.1.1-2 and the Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 4.6-7, and there becomes the master image of the choice between savṛtti and nivṛtti, worldly involvement vs. renunciation; or between jīva, “soul”, the entity wandering through life and facing all its challenges, and ātma, “Self”, the unchanging core of our being. This was to remain a major theme throughout Hindu philosophy. These are just a few examples of the common phenomenon of Vedic intertextuality. Does God, by definition the highest authority, deal in quotations, which are an appeal to higher authority? A specific case of intertextuality is later Vedic passages referring to earlier ones to disagree with them. It is often said that the Buddha rejected Vedic ritualism, as part of the now-common assertion of Buddhism’s separateness from “Hinduism” or at least from the Vedic tradition. But this is in fact one of the cases where the Buddha simply continues a trend started in the Upaniṣads, i.e. in the concluding part of the Veda itself (“Vedānta”). To put it in well-known terms, the Upaniṣads replace (or at least, shift the focus from) karmakāṇḍa, the ritualist half, to highlight jñānakāṇḍa, the wisdom half. Thus, in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad 7.1.4 ff. the senior sage Sanatkumāra explains to the junior sage Nārada that the Vedas are called nāma, “a mere name”, together with (and on the same footing as) a string of worldly sciences. Then he assures him that there is something higher than this “name” category, and enumerates a number of things successively higher, such as saṅkalpa (decisiveness) and prāṇa (life breath). This chapter is not one of the most logically cogent in the Upaniṣads, but at least it testifies that the Vedas are not given the unique reverence due to a uniquely divine revelation. The Mundaka Upaniṣad 1.1.5 lists the four Vedas along with the auxiliary (undoubtedly human-originated) sciences or Vedāṅgas as aparavidya, “non-supreme science”. It contrasts all of these, including the Vedic hymns, with the roadmap to the akṣara, the “immutable” or absolute, which is paravidya, “supreme science”. To drive home this point further, the Mundaka Upaniṣad 1.2.7 compares Vedic sacrifices or yajñas to leaky boats: “These ships of sacrifice (…) are inferior in merit, transient and fleeting.” Would God, or whatever we call the supernatural power that supposedly gave us the Vedas, first reveal a doctrine that He had carried with Him for ages, and then within a few centuries (a mere blip on a divine time-scale) repudiate His very own message? Actually we do find this situation in the Islamic system, where Allah is said to have “abrogated” some Qur’ān passages with later ones of a different or opposite thrust. But if we take a sober outsiders’ look, we see this “abrogation” doctrine for what it is: a transparent attempt by apologists to keep up the postulated divinity of a text though it bears the hallmarks of authorship by an human composer who changed his mind under changing circumstances. Similarly, the world evolved in the Vedic age and new human insights gave rise to new texts of a different thrust. Finally, we have a few cases of intertextuality with non-Vedic texts. The overlaps with the Mahābhārata are a bit trivial, but are to be noted, for they confirm the Vedic situatedness in space and time. Thus, the youngest person mentioned in the Ṛg-Veda is Śantanu, who is the stepfather of the Veda editor (Veda-Vyāsa, né Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana). The youngest in the Yajur-Veda is Veda-Vyāsa’s biological son Dhrtarāṣṭra, which tallies well with the tradition that Veda-Vyāsa gave the definitive form to the Vedas, or at least to the Veda-Trayī of Ṛg-Veda, Sāma-Veda (which mostly repeats from Ṛg-Veda, but now set to music) and Yajur-Veda. The Atharva-Veda took a few generations more, for the youngest person mentioned there is Veda-Vyāsa’s great-great-grandson Parīkṣit. A far more sensational case of external intertextuality concerns the Vārṣāgira battle mentioned in RV 1.100. It lists the main protagonists of the battle, which took place on the Afghan side of the Bolan Pass (a sequel to the Battle of the Ten Kings mainly discussed in RV 7.18, 7.33 and 7.83). This battle and the main protagonists likewise figure in the Iranian scripture Avesta, mainly Yašt 5.109-113 and Yašt 9.30, and they match (fully discussed in Talageri 200:208-231, esp. 216). It is extremely exceptional to find a battle this early where we have the version of both the warring parties. Finally we must mention a very fundamental critique, for which we can as yet only quote a personal communication from the nonagenarian art historian Dr. Lokesh Chandra. According to him, the term Śruti is usually subject to mistranslation, it should be “that which can be heard; fame, glory”. Indeed, whereas the Śāstras are discretely used for learned reference in judicial proceedings among specialists, the Vedic hymns were recited in public or included in publicly-conducted rituals. They were heard from afar. It is not impossible that this down-to-earth use of the description “heard” was subsequently reinterpreted in a supernatural sense. The latter interpretation has become the accepted one since more than two thousand years, but that doesn’t make it authentic. Vedas in history The Vedas, by their own testimony, are located in history. Their flora (no sequoias or pine trees), fauna (no giraffes, penguins or kangaroos), rivers (no Yellow River or Mississippi) and level of technology (no stone fist-axes nor automobiles) indicate a particular window in space-time. Unambiguously, their cradle was in Bronze-Age Northwest-India. From there and then, a number of historical events found their way into otherwise religious poetry. All the arguments we have ever heard against the historicity of the Vedas (which cannot annul the Ṛṣis’ own primary testimony anyway) are based on post-Vedic sayings making the same claim that the traditionalists still make, nothing more. Thus from the Manu Smṛti: “But from fire, wind and sun, He [= Prabhu, the Lord] drew forth the threefold eternal Veda, called Ṛk, Yajus and Sāman, for the due performance of the sacrifice.” (MS 1.23) Mind you, already in the Ṛg-Veda, the Ṛṣis’ distant ancestor Manu was known as a lawgiver, and the notion of “Manu’s Law” may already have existed. But it was malleable, evolved with the times (as still explicitly permitted in the concluding part of the presently-available Manu Smṛti), but the historically-attested version bears the imprint of the social conditions ca. two thousand years ago. It is absolutely not a contemporary testimony of the Vedas’ genesis, and anyway, its florid formulation seems just a manner of speaking, not a denial of the Vedas’ composition by human hand. In a general sense, it is of course true that the Manu Smṛti, the Bhagavad Gītā and other post-Vedic literature took this new narrative of uncreated revealed eternal Vedas and ran with it, making it into an unquestioned tradition. Yet, with all due respect for those authority-laden books, their claim is and remains in conflict with the much older evidence from the Vedas themselves, and wrong. Among the reasons not yet discussed, we might mention that explaining the hymns as supernaturally induced does injustice to the divine character of the gods: if these have to dictate to the poets the hymns of praise to themselves, they are narcissistic. If a girl is given a serenade by a suitor below her balcony, she is not going to dictate to him which praises to sing. On the contrary, she wants to be surprised by what new imaginative phrases he comes up with. The relation between composer and deity is indeed that of a lover singing a serenade under his beloved's balcony. Just as the suitor hopes to sway her and make her favour him, the poet hopes to influence the deity towards his side ("do ut des"). It is absurd to think that the girl has dictated the lyrics of the song of praise to the suitor: “Tell me how uniquely beautiful I am. Sing how my eyes are as deep as the ocean! Compare me to a summer’s day!” On the contrary, she wants to get impressed with the novel imagery he has managed to invent. Similarly, it is absurd to think that the gods have dictated the hymns in praise of themselves to the composers. How was the transition made from human hymnal poetry into a legacy from the gods? In practice, the Vedas derived an enormous prestige from: 1) the quality of the poetry, at a time when mastery of the possibilities of language was the highest art form (cfr. the pre-Islamic Arabs, who as nomads had no sculpture or architecture worth the name, but had a cult of singing and poetry); 2) the discipline of learning the hymns by heart, the whole edifice of their mnemotechniques and the social support by a Brahminical class set apart for it, and 3) the fact that they became the backbone around which many new sciences grew (Vedāṅgas, Upavedas, some of them worldwide firsts, esp. linguistics and some branches of mathematics). They peacefully conquered India, because kings in eastern and peninsular India invited Brahmin communities to settle in their domains, encouraging their immigration with the gift of privileged neighbourhoods (agrahāras), all in order to add the prestige of the Vedic tradition to their dynasty’s fame. This way, the Vedas and their language acquired a new role as the glasses through which to see all the accruing non-Vedic components of Hinduism (e.g. mūrtipūjā), serving as vault over these and providing them with a conceptual framework and technical language. As their origin disappeared on the horizon but their glory became ever more conspicuous, the Vedas were elevated ever higher. A new narrative gained ground, allotting them a divine origin. Invented tradition This evolution provides one of world history's best examples of an “invented tradition”. The term was launched by the British Marxist philosopher Eric Hobsbawm, ca. 1980. An invented tradition is fairly recent but falsely claims ancientness. Or more charitably, it reinterprets earlier tradition and absorb it into a new worldview. By the time literacy was popularized (we won’t speak out on the common assumption that it was “revived”), ca. 300 BCE, a new tradition had been invented that continues the centrality of and veneration for the Vedas, but overlays this with a newly-added doctrine of their supernatural provenance. An invented tradition projects the present norms onto the past, or norms valid in a recent past onto a more ancient past. Its votaries homogenize the past into a single screen, denying any specific time-depth to different phases. They do in time what we all do in space when looking at the stars: we see no space-depth, these stars all look homogeneously far, whether 4 or 4,000 light years away. In doing so, the invented-traditionalists deny changes that have taken place at some historical point in the past. This takes the form of grafting onto the ancient past far more recent traditions. When Marxists speak of an invented tradition, they usually insinuate a sinister motive for imposing this false account of the past. The oppressor class misuses its cultural power to misinform the oppressed classes, all the better to seduce them into accepting their subaltern position. In this case, however, we see no reason to posit such an ulterior motive. The Hindu mind innocently tends towards divinization, as exemplified by the cases of Rāma and Kṛṣṇa. The heroes Rāma and Kṛṣṇa started out as ordinary human beings: born from a mother like everyone (as attested by their respective birthplaces, still centres of pilgrimage), they both experienced love and intrigue, war and flight and victory, mourning and joy, doubt and compromise. They died an all-too-human, meaningless death: drowned in a flood c.q. shot in a hunting accident. Yet a few generations later, they got elevated to the status of Viṣṇu’s incarnation, in recognition of their role as upholder of dharma in the human world (magnified in the retelling), the human counterpart of the deity’s role in the pantheon as Preserver. Next, temples are dedicated to them, on the same footing as temples to the immortal gods. Though we consider the apauruṣeyatva doctrine a mistake, we need to emphasize its relative innocence, for it contrasts with a similar and related invented tradition that is not so innocent: the attribution of a divine origin to the institution of caste. Caste was absent in the Vedic age, as affirmed by Orientalists like Frits Staal (2008:53-55) and even Marxist historian Shereen Ratnagar (in Thapar 2006:166). On its fundamentalist revaluation of the Vedas, the 19th-century reform movement Ārya Samāj based its seemingly very modern rejection of caste, taking Vedic society as model for its projected casteless society. Next, patrilineal caste appeared during the long millennium when the Mahābhārata was being edited. This may be exemplified by the case of Veda-Vyāsa, sage par excellence and son of sage Parāśara, but his mother belonged to a fishermen community. This patrilineal system prevailed till at least the Buddha’s lifetime (he had to deal with a conflict in his friend Prasenajit’s family when son Virūdhaka discovered that his mother was not a proper kṣatriya: no problem according to the aged Buddha, but intolerable for the young prince). Then the new norm of endogamy appears in the upper class, and this gradually gets generalized to all of Hindu society by ca. 300 CE, when geneticists find that it has developed a box-type division in separate communities. (Biswas 2016) Traditionalists will at this point tend to minimize the caste problem, pointing out e.g. that outsiders typically fail to understand how, before being an exclusion-from, caste also is a belonging-to, a solidarity network. Alright, the issue is complicated, but it remains true that the new caste structure of society privileged certain communities. It clearly served the power interests of certain emerging castes, while demeaning others. It is too late now to get worked up over social evolutions taking place thousands of years ago, but we may frown when we still see an (admittedly shrinking) group justifying caste stratification and distorting history to that end. Invented-traditionalists tend to dehistoricize caste. They deny its gradual rise, and claim it as eternal and intrinsic to Hinduism. (Today, it certainly serves the interests of the Christian Missionaries and anti-Hindu Leftists who pontificate that “there is no Hinduism without caste” – in perfect unison with the Hindu invented-traditionalists.) This invented tradition on caste differs from but piggy-backs on the apauruṣeyatva tradition. They argue that caste was divinely ordained, and that this is clear from its legitimation in the God-given Vedas. We just argued that caste is absent there, yet they always point to the Puruṣa Sūkta (RV 10:90) as the basis for caste. This hymn appears at the very end of the Ṛg-Veda, and according to many scholars including Friedrich Max Müller it is an even later interpolation, put there precisely to create Vedic legitimacy for caste. This would make it a very wilful case of invented tradition, fielded deliberately with an oppressive intent. However, no matter what the hymn’s provenance, a close reading shows surpringly that it doesn’t contain the defining elements of caste at all: hereditary profession and endogamy. It merely sums up four functional layers in society, hierarchically arranged like the body parts from head to toe, which you find in any developed society. This is simply the application of the corporatist, “body-like” model to the social world, after the hymn had likewise applied it to the natural world. This again is a comparison you find in many cultures: the skull corresponding to the heavenly vault, the eyes to sun and moon, the bones to the mountains, the bloodstream to the rivers, the feet to the earth. In Roman society too, the upper-class negotiator Menenius Agrippa (ca. 500 BC) persuaded the rebellious lower classes with the corporatist metaphor: all parts of society have to work together and accept each other’s specificities, just like the parts of the body. Saint Paul, a Roman citizen, would repeat it (1 Corinthians 12:12-31). Then with that passage as a lead, the Catholic Church through Pope Leo XIII (encyclical Rerum Novarum 1891) would declare corporatism the “social teaching of the Church”, upholding the harmony model against the then-rising socialist model of class struggle. But here you see the poison of invented traditions again. The terms used had not been casteist in the mind of the writer, but had meanwhile become caste terms. For at least sixteen centuries, 4th till 20th, these four varṇa (colour, quality) groups had a hereditary monopoly on certain professions, and refrained from intermarriage. These defining traits of caste (hereditary profession and endogamy) got back-projected onto the Puruṣa Sūkta, hence on the Vedas, hence on the gods who had supposedly authored the Vedas. This went effortlessly: every Hindu in 800, or 1800, who heard about a Brāhmaṇa or a Śūdra, was bound to think of caste, and was likewise bound to associate the Vedic source with divine revelation. This is how bad history, including invented traditions, can lead to grave problems. It can absolutize them, turn them into a matter of divine volition, no less. But this also shows how good history can relativize them and make them manageable again. Conclusion The assumption that the Vedas are of supernatural origin, apauruṣeya, is demonstrably in conflict with various types of testimony in the Vedas themselves. Oddly, for people who hold the Vedas in such quasi-divinizing awe, the invented-traditionalists turn out to go against this Vedic testimony. We invite them to briefly interrupt their devout Veda recitations for a critical reading of the Vedas, to clear up their confusion. They won't welcome this refutation of their fond belief. They may associate our observations with despised ideological movements like Nehruvian secularism, materialism and atheism. But look at the bright side. Hindus too are called to develop the Constitutionally-ordained “scientific temper”, which was never contradicted by any Hindu religious dogma. The apauruṣeyatva belief was never un-Hindu, only a mistake, as happens once in a while to human beings. Moreover, if traditionalists care about ancestry, this refutation of their cramped belief ought to gladden them. It implies that their Ṛṣi ancestors were not passive receptacles of voices from above, but creative geniuses. Surely this quality is still lurking somewhere in their own genes. Bibliography Achar, BN Narahari, 2020: Revisiting the Chronology of Rigveda and the exact identity of Vedic Aryans, Academia.edu. Anirvan, 2018: Veda Mīmāṁsā, vol.1, Akshaya Prakashan, Delhi. Besant, Annie, and Das, Bhagavan, 2000 (1940): Sanātana Dharma. An Advanced Textbook of Hindu Religion and Ethics, Theosophical Publishing House, Chennai. Chandrashekharendra Saraswati, Sri, 1991: The Vedas, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay. Elst, Koenraad, 2012: The Argumentative Hindu, Voice of India, Delhi. Biswas, Premankur, 2016: “Genetic study suggests caste began to dictate marriage from Gupta reign”, Indian Express, 16 February 2016. Jha, MG, 1915: The Purva-Mimamsa-Sutras of Jaimini, Bharatiya Publishing House, Varanasi. Kashyap, RL, 2012 (1999): Why Read the Rig Veda?, Sri Aurobindo Kapali Sastry Institute of Vedic Studies, Bengaluru. Krishna, Daya, 1996 (1991): Indian Philosophy. A Counter Perspective, OUP, Delhi. Mishra, Sampadananda, 2022: The Rishi Tradition of Bharat, Subbu Publ., Delhi. Nagar, Shantilal, 2012: Biographical Dictionary of Ancient Indian Rsis (Based on Vedas, Upanisads, Epics and Puranas), 2 volumes, Akshaya Prakashan, Delhi. Oldenberg, Hermann, 2005 (1888): Prolegomena on Metre and Textual History of the Ṛgveda, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. Rao, SK Ramachandra, et al., 2012 : Exploring the Mystery of the Veda, Sri Aurobindo Kapali Sastry Institute of Vedic Studies, Bengaluru. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 1992 (1953): The Principal Upanishads, Edited with Text, Translation and Notes, Humanity Books, New York. Sastry, Kaipu Lakshminarasimha, 1980: Bharadwaja, Bharata-Bharati Pustaka Sampada, Bengaluru. Sharma, Chandradhar, 1987 (1960): A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi. Staal, Frits, 2008: Discovering the Vedas. Origins, Mantras, Rituals, Insights, Penguin, London/Delhi. Talageri, Shrikant, 2000: The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi. --, 2020a: Rigveda and the Aryan Theory: a Rational Approach, talageri.blogspot.com. --, 2020b: A Reply To Prof. Narahari Achar’s Critique of my article “The Rigveda and the Aryan Theory: A Rational Perspective. The Full Out-of-India Case in Short”, talageri.blogspot.com, 7 July 2020. --, 2020c: The Chronological Gulf between the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda, talageri.blogspot.com, 4 Oct. 2020. Thapar, R., et al.: India. Historical Beginnings and the Concepts of the Aryan, National Book Trust, Delhi 2006. Vedalankar, Pandit Nardev, 1978: Basic Teachings of Hinduism, Veda Niketan, Durban. Wilson, HH, 1997 (1866): Ṛg-Veda Saṁhitā (full text plus translation), Parimal Publ., Delhi.
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Why Indo-Europeanists have a duty to face the Out-of-India Theory

(Pragyata [on-line magazine from Delhi], 21 September 2022) Last week, after years of Corona intermezzo, the Indogermanische Gesellschaft (German: “Indo-European Society”) reconvened for a working conference in the charming Dutch city of Leiden, since long reputed for its Oriental Studies. It was sharply focused, no parallel sessions and all papers dealing somehow with the conference theme: the “Secondary Homelands of Indo-European”. This was indeed worth a brainstorming session bringing together the best minds in the field. Further, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (“German Orientalist Society”) has resumed its regular conferences, so after five years it is holding its Orientalist Conference right now in Berlin, which is where I am writing this article. It includes numerous parallel sessions on all parts of Asia and the Islamic World, among them a long session on Indo-European linguistics. Here there is no thematic focus, but something useful may still come out of it. Debating the homeland Thus far, the debate had concerned the Primary Homeland, or simply the Homeland. When the India-based Jesuit missionary Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux sent his memorandum on the kinship of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek from India to the Academy in Paris in 1767, the Indo-European language family was born (later made known in India by William Jones in 1786), and the hunt for its homeland could take off. The Bible-thumpers insisted on Armenia. That is where Noah’s Ark had landed, and the Indo-Europeans were taken to be the descendents of Jafeth, one of Noah’s sons. But the role of the discovery of Sanskrit in the realization of its kinship with (and the mutual kinship of) most European languages was widely taken to indicate India. Sanskrit was apparently the oldest form of Indo-European, with e.g. 8 cases of the noun instead of 5 in Greek and 6 in Latin, or 3 numbers instead of 2, with Latin and Greek having only a few relics of the missing locative and instrumental cases and of the dual number. Modern linguists would therefore call it an elder sister of the other languages, back then people concluded that Sanskrit had to be the mother of the others, the origin. The French freethinker Voltaire was among the leading European minds who welcomed the idea of an Indian origin for European culture, if only because as an ex-Christian he wanted to diminish the Church’s claim on Europe. Though the term “Out-of-India Theory” (OIT) was only coined ca. 1997 (by the American Indologist Edwin Bryant), the idea had been launched by Europeans some 250 years ago. For about sixty years, India remained the favourite among the possible homelands. The tilting point came in the 1830s, esp. after August Schlegel had proposed the Caucasus area. The nail in the Indocentric hypothesis’ coffin came with the launch of Linguistic Paleontology ca. 1860, which located the homeland in a colder zone and to the west (on the assumption that words for cold-climate flora and fauna pointed this way, whereas in fact, India too has islands of cold climate near the mountains, and has bears, wolves, otters and birch trees too); and by the discovery of war episodes in the Rg-Veda which were interpreted as depicting white invaders subduing the dark natives (see below). In India this choice for a peri-Caucasian homeland necessitated a later influx into India, which became known as the Aryan invasion (hence Aryan Invasion Theory, AIT). Nowadays many philologists squeamishly insist on calling it an “immigration”, as if a change in language and religion of the then-largest human civilization could have come about (as the excavations indicate) without power struggle. Well, suit yourselves: after all, an invasion is also a form of immigration, so no objection to reading “AIT” as “Aryan Immigration Theory”. Some Indians saw the bright side: the AIT upgraded them from colonial underlings to the cousins of their British overlords. In the USA, some Hindu immigrants even used it in Court to upgrade themselves from the “Coloured” to the “White” category. But still it became most popular among those Indian communities most loyal to the colonial power, most anti-nationalist, like on the one hand the Sikhs (who identified themselves with the Aryan invaders, even physically looking like how we imagine the Vedic sages), on the other the Dravidianists and the Christianized tribals (who identified themselves as the non-Aryan natives entitled to compensatory privileges). The second, anti-Aryan tendency has gained strength after Independence, while the pro-Aryan tendency has withered away, in parallel with the post-Nazi opinion shift in the West. Many Indians remained skeptical of such an invasion (though without developing a theory of how the other Indo-European languages ended up in Europe, such as the OIT), e.g. Aurobindo Ghose and Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, but this was henceforth kept out of public debate. Meanwhile many English-speaking Indians accepted it, mostly out of awe for Western scholarship which had proven itself path-breaking in many fields. This included even anti-colonial champions such as Congress president Bal Gangadhar Tilak (who thought up his own version in his 1903 book Arctic Home in the Vedas) and chief Hindu Nationalist ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar in his still-influential manifesto Hindutva (“Hinduness”, 1924). It may be needed to emphasize this, as misinformed Westerners have been tutored to identify the rejection of the AIT with Hindu nationalism. In 2015, Mallikarjuna Kharge, parliamentary leader of the oppositional Congress Party, scolded some high-caste North-Indian adversaries: “You Aryans don’t belong in India”, a very common rhetoric. It is often sharpened for use against the Brahman caste: Brāhmaṇ sālā, deś choḍo! (“Brahmin brother-in-law [a common term of abuse, implying: ‘I slept with your sister’], leave the country”), with anti-Brahmanism having become in many details the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism. While European scholars have delinked Indo-European history from all possible political connotations (at least consciously), in India the political misuse of the AIT has continued till today. Political dimension It is because of this divisive use of the AIT that when scholars ca. 1990 started challenging the AIT, the Hindu nationalist movement jumped on the bandwagon. As a result of this political embrace of the non-AIT (which need not imply the OIT), Western scholars have developed the reprehensible habit of referring to the non-AIT spokesmen and even the OIT defenders (they don’t know the difference) as “Hindu nationalists”. Thus, in an incident between Hans Hock and Shrikant Talageri which I greatly deplore, Hock, who had distinguished himself by his scholarly engagement with the OIT, scolded Talageri as, of course, a “Hindu nationalist”, as if that made his newer arguments unworthy of dealing with. It so happens that I have written my PhD dissertation and several books about religio-politics in India, and dare to claim some expertise in the matter. The difference between the realities on the ground and the Hindu nationalist movement’s international reputation is breath-taking and certain to become a case study in academic malpractice once the power equation that has made this possible, changes. Thus, when in the mid-1990s the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bhāratīya Janatā Party, “Indian People’s Party”) threatened to come to power, terrible predictions were made about what it would do, like “throwing all Muslims into the ocean”. But in 14 years of being in Government (1998-2004 and 2014-present) nothing of the sort has happened. Indeed, the hard figures about victims of religious violence, as opposed to the swollen media rhetoric, shows that the Muslims are far safer in India today than under anti-Hindu-nationalist Prime Ministers like Indira Gandhi (and a hundred times safer than Hindus in Pakistan or Bangladesh). But no fulminator against “Hindu fascism” is known to have retracted his assessment even after having been proved wrong. Apart from stating that much here, I will leave this topic for a different occasion. It is only relevant here to explain how non-specialists in Indian religio-politics, such as the Indo-European linguists, are massively falling for a distorted view of it, with implications for their own choices within their field of expertise, i.c. boycotting the OIT. There are a few problems with this boycott, though. Firstly the identification of the non-AIT (and a fortiori the OIT) with Hindu nationalism is not true, a consideration that ought to count for something among scholars. There is at most an overlap between the historiographical and the political position, but with many exceptions on both sides. Thus, one of the anti-AIT pioneers, Bhagwan Singh (The Vedic Harappans, 1995), was a Marxist, and the whole rejection of the AIT has an obvious anticolonial dimension. Oh, and speaking for myself: I am neither a Hindu nor a nationalist. At any rate the OIT predated any use by any political movement. Admittedly there is this bizarre conspiracy theory abroad (equally among the rank-and-file of India’s anti-AIT camp as in the OIT camp) that a politician sits down to contemplate how to pester his opponents, and then – eureka! – comes up with the plan of concocting a scholarly theory, which moreover manages to fool and instrumentalize the legitimate scholars of the field. Perhaps academics feel themselves far above such a conspiracy theory, yet that is what they are guilty of when identifying the OIT with one of India’s political currents. Secondly it is not relevant. Whether a position is correct or not is independent of who utters it. It is unbecoming for a scholar to attack the person behind an argument and pretend that he thereby has debunked the argument. Indeed, that is the AIT camp’s own position: they defend the AIT (that’s what they implicitly do by espousing any of the peri-Caucasian homeland theories) eventhough it was espoused and ideologically instrumentalized by both the British colonialists and the Nazis. After all, on the abstruse homeland question these worthies might have been right for once. So for what we can see, the AIT party doesn’t seem to be troubled by the political associations of the AIT, and never even to think of them. If some Indo-Europeanists misinformedly declare that the OIT is too politically tainted for their tender attention, let them reflect on the more far-reaching political uses of the AIT which they embrace without a second thought. There is also a non-political reason for boycotting the OIT. In her review of the only book ever that brought together pro-AIT and pro-OIT viewpoints, The Indo-Aryan Controversy by Edwin Bryant and Laurie Patton (eds., 2005), Stephanie Jamison lambasts the very idea of a debate: it wrongly gives a platform to a superstitious theory comparable to Biblical Creationism, the OIT camp are flat-earthers which a scholar can only ignore. This shameless advocacy of cancel culture, moreover for a theory that was long the most accepted one, is an attitude that has gained ground among professional Indo-Europeanists, as I have had to personally find out many times. A consequence is for instance that Joanna Nichols and Claus Peter Zoller have, after Shrikant Talageri pointed out the pro-OIT implications of their findings (that the pattern of lexical borrowing in West-Asian languages from Indo-European indicated that this family came from the east, Bactria or so; c.q. that the Bangani dialect in North India shows a substrate of a kentum Indo-European language similar to the family’s westernmost branches), declared that their findings remain valid but not these pro-OIT implications. In India this is being laughed at as an Inquisition-like or Stalinist-like recanting. Europeans in India The Indian homeland theory is not a recent “concoction by Hindu nationalists”, as ignorant opinion-makers tend to claim. It was a European invention cherished by many Europeans for linguistic and sometimes also ideological reasons. Among them, the pioneers had been Europeans living in India (Coeurdoux, Jones), a significant detail. In Europe before 1800, India was a mystery land in the distance, not yet demoted to a mere colony, but not figuring in people’s everyday consciousness either. In the popular Mercator projection of world maps, India looks smaller than Scandinavia, though in both surface and population it is larger than Europe as a whole. It was easy to side-line and ignore India, except for those living there. Once the OIT lost ground to the peri-Caucasian Homeland theories, it was still Europeans living in India who came to its defence (most prominently Mountstuart Elphinstone, 1841). And after the OIT was revived in the 1980s, it was again Westerners living part-time or full-time in India who elaborated it, but this time along with native Indians. This European phenomenon of “forgetting India” (as the French scholar Roger-Pol Droit calls it is his book title L’Oubli de l’Inde), even among experts of a language family that is half-Indian, was much in evidence at the Leiden conference. It was only discussed in the last 3 papers (of 30), after the actual Homeland discussions had focused on the choice between Armenia and the Yamnaya culture of the steppes. Only in the final lecture was the OIT even mentioned, but at least this mention was fair and objective. Why the OIT was revived It fell to Prof. Martin Kümmel, the leading light in the Indo-Iranian section of Indo-European Studies, to present an overview of the state of the art. He explained the OIT cursorily as mainly stemming from an absence of evidence for an invasion, but noted that most linguists reject the theory. This is in general accurate. The OIT became viable again when ca. 1990 leading Indian archaeologists (and a few non-Indian ones like Jim Shaffer and Diane A. Lichtenstein) went public with their finding that Northwest India, where they were excavating the Harappan cities, showed no trace whatsoever of a foreign influx, neither in the form of the battles most likely to make such a huge take-over possible, and not even by a peaceful discontinuity in material or religious culture, esp. one traceable through Central Asia. This may be contrasted with the well-attested Aryan invasion of Europe, where the influx of the cattle-raising and presumably IE-speaking populations from the steppe is marked by new pottery, burial styles and other archaeological evidence. The dean of Indian archaeology, Braj Basi Lal (deceased last week at 101), who had supported the AIT for decades, changed his mind: he started declaring the Harappan landscape and Vedic literature to be “two sides of the same coin”. Contrary to common opinion, he found numerous similarities between the archaeological testimony from Harappa and Vedic culture. At any rate, these AIT rejecters are people of the same academic rank as the Western linguists who scorn their position; it will not do to “pull rank”. But note that only few of these AIT-skeptical archaeologists took the next step: from negatively denying an immigration into India to positively affirming an emigration. For many Indians, their horizon stops at the Khyber Pass: they are not interested in whether anyone came from outside or went outside. Indeed, many mistrust the emigration theory as a Western ploy to somehow, even after having to give up the immigration scenario, still have a connection with India: the “foreign hand”! Most of them don’t really care; it’s just that on their home turf, they find no trace of the Indo-Aryan invasion that the Westerners are so sure about. Most of the archaeologists, including the naturalized Frenchman Michel Danino, happen to work on the already very extensive topic of the Subcontinent’s archaeology and won’t speak out about what lies outside their expertise. They are satisfied to see the greatness and creativity of India getting ever more recognition at the expense of scenarios of foreign importation. Rejecters of the AIT may be counted in many millions, and some, like the late physicist Navaratna Rajaram, have unchained a titanic rhetoric in the effort, with lots of perceived colonial racism and Biblical superstition conspiring to deny Indians their homeland; even with a show of contempt for the idea itself of a homeland or a language family. They found an ally in the AIT-skeptical Cambridge anthropologist Edmund Leach who highlighted the colonialist background of the AIT, and more recently the Indian adaptation of the Woke wave is put to use to ideologically criminalize the AIT. Even so, Out-of-India theorists are only a handful. For some twenty years after the turning-point of the early 1990s, the late linguist Satya Swarup Misra and the “bank clerk” and self-taught Vedic philologist Shrikant Talageri were the only Indians to develop an Out-of-India scenario. Talageri was not only to intervene in linguistic debates, lacking in specialism but making a rarely effective use of his common sense; he also, and most uniquely, made his mark by presenting the literary testimony of the RgVeda. He showed something that the Indo-Europeanists had deemed impossible, viz. that the later stages of the dispersal from the Indo-European homeland were not separated from history by a millennial abyss, but were actually described by eye-witnesses in human language. No indirect evidence from linguistics, archaeology or genetics, as others have developed, but an explicit mention by human beings like us. While many Hindu traditionalists see the Vedas as eternal and beyond history, an actual lecture of the Vedic hymns teaches that they are very human literature, complete with intertextuality, language evolution, man addressing the gods (as opposed to the Quran or the Biblical Ten Commandments, where it is God addressing men), discernable temporal layers, and numerous references to material circumstances, wars, weddings, genealogies and the rest. They are not history books but nonetheless contain a lot of historical information. The Orientalists Edward Hopkins and Hermann Oldenburg had mapped out the layeredness of the Rg-Veda, and Talageri takes this further. Among the few, exceedingly nit-picking attempts to counter him, the pride of place is invariably for the allegation that he is but an “amateur”. Well, those who want to lambast his reconstruction of Vedic history will first have to prove the top-ranking professionals Hopkins and Oldenburg wrong. In an extremely detailed reading of the Rg-Veda which I cannot hope to summarize here, he manages to decipher numerous aspects of Vedic tradition, such as the lexical and other linguistic changes over time, or the sequence in geographical shift. Thus, the oldest books are familiar with the Ganga in Inner India, but know nothing about Afghanistan, while the later books show a westward shift in perspective. This is the very opposite of what the AIT would make you expect. Most linguists don’t accept the OIT, as Kümmel correctly reports. But then, most linguists by far don’t know the OIT. They rely on vague hearsay, mostly from hostile sources. The minimum that they could do is familiarize themselves with Talageri’s path-breaking work. This starts with his books The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis (2000) and The Rigveda and the Avesta: the Final Evidence (2008); but poverty-stricken or niggardly scholars can now download most of his updated or newer work from his academia.edu page (https://independent.academia.edu/ShrikantTalageri) or his blog spot (https://talageri.blogspot.com). We can have a more in-depth discussion once this essential preliminary has been fulfilled. It is only in the last decade that Talageri is getting a few followers. Often these are academics from wildly different fields who started out by ludicrously misunderstanding the stakes of the controversy, but who have grown during the debate, e.g. the physicists Raj Vedam and Abhijit Chavda, retired bureaucrat Sanjay Dixit, or bio-medical scientist Premendra Priyadarshi. Other pioneers of the revived OIT have been Westerners, principally retired Sanskrit professor Nicholas Kazanas from Greece. There are no departments of Indo-European Linguistics in Indian universities, and no Indian seems to have been motivated to master the subject himself, so that those who do want to speak out on the linguistic aspects often make fools of themselves. But the entry of genetics into the debate has provided a more welcoming atmosphere for the more science-savvy Indians. The contribution of genetics The star guest at the Leiden conference was David Reich, the pioneering geneticist from Harvard. Indians may know him from his book Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018) and its claim that an influx of genetically distinct people entered India from the northwest in 2000-1500 BC, seemingly an independent and unexpected confirmation of the extant AIT. This prestigious book was politically instrumentalized for an attack on Hindu nationalism by journalist Tony Joseph in Early Indians (2018), itself the object of a rebuttal by Shrikant Talageri: Genetics and the Aryan Debate (2019, with foreword by the present writer). Mind you, David Reich need not have been wrong. Having now met him for a few conversations, I certainly wouldn’t suspect him either of prejudice or of incompetence; it will take a very thorough job to find him wrong. But like Martin Kümmel on Indo-European linguistics, his fault may lie in what he does not address. His Indian critics mainly hold it against him that the genes characteristic of the Yamnaya population have been found at an earlier date and in greater variety in India. (Against this, it is argued that this is true for the overarching R1a haplogroup, emerging 22,000 years ago probably in India, while the more specific R1a1 emerged outside India; I leave it to the legitimate geneticists to fight this out.) Secondly, there may well have been a foreign influx, as there have been many in Indian history, such as the Scythians, Greeks, Huns, Kushanas and Turks. But all of them (and the Syrian-Christian and Parsi refugee communities) have linguistically assimilated, even when retaining their separateness in religion. None of them kept its language, let alone impose it on the natives. So invasionists have some explaining to do about what made these Aryan invaders so dramatically different. Anyway, one invasion more or less won’t make the difference, for the influx of a language clearly does not follow from the influx of a genetically definable human community. And there is a third problem with the support for the Aryan Invasion Theory from genetics. We will discuss it separately at the end. In Leiden, Reich presented more recent work, pertaining to a debate between several peri-Caucasian homelands. He sees the Yamnaya culture, generally considered the Indo-European homeland, as only a “secondary homeland”. For those who read carefully, he had cursorily already said so in his 2018 book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Yamnaya was a settlement for people coming from south of the Caucasus, Armenia or even northern Iran. At the 2017 German Orientalist Conference in Jena, linguist Paul Heggarty had already made a similar suggestion, though he thought more of Anatolia as the ultimate homeland. It just goes to show how even linguists are not too sure of their linguistically-derived homeland theories, easily disagreeing, changing their minds or giving in the non-linguistic innovative hypotheses. (The homeland of the Afro-Asiatic, Sino-Tibetan and Uralic families are also still in dispute; about the latter, a speaker in Leiden defended the Ob basin in Siberia as the homeland.) The OIT, of course, had always thought of Yamnaya as but a secondary homeland, consisting of locals mixed with immigrants from India (or from a linguistically Indianized territory to the east, esp. Bactria); but nobody here took this possibility in consideration. The finding that made waves this time was that genetically, the Anatolians (Hittites, Luwians) proved to be related to the Armenia-based people of some 5500 years ago, but not to the Yamnaya people. So these Armenians may have moved to both Anatolia and the steppes, and in the latter mixed with locals and produced the ultimate Yamnaya type that was to invade Europe. So the Yamnayans were only a subsection of the Indo-Europeans, distinct from at least the Anatolian branch. Many papers at the Leiden conference (less in Berlin, where the focus remained purely linguistic) took the genetic findings concerning the local populations of their topic into account. Thus, a paper on the Indo-Europeanization or Celticization of the British Islands acknowledged that linguists over generations had reconstructed a Hamito-Semitic substrate influence in island-Celtic: immigrants from North Africa or traders from Phoenicia had settled in (or remained in contact with) the British Islands, and imparted some of their language to incoming Celtic. But this was wiped off the table: no more Hamito-Semitic influence, not because those linguists had been proven wrong, but because its presence is not confirmed (yet) by the newest genetic date, which show no Mediterranean genes. Here we wonder if linguists are not going too far in subordinating their own discipline to the “harder” discipline of genetics. After all, genes don’t speak, and gene-carrying people are known to have changed language. After 1945, all courses on Indo-European Linguistics have emphatically warned against identifying languages with physical traits. A century ago, the confusing notion of the “Aryan skull type” misled people, and after 1945 a sharp distinction between Linguistics and Physical Anthropology was maintained. But today this has resurfaced as the “Aryan gene” – that’s what Indian papers on the pro-AIT side called the Yamnaya-associated R1A1 gene during the 2018 debate over Tony Joseph’s version of David Reich’s findings. In their ivory towers Western scholars think the political misuse of the AIT is a thing of the pre-war past, but in India it certainly isn’t. Linguists bending over backwards to please the physical anthropologists in 1900 or the geneticists today are only a particular case of a more general problem of research method. When two bodies of evidence, generated by different disciplines, point in different directions, the solution is not to suppress one type of evidence in favour of the other. It is not to make one discipline crawl and swallow its own conclusions to appease the other. All while rechecking both types of evidence to make sure that they really constitute evidence, the scholarly mind will endeavour to do justice to both and to reconcile them. If this means conceding that we aren’t there yet, and that against our grain we have yet a lot of work to do, then so be it. The testimony of the RgVeda In contrast with the linguists’ enthusiasm for the new science of genetics, and already longer for European archaeology, we notice a radical disinterest in several other relevant disciplines. Some Indian archaeology has been used in the past, particularly the seeming contrast of the excavated Harappan cities with Vedic culture. But more recent archaeological developments are being completely ignored. The principal one is the absence of archaeological traces of the invasion. Certainly there are no signs of a military conquest, which is why some scholars wax indignant when others describe their position as an Aryan “Invasion” Theory. But the word “invasion” does not pertain to the manner of a take-over by foreigners, but to the very fact of the take-over. The Indo-European invaders are thought to have imposed their language and religion on the largest conglomeration of people at that time: such a feat deserves the term “invasion”. At any rate, the archaeologists find no trace of it. Even anti-OIT champion Michael Witzel admits that there is no archaeological evidence for it “yet”. The evolution of a single person’s view on this proves important, too. Prof. BB Lal, who died last week aged 101, was the only archaeologist ever who could be cited as furnishing proof of the “Aryans” in India. In the 1950s he had explained the Painted Grey Ware that he had dug up in post-Harappan cities of Northwest India as characteristic of the Aryan invaders on their way deeper into India. Around 1990, as the rejection of the AIT became more common around him, he rethought his findings and concluded that he had only tailored (not to say force-fitted) his findings to the AIT paradigm he had interiorized from his mentor, Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He had applied the reigning paradigm but not proven it. Ever since, a number of publications of his, culminating in his book The Rigvedic People (2015), have documented the essential oneness of the archaeologically attested Harappan cities and literarily attested Vedic culture: “Harappa and the Vedas are but two sides of the same coin.” Earlier the Indo-Europeanists considered the Rg-Veda as a goldmine of relevant historical information. Though hymns to the gods, the Vedic texts contain much historical information in passing, such as the level of technology and the surrounding natural data suggesting to place them in Bronze Age (3300-1500 BC) Northwest India. In particular, they describe several battles, and these teach us about the ethnic landscape. The early translations suggested that these battles pitted white invaders, naturally victorious, against the dark aboriginals. This became one of the nails in the coffin of the original OIT: if the linguistic evidence was non-committal on the homeland question and allowed for an Indian homeland, it nonetheless became untenable to insist on this Indian homeland if the Indians themselves testified that they had come as invaders. But at least, the indubitably good side here is that it proves the early Indo-Europeanists to be interdisciplinary: they took extra-linguistic (i.c. literary) data seriously. But that was not the case in every relevant respect, and today less so than in the 19th century. Thus, no translator back then or today has accounted for the repeated presence of the Iranians in the Rg-Veda, esp. in the Battle of the Ten Kings and the Vārṣāgira battle. The unmistakably Iranian names of the hostile kings and tribes and the unmistakably Zoroastrian references in the description of their religion make you wonder how a whole series of translators has been able to pigeonhole them as “black aboriginals”. Even within the invasionist paradigm with its likeness to the then-ongoing colonization, scholars should have thought of the fact that the colonial powers fought each other as often as they fought the natives, so that here the enemies of the Vedic section of the supposed Aryan invaders could have been an adjoining section of the same invader group, such as the Iranians. (And incidentally, this Vedic mention also revolutionizes our insight into the role of Zarathuštra Spitama within Zoroastrian history: not the great reformer who created the distinctive Mazdean doctrine but the hereditary court priest of king Vištāspa’s Kavi dynasty, who inherited an anti-Deva, anti-Indra and without-yajña tradition already several generations old, but who became famous by first putting it into hymns.) This complements the Avestan data about 16 Iranian countries: these are the different regions of present-day Tajikistan and Afghanistan, plus as the second Hapta-Hendū, Sanskrit Sapta-Sindhū i.e. present-day Panjab, and as the first Airyānam Vaēja, “expanse of the Aryans”. There is no mystery about this, it is Kashmir. The Avesta describes Hapta-Hendu as too hot, and after the Sahara desert, Panjab in the dry season is indeed the hottest region in the world; while Kashmir is called too cold, and for South-Asians Kashmir is indeed unusually chilly. In Vedic literature, while the Vedic Paurava tribe lives in Haryana, their Ānava sister tribe lives in Kashmir; and after their joint and successful counter-attack against the Druhyu tribe located in Panjab, it is the Ānavas who take over Panjab, chasing the Druhyus to Afghanistan. But as the Paurava-Bhārata king Sudās encroaches on Panjab, it is these Ānavas or proto-Iranians who unite to throw him back, but are defeated in the Battle of the Ten Kings and chased in their turn to Afghanistan. Here you see two literarily attested phases of emigration from India, arguably part of the disintegration of Proto-Indo-European unity. When I confronted Prof. Kümmel with this perpetuation of the “black aboriginals” scenario, he simply denied this. In India they would now lambast him as an incorrigible racist and all that, but I sensed this was based on something real. To be sure, in India’s Reich-triggered debate of 2018-19 I have seen numerous times how the hostile Dāsas and Dasyus (both Sanskrit versions of Iranian terms) of the Battle of the Ten Kings were still identified as the dark aboriginals. In Western popular and second-hand literature this continuation of imagery from the 19th and 20th century is also still common, and where the enemies are not identified, at least no acknowledgment or correction of the old translators’ consequential error is forthcoming. Yet there is indeed one important break-away from this old consensus within the scholarly world. In Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton’s 2014 RgVeda translation, the recentmost of its kind, this notion of black opponents is preserved, but with reference to Hans Hock’s 1999 paper on the Vedic use of colours (a rare instance of the genuine AIT-vs.-OIT debate that took place around the turn of the millennium), the authors specify that this doesn’t refer to skin colour. As Hock points out, “black” is very commonly said of enemies. Thus, in World War II the British called the Indian freedom fighter and Axis collaborator Subhas Chandra Bose “a black”. So it constitutes progress if the enemies are no longer describes as “black-skinned”. But the result of all these obsolete “white conquers black” translations has not been corrected, in fact it has gone completely unchallenged. It served as proof from the horse’s mouth for the Aryan invasion when that hypothesis was still in the process of being established, and now that this proof has fallen away, the Aryan invasion still goes unquestioned. Moreover, in the specific episode of the Battle of the Ten Kings, even this correction of the meaning of “black” isn’t good enough. Here the description of the enemies as “black people” (janāḥ-asiknīḥ, RV 7:5:3) is a pun referring to the river basin where they come from: as “people from the Black River”. Asiknī is the Vedic name of the Chenab in present-day Pakistani Panjab, the river just west of the Paruṣṇī, present-day Ravi, where the battle takes place, with the Vedic Bhārata tribe coming from Haryana in the east. The mistranslation as “black aboriginals” for what is really the “proto-Iranian tribal coalition” is, given the career of the Aryan invasion of India as the paradigm of the racist worldview (explicitly espoused by Adolf Hitler in his 1920 booklet Warum Sind Wir Antisemiten?), one of the most consequential mistranslations in history. Vedic chronology A non-linguistic type of information full of consequence for the homeland question is Vedic chronology. Every Indo-Europeanist wanting to give an opinion on how North India “became” Indo-European ought to familiarize himself with it. Here it is well worth reviewing how Friedrich Max Müller’s estimate of 1500 BC for the fabled Aryan invasion into India succeeded in becoming the orthodoxy. It was at once criticized by Max Müller’s own pupil Moriz Winternitz, who judged it unrealistic to cram the entire cultural and philosophical evolution from early Vedic to the Buddha in a few centuries. Max Müller himself ended up admitting that it really was only a guess, and even threw his arms up in the air to muse that we would never know the date. We are skeptical of such premature pessimism, but strongly agree that 1500 BC was only a baseless guess. Yet for lack of a systematized alternative, it became the orthodoxy, and still is. There was no relevant archaeology then, but here science has advanced. Spoked-wheeled chariots have been discovered in Sanauli near Delhi, and dated to ca. 2000 BC. They are mentioned in the Rg-Veda, but only in its latest, tenth book, which is centuries younger than the other books, quite distinct in language and worldview. The earlier books know of the slow (and often large) ox-drawn carts, but the swift horse-drawn chariot is confined to the youngest layer. So: much of the Rg-Veda can be dated to the early 3rd millennium, only the 10th book near its end. The drying-up of the Saraswati river, since then a seasonal rivulet named Ghaggar, has been dated by geologists to 1900 BC. In the post-Vedic Mahābhārata epic, we see it in this rivulet state, with one of the heroes going on pilgrimage to the site where it definitively dries up in the desert. As a consequence of the Saraswati's dessiccation, many people have moved to the east (Greater Magadha), the west and even far west (furnishing the Sanskrit elements in the Kassite and the Mitannic language) and locally upland to smaller rivers, where they had newly founded the cities central to the epic: Hastināpura, Soniprastha, Indraprastha etc. In the Rg-Veda, by contrast, the Saraswati is still an ocean-going river, the life-artery of the Vedic civilization, praised as the river par excellence; clearly well before 1900 BC. (The treatment of the Saraswati evidence forms an interesting case study in the stonewalling of putative pro-OIT evidence by AIT militants, typically outsiders to Indo-European studies such as comparative historian Steve Farmer: they lambast the equating of the Vedic Saraswati with today’s Ghaggar as a paranoid Hindu-nationalist concoction, when actually it was established by a string of Western scholars since the 1850s, in tempore non suspecto. A case study in how this debate has been poisoned by endless political imputations.) A really objective measuring rod for Vedic chronology is provided by astronomy. True, archaeo-astronomical data are often injudiciously used by an intellectual fringe, e.g. the description of an eclipse would apply quite regularly, so the claim that it points to a particular date only betrays ignorance or over-enthusiasm. This is why the Indian debates about the Mahābhārata war’s astro-dating are hilarious to watch. But there is one very big hand on the cosmic clock that offers a reliable though vague chronology: the precession of the equinoxes. The equinoxes move through the constellations (or vice-versa: the stars move past the equinoxes) at the rate of 1° per ca. 71 years, full circle in ca. 25,772 years. When an equinoctial or solstitial point coincides with a particular star, it won’t do so again for the next 25 millennia. The later Vedas and the Brāhmaṇas, decidedly a younger corpus than the Ṛg-Veda, contain several references to the Pleiades constellation on the Equinoctial axis (Atharva-Veda 19:7, Taittirīya Saṁhitā 4:4:10, Maitrāyaṇi Saṁhitā 2:13:20, Kathaka Saṁhitā 39:13, Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa 2:1:2:3), which took place in the 23rd century BC. The Kauśītaki Brāhmaṇa 19:3 indicates the same period by means of a different astronomical pointer, viz. the star Regulus on the summer solstice point. An ancillary work of the Vedas, the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa (“Veda-Ancillary of Stellar Science”, at that time meaning astronomy though nowadays used to refer to astrology), conventionally dated to 500-200 BCE, actually dates itself twice to ca. 1350 BCE, viz. by explicitating which stars are on the winter solstice and spring equinox points: Dhaniṣṭha solstitial, Bharaṇī equinoctial. Note that the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa is a manual of observational astronomy, drawing attention to phenomena your eyes can see and which have a role in the ritual you are setting up. It definitely doesn’t deal in reminiscences, as opponents have argued; moreover, a reminiscence bridging the centuries between the Vedic and the conventional Max Müller dates would point to a great astronomical acumen that would in turn support the astro-information they recorded. This is an explicitly post-Vedic and very post-Rg-Vedic text, so the Vedic corpus was already complete by the time, some 1500 BC, when the Aryan Invasion Theory has the Aryans only arrive in India. It is one of more than a dozen precessional pointers in Vedic literature broadly defined, which prove completely consistent: the absolute-chronological astro-sequence never violates the known relative-chronological literary sequence. (Next, they also get coordinated with archaeological data like the appearance of chariots and of iron implements, two types of evidence that happen to be in flux due to new discoveries, unlike the precessional data.) Moreover, not one of them supports Max Müllers widely-accepted chronology. We have derived some amusement from reading the mental and verbal acrobatics which conformistic scholars try out to neutralize this inconvenient evidence. The frantic attempts by leading Indian historians like Romila Thapar to refute or cancel this astronomical evidence at least shows that they realize its importance and understand the threat it poses to the conventional chronology. By contrast, Western scholars have so far preferred to ignore this pertinent evidence. Well, not all of them. In a book that every Indology student gets to read, the Vedic Index by AB Keith & AA MacDonnell, 1912, the authors acknowledge that locating the star Maghā/Regulus on the Solstice, as the Kauśītaki Brāhmaṇa does, strictly refers to ca. 2300 BC, where indeed it belongs, but in their conclusions shift it to 800 BC, fully 1500 years later than what the Brāhmaṇa text and elementary astronomy tell us. Me thinks it is unbecoming of scholars to cavalierly shift an attested date around like this. Likewise, David Pingree, who counts as an authority on ancient astronomy, moves the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa down from 1350 BC to 500 BC or even 200 BCE, pleading that the evolution rate of language necessitates this denial of the astronomical information. So this is the ignore-the-evidence mentality that we are up against. But the astronomical data from the source text fails to support the scholars’ low and AIT-friendly estimate. Suppose the rate of linguistic change does indeed point the Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa to a date no less than a millennium later than its own chronological self-testimony. Then the scholarly attitude is to acknowledge that different types of evidence are in conflict; that the supposed linguistic evidence contradicts the astronomical evidence. Let this sink in, and next you can explore ways to either falsify one of them or to reconcile them at a higher level of understanding yet to be reached. What is not acceptable is to simply suppress one type of evidence and pretend that it doesn’t exist. Yet that is what has been done for more than a century to protect the low invasionist chronology. Against this we find that, as historical evidence goes, it provides strong support to Shrikant Talageri’s higher chronological estimate. A consequence of this higher Vedic chronology concerns David Reich’s claim that there was a genetically identifiable influx from Eastern Europe into India in ca. 1700 BC. I know that some Indian geneticists dispute this, but not being competent in genetics, I will not press this point. Let there have been an influx. Through the Khyber Pass, so many invasions (all in the nature of military conquest) have taken place since; no big deal if one more can be identified. Note that all of them have linguistically assimilated, even when preserving their religious separateness. They lost their mother tongue, and a fortiori, they failed to impose it on the natives, quite in contrast with what the Aryans are claimed to have done. At any rate, we don’t mind an influx of people ca. 1700 BC. But one thing we know for sure (and this is the third problem for Reich’s theory): this influx was not what brought the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European into India. With the RgVeda having been composed inside India starting more than a thousand years earlier, 1700 BC was simply too late for an Indo-Europeanization. If this comes as a shock to all those who had thought that the AIT has now finally been proved by genetics, they have the option of proving all the evidence for a higher Vedic chronology wrong. But this they will only be able to do after familiarizing themselves with this part of the OIT. Conclusion It is possible to pull a horse towards a pond, but not to make the horse drink. The Indo-Europeanists who have ignored the OIT challenge for decades are at liberty to continue doing so. There is no punishment even if they end up being proven wrong: the pro-geocentric near-consensus that stalled the Copernican revolution towards heliocentrism was never punished either. At most the die-hard geocentrists live on in our memory as misguided; and hardly even that, for no one ever thinks of them. No one with what the Indian Constitution calls the “scientific temper” would want them to suddenly drop their AIT certainties and adopt the new line of the OIT. No, the invitation is for them to study the evidence for the OIT themselves and form their own judgment.
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Talageri’s RigVeda

(9 July 2022) This article is a very brief comment on the main position of Shrikant Talageri in his review of Jijith Nadumuri Ravi’s digestion of Talageri’s over-all Out-of-India thesis, and on Talageri’s sharpened position on the chronological layeredness of the RigVeda. Both can be found on Talageri’s blogspot: talageri.blogspot. com, on 19 Aug 2020: “The chronological gulf between the old RigVeda and the new RigVeda”; and on 10 March 2022: “A review of Rivers of the RigVeda by Jijith Nadumuri Ravi”. For all the details and references, see there. Talageri emphasizes throughout his work that the RigVeda (let alone the other Vedas and the ancillary literature) contains successive layers, as already pointed out by the late-19-century US and German Orientalists Edward Hopkins c.q. Hermann Oldenburg. This then allows for a chronological classification: with Family Books (2-7) at the ancientmost top, the books 1, 8, 9, 10 at the end, and further subdivisions like books 3, 6, 7 at the older extreme and book 10 at the youngest end, centuries later than the others. So far this seems uncontroversial enough, right? For whomever sees the Vedas as a key to history, a repository of factual data, this type of chronological division is a matter of course. We may still differ on which part precedes which other part, but it is only logical that in such a diverse corpus, age is only one of the factors of diversity. Yet it turns out that two very different groups object to it. One group is very large and its objections already old and deep-seated. The other group is small and its objections opportunistic. Millions of Hindu traditionalists feel very uneasy about this tinkering with their Vedas. Better to leave them in one piece. Even when they learn that for Talageri, this analysis of the Vedas happens to contribute to the demonstration of an east-to-west gradient, with the older parts proving more easterly and the later more westerly, thus disproving the Veda-belittling Aryan Immigration scenario, they still feel uncomfortable with it. In the traditional view, India was central; in the newer Immigrationist view, it was only an expansion zone of a culture centred outside of it; but in Talageri’s view it regains that centrality, or is at any rate freed from the stigma of being a foreign dependency. All true, yet they would rather be free from that modernist Immigrationism, in which they had never seriously believed anyway, without this self-abnegating exercise of cutting up their own scriptures. So, Talageri receives occasional hate mail from traditionalists, not seriously threatening but still unpleasant. Discovering temporal layers in the text means that it was not created at one go. Instead, it implies that the Old Books were already in existence while the final Book 10 was still totally unheard of. For ordinary creations this is but normal but is this also true for the Vedas? Well, the Vedic Sages themselves would not have been uptight about it. They formulated their poems as their own creation, of very human and temporal origin, directed to rather than received from the gods. They were neither believers in nor preachers of the entirely post-Vedic doctrine of a supernatural or Apaurusheya origin. But sclerotic adherents to the post-Vedic and quasi-Quranic doctrine of a divine origin, find it more logical that the Vedas were created all at the same time in heaven, waiting for an eternity until a Mantradrashta, a “seer of Vedic verses’, would captivate them. Just as the Quran has been waiting since creation until God cared to send it down through the Prophet. This belief seems to be a common weakness of the religious mind, which in Islam has made it into the core of the theology and in Hinduism at least in the customary assumptions of many. One can imagine that as the RigVeda got completed, enjoying the prestige of public declamations, institutions guaranteeing transmission, and a surrounding culture of auxiliary sciences (linguistics, astronomy, mathematics), people lifted it ever higher into the sky and started divinizing it. That is why many Hindus insist that there are no historical data in the RigVeda: no personal names, no rivers or mountains, certainly no names of battles. Then again, it is not a history book, but any book will off-hand give some details about its circumstances. This way, the RigVeda is, through its landscape names and technological level, fauna and flora, unambiguously an Indian Bronze Age text. This realization has percolated rather widely, and many traditionalists hold an unstable half-way position. Another consequence is that many Hindus like to trace their own Hindu Dharma back to the RigVeda. They think everything Hindu proceeds from the Veda. One example is yoga, which Western scholars deduce from other, older sources, rightly or wrongly. Here, Talageri strongly disagrees: the Vedic tradition is a creation of the Bharata clan, itself part of the Paurava tribe, itself part of the “five tribes” (two of whom he leads out of India where they become the ancestors of many nations), itself part of the people of the great patriarch Manu, a fundamental Hindu by any account. That is why he objects to Ravi’s attempts to derive all Hindu communities through migration from a Vedic Northwest. This goes down well with Veda-centric Hindus, but there is no indication of it. Not only is there no reason to assume that India was ever empty and in need of migrations, but there was no Vedic conspiracy behind all the Hindu sects either, regardless of where they are. Alright, so much for one very large demographic reluctant to accept the RigVeda as a historical product, resulting from intense human activity in Bronze-Age Northwest India. Another group tries to profit from the common belief in oneness of the entire RigVeda. Consider the chronological implications of the statement that “the RigVeda contains evidence of the spoked wheel”, with spoked wheels not predating, say 2300 BCE. Many still use this as an argument against a high chronology: the book can’t be older that this terminus postquem. So, Talageri makes a distinction: those references are in the tenth Mandala, which as the RigVeda’s youngest book may indeed be limited to that time bracket; but it can’t constrain the earlier books, which may well be a thousand years older. That is incompatible with the Aryan Immigration paradigm, hence the desire among some Immigrationists, otherwise modern and rational, to pretend that the Rigveda is a unit and that conclusions about its last book also count for its first book. Well, that sums it up. Scholars reluctant to face the revisionist consequences, will not keep the acceptance of history within and behind the RigVeda off for very long. The objections of the traditionalists may be a tougher nut to crack. But that has never prevented Shikant Talageri from being candid about where the evidence is leading us.
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Ever closer to Bhâropîyasthân. State of the art of Out-of-India debate

 

Ever closer to Bhāropīyasthān

State of the Art of the Out-of-India Debate

 

(Published in the Festschrift/tribute for my erstwhile professor of Indo-European linguistics, Lambert Isebaert: Etudes Classiques vol.88, Université de Namur 2020, p.85-108. I apologize to the publishers for not waiting a whole year with this online republication, as they had requested: since the volume is almost entirely in French, none of my American or Indian friends or colleagues will buy it, so I make my own paper directly available.)

Résumé. — Assez courante vers 1800, l’hypothèse selon laquelle le berceau de la famille de langues indo-européennes se trouvait en Inde n’était plus prise en considération pendant près d’un siècle et demi, avant de resurgir dans les années 1980. Elle rivalise désormais avec le paradigme dominant d’une immigration « aryenne » en Inde. Les tentatives récentes (surtout à partir de 2006) d’étouffer le débat, qui se déroule malheureusement dans une atmosphère particulièrement acrimonieuse, sont regrettables en l’état actuel des données.

Abstract. — After having been widely assumed ca. 1800, the Out-of-India scenario of the Indo-European family’s genesis went dormant until its revival in the 1980s. It is now the main challenger to the dominant scenario of an “Aryan” immigration into India. Unfortunately, the debate has been hampered by acrimony and, certainly from 2006 onwards, by stonewalling, But the evolution of the evidence does not warrant this.

 

1.     Shifting homelands

In the 1980s, when attending Prof. Lambert Isebaert’s course of Indo-European (IE; in modern Sanskrit: Bhāropīya,= Bhārat + Yuropīya) Linguistics at Catholic University of Leuven (then KUL, now KU Leuven), we once asked him if there was any proof for the dominant Steppe Homeland Theory that he seemed to assent to. With no idea yet of the recently revived Out-of-India Theory (OIT), we already knew that the homeland search had had a chequered history, so we wondered: what did the Steppes have that the other homeland candidates did not? To the best of our memory, this was literally his answer: “That has been proven”.

Perhaps our memory has become a little vague about the sequel: “… by archaeology”. But that is the answer that we received from numerous back-bench Indo-Europeanists whom we met and asked the same question at successive scholarly conferences.

Another professor of ours, the leading Dutch Indologist Pierre Eggermont, spoke in the same vein, and also named his source: Prof. B. B. Lal’s 1950s’ discovery of the Painted Grey Ware (PGW), a type of pottery that he explained as typical of the Aryans penetrating deeper into India[1]. Till today, that finding is still being cited as proof of an Aryan invasion, e.g.: “Lal considered PGW to be intrusive”[2].

For any non-specialist in archaeology, this reliance on an external authority should be acceptable, and at the time, it reflected the state of the art. But that state of the art has evolved since then.

The lone archaeological witness to the Indo-European (IE) immigration into India, Prof. B. B. Lal, has changed his mind. During the last two decades, he has published several books in which he disowns his old interpretation of his PGW discovery[3], culminating in a hefty tome dedicated to a reasoned argumentation in favour of the OIT, including a refutation of the counter-arguments already given by then, where he pleads that “the civilization that prevailed in the Sarasvati valley from the 5^th millennium BCE to the 3^rd millennium BCE is indeed that of the Rigvedic people”[4]. He explained to us in 2017 how, as a junior scholar, fresh from studies under the pioneering invasionist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, he had force-fitted his findings into the dominant paradigm, but had later come to understand that his explanation was merely an application of the paradigm, not a proof of it.

B. B. Lal’s is a modern return to the assumption of an Indian homeland common in Europe in the half-century around 1800: “At the time when the Indo-European family was first discovered and scholars began to speculate on their probable place of origin, their initial thoughts were directed toward India because of the evident antiquity of Sanskrit”[5]. The OIT is not some far-fetched novelty, but stood at the cradle of the very notion of an Indo-European language family.

This was, though not logically compelling, an economical hypothesis given the central role of Sanskrit in the discovery of Indo-European. It was considered the language closest to the putative ancestral language or Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and from linguistic closeness, geographical closeness was inferred.

It helped that there was a slight Indomania in Europe’s cultural climate. In a 1775 letter, Voltaire (apparently aware of Gaston-Laurent Cœurdoux’s first mapping of the Indo-European family, sent as a Mémoire to the French Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles Lettres in 1767) already speculated that the “dynasty of the Brahmins” taught the rest of the world: “I am convinced that everything has come down to us from the banks of the Ganges”[6]. In that same phase of intellectual-cultural development of Enlightenment Europe, Immanuel Kant suggested: “The culture of the Indians, as is known, almost certainly came from Tibet, just as all our arts like agriculture, numbers, the game of chess, etc., seem to have come from India”[7]. The battle hymn of this temporary Indocentrism was Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 book Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (‘Language and Wisdom of the Indians’).

But gradually, the difference between PIE and Sanskrit came into sharper focus. Thus, the distinction between the vowels a/e/o in Greek was collapsed into a in Sanskrit, arguably not the other way around; and Greek k more or less continued the PIE consonant, whereas the Sanskrit c/ś/ṣ had to be an evolved form. Thus, Greek ὀκτώ (‘eight’) was deemed true to the PIE original, whereas Sanskrit aṣṭa came to be considered as an evolute or “deviation” from the original. It was deduced, plausibly but not logically compellingly, that this linguistic distance between PIE and Sanskrit should translate into a geographical distance between the homeland and India.

Together with the background influence of India’s ongoing decline from an exotic trading-partner to a mere colony, this caused a shift to what Indians still call the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT): locating the homeland in Bactria, Russia, Anatolia or Europe, so that the presence of Sanskrit in India could only be explained through an invasion. In 1834, August Schlegel (Friedrich’s brother) located the homeland around the Caucasus mountains. From there, the putative homeland would travel a bit, but in recent decades stabilize again in the peri-Caspian steppes.

In India, the AIT never caught on except among the discourse-dominant part of the anglicized minority, best exemplified by Hindu nationalist B. G. Tilak’s hypothesis of a homeland in the Arctic[8] (often cited as evidence from the Indian tradition itself for the AIT); Jawaharlal Nehru’s evocation of the Aryan riders storming down the Khyber Pass in his book The Discovery of India[9]; and archaeologist V. S. Agarwal’s suggestion (made famous by Sir Mortimer Wheeler) that as the Aryan war-god, “Indra stands accused” of destroying the Harappan civilization[10].

Those anglicized intellectuals who objected to it, like Sri Aurobindo Ghose, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar (who, to the chagrin of his followers, articulately rejected the AIT[11]) or Guru M. S. Golwalkar, were a bit subdued about it because of “the blind belief in the fallacy that linguists have established that the original homeland of the Indo-European family of languages was located outside India”[12]. There was in decades only one book that tried to argue the case against the AIT, invoking the traditional Sanskrit grammarians, and it got no further than proving that Ᾱrya never had a linguistic or racial meaning[13], already a consensus among post-1945 linguists. Only traditional Pandits fully rejected the AIT, or had simply never heard of it, as it is not indicated in the Vedas.

In the 1980s, the OIT began to reassert itself. The opening shot was fired in the book Karpāsa in Ancient India by K. D. Sethna (1982), a Parsi and the elderly former secretary of Sri Aurobindo. He found that karpāsa (‘cotton’) had been absent from the Ṛg-Veda (RV) but present in the Harappan cities in the same area, mainly the Sarasvati basin. He concluded that the RV (perhaps minus its 10^th book, which is centuries younger), predates –2600, when the high tide of Harappan city culture started. A sceptic nonetheless admits that it “discussed in an outwardly rational fashion, without overt signs of nationalism or chauvinism”[14].

The rejection became a big movement by the mid-1990s. It attracted the cooperation of Western scholars like Professors Edmund Leach, Georg Feuerstein, Klaus Klostermaier and Nicholas Kazanas, while the archaeologist duo J. Shaffer and D. Lichtenstein[15] had not waited for this opinion wave. In India, it caught the attention of the Hindu nationalists, and the negative attention of political movements drawing on the AIT (cf. infra). For a short while around 2000, it enjoyed a fairly friendly interest from the Indo-Europeanist establishment, mainly several papers in G. Erdosy (ed.) (1995) and in J. Bronkhorst and M. Deshpande (eds.) (1999), Edwin Bryant’s doctoral research into the debate and its publication[16], the fall/winter 2002 issue of Journal of Indo-European Studies hosting a pro-OIT paper by N. Kazanas (2002) with comments, and finally E. Bryant and L. Patton (eds.) (2005).

The pivotal year was 2000, when a book was published that changed the terms of the debate. Till then, the AIT was confronted by its opposite, the non-AIT, which saw the Indo-Aryans as native to India but showed no interest in the non-Indian IE languages (with the exception of the linguist S. S. Misra [1992], improved in 2005). The term OIT, launched by Edwin Bryant around the same time, was a bit flattered: Westerners thought that any choice of PIE homeland implied a scenario for bringing the other branches to their historical habitat, but most Indians never thought that far.

With the book The Rigveda, a Historical Analysis, by Shrikant Talageri, a self-taught historian, the AIT came to be challenged by a fully equipped alternative: North India had been the homeland whence the non-Indian branches emigrated, and it was the Ṛg-Veda that contained a memory of the first emigrations plus an actual description of the last emigrations. This implies a high chronology: third millennium BCE and even beyond, based mainly on the internal logic of the literary data and on coordination with archaeological data.

In India and among Non-Resident Indians, the persuasion caught on that the AIT had been refuted and “nobody believes in it anymore”. Hindu nationalist mathematician N. S. Rajaram declared the debate over. He presented a “Sanskritic” decipherment of the Harappan script[17] but provoked only sceptical and debunking reactions, culminating in the scathing “Horseplay at Harappa” cover-story in the Marxist fortnightly Frontline (October 2000)[18]. This critique contained the false allegation of “fraud” when he had only been deluded by wishful thinking: he saw a horse in a defaced bull on a Harappan seal (just as a top Indologist had read a contrived Aryan invasion reference in a Vedic text[19]), but as a demolition of his anti-invasionist narrative, it was otherwise pertinent.

This deluded triumphalism further led to a tragi-comical overreach by NRIs[20] in the California Textbook Affair of 2005-2007 (about amending the history textbooks in a less anti-Hindu sense), triggered by their claim that ‘the AIT has been discarded” and ending in their total defeat[21]. This episode featured a breath-taking hatred on both sides, and after that, a distinct hostility has remained throughout an otherwise uneventful decade.

 

The parties to the debate

The majority opinion in the West today takes a steppe homeland for granted but is temperamentally agnostic. Scholars consider the whole controversy obsolete: questions of origins remind them of the Biblical or feudal emphasis on ancestry. Also, they vaguely know that the homeland quest has been tainted by politics, first in Britain, then in Germany, and even now in India, and they do not want to be implicated in this (but cf. infra). This is one of the reasons for Western Indo-Europeanists’ irritation at many Indians’ deadly serious insistence on rejecting the AIT, even before going into the merits of the rivalling theories.

Among Westerners, advocates of an OIT are a mere handful. In India too, it is actively pursued only by a handful of people: apart from a few amateurs, most notably “the bank clerk” (as his rank-pulling enemies never fail to emphasize) Sh. Talageri, we note archaeologists, historians, Sanskritists, now also geneticists. Our insiders’ testimony that even in India the OIT is a minority view may come as a surprise, given all the noise made on internet forums by Indian AIT opponents.

An AIT sceptic is something else than an OIT advocate. Many reject that the “Aryans” came from across the Khyber Pass, but are just not interested in anything that happened beyond it: no migration towards India but neither an emigration from India. They just do not want anything Indian to be related to anything external: it might be a neo-colonial ruse by “the foreign hand”. They ignore or even deliberately reject the very notion of an IE language family.

Though complete outsiders, they pontificate that Comparative and Historical Linguistics is only “a pseudo-science”, where “a conjecture is turned into a hypothesis to be later treated as a fact in support of a new theory”[22]. They contend that Sanskrit is not more akin to Greek than to Dravidian, and that all Indian languages should together count as one language group, distinct from all non-Indian languages; if there are any similarities with these, it must be due to transmission[23]. Thus, typifying how in the absence of philological professionals, amateurs grab the microphone, a surgeon elaborately derides reconstructed PIE through comparison with the failed Phlogiston hypothesis[24].

Sh. Talageri (2000), p. 403, lists 5 problems in this anti-AIT party: (1) rhetoric rather than analysis; (2) hyperfocus on the early Orientalists’ alleged motives; (3) answering invasionist arguments by evasion; (4) not understanding the issues; (5) blind glorification of the Vedic Aryans. This list is practically echoed by several Western critics in E. Bryant and L. Patton (eds.) (2005). To the second point: the association of the AIT with colonialism (or indeed of the OIT with Hindu nationalism) is now the biggest hurdle for meaningful debate. To focus on ancient events, we seem to need a moratorium on discussion about recent opinions.

Not only AIT advocates have a negative impression of many AIT denouncers. The latter’s arrogant smugness has even put off non-Indian OIT defenders, such as Nicholas Kazanas, Igor Tonoyan-Belyayev (who has argued for lexical exchanges between PIE and its neighbour Tibetan, thus establishing PIE’s presence in North India[25]) and Aleksandr Semenenko (who has matched many Harappan findings with Veda passages and offered genetic evidence for a westward emigration[26]). Indeed, A. Semenenko, who had founded a Facebook group for discussion of OIT evidence, decided after a year to throw hundreds of vocal Hindu nationalist members off and change the name to an unambiguous “Anti-Hindutva RigVedaSamhita without any trash under the name ‘Vedic’”.

Many of these history rewriters thought that with Narendra Modi’s accession to power in 2014, their time had come, and they sent in “research proposals” to the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). None of these was accepted because they ignored the elementary rules of scholarship. Any thesis student knows that before developing your own hypothesis, you must first survey the field and assess what previous scholars have found, but these traditionalists couldn’t be bothered. Contrary to a rumour about a Modi conspiracy against proper history-writing, they were given short shrift.

At the same time, though supporting the OIT, the Hindu nationalist establishment invests strictly nothing in the scholarly legwork needed to buttress it. Contrary to Western fantasies about “fanatical Hindus”, this movement’s leaders are just time-servers with a strong anti-intellectual prejudice and limited ideological commitment[27]. Thus, Human Resources Development Minister Prakash Javadekar declared he was proud of “not having rewritten a single chapter in four years” in the history textbooks (India Today, 27 Sep. 2018). While formally controlling the Republic’s educational and research institutions, the government does nothing to promote its own agenda through university nominations, grants, or setting up research projects. Instead it uses its power to give posts in the ICHR as rewards to lethargic and incompetent gerontocrats.

So, committed scholars simply try to make the most of whatever little opportunity they get. When history professors Meenakshi Jain and Saradindu Mukherji and archaeology professor Michel Danino (French-born naturalized Indian) fortuitously gained a temporary position in the ICHR (2015-2018), they used it to organize a top-notch conference, “Indian History: Emerging Perspectives” on 5-7 March 2018 in Delhi, and purposefully invited the leading Out-of-India theorists; proceedings forthcoming.

As shown by the example of B. B. Lal, valorized by the AIT camp as long as he was their sole source of hard “evidence”, most OIT advocates are people of equal academic rank as their lambasters. But one would not think so if one saw the scatology, not otherwise allowed, in which OIT defenders get covered in cursory media of Western academe (Religion in South Asia list, Indo-Eurasian Research list, Indology list, or the Facebook group PIE). Indians interpret these double standards as evidence of racism. Probably race has little to do with it anymore, but in a time of assuaging or revaluating non-Western cultures, this behaviour is nonetheless anomalous.

We do not consider it appropriate to quote from this informal discourse, but a published text that has benefited from the author’s leisurely reflections and an editor’s attention should be allowed as an example of the steep inequality assumed by the AIT party between themselves and the OIT party.

A still mild but very representative example is H. H. Hock (1999b): all while producing a rare serious argumentation against the OIT, Hans Hock systematically identifies the invasion sceptics as “Hindu Nationalists”; which is not logically of consequence (people can have political or other commitments yet speak the truth), but happens to be untrue. For one counter-example: the present writer is neither Hindu nor nationalist. Nor are the Western scholars enumerated above. And for those who are, it is still unpleasant to be pigeon-holed in their ideological corner instead of criticized for their scholarly conclusions. We see here in a nutshell the same conspiracy theory as among Indian polemicists: a (racist-colonial c.q. Hindu nationalist) politician sits thinking how to fool everyone, shouts Eureka, and comes up with a scholarly theory (AIT c.q. non-AIT). Both parties are mistaken in thinking that a theory can simply be “concocted”.

A sharper example is Stephanie Jamison’s review of E. Bryant and L. Patton (eds.) (2005), which includes chapters by several indigenists: “[…] the parallels between the Intelligent Design issue and the Indo-Aryan ‘controversy’ are distressingly close. The Indo-Aryan controversy is a manufactured one with a non-scholarly agenda, and the tactics of its manufacturers are very close to those of the ID proponents mentioned above. However unwittingly and however high their aims, the two editors have sought to put a gloss of intellectual legitimacy, with a sense that real scientific questions are being debated, on what is essentially a religio-nationalistic attack on a scholarly consensus”[28].

This is flatly untrue: the OIT never posited a supernatural intervention. A number of scholars have no national or religious dog in this fight. It is no less rational than the Anatolian Homeland Theory, found wrong but taken seriously; the eccentric location of its chosen homeland is not stranger than the undoubted eccentric homelands of Austronesian, Bantu, Russian, or Arabic; and a thickly-populated homeland is likelier than the thinly-populated steppes. In practice, this was an explicit call to what has become, from the contemporaneous California Textbook Case onwards, a general policy of the AIT camp: contemptuous stonewalling. The OIT school was henceforth treated as flat-earthers on whom no breath or ink should be wasted.

The OIT party can be harsh on its opponents too, but in a different sense: they highlight alleged polemical malpractice. At the ICHR 2018 conference, Danino’s paper was titled: “Fabricating Evidence in Support of the AIT”. Sh. Talageri regularly lambasts “the joke that is Western Indology”[29], not sparing even the biggest names in detailed critiques. Thus, he makes fun of the “radical damage control measures” and “weird about-turns” by the AIT party, such as the “Stalin-era-like” retraction by Johanna Nichols of her plea for an Asian origin of linguistic features in West-Asian languages, attributed to “peer pressure”[30]. She had, in her own words, first contributed “a beautiful theory that accounts elegantly for a great deal of the dynamic and linguistic geography of the IE spread” which “still stands”[31]; but now she disowns the logical conclusion of her own still-standing research, allegedly because it adds evidence for an eastern homeland.

 

“Invasion”

Let us clear the air about an unnecessary quarrel that further bedevils even the mere restart of a debate. Many Indo-Europeanists refuse to engage with the Out-of-India school, citing the objection that the description of their own position as “invasionist” is inaccurate, unfair and partisan. Is it?

We do not mind reading “AIT” as Aryan Immigration Theory, if that can serve some diplomatic purpose; but we will still know that what the AIT people mean, is really an invasion. First of all, the term is historically accurate. As soon as the wellspring of IE was relocated to a territory outside India, its intrusion into India, like that into Europe, was conceived of as a military conquest. For a generation that remembered a World War or had learned how entire continents were hispanized or anglicized via conquest, this was natural.

The narrative was given an ideological colouring: the Aryans were warlike and patriarchal, their Old European and Harappan victims peace-loving. Marija Gimbutas and the Feminists took the latter’s side whereas Rightists threw their weight behind the Aryans, thinking these had a Darwinian right over their weaker adversaries. In spite of opposing sympathies, both parties had a conquest in mind.

This scenario was explicitly defended by Bernard Sergent, son of a Résistance couple. He acknowledges the attempt to outgrow the old-school view of history as a series of battles: “This is healthy, I say, because in doing so, one takes into account the slow movement in history, the long term, whereas the heuristic value of the event is superficial”[32].

But: “Unfortunately, the result of this tendency […] is the refusal, sometimes systematic, of an explanation of brutal historical change and of the very notion of invasion. […] In that case methodical doubt and prudence have inverted themselves into dogma. Yet in the case of India and many other countries, history […] teaches the reverse, namely the frequency and essential role of invasions”[33].

B. Sergent counts nine invasions into India from the 6^th century BCE to the 5^th CE. None of those, nor the later Arab, Turkish and Afghan conquests, nor the peaceful settlement of the Jews, Syrian Christians and Parsis, led to displacement of a native language, nor even to maintenance of the immigrants’ own language. Though infusing their genes in the Indian population, they all assimilated linguistically. Same for the parallel case of Mesopotamia, where we note the Aryan-like “imperceptible influx of pastoral people” but also “outright invasion by motley groups of border peoples” such as “the Guti, Lullubi, Kassites, and Mitanni”[34]. Whether invaders or infiltrators, they all lost their languages, much in contrast with the putative Aryan immigrants.

Though AIT-minded archaeologists looked for signs of a non-violent immigration into India, they still have not found them: “the so-called ‘invasion’ of IA speakers is not (yet) visible in the archaeology”[35]. If it had become visible, this would have been highlighted in cover-stories, in India if not in the West. Quod non.

Moreover, emphatic immigrationists often turn out to be invasionists once they reconstruct their immigration, e.g. describing the horse and chariot, supposedly Aryan imports, as a military advantage. Several battles mentioned in the RV, foremost the Battle of the Ten Kings (chiefly RV 7:18, 33, 83), are still generally presented as Aryan against Native: “Indra subjected the aboriginal tribes of the Dāsas/Dasyus to the Aryans”[36]. Or: “The Vedic Aryans made their way, fighting, into the Indian subcontinent”[37]. A recent paper speaks of “the Bharatas’ trail of conquest” and “the Vedic conquerors”[38].

What makes an immigration into an invasion is not the means used but the end achieved: after an “invasion”, the former outsiders are not merely in, they are also in charge. If the newcomers end up imposing their (religious, linguistic) identity rather than adopting the native identity, the result is like after a military conquest: the natives become second-class citizens in their own country. In the case of the hypothetical Aryan invasion, the result clearly is that North India got Aryanized. Allegedly they even subjugated the natives permanently through caste. It is entirely reasonable to call this an “invasion”.

While this concept fully applies to the AIT, its materialization is completely absent in India, which contrasts with the situation in Europe. As B. Fortson (2010), p. 48-49, notes: “But in the period 3100-2900 BC came a clear and dramatic infusion of Yamna cultural practice, including burials, into Eastern Hungary and along the lower Danube. With this we are able to witness the beginnings of the Indo-Europeanization of Europe”.

The Aryan immigration into Europe was the kind of “clear and dramatic infusion” that scholars have been looking for in India, in vain. Science journalist Colin Barras summarizes: “Five thousand years ago the Yamnaya people started a violent conquest of Europe […]. Genetic research shows that the old Britons who built Stonehenge must have disappeared soon after”[39]. Archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen postulates that the coming of these Indo-European speakers “must have been a kind of genocide”[40].

The last few years have seen a wave of enthusiasm among AIT supporters for geneticist David Reich’s (2018) interpretation of his own findings as confirming their “immigration” scenario. That genes “immigrated” into India is in itself no problem: what else did the Shakas, Greeks, Huns etc. do before they adopted the native language? But the pro-AIT journal Scroll.in reports “the aggressive nature of Indo-Aryan migration into India”[41].

D. Reich himself is quoted as confirming with understatement that this encounter between the Steppe pastoralists and the Harappans “cannot have been entirely friendly”[42]. Till now, the AIT party might have hoped that, unlike the Shakas and Hunas, the Aryans were successful in maintaining and imposing their language precisely because they did not “invade”, instead immigrating peacefully. That, however, is not what D. Reich has in mind; he clearly means conquest. What the AIT party is applauding for, is purported evidence for an invasion. The term “immigration” on which they nowadays insist, is but a weasel word for “invasion”.

India shows great material and cultural continuity even in the period when an Aryan invasion with its dramatic shift in language should have caused great discontinuity. Plus, the wide presence of Harappan produce in Central Asia, Mesopotamia, and the trading outpost in Bactria (Shortugai), show the existence of Harappan trade networks there, hence a familiarity with this area, facilitating an emigration into their backyard when the need arose. Already in 1995, G. Erdosy noted “the gulf still separating archaeology and linguistics”[43], i.e. between evidence favouring the OIT and a near-consensus around the AIT.

 

The Asiknī

For many people, the word “Aryan” makes an alarm bell go off because of a non-linguistic connotation: racism. This political overtone is partly rooted in a linguistic mistake: a mistranslation. This was not a deliberate “concoction”, as Indian polemicists allege, but a side-effect of the racial prejudices common around 1900, that acted as coloured glasses through which translators read the Vedas.

The RV repeatedly refers to “black” entities. Sometimes this innocently refers to natural phenomena that are actually black, e.g. kṛṣṇa tvac, RV 9:41:1, ‘the black cover’, may signify the night. But mostly, this usage follows the universal tendency to represent enemies as black: “When there is sufficient context for interpretation, we find that the notions can at least equally well be read as an ‘ideological’ distinction between the ‘dark/black’ world of the dāsas/dasyus and the ‘light/white’ world of the āryas”[44]. Indeed, as late as World War II, the collaborators with the Axis were called “black”, the resisters “white”, e.g. in British reports, Subhas Bose’s soldiers counted as “black”[45]. So, the racial interpretation of “black” has now partly been discarded in scholarly circles, at least consciously.

One case where an innocent designation as ‘black’ is racially interpreted, is asikni characterizing a military enemy in the Battle of the Ten Kings (RV 7:5:3, repeated in 9:73:5). Combined with viśa, it is translated as ‘the dark-complexioned races’ (H. H. Wilson [1997 [1866]]), ‘the dark-hued races’ (R. Griffith [1991 [1889]]), ‘die schwarzen Stämme’ (K. F. Geldner (2003 [ca. 1928]]), and even very recently ‘dark clans’ (S. W. Jamison and J. P. Brereton [2014]). Moreover, Vedic priest Vasiṣṭha and the Vedic Tṛtsu clan happen to be described as śvitya, ‘white-clad’ (RV 7:33:1 and 7:83:8), which some translators render as ‘white-complexioned’ (thus H. H. Wilson [1997 [1866]]). This battle description became the crowning evidence of the grand AIT narrative, where the white Aryan invaders defeat the black aboriginals.

But in fact, this is a pun on the enemies’ provenance: Asiknī, ‘the black (river)’, is simply the Sanskrit name of the river whence they come, the Chenab (to the west of the Vedic tribe’s Ravi). So, ‘the Chenab crowd’. The enemies are led into battle by a king with an Iranian name, Kavaṣa. Their tribal names and nicknames are all known from Iranian and Greek sources to refer to Iranian communities. Their religion is described as having distinctively Mazdean characteristics: without Indra or Devas (who have been demonized) and without fire-sacrifice (because fire is elevated so far as to taboo throwing things into it). Obviously, the enemies of the Vedic people at that time were Iranian, not “black aboriginal”. This is attested from so many angles that one wonders how this mistake could have been made at all.

The mistake was reproduced by numerous authors, including many without ideological agenda. Thus, “the śūdras were an-ārya, ‘non-Aryan’, referring to the darker-skinned elements of the population (the Sanskrit term for ‘caste’, varṇa, means ‘colour’)”[46]. In fact, varṇa means ‘one in a spectrum’: a colour in the visual spectrum, a letter in the sound spectrum (hence varṇamāla for ‘alphabet’), and a class in the social spectrum. The identification of a social class with a colour is a fossilized metaphor. The same symbolic meaning counts for Avestan pištra, roughly ‘caste’ but literally ‘colour’[47].

Today, the dominant egalitarian paradigm projects the same categories onto ancient texts: “The Dalit [‘broken’, the Untouchables] were the original inhabitants of India and resemble the African in physical features”[48], but with the opposite valuation: now the “black aboriginals” count as the good ones, entitled to compensation, the “white invaders” as the bad ones, summoned to discharge their historical guilt. Fanciful racial notions continue to divide India.

 

 

Political dimension

The Indian rejection of the AIT makes an Indologist protest “to what degree the question of Indo-Aryan origins has become politicized”[49]. But seen from India, this makes you wonder what planet the scholar has been living on; probably “the West”, where they know nothing about AIT’s much older divisive effect on India. And even inside the West, the Indo-Europeanist research itself has been deconstructed as a deeply politicized undertaking[50]. It is comical to find academics, as if blushing virgins, run away from the OIT because of its alleged political taint, while having no qualms about espousing the AIT, politicized since far longer, in many more countries, and not as a pastime of a few historians but as the basis for gory government policies. Political applications of the AIT include:

·        the colonial justification of rule by the British pure Aryans over the upper-caste mixed Aryans and the lower-caste non-Aryans;

·        the perfect illustration of the Nazi scheme of rule by the pure Aryan race and the degeneracy through race-mixing with a lower race, in spite of a commendable effort to prevent this through caste apartheid;

·        post-war, a galaxy of Rightist groups in the West still use the AIT to buttress their identity project, see e.g. the relevant “Survive the Jive” Youtube videos by historian Thomas Rowsell, or the periodicals Terre et Peuple, Éléments and Nouvelle École; some even attribute the successes of the IE family to an intrinsic European superiority: “What then does account for the remarkable conquests of the Indo-Europeans? […] The simplest explanation is that the original speakers of PIE possessed, on average, considerably higher intelligence than most of the people they defeated”[51].

·        anti-Brahminism, an Indian replica of anti-Semitism (“Brahmins, go back to Central Asia”);

·        Dravidianism, a Tamil cultural separatism, from 1947 till 1962 also political;

·        the Dalit movement a.k.a. Ambedkarism;

·        the British-cum-missionary construction of the Tribals as Ādivāsīs (‘Aboriginals’), an ancient-sounding neologism from the early 20^th century, pregnant with the message that the non-Tribals are intruders[52].

One ideology associated with the AIT was National-Socialism. In order to justify the untouchability of the OIT, invasionist polemicists sometimes try to link it to Nazism, and this not just on Twitter and in yellow journalism, e.g. that Brahminism resulting from the AIT was the “father of Fascism, Racism, Nazism”[53]. This swollen rhetoric is even used among top academics[54]. Possibly these scholars do not realize what they are saying, but this is really not innocent: in contemporary Western culture, association with National-Socialism is the single worst allegation possible. Yes, AIT skeptics have behaved impolitely; but none of their swearwords can match this level of incrimination.

Yet, there is nothing Nazi about the OIT, on the contrary. It is the AIT that served as the perfect paradigm of the Nazi worldview, and that was taught in the history textbooks under Nazi control: “In the Third Reich, even schoolchildren knew from their textbooks that this race had spread from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around”[55]. The Nazi top “race scientist”, Hans F. K. Günther, thought that the Indo-Europeans had penetrated the north of the Indian Subcontinent some centuries BCE[56].

Among Adolf Hitler’s own rare utterances on the Hindus, each of them negative, was a racial interpretation of the AIT: “We know that the Hindus in India are a people mixed from the lofty Aryan immigrants and the dark-black aboriginal population, and that this people is bearing the consequences today; for it is also the slave people of a race that almost seems like a second Jewry”[57]. He even followed the now-fashionable use of “immigrant” (Einwanderer) instead of “invader”.

In India, this racialized AIT is still very alive. In November 2015, Congress leader Mallikarjuna Kharge shouted in a parliamentary debate: “You Aryans are from outside India!” A press comment radicalized this perception: “The only indigenous people in India are the adivasis”[58]. The non-Indo-Aryan-speakers are pitted against the Indo-Aryans, and most of all, the Tribals/“Ādivāsīs” against the non-Tribal “invaders”. In less extreme form, this racial vision still informs India’s caste-based reservation policy. This way, the 19^th-century racial AIT interpretation serves as a poison injecting division and resentment into Indian society even today. That is why the Hindu nationalists clutch at any possible refutation of the AIT.

 

Linguistics

Linguists are rather modest about their ability to prove the location of a homeland: “Our knowledge of these migrations [that broke PIE unity] is very limited. On a linguistic basis, little can be said about them”[59]. If the anti-AIT party were to care for reading dusty linguists, it would quote this with glee.

In the already limited circle of OIT advocates, linguistically capable people are even fewer. One of the rare linguistic arguments offered to refute the OIT concerns the isoglosses, i.e. the changes commonly affecting some IE member languages but not others, indicating that the affected languages have gone through a common development after the dispersal of the common ancestor language. In Hans Hock’s opinion, the pattern of isoglosses is incompatible with the distribution of languages necessitated by an Indian homeland[60]. Sh. Talageri responded to this argument at length[61], as did N. Kazanas[62], and K. Elst[63]. It is outside the purview of this paper to discuss the arguments; but do note that, after the demise of S. S. Misra, these are the only names one needs to remember in this respect.

Another linguistic topic, first raised by Sri Aurobindo in a lecture on the Vedas ca. 1915 (published 1956)[64], is the deeper rootedness within Sanskrit. The word wolf/vṛka is taken to be related to the verbal root vṛk- ‘to tear’ (whence vṛkṇa ‘a cut, wound’), so ‘wolf’ would really mean ‘the tearer’, whereas elsewhere it only means ‘wolf’[65]. Likewise, it is claimed that only Sanskrit can deduce the pan-IE term name from a verbal root: nāma from nam-, namati ‘to greet’[66]. N. Kazanas (2015), p. 43-124, worked out an annotated list of 393 such roots. Thus while Latin pater seems isolated, Sankrit pitā, pitṛ can be interpreted as an agent noun from pā-, pāti ‘to protect’; and unlike Greek θυγάτηρ or English daughter, Sanskrit duhitā, duhitṛ finds an explanation within the language itself, cf. duh-, dugdha ‘to milk’ (i.e. ‘milkmaid’)[67]. This would indicate that the other languages have creolized somewhat, mixing each with the local substrate language of their respective newfound habitats.

N. Kazanas (2015), p. 43, concludes: “Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European and that, since this could only happen in sedentary conditions, the Indoaryan speakers of Sanskrit did not move (much) from the original homeland”.

Here he reiterates the case he had earlier made in Comparative Mythology: the Vedic pantheon has a completeness in comparison with the bits and pieces in other branches, which often cannot be connected with one another except by bringing in the Vedic version as middle term, so: “This then I call the Preservation Principle […]: the people or culture that has preserved most, ceteris paribus has moved least”[68].

We could extend this principle to another finding in Comparative Mythology. Nick Allen, who never questioned the AIT, has left us a discovery that arguably supports the OIT. Seeing numerous similarities between Homer’s epics and the Mahābhārata, he realized the latter had yogic elements that are missing in the corresponding Homeric passages. N. Allen argues that the proto-narrative already contained yoga features, which were lost in the Greek version: “Either the proto-journey was like the Greek and contained nothing relating to yoga, in which case the yogic aspect of the Sanskrit story was an innovation […]. Or the proto-journey was like the Sanskrit and was quasi-yogic or proto-yogic in character, in which case Greek epic tradition largely or wholly eliminated that aspect of the story. […] I argue that some significant and fairly precisely identifiable features of yoga go back to the culture of those who told the proto-narrative – who […] may well have been proto-Indo-European speakers”[69].

The logical but missing explanation stares him in the face: this dimension was lost by the Greeks in the rough and tumble of the trek westwards. Just as in a decomposing corpse, the brain disintegrates fast while the skeleton remains, the most precious elements in a tradition get lost most easily. They need constant nurturing, which is more difficult during a long-distance migration in premodern conditions. Only the Indians had the comfort of a stable situation where they could preserve them.

Other linguistic topics investigated include the loanwords into Sanskrit (or their absence where they had been expected, as in the Northwest-Indian hydronyms), the loan pattern between Indo-Iranian and Uralic, and linguistic palaeontology. This work is among the least read in the world: no reviews, no response papers, not even quotations. On social media and other forums, the “Aryan Invasion” is actively debated, e.g. to connect Vedic literary data with Harappan archaeological discoveries, or now to digest new genetic findings, but the linguistic dimension is either starkly ignored or filled up with fantasies.

Some Indian linguists do apply the comparative and historical methods to the relation between the Indian languages[70], but the Indo-European level is somehow beyond their research interest. Most AIT sceptics treat it with disdain or hostility, thinking that Linguistics is necessarily linked to the AIT. The most negative book reviews (now lost in cyberspace) of K. Elst (2007) and Sh. Talageri (2008) were not by invasionists but by their bête noire, N. S. Rajaram.

 

Literary evidence

Most Indo-Europeanists assume some two thousand years between the disintegration of PIE and the first literary testimonies of Hittite, Mycenaean Greek and Vedic Sanskrit. What Sh. Talageri (2000 and 2008, summarized and updated 2020) gathered from the Vedic and Avestan corpus will remain his major claim to fame (for the OIT party) or ridicule (for the AIT and anti-AIT parties): the surprising thesis that literary evidence reaches back far enough to provide information on PIE’s disintegration.

Here, the Vedic tradition evolved in the 3^rd millennium BCE and even beyond, within the Paurava tribe based in the Sarasvatī basin. The RV still remembered their coexistence with the Druhyu tribe until it largely emigrated under duress (RV 1:107:8, 6:46:8, 7:18, 8:10:5, 10:134), then describes co-existing with the Ānava tribe in the northwest until it, too, emigrates under duress; and also with other tribes east and south. These were not daughters but sisters of the Vedic community, so the Vedic traditions represent only one line within the commonwealth of Hinduism, whereas both Hindu nationalists and AIT-minded outsiders commonly assume the Vedas, composed near the supposed invaders’ entry point, to be the source of Hinduism.

The Druhyus went northwest to Central Asia, shed their Tocharian branch on the way (Anatolian may represent an even earlier emigration) and imposed their dialects on the steppe region, whence their mixed progeny conquered most of Europe, yielding Italo-Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic. The Ānavas also went northwest and their Scythian branch was to equally fill up the steppes, but most Iranians and the ancestors of the Armenians, Phrygians, Greeks and Albanians took the route south of the Caspian Sea.

The steppes certainly were a secondary homeland, a staging-ground for the “Aryan invasion” of the European subcontinent, but not the ultimate homeland of PIE. In the words of E. Callaway (2015): “Less clear is whether all Indo-European languages derive from this group, or whether just a subset do, says Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He suspects that the Yamnaya people spoke a language that later developed into Slavic, Germanic and other northern European tongues, but he doubts that they imported the predecessor of southern European languages such as ancient Greek, or those of eastern Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit”.

Exactly. In Sh. Talageri’s reconstruction, most languages of Europe derive from the Druhyu tribe’s emigration, which settled in Russia and mixed with the locals, linguistically assimilating them, before intruding into Central Europe[71]. The Greeks, Albanians and Armenians, by contrast, were peripheral groups in a largely Iranian Ānava tribe and emigrated in a second wave still described in books 7 and 4 of the RV[72]. An even later emigration – issued from the stay-behind Paurava tribe – yielded the Sanskrit traces in Kassite and Mitannic.

An uncontroversial Indologist theory by Hermann Oldenberg about the layeredness of the Vedic text (resented by traditionalists as “reducing a divine revelation to mere history”) yields a sequence of the different chapters. This shows that the older chapters mention eastern rivers, fauna, etc., and the later chapters more westerly ones, so that the RV describes an east-to-west gradient, just the opposite of what the AIT posits. The most Afghanistan-oriented chapter is the late 8^th, not the oldest chapters as the AIT would imply.

A closer analysis of verse forms and name types proves that the Sanskrit-speaking founders of the Mitanni culture are of a piece with the youngest layer of the RV. This in turn allowed for absolute chronological information: the late RV predates by centuries the Mitanni kingdom of the mid-2^nd millennium.

Astronomical evidence confirms Sh. Talageri’s relatively high chronology. The useful references in the Vedas are few and far between, sometimes hard to interpret with precision[73], but still numerous enough, and consistent: not a single one of them supports the low AIT-implied chronology.

Most point to the asterism Kṛttikā on the spring equinox or the asterism Maghā on the summer solstice, both timed by their precessional movement at ca. 2300. They concern the RV’s 10^th book, the Yajur and Atharva Vedas and the Brāhmaṇas, implying a higher age for the Family Books: up to and even beyond 3000 BCE[74]. One cannot explain them all away as either just wrong and confused, or as mere reminiscences of past observations[75]. Such special pleading can work once, but not in every instance; Occam’s razor applies.

The Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa, a post-Vedic manual of observational astronomy, definitely not dealing in reminiscences, is unambiguous. It dates itself in two different ways (Dhaniṣṭha solstitial, Bharaṇī equinoctial) to ca. 1300 BCE, a time when the AIT hardly has the Ṛg-Veda being composed. It “gives very precise information on all four solstitial and equinoctial points corresponding to the late 2^nd millennium BCE, and this text is very much later than the Brāhmaṇas. These data are as valid evidence for an early date for the Ṛg-Veda (which long preceded all these texts) as any evidence brought forward to promote a later date”[76]. This latter proof is then said to pertain to the existence of chariots and iron implements, two types of evidence that happen to be in flux due to new discoveries, unlike the precessional data.

It is unbecoming of scholars to cavalierly shift this date down to 500 or even 200 BCE, as is common, pleading that the evolution rate of language necessitates this denial of the astronomical information (what if this soft linguistic evidence, predicated on low Vedic dates, is circular?); or to put a position of Maghā on the Solstice at 800 BCE, as A. A. Macdonnell and A. B. Keith (1912 [1982]), p. 422-424, did, fully 1500 years later than what the Brāhmaṇa text and elementary astronomy tell us. So, as historical evidence goes, the astronomical data provide strong evidence for Sh. Talageri’s high chronological estimate.

 

Genetics

Educated Indians, steadfast in their willful illiteracy in linguistics, are more on their home turf in the hard sciences. Strictly, these have at most a minor impact on the linguistic homeland question: “Racial movements allegedly traced on the basis of genomes and haplogroups cannot help us trace the history of the Indo-European language migrations”[77]. This is but a modernized variation on what we all learned about skull-type Indo-Europeanism in our IE courses: it was a pre-war mistake to identify physical groups with linguistic communities. Yet somehow the AIT school, after having totally avoided taking cognizance of the advancing OIT case for more than a decade, suddenly turned jubilant over certain findings by geneticists.

The bygone identification of a race with a language is hailed again, though now defined by genotype. Invasionist polemicists argue in all seriousness about the evidential value of the “Aryan gene”, R1a1[78]. Genes, like skulls, do not speak: while a human migration may be proven by a sufficient number of such findings, we still would not know what happened to their language.

Yet, genetic discoveries favouring migrations out of India exist but have been passed over in silence. Thus, S. Sharma, E. Raj and R. Jena (2009) claim to show that R1a1, widely present in Central Siberia, Eastern Europe and North India, has its origin in the latter[79]. But now that research by David Reich (2018) seemed to support an AIT scenario, this made headlines. It was applauded among pro-AIT scholars and their political followers worldwide[80].

The recent AIT applause for D. Reich was centred on his claim of the R1a1 genes’ eastward movement. This does not impress the Indians anymore, they claim solid evidence for the reverse: “The haplogroup R1a* originated in India approximately 15,450 – 18,500 years ago. […] The westward Indo-Aryan expansion is a plausible explanation for the male-mediated demic expansions of R1a1a (R-M17) into Europe beginning around 2,500 BCE, which, to a large extent, replaced indigenous European males and their Y-chromosome strata”[81].

Impeccable scientists have shown lots of migration from India, affecting both the human and in their wake several non-human species (even mice, see P. Priyadarshi [2012]). Thus, genetic evidence for Indian cows’ genes in Ukrainian cows shows an Indian presence on the steppes: “However, in some areas of the Eurasian continent, phenotypically humpless cattle are known to have been influenced by historical admixture from zebu cattle […]. This study suggests that the Ukrainian and the Central Asian regions belong to hybrid zones where taurine-zebu crossbreds have existed”[82]. So, accompanying human emigrants, Indian cattle migrated all the way to Ukraine. By contrast, there is no sign that Western cattle were brought into India: the Aryan invaders were cowherds without cows.

Indologist Giacomo Benedetti (2012) comments: “Then, the presence of zebu genes and representations in Asia and Europe seem to be […] a confirmation that there was an important movement from South Asia to the West”.

The genetic debate has technical aspects that exceed our competence. What we can report, though, is the much increased self-confidence in the new generation of OIT-minded researchers. After the AIT crowd has thrown the gauntlet regarding genetic evidence, they are meeting the challenge quite well. As we witnessed at the conference “Bharat beyond Aryan Invasion Myth in the Light of Recent Discoveries” (Hyderabad, 7 December 2019, organized by Indic Academy and Pragna Bharati), they still wax indignant about Western “manipulations of evidence”, but they also provide excellent counter-evidence.

 

Conclusion

The polemicists for and against the AIT have a lot in common. They attribute political motives to their opponents and deduce from these imagined motives a justification for ignoring the evidence presented. Not that the debate is entirely symmetrical: though the AIT sceptics talk in the same vein, a few of them nonetheless do provide responses to all the opposing argumentations that reach their attention. This is much less the case in the other direction: “An ostrich-like attitude is perpetuating the Aryan invasion myth”[83].

So, we plead against this rhetoric of excluding opponents from the debate. It is unbecoming of scholars to declare themselves above pertinent evidence, even if coming from a school alleged to have unpleasant motives. Moreover, given the fast-shifting international power equation, this attitude of Western scholars ignoring their Indian counterparts, or at best talking down to them, strikes us as increasingly anomalous.

Koenraad ELST

Indus University, Ahmedabad, India

koenraad.elst@gmail.com

 

 

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[1] Starting with B. B. Lal (1950-52), Id. (1952), and still Id. (1981).

[2] S. V. Pradhan (2014), p. 67.

[3] B. B. Lal (2002), Id. (2005).

[4] B. B. Lal (2015), p. 125.

[5] R. S. P. Beekes (2011), p. 48. For the original Dutch version, see Id. (1990), p. 73.

[6] “Je suis déjà entièrement de votre avis qu’il n’est pas possible que différents peuples se soient accordés dans les mêmes méthodes, les mêmes connaissances, les mêmes fables, et les mêmes superstitions, si tout cela n’a pas été puisé chez une nation primitive qui a enseigné et égaré le reste de la terre. Or il y a long-temps que j’ai regardé l’ancienne dynastie des brachmanes comme cette nation primitive. […] je suis convaincu que tout nous vient des bords du Gange, astronomie, astrologie, métempsycose, etc.” (letter to M. Bailly of December 15, 1775; see A.-J.-Q. Beuchot [1834], p. 447-448).

[7] Quoted in C. Hale (2003), p. 61. German original: “Die Gelehrsamkeit der Indier namentlich rührt mit ziemlicher Gewißheit aus Tibet her, so wie dagegen alle unsere Künste aus Indostan hergekommen zu sein scheinen, z.B. der Ackerbau, die Ziffern, das Schachspiel u.s.w.” (I. Kant, Physische Geographie [1802], Zweiter Abschnitt: Vom Lande, § 37).

[8] B. G. Tilak (1903).

[9] J. Nehru (1946).

[10] R. E. M. Wheeler (1947), p. 82.

[11] See K. Elst (1993), p. 15-30, Sh. Talageri (2000), p. 384-397, A. Sharma (2005).

[12] Sh. Talageri (2000), p. 384.

[13] Cf. K. S. Rao (1957 [2015]).

[14] M. Witzel (2006), p. 208.

[15] J. Shaffer and D. Lichtenstein (1995) and Id. (2013).

[16] E. Bryant (2001), a model of “scholarly fair play” according to J. P. Mallory’s blurb.

[17] N. Jha and N. S. Rajaram (2000).

[18] Details in K. Elst (2018a), p. 210-214.

[19] M. Witzel (1995), p. 321, debunked in K. Elst (1999), p. 164-167; human psychology allows for more options that “truth” vs. “fraud”.

[20] NRI = Non-resident Indian [editors’ footnote].

[21] Details in K. Elst (2012), p. 145-155.

[22] N. S. Rajaram (1995), p. 217.

[23] It is to them that Sh. Talageri addressed his paper explaining the notion of language family; in vain (Sh. Talageri [2017b]).

[24] Sh. Sastry (2018), answered by K. Elst (2018).

[25] See I. Tonoyan-Belyayev (2017) and Id. ( 2018).

[26] See A. Semenenko (2019).

[27] See K. Elst (2015), p. 160-170.

[28] S. W. Jamison (2006), p. 256.

[29] Sh. Talageri (2017a).

[30] Sh. Talageri (2017c).

[31] J. Nichols in a note preceding the academia.edu version of her 1997 paper.

[32] B. Sergent (1997), p. 153 (my translation).

[33] B. Sergent (1997), p. 153 (my translation).

[34] M. Witzel (2006), p. 213.

[35] M. Witzel (2006), p. 213.

[36] T. Elizarenkova (1995), p. 36.

[37] F. Staal (1996), p. 154.

[38] R. Stuhrmann (2016), responded to by Sh. Talageri (2017a).

[39] C. Barras (2019b), p. 41 and 45.

[40] Quoted by C. Barras (2019a).

[41] Sh. Daniyal (2019).

[42] Sh. Daniyal (2019).

[43] G. Erdosy (1995), p. xiii.

[44] H. H. Hock (1999b), p. 154.

[45] Quotes in G. D. Bakshi (2019a), p. 67 and 153.

[46] J. Puhvel (1989), p. 45.

[47] Cf. H. H. Hock (1999b), p. 155.

[48] V. T. Rajshekar (2009), p. 43.

[49] L. M. Fosse (2005), p. 434.

[50] See e.g. S. Arvidsson (2006) and J.-P. Demoule (2014). This is not to say, however, that the views of these authors should be uncritically accepted. On J.-P. Demoule’s ideologically motivated misrepresentation of Indo-European linguistics and historical linguistics in general, see A. Pereltsvaig (2015), R. Garnier (2015-16), and especially the systematic refutation of his arguments by Th. Pellard, L. Sagart and G. Jacques (2018). Another recent attempt (by Angela Marcantonio) to deconstruct the Indo-European hypothesis is equally unconvincing (see I. Yakubovich [2011], p. 227-228). But it does say that the PIE hypothesis itself has proven as vulnerable to this political explaining-away of scholarly theories as is now being tried on the OIT.

[51] M. Hart (2007), p. 187.

[52] See Sh. Talageri (2016).

[53] V. T. Rajshekar (1994).

[54] E.g. R. Zydenbos (1993), unpacked in K. Elst (1999), p. 57-78; Sh. Pollock (1993), rebutted by R. Grünendahl (2012) and by K. Elst (2018), p. 97-105; and M. Witzel (2006), p. 227.

[55] Savitri Devi Mukherji (1976), p. 273, quoted in K. Elst (2001), p. 561. She was née Maximiani Portas, French-Greek, married to Asit Krishna Mukherji from Kolkata, both Hitler admirers.

[56] H. F. K. Günther (1987), p. 122. But see also H. F. K. Günther (1934), p. 25: “"Die Zuwanderungen der Inder nach Nordwestindien haben wahrscheinlich das 15. und 14. Jahrhundert erfüllt; einzelne erste Zuwanderergruppen mögen Nordwestindien vielleicht schon vorher erreicht haben”.

[57] A. Hitler (1920), reproduced in E. Jäckel and A. Kuhn (1980), p. 195 (my translation).

[58] M. Guruswamy (1995).

[59] R. S. P. Beekes (1990), p. 70 (my translation). Cf. also R. S. P. Beekes (2011), p. 46: “Linguistic information offers us no basis for determining the moments of time at which the Indo-European peoples began to inhabit the areas where they eventually settled”.

[60] See H. H. Hock (1999a), p. 13-17.

[61] See Sh. Talageri (2000), p. 266-282; Id. (2008), p. 205-236; (2020).

[62] See N. Kazanas (2013), p. 110-163.

[63] See K. Elst (2007b), p. 29-35.

[64] Sri Aurobindo Ghose (1956).

[65] According to mainstream IE linguistics, this hypothesis can no longer be maintained since PIE *wĺ̥kʷos ‘wolf’ contained a labiovelar whereas the root ‘to tear’ ended in a pure velar; see M. Mayrhofer (1956-76), vol. III, p. 240, and Id. (1986-2001), vol. III,, p. 571.

[66] This may be no more than a folk etymology, however. On the problem of the etymology of PIE ‘name’, see M. Mayrhofer (1986-2001), vol. II, p. 36, and especially S. Neri (2005), p. 212-213, fn. 50.

[67] Although such speculation on the origin of IE kinship terms in *-ter- as agent nouns can boast a long history and has not yet died out, it is rarely taken seriously today; cf. the thorough discussion – not devoid of sarcasm – by G.-J. Pinault (2009 [2010]), p. 27-28, who concludes that “tous les rattachements supposés à des racines verbales sont aussi vains que ridicules” [p. 28] and also provides a detailed rebuttal of the often attempted derivation of PIE *d^hugh₂-tér- ‘daughter’ from the root *d^heug^h- [p. 30].

[68] N. Kazanas (2002), p. 300. It must be noted, however, that N. Kazanas’ methodology, if better known, would be considered misconceived because there is no natural relationship between the degree of archaism of a given language and its geographic proximity to the original homeland of the language family to which it belongs (see I. Yakubovich [2011], p. 231-232, in a review of an earlier publication by the same author).

[69] N. Allen (1998), p. 3; about whom, see K. Elst (2020).

[70] E.g. G. N. Jha (2013), p. 19-38.

[71] Sh. Talageri (2000), p. 269-282; Id. (2008), p. 223-225 and 246-250.

[72] Sh. Talageri (2000), p. 163-231 and 267-270.

[73] As shown by H. H. Hock (2005), p. 295-303.

[74] Cf. U. Sen (1974).

[75] “Information from much earlier times can get embedded in ritual and through this channel continue into later times” (R. Thapar [2006], p. 27).

[76] E. Bryant (2002), p. 348.

[77] Sh. Talageri (2018).

[78] As cited by, e.g., G. D. Bakshi (2019b), p. 172.

[79] Cited by G. D. Bakshi (2019b), p. 200, as “never refuted”.

[80] E.g., for the Nouvelle Droite, P. Bouts (2019); and in India, T. Joseph (2018), responded to in Sh. Talageri (2019).

[81] A. L. Chavda (2017).

[82] J. Kantanen et al. (2009), p. 404.

[83] B. B. Lal (2010).

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