Indology-Bashing

 

Indology-Bashing

[Appendix added on 18-1-2021]

 

The following article was recently published (online) on Swarajyamag on 11-1-2021, entitled "Comparative Linguistics has Unsavoury Roots, Here's Why" by Avatans Kumar:

 

https://swarajyamag.com/culture/comparative-linguistics-has-unsavoury-roots-heres-why

 

The writer is known to me (by name) on a discussion site, and I do not like having to comment unfavorably on anyone known to me, but this article represents a kind of self-defeating Hindu response (to the western Indological perspective) which is, unfortunately, rapidly becoming a fashion among writers on the Hindu side. Unfortunately, since this takes the focus away from a discussion of facts and data into a discussion of real and alleged "motives" of the opposing side.

 

That this is in fact the way "left-liberal" discourse (the opposing side in this case) functions does not excuse similar discourse on the Hindu side, since the "left-liberal" side functions in this way only because (a) the facts and data (on almost every contentious subject) are unfavorable to them, and (b) at the same time the "left-liberal" side is so completely in control of the levers of power, in the field of politics and information, that they do not require to have to be right in order to prevail or to be declared (by the levers they control) as the winners in any debate.

 

But the Hindu side has, in almost all cases, (a) the facts and data on their side, and (b) at the same time they are also liable to be declared the losers even when they are right, because of the stranglehold of the "left-liberals" on discourse today — thus, lakhs of temples deliberately destroyed by Muslims is all right, but the demolition by Hindus of one Muslim structure to take back one of their most revered religious sites is a gigantic crime against humanity; cleansing of lakhs and lakhs of Hindus from Kashmir is all right, but the slightest restriction on the "rights" of any Kashmiri Muslim is a monstrous case of violation of human rights; violent persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh is all right, but giving refuge to those persecuted Hindus in India amounts to persecution of Indian Muslims, etc.

 

In these circumstances, nothing is more self-defeating and suicidal, and plainly stupid, than Hindus making the discourse easier for the opposing side by (a) refusing to use the facts and data which are in their favor, and (b) at the same time presenting anti-intellectual positions which make defeat more certain and at the same time introduce an element of derision in that defeat. Sad to say, this is the trend among large and influential sections of self-declared Hindus today, and the above article portrays that trend in the field most relevant to me: the field of Indian history, or, as both sides correctly call it, Indology.

 

This latest popular fashion on the Hindu side, which I would call Indology-bashing, received a massive new lease of life when two NRI professors, Joydeep Bagchee and Vishwa Adluri, made it their mission in the last few years, and there has been no looking back ever since. The above article also gives them credit for it.

 

There are two distinct aspects to this Indology-bashing:

1. A discussion of the motives, biases and ideologies of the Indologists.

2. A rejection of Indology, and consequently, as the title of the above-cited article makes clear, the rejection even of Comparative  Linguistics and the concept of language families, as a pseudo-science (or, as the two above professors called it, a "Nay Science").

 

I will deal with this topic in three parts:

I. Indology as "Racism".

II. A Tribute to a very great Indologist: Ralph T. H. Griffith.

III. Is Comparative Linguistics a pseudo-science?

 

 

I. Indology as "Racism"

 

That the early Indologists were motivated purely by racist or religious motives has long been a popular belief among Hindu nationalists. And it is not entirely wrong, as a study of the comments and views expressed by many prominent early Indologists will show. As there are many people studying these comments and views, I will not bother here to give instances. The two professors referred to above, Bagchee and Adluri, for example, have written an excellent article "Jews and Hindus in Indology", showing the contempt and hatred that the German Christian Indologists bore even towards the Jewish Indologists of their own time. Such biases should indeed be analysed in detail and brought forward for understanding many of the dogmas adopted by the Indologists in their Indological studies.

 

But we have likewise many Indian scholars in the nineteenth century who became supporters of the AIT. These scholars had the following personal characteristics: they were Brahmins, and they identified the "Aryan Invaders" as their personal ancestors, and glorified in the concept of this alleged Aryan Invasion. There is an excellent article "Aryan origins: arguments from the nineteenth-century Maharashtra" on this by Madhav Deshpande, another NRI (or so I assume) scholar and associate of Michael Witzel, showing how a large number of Maharashtrian Brahmin scholars in the nineteenth century looked at the subject.

 

Lokmanya Tilak was one of the most prominent later writers of this genre. In his book "Arctic Home in the Vedas", he consistently regarded the Aryan invaders as his earliest personal ancestors, and he even glorified their alleged treatment of the natives of the various lands (including India!) they allegedly conquered as indicating their superiority to the natives. He tells us "the very fact that …[the Aryans] were able to establish their supremacy over the races they came across in their migrations from their original home, and that they succeeded, by conquest or assimilation, in Aryanising the latter in language, thought and religion under circumstances which could not be expected to be favourable to them, is enough to prove that the original Aryan civilization must have been of a type far higher than that of the non-Aryan races" (TILAK 1903:409), and exults in "the vitality and superiority of the Aryan races, as disclosed by their conquest, by extermination or assimilation, of the non-Aryan races with whom they came into contact in their migrations in search of new lands from the North Pole to the equator" (TILAK"1903:431).

 

What do we brand as "racist" here: Tilak, Brahmins as a whole, Maharashtrians as a whole, Hindus as a whole, the Rigveda as a whole, or the discipline of Vedic studies as a whole?

 

Surely we should have the common decency and viveka-buddhi to be able to distinguish between evaluating, on the one hand, the personal prejudices of individual writers (howsoever important, pioneering and many in number), and, on the other, the credibility or validity of the academic subject or discipline they are dealing with? The personal biases, prejudices, hatreds and idiosyncracies of individual Indologists do not automatically indict the discipline of Indology itself (and certainly not the science of Comparative Linguistics and the scientifically extremely valid concept of an Indo-European language family).

 

I have repeatedly, throughout the course of my writings in the last almost three decades, firmly refused to condemn "western Indologists" as a whole. Whatever prejudices and motives many of them may have harbored in their hearts, and whatever blinkers they may have worn on their eyes which led them to countless and very basic wrong interpretations and analyses — all of which must be fully exposed — I have no doubt there were many among them who were extremely sincere in their studies. I give below the plea made by Ralph T H Griffith in his introduction to his translation of the Rigveda.

He points out that scholars of "the modern school of Vedic interpretation"  like himself have spent "half their lives" in studying the Vedas, and hopes that their Indian critics "will at any rate give the leaders and the followers of this modern school credit for deep devotion to ancient Indian literature and due admiration of the great Indian scholars who have expounded it; and will acknowledge that these modern scholars—however mistaken their views may appear to be—are labouring sincerely and solely to discover and declare the spirit and the truth of the most ancient and venerated literary records that are the heritage of Aryan man".

 

In fact, in respect of Griffith, I must point out that:

1. I consider Griffith to be a very great Indologist whom I respect,

2. Griffith is often unfairly derided by both the AIT and OIT sides,

3. I am very regularly accused, initially by Witzel, and now by every brainless lout on the internet, of basing my works on, and "relying" solely on, the translation by Griffith,

Hence I feel it necessary to pay my deep respects to this great Indologist and point out some home-truths, before moving on to the subject of Comparative Linguistics.

 

 

II. A Tribute to a very great Indologist: Ralph T. H. Griffith

 

Griffith is regularly derided by Hindu scholars for his AIT outlook, but he is also derided by western scholars.

 

In his vicious critique “WESTWARD HO! The Incredible Wanderlust of the Rgvedic Tribes Exposed by S. Talageri” of my second book “The Rigveda – A Historical Analysis”, Michael Witzel wrote that I rely “throughout on Griffith’s outdated Victorian translation (1889), which even in its own day was aimed at a popular (and not scholarly) audience” (WITZEL 2001b:Summary), and, naturally, “depending totally on” (WITZEL 2001b:Edit), and “blindly using, any translation – let alone one as inadequate as Griffith’s – can easily lead one astray” (WITZEL 2001b:§3)."

 

In a more recent issue of Witzel's internet journal JIES, Stefan Zimmer reviews the recent English translation of the Rigveda by Stephanie Jamison, and declares it to be "the first complete Rigveda [,,,] in English […] which may be taken serious by the scholarly world", and takes a swipe at Griffith: "only two complete translations of the Rigveda have been published in the past, viz. by Horace H. Wilson (1850-57, with reprints) and Ralph T.H. Griffith (1889-92, with revised later reprints). Both have been deservedly blamed for being philologically unreliable even in their own times, and both, consequently, played no role at all in subsequent Indological studies" (ZIMMER 2015:477).

 

Incredible but true: no "scholar" was able to translate the whole Rigveda into English in the course of 123 years between 1892 to 2015, and this is the disrespectful way in which the western scholars treat the two great pioneering scholars who did the job on their own in the earliest days.

Of course, just because they were the earliest they do not merit compulsory praise, but was their work really so bad as to deserve this condemnation? Obviously, the "scholarly audience" that Witzel refers to above did not find Griffith's (or Wilson's) translation sufficient to prove their agenda: his AIT interpretations do not usually appear in his actual translations (whether correct or incorrect), which are more objective, but in his footnotes, which provide the subjective note.

 

Griffith's translation definitely has its limits and faults. The language and style are Victorian, as also his moral inhibitions: he omits translating certain hymns and verses into English in the main body of his work, for their erotic content, and puts them in a separate appendix at the end of the book but translated into Latin (not meant for the "popular" audience but only for the "scholarly audience"). Moreover, his ill-advised use of Roman numerals for the hymn-numbers, and detachment of the Vālakhilya hymns from the middle of Book 8 and placing them in an appendix to Book 8 (changing the hymn-numbers of the hymns in Book 8 in the process), also add to the confusion.

 

But the great advantage of his translation is that, in spite of the countless mistakes made by him (because of the AIT blinkers worn by him), it gives us a greater insight into the Rigveda than any single translation by any other scholar. He has not only studied all the studies and partial translations of the Rigveda till his time (he mentions in his preface the works of Ludwig, Peterson, Müller, Wilson, Grassmann, Weber, Oldenberg, Bergaigne, Wallis, Kaegi, Monier-Williams, Goldstücker, Benfey, Muir, Roth, Cowell, Geldner, Colebrooke, etc.), but more important, he often points out the differences in their interpretations in the footnotes when his own translations differ: no other scholar does this to the same extent and in the same manner (including the Geldner and Jamison praised by Witzel and Zimmer when condemning Griffith), and therefore all other translations, even the best of them, give us limited perspectives (the views of only the single translator) on the actual verses being translated.

 

Thus, for example, he correctly translates VII.18.7 as "Together came the Pakthas, the Bhalānas, the Alinas, the Śivas and the Viṣāṇins", but in the footnotes points out Wilson's literalistic translation as "Those who dress the oblations, those who pronounce auspicious words, those who abstain from penance, those who bear horns (in their hands), those who bestow happiness (on the world by sacrifice)".

He incorrectly translates VII.18.8 as "Lord of the earth, he with his might repressed them: still lay the herd and the affrighted herdsman", but in the footnotes mentions Wilson's more accurate translation: "But he by his greatness pervades the earth, Kavi, the son of Chayamāna, like a falling victim, sleeps (in death)".

He incorrectly translates VII.83.1 as "armed with broad axes" and in the footnotes he not only gives Wilson's translation as "armed with large sickles", but, more important, notes: "Professor Ludwig notes that the former meaning is perfectly impossible, and argues that pṛthuparśavah must mean 'the Pṛthus and the Parśus'".

Many such instances can be produced, The Rigveda is a difficult text to translate, and the translation of a single scholar cannot reveal the full or correct picture. Griffith's work is therefore of great utility in understanding many contradictory translations, or even in understanding that there are indeed contradictory translations.

 

Incidentally, in condemning Griffith, both Witzel and Stefan Zimmer praise the German translation of Geldner (apart from the latest English translation of Jamison):

"the far more accurate scholarly translations made by K.F. Geldner (1951, German)…" (WITZEL 2001b:§3)

"up to now the standard translation into any language was Karl F. Geldner's German one, published in 1951 by the American Oriental Society, already written in the beginning of the century. An excellent work by the great Avestan and Vedic scholar, constantly consulted by everybody, much admired for its ample philological notes…" (ZIMMER 2015:478).

 

But note:

 

1. Jamison for example, translates the three verses referred to above as follows:

VII.18.7: "The Pakthas ["cooked oblations"?] and the Bhalānases ["raiders"?], spoke out, and the Alinas, the Viṣānins and the Śivas".

VII.18.8: "With his greatness he [Indra? Turvaṣa?] enveloped the earth, being master of it. The poet lay there, being perceived as (just) a (sacrificial) animal".

VII.83.1: "the broad-chested ones".

Note that Jamison's translation of VII.18.7 alternately translates Pakthas and Bhalānases as names or literal phrases, and the other three words only as names, creating a non-existent division in the five names (unlike Griffith, who consistently treats all five as names, and Wilson, who treats all five as literal phrases).

And her translations of VII.18.8 and VII.83.1 camouflage all the names in the form of literal phrases. Without Griffith (and Wilson in the first case) would the reader even have known that the concerned verses contain names?

This is why I give tribute to Griffith as a truly great Indological scholar. Even where he was wrong most of the time, it was not because of ideology or insincerity, but because of the AIT blinkers which were worn by him as a scholar of his time. And a study of his translations (and footnotes) is indispensable.

 

2. Further, the endorsement of Geldner while condemning Griffith, by both Witzel and Stefan Zimmer (I mention his name Stefan, since there was also an earlier Zimmer referred to by Griffith) is not very consistent when they find Geldner's translations inconvenient to their AIT interpretations.

Thus, the word ibha in the Rigveda is variously translated by Griffith as "servant/attendant" in IV.4.1 and VI.20.8, and as "household" in I.84.17. Geldner correctly translates the word as "elephant" in IV.4.1 and I.84.17, and leaves it untranslated as ibha in VI.20.8.

In this case, needless to say, Witzel and Stefan Zimmer would find Griffith's translations to be "scholarly" or "far more accurate scholarly translations", and would reject Geldner's as "inadequate" and "philologically unreliable".

Such is the hypocrisy of modern western Indological "scholars". And so much is the value you can place on their praise and condemnation of early Indologists.

 

As for the criticism that my analysis of the Rigveda solely "relies on" or is "based on" Griffith's translation:

Not one single person, neither Witzel who initially made this claim, nor the numerous brainless moronic clods on the internet who frequently repeat his words, can point out a single instance where I have "relied on", or "based" my analysis on, Griffith's translations and consequently have been led into any conclusions. That I have given a detailed critique of Griffith's translations in my second book (TALAGERI 2000:339-343) is not even worth mentioning in this regard.

 

Therefore and nevertheless, I pay my tributes to this great Indologist (as I already paid tribute in my books to Edward Hopkins, another great Indologist). However many mistakes these two particular Indologists, and many others, may have made — and, after all, human beings do make mistakes — they are not fools or villains, but great scholars who deserve respect.

 

 

III. Is Comparative Linguistics a pseudo-science?

 

To return back to the main topic: is Comparative Linguistics a pseudo-science and is the concept of a language family incorrect or unscientific?

 

I have already dealt with this in my earlier blog "Are German and French Closer to Sanskrit than Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu?" I will repeat the facts here, again, in the specific context of the Swarajyamag article which made me write this article in the first place.

 

To begin with, check the common words in the different Indo-European languages:

 

1. Compare relationship words:

English: father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter.

Sanskrit: pitar, mātar, bhrātar, svasar, sūnu, duhitar.

Persian: pidar, mādar, birādar, khvahar, pesar (hūnu in Avestan), dukhtar.

Compare all these words with Tamil: tandai, tāy, aṇṇan/tambi, akkāḷ/tangi, peyan, peṇ.

 

2. Compare numbers:

Sanskrit tri, Sinhalese tuna, Kashmiri tre, Hindi tīn, Avestan thri, Pashto dray, Greek treis, Albanian tre, English three, German drei, Dutch drie, Swedish tre, Danish tre, Norwegian tre, Icelandic thryu, Gothic thrija, Latin tres, French trois, Spanish tres, Portuguese três, Italian tre, Romanian trei, Russian tri, Macedonian tri, Polish trzy, Czech tři, Slovak tri, Slovene tríje, Gothic thrija, Lithuanian trys, Latvian tris, Irish trī, Welsh tri, Tocharian trai, Hittite tēries, etc. Compare all these words with Tamil mūnṛu, Malayalam mūnnu, Telugu mūḍu, Kannada mūru, Tulu mūji.

 

3. Compare personal pronouns:

Sanskrit tu-, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, etc. tū, Avestan tū, Persian, Pashto, Kurdish tu, Latin tū, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Catalan tu, Irish tu, Scots-Gaelic thu, Welsh ti, Old English thū (later English thou), Icelandic thu, German, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish du, Old Church Slavic ty, Russian, Belorussian, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian ty, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Bosnian ti, Armenian du, Albanian ti, Doric Greek tu, Lithuanian and Latvian tu, Tocharian tu.

Compare all these words with Tamil, Malayalam, Toda, Kota, Brahui nī, Kurukh nīn, Kannada nīnu, Kolami, Naiki nīv, Telugu nīvu.

[For good measure, also compare Sanskrit vay-, yūy-, te, English we, you, they, and Avestan vae, yūz, dī. And then with Tamil nāṅgaḷ, nīṅgaḷ, avargaḷ.  

Or compare Sanskrit dative -me and -te, Avestan me and te,  English me and thee, Doric Greek me and te, Latin me and te. And then with Tamil yennai and unnai]

 

4. Finally, take the most fundamental of verbs, the verb "to be", and its most basic present tense conjugational forms: (I) am, (thou) art, (he/she/it) is. The forms in a main representative language from each of the twelve different branches are:

Sanskrit: asmi, asi, asti.

Avestan: ahmī, ahī, astī.

Homeric Greek: eimi, essi, esti.

Latin: sum, es, est.

Gothic: em, ert, est.

Hittite: ēšmi, ēšši, ēšzi.

Old Irish: am, at, is.

Russian: esmy, esi, esty.

Lithuanian: esmi, esi, esti.

Albanian: jam, je, ishtë.

Armenian: em, es, ê.

Tocharian: -am, -at, -aṣ.

 

Compare with:

Tamil: irukkiŗēn, irukkiŗāy, irukkiŗān/irukkiŗāḷ/irukkiŗadu.

Kannada: iddēne, iddi, iddāne/iddāḷe/ide.

Telugu: unnānu, unnāvu, unnāḍu/unnadi/unnadi.

 

Marathi: āhe, āhes, āhe.

Konkani: āssa, āssa, āssa.

Hindi: hũ, hai, hai.

Gujarati: chũ, che, che.

Bengali: āchi,  ācha,  āche.

Sindhi: āhyẫ,  āhĩ,  āhe. 

Punjabi: hẫ,  haĩ,  hai.

 

See how even the modern North Indian ("Aryan" language) words are not exactly like the Sanskrit words or like each other, though the connection can be seen or analyzed; but the words in the ancient Indo-European languages given above are almost replicas of each other, like the dialectal forms of a single language. And this is not only with ancient Greek, Avestan and Hittite, but even modern Russian and Lithuanian. But all these languages have evolved separately from each other for thousands of years in different geographical areas with very little historical contacts (and certainly no known historical contacts where the interaction was so total and all-powerful that even such basic words could have been borrowed from one to the other, when there is not a single known example anywhere in the whole world where even closely situated languages with one language totally influencing the other one has resulted in the borrowing of personal pronouns or basic verbal forms). Obviously the "Indo-European" languages are closely related to each other. But the speakers of the languages are clearly not racially or genetically related to each other (while the speakers of different language families in India are racially and genetically related to each other). So this means that these languages have spread from some one particular area to all the other areas in prehistoric times, and (by elite dominance or whatever means) language replacement took place where the people in the other areas, over the centuries, slowly adopted these languages: there can be no alternative explanation. The only question is: from which area? I have shown that it was from North India.

 

We could go on and on, piling up the irrefutable evidence which would be clear even to the meanest intelligence. But let us take up the question in the context of the Bagchee-Adluri theory:

 

In the above Swarajyamag article, we are told "The discovery of Sanskrit and its rich heritage in scientific and philosophical texts forced German Indologists and philologists to reckon it as related to PIE." Further, "Adluri shows that the field of comparative linguistics developed as an adjunct to racial anthropology. Proponents of this branch of linguistics were acquainted with, and approvingly cited and borrowed its methods and ideas of science from, comparative anatomy, botany, and paleontology."

In short, all these languages, according to the article, are not really related to each other: it is only the European Indologists, out of their racist ideologies and anti-Jewish prejudices, who concocted the false science of Comparative Linguistics and the false idea of a Indo-European family of languages to link together unrelated languages in a fake "family", to separate European non-Jews from Jews, and to proclaim the superiority of the European race to non-European races. And they concocted this concept not from linguistic facts, but from "comparative anatomy, botany, and paleontology"!

 

There is only one question which the Indo-European-language-family-deniers must answer: how did all these diverse languages, with no historical links to each other (that could argue historical influence), suddenly acquire this striking similarity to each other in even the most basic aspects of vocabulary which can never be borrowed by one language from another language, if they were not really derived from a common ancestral language and if they were only clubbed together by racist ideologues with a racist agenda?

 

As soon as the racist Indologists decided to concoct this fake language-family, did they immediately replace the original words from all these languages for, for example, "am, art, is", with new concocted words as detailed above and below?:

Sanskrit: asmi, asi, asti.

Avestan: ahmī, ahī, astī.

Homeric Greek: eimi, essi, esti.

Latin: sum, es, est.

Gothic: em, ert, est.

Hittite: ēšmi, ēšši, ēšzi.

Old Irish: am, at, is.

Russian: esmy, esi, esty.

Lithuanian: esmi, esi, esti.

Albanian: jam, je, ishtë.

Armenian: em, es, ê.

Tocharian: -am, -at, -aṣ.

 

Or were all these words already there in all these languages, by some miracle of coincidence and independent origin, for the convenience of these racist Indologists to concoct their racist idea of a false "language-family"?

 

Let us (Hindus) not strive to lose a winning battle by such utterly senseless and thoughtless theories.

 

 

 

 

APPENDIX added 18-1-2021:

 

My above article has produced a "rejoinder" from another member (ShankaraBharadwaj Khandavalli) of the discussion group to which the original writer (Avatans Kumar), whose article I critiqued in my above article, belongs:

 

https://skandaveera.wordpress.com/2021/01/17/is-indology-pseudo-science/

 

It is the only type of rejoinder that my article could have got from the Indology-bashers: one filled from beginning to end with ideological faith statements, insinuations, vague generalizations, and an utter contempt for the facts and data. In fact the "rejoinder" only proves completely every single point made by me in my above article. The article, needless to say contains only rhetoric and is completely devoid of any kind of data.

 

I will not deal with the rhetoric as a whole. Frankly, I am tired of such hate-debates, and do not want to enter that swamp. But the point of the whole thing is not whether we want to confer Bharat Ratnas on the Indologists or to wage war on the countries which produced them. The only relevant issue behind all this cross-talk is:

Is the concept of an Indo-European family scientifically valid or invalid?

 

Hence I will only take up the writer's pronouncements on this issue.

I will ignore frankly ridiculous propositions like "Indian knowledge narrates several cycles of creation, the Manus and Prajapatis and devatas in these cycles. It indicates the prior existence of all the knowledge that got reshaped and restructured over time. Veda itself is evidence: the four veda structure is itself a re-structure of pre-existing knowledge. Why would an ancestor language of Vedic language be unmentioned in any form?":  if this is the kind of kindergarten argument that one is supposed to take up on any — and I mean any — scientific subject, I step out of the debate. I have repeatedly stated on private forums that a "debate" on religious fundamentalist beliefs and dogmas of any religion is not my idea of a serious debate, and treating studies as right or wrong based on whether or not they fulfill the requirements of these beliefs and dogmas is unthinkable.

Or this: "Why would an ancestor language of Vedic language be unmentioned in any form?": does it mean that unrecorded and "unmentioned" languages of the world, from the beginnings of time, are actually languages which never existed? Since the Rigveda is the oldest recorded text, who would "mention" its ancestor language? And since even the Andamanese languages, let alone their ancestral form, were not mentioned anywhere before European scholars recorded the languages, are these languages non-existent figments of someone's imagination? My great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather also may not be "mentioned" anywhere, but I am sure he existed.

As I said, I will not deal here with kindergarten arguments, other than those which try to give "alternate explanations" for the common words in the different IE languages.

[However, one point. Khandavalli tells us: "No one showed how Tilak was a casteist just because he accepted AIT." If I had branded people with labels "just because" they accepted the AIT, I would not have been defending the sincere scholars among the Indologists. Tilak did not just "accept AIT", he (as part of a large group of Maharashtrian Brahmin scholars of his time who accepted the AIT) repeatedly identified his "Arctic Aryans" as his ancestors, repeatedly made statements like "the original Aryan civilization must have been of a type far higher than that of the non-Aryan races" (TILAK 1903:409) and specifically said that "the vitality and superiority of the Aryan races" was "disclosed by their conquest, by extermination or assimilation, of the non-Aryan races with whom they came into contact in their migrations in search of new lands from the North Pole to the equator" (TILAK"1903:431). I'm sure this is straight English which anyone should be able to understand].

 

The above "rejoinder" neatly states the logical facts (before rejecting them) as follows:

"The main question remains the validity of comparative linguistics that Indologists use. Here Shrikant simply accepts and repeats the line of Indology, without explaining its premises or why it should even be accepted.

In short the logic goes something like this (paraphrasing) –

1.     there is similarity in word roots between Indian and European languages

2.     the peoples speaking these languages do not have direct contact and the languages have evolved in different trajectories in the recent millennia

so they must have had a common root in one language from where different peoples have dispersed to different areas and the common roots are visible in the various languages they are using"

 

And Khandavalli gives incredible "alternate explanations" for the common words in the different IE languages:

 

1. "Given man’s nature is same across the planet, and given that word-roots are man’s perception of natural phenomena, man in different parts of the world can very much arrive at the same kind of emotive word-root to describe those phenomena. This does not even necessitate interaction…..Why can languages not evolve in different places with similar features?"

So, people across Europe, Iran Central Asia and North India, having exactly the same "nature", arrived at the same words, independently and with no interaction with each other, for basic family relationships, numbers, personal pronouns, basic verbal conjugations, etc., etc. But the people of South India had a different "nature" and so did not arrive at these same words! In denying linguistics, doesn't this amount to embracing racism?

 

2. "… a few elite men from the subcontinent settling abroad and enriching those societies with another’s knowledge. No need for common linguistic ancestor, simply an uncivilized society taking imperfectly the learnings of an already civilized society".

There is not a single example in the whole world where even neighboring languages, with one language heavily influencing the other, led to a total replacement of basic words (personal pronouns, basic forms of "to be", etc.). So this fairy tale (apart from the fact that it does not fulfill Khandavalli's criterion of believing only in things which are "mentioned") where a few people went and gave "knowledge" of Sanskrit words to all the different people of Iran, Central Asia and different parts of Europe is impossible to swallow. Further, the different words used by all those different people, before they adopted the Sanskrit vocabulary as "knowledge", are also not "mentioned" anywhere.

Again, it looks like "elite men" from prehistoric India were as Europe/America-mad as "elite men"  of modern India, and did not feel like imparting to the uncivilized people of South India these "learnings of an already civilized society" which they so readily imparted to Europeans.

 

3. "There is another possibility:  direction of movement of people and direction of movement of culture being opposite. While waves of people came towards Indian subcontinent they kept learning and taking things out into their regions."

The same goes for this: is there any "mention" of this incredible situation anywhere? The Islamic Arabs and Persians who came to India imparted their words into Indian languages, but did not similarly take back Indian words into Arabia. Sanskrit migrants to South-east Asia imparted Sanskrit words into the languages there, but not similarly bring back Malay, Burmese, Thai and Khmer words into Indian languages. One of the proofs of the OIT is that the Finno-Ugrian languages have Indo-Iranian words, but the Indo-Iranian languages do not have Finno-Ugrian words. In his zeal to bash the concept of an Indo-European language family, Khandavalli is willing to hack away at the OIT case with illogical arguments.

Again, why did this massive export of "knowledge" miss out South India? Was there a Lakshman rekha between North and South India?

 

4. Finally: "There is still another possibility: there have been both directions of movement at different points of time, meaning greater troubles for the theories of Indology and history. One can multiply possibilities….".

Well!

This reminds me of the Ayodhya Debate at the time of the Chandrashekhar government. The VHP side presented a single, strong, irrefutable case drafted out for them by Koenraad Elst. The Babri side presented every single "alternate explanation" to the facts. That those "alternate explanations" were not only plainly stupid and totally unsupported by any records, but they also contradicted each other sharply, did not matter: anything but the facts.

 

So is it any surprise that Khandavalli's conclusion is: "So “PIE” and OIT do not logically sit together that well". As no sane person can deny (except in fervent rhetoric) that there must have been a PIE language, what he is saying in short is that the OIT does not logically sit together with the facts.

Is "self-defeating" an overstatement?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

GRIFFITH 1889: The Hymns of the Rig-Veda. (tr.) Griffith, Ralph T.H. Munshiram Manoharlal, rep. 1987, Varanasi.

 

JAMISON-BRERETON 2014: The Rigveda―The Earliest Religious Poetry of India. Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 2014.

 

TALAGERI 2000: The Rigveda: A Historical Analysis. Talageri, Shrikant G. Aditya Prakashan (New Delhi), 2000.

 

TILAK 1903: The Arctic Home in the Vedas. Tilak, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar, Tilak Bros (publishers), Pune 1903.

 

WITZEL 2001b: WESTWARD HO! The Incredible Wanderlust of the Rgvedic Tribes Exposed by S. Talageri. Witzel, Michael, at http://users.primushost.com/~india/ejvs/ejvs0702/ejvs0702a.txt, JIES 2001.

 

ZIMMER 2015: Review of Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, Zimmer, Stefan, in Journal of Indo-European Studies (JIES), Volume 43, Number 3 and 4.