False Allegation About My Insulting Witzel's Wife

 

False Allegation About My Insulting Witzel's Wife

 

As I said, people sometimes send me tweets (I am not on twitter) which refer to me. Sometimes, I choose to respond to them on my blog.

Here is a slanderous tweet today by an AIT warrior named Curwen Ares Rolinson, which refers to my making an "insulting comment" about Witzel's wife. I have seen this slanderous allegation being bandied around frequently in various places and on various fora. Further, this particular lying tweet goes on to say I "later admitted [I] should not have done it" after Witzel expressed his refusal to be amused!

Here is the tweet:

Well, I am not amused by these slanderous lies being bandied around about me. And I think it is time to put this in the right perspective to expose all this fake propaganda.

I had written my second book "The Rigveda - A Historical Analysis" in the year 2000. While writing this book, I discovered that Witzel had been going around abusing me for my alleged political ideology in his earlier articles on Vedic history, on the basis of my earlier 1993 book "The Aryan Invasion theory - A reappraisal", and without having read or even seen that earlier book!

Therefore, I included a chapter in this second book in 2000, entitled "Michael Witzel - An Examination of Western Vedic Scholarship", exposing his own fake and flawed Vedic scholarship through a critique of those earlier articles of his on Vedic history. I got the publisher to send him a copy of my book.

 

This had a strange and unexpected result:

Witzel, through another lecturer then at Harvard, sent me an offer through Ashok Chowgule (then and still a leader of the VHP) — an offer for me to be considered for a scholarship to study at Harvard under Witzel himself, with a proviso: I had to be ready to modify my views and not to prove to be "intransigent" in those views!

Naturally, I refused the offer through the same channels. However, my refusal seems not to have been communicated to Witzel, and, in 2001, there was a small email debate between me and Witzel with a few others (published on the internet by various people at the time) in which it was clear that Witzel was confident that his offer must have softened me up and made me amenable to his position.

However, after he realized that there had been no softening on my part (and concluded that perhaps his offer had not been communicated to me after all), he himself revealed in that same email debate that he had been considering me for a scholarship but that (after my part in that email debate) he realized that it would have been a waste of his time and energy and that I was not worth it.

I responded that the offer (practically a bribe offer) had already been made and rejected by me. This infuriated Witzel and he promised me that he would write a review article about my second book (TALAGERI 2000) and tear my thesis to shreds.

He finally did put up a pathetic review article on his EJVS site:

https://crossasia-journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/ejvs/article/view/829

 

I replied in full detail to his pathetic review. Much water has flown under the bridge since then, but this sole reference to Witzel's wife was there in that reply of mine which was entitled "Michael Witzel - An Examination of his Review of my Book TALAGERI 2000".

First here is the section of that reply (in the year 2001) which contains this much-misreported reference to Witzel's wife:

 

"At the same time, in referring to my 'silly but infuriating use of irregular abbreviations of book titles' (see section III.11.c of this article), Witzel writes:

'Amusingly, HINDUTVA (given just like this – all in caps!), a book by the nationalist politician V. D. Sarvarkar, who closely worked with Italian and German fascists, is not further abbreviated in T.’s bibliography – indicating, in an almost Freudian way, the bent of mind of the author under discussion here. Nomen plenum est omen.' (§5).

An unbelievable chain of free association and wholesale slander: Witzel starts out with the claim that Savarkar (spelt “Sarvarkar”) “closely worked with Italian and German fascists” – a statement so grotesquely and blatantly false that, if such a verifiably false statement had been made about any historical personality from Europe or the U.S.A., I doubt if Witzel could have got away without, at the very least, a convincingly worded public apology!

From this he concludes that Savarkar was a fascist. For a detailed discussion on the ugly misuse of terms like “fascist” in current political debate, Witzel should read Koenraad ELST’s recent book “The Saffron Swastika” (2001).

And then, he concludes, from my reference to Savarkar’s book “HINDUTVA (given just like this – all in caps!)”, that I have a fascist “bent of mind”!

Savarkar’s book is the only book in my entire bibliography which has a one-word title (two other books, The Mahabharata and The Yajurveda, are not the original texts, but translations of ancient texts by modern scholars). Since I have referred to the books (except the Mahabharata and the Yajurveda) by the initials in the titles — “Vedic Mythological Tracts” being VMT — Hindutva would have become simply H, which would certainly have been 'silly'!  Freudian Psychology being one more of those countless subjects about which I know nothing, and Witzel knows everything, I was not aware that I was exposing all my darkest secrets by the simple slip of giving the name of a book 'all in caps'!

'Amusingly', my entire discussion about the parts of Savarkar’s book relevant to my subject (TALAGERI 2000:367-368) is a sharply critical one. And yet, Witzel discovers my fascist bent of mind from these references! The reference to Freud is very apt: Freud would have found Witzel an interesting specimen for a special study!

 

What if a similar chain of free association is applied to Witzel himself?

1. Witzel is a speaker of German. So was Hitler!

2. Witzel’s most sacrosanct academic idols in RV studies are Germans: Oldenberg, Geldner, Mayrhofer, Rau, Kulke. At the same time, Witzel has a heady contempt for Indians and Indian scholarship in general. So did Hitler!

3. Witzel is so antipathetic to the idea of an Indian homeland that he has made it his life’s mission to counter the idea. Hitler would have been equally antipathetic!

4. Witzel seems to function within an Axis-centric circle: he is a German, his wife (I am told) is a Japanese. The Editorial Board of his EJVS consists of Germans, Japanese and Italians, with a sprinkling of a couple of others teaching in German universities, and two scholars (a Finn and an Indian Brahmin) having an ancestral association with the Swastika!

No – I am not proud of what I have just written: I am only holding up a mirror to Witzel (with due apologies to everyone else named in the process) to show him how cheap such slander mongering can sound!"

 

So this was my response to Witzel's cheap slander of one of the greatest sons of India, Swatantryaveer Savarkar, and his attempt to connect Savarkar with Nazis and fascism, and then to connect me also up as a "fascist" on the ground that I put the name of Savarkar's book "HINDUTVA (given just like this – all in caps!)" in the bibliography of my book!

So not only was my reference to Witzel's wife a mild one, I pointed out there and then (and not "later admitted", as that lying tweet implies) that I was offering my "due apologies to everyone else named in the process" and that I wrote all this only to show Witzel "how cheap such slander mongering can sound".

All this is indeed cheap, but not as cheap as people continuing to lie and make an issue out of a non-issue even twenty years later!