Does Indian History Need To Be Rewritten?

 

Does Indian History Need To Be Rewritten?

Shrikant G. Talageri

 

[I started this article yesterday because I had received a request from opindia.com a week or so ago to "write an article on why India needs to rewrite its history" because  of objections being raised by leftists to RSS people being appointed on a national focus group for curriculum changes. As I was absorbed in writing my articles uploaded just before this one, and was not keeping in good health, I was hesitant,  but they insisted (for which I am grateful to them). I completed the article and sent it to them by midday, and informed them at the same time that I would also be uploading it on my blogspot as usual, and also since I felt that they would probably edit certain parts of the article for obvious reasons. After nearly six hours, I have not received any reply as to whether they have any objections to this, or whether in fact they would upload the article (even in a truncated form) at all. They are still free to publish, or not publish, the article on their site, but I am now (also?) uploading it on my blogspot]

 

Is Indian history being "rewritten" at the moment? This is a basic question which comes to mind when we see the kind of hullabaloo being created all over the world, not just in India, over the claims/allegations being made by supporters/opponents (respectively) of the ruling BJP dispensation, to the effect that the writing of history in India has been taken out of the hands of historians and been handed over to people inclined to a particular "rightist" or "Hindutva" ideology.

This is not true. Even if there are ideologically inclined people in the support base of the BJP, they have little say in the affairs and decisions of the ruling dispensation which has never shown any particular inclination for any kind of ideological thinking or action, except when elections draw near and bloc votes have to be garnered (and history writing or rewriting has never been a particularly prominent vote-gatherer, so such issues do not figure even in these pre-election calculations). The only concerns of the BJP have been to make money in massive amounts in the name of various other headings (the main being "Development"), even when this involves massive and irreparable damages to what the naïve believe to be "Hindu" causes dear to the hearts of BJP politicians.

In this particular matter, we have repeated declarations and assurances by the concerned BJP ministers (and though generally I take their declarations with a heavy pinch of salt, in this particular case I am sorry to say I have no doubt they are being scrupulously honest when they declare that no changes of a "Hindu-ideology"-kind have been made), which are proudly broadcast by their party media:

https://swarajyamag.com/insta/the-right-but-not-rewrite-wing-bjp-government-hasnt-modified-history-textbooks-since-2014-says-hrd-minister-prakash-javadekar

My reason for making this point very clear at the very beginning of this article is that the article should by no means be thought of as in any way a defense of, or apologia for, the indefensible BJP government. If anyone in this government, or anyone from within its support base who is in any position to influence the decisions of this government, feels that history requires to be rewritten, they will always (and I mean always) be willing to keep those feelings in cold storage under various pretexts and excuses. In any case, the only kind of rewriting that can be expected from the kind of people who manage to make themselves heard in this government are those whose ideas of "rewriting history" will be confined to:

1. Giving prominence to historical figures shunned and reviled,  or shoved into the background by the Congress/Leftist mafias who have controlled discourse in India since 1947.

2. Putting up massive statues, building grand (and well publicized) temples, and renaming places (often in connection with the historical figures mentioned earlier).

3. Promoting the most fundamentalist, obscurantist or frankly childish ideas about ancient Indian chronology, society and achievements.

 

Therefore: NO! Indian history is not being rewritten. The real questions here are therefore:

1. Why Does Indian History Need to be Rewritten?

2. How should Indian History be Rewritten?

 

 

I. Why Does Indian History Need to be Rewritten?

Actually it is not just Indian history which requires to be rewritten. The teaching of blatantly false, and even dangerously destructive and toxic, history is a major world problem or phenomenon. A well known adage says "History is written by the victors".

At a primary level, the two great imperialist religions (Christianity and Islam) have conquered most of the world, after destroying all the Pagan religions which had lived in comparative peace and mutual acceptance/tolerance before the rise of the Great Proselytizers. And today, after the complete rewriting of the history of the world by the all-powerful forces represented by these two religions has created a picture where all the other destroyed Pagan religions have been completely and very effectively demonized, vilified and blackened, it is the last surviving bulwark of the Pagan religions of the past, Hinduism (=Indian Paganism) which is now the target of these two imperialistic religions. So the whole of history is now to be viewed through a prism where everything Muslim or Christian is sacrosanct, and everything Hindu is condemnable. The dark texts, ideologies, doctrines and histories of Christianity and Islam are completely whitewashed and Christianity becomes a "Religion of Love" and Islam a "Religion of Peace", while the whole of Hinduism is reduced to the iniquities of the caste-system and Hinduism becomes a "Religion of Evil" or a "Religion of Iniquity, Exploitation and Superstition".

AL Basham (one of whose pupils, surprisingly, was Romila Thapar!), incidentally, had the following to say about the ethos of Indian/Hindu civilization and its history: “At most periods of her history India, though a cultural unit, has been torn by internecine war. In statecraft, her rulers were cunning and unscrupulous. Famine, flood and plague visited her from time to time, and killed millions of her people. Inequality of birth was given religious sanction, and the lot of the humble was generally hard. Yet our overall impression is that in no other part of the ancient world were the relations of man and man, and of man and the state, so fair and humane. In no other early civilisation were slaves so few in number, and in no other ancient lawbook are their rights so well protected as in the Arthasastra. No other ancient lawgiver proclaimed such noble ideals of fair play in battle as did Manu. In all her history of warfare Hindu India has few tales to tell of cities put to the sword or of the massacre of non-combatants…There was sporadic cruelty and oppression no doubt, but, in comparison with conditions in other early cultures, it was mild. To us the most striking feature of ancient Indian civilization is its humanity.” ("The Wonder That Was India", 1956, p.8-9).

But after 1947 it become almost a religious dogma of Indian and western historians, and of those who control academic writing and media propaganda in India and most of the world, to rewrite history and to project ancient Indian/Hindu civilization as a remarkably and uniquely inhuman civilization, whose only characteristic was an iniquitous caste system.

 

And the rewriting of history is constantly and continuously taking place all over the world: every time there is a regime change, history books change and the new narratives often go to opposite extremes of the earlier narratives: this has happened not only in all the countries all over the world which freed themselves from colonial rule, but also whenever ideological or political regime changes take place in any country: whether after the rise of Nazism in Germany or after the fall of Nazism in Germany, whether after the establishment of Communist rule in the Soviet Union or after the fall of Communism and break-up of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc. whether in Saddam's Iraq or in post-Saddam Iraq, whether in pre-partition India or in present-day Pakistan which was a part of that India — the unbelievable extent to which the Pakistani text-books preach false history and hatred of India and Hindus has been highlighted several times.      

So the question is not, and cannot be — can never be — whether it is right or wrong to rewrite history. The question is about what direction the rewriting will take: any rewriting which takes the historical narrative "from Untruth to Truth" is not only right, it is compulsory and indispensable. So just the fact of rewriting history is nothing to be bashful or ashamed of, it all depends on whether the rewriting leads towards the Truth or away from it.

 

The rewriting of Indian history in the direction of falsehood has been taking place in post-Independence "Secular" India right from the day leftists took control of Indian history-writing, but it has reached monstrously gigantic and blatantly brazen proportions in the last few decades, whenever Hindus tried to throw off their intellectual shackles. The two most prominent examples will suffice:

1. The Ayodhya Temple Issue: Ever since Islam entered India, it has a continuous history of desecrating and destroying temples and idols, and this entire history has been noted down in merciless, gloating detail by the Islamic historians themselves. Hindus never had a steady tradition of recording historical events, but the Hindu traditional memory also preserved this tradition of Islamic iconoclasm and temple destruction. All history books down the centuries, including those by colonial writers, recorded all this massive history of iconoclasm and temple-destruction.

But, the moment the Ramjanmabhoomi at Ayodhya  became an active issue among a section of Hindus, the entire army of academic and media forces, Indian and International, joined hands in a massive campaign to rewrite the history of the Ayodhya site, and anyone who claimed that the mosque structure was built on a demolished temple became a "revisionist" and a "falsifier" and "rewriter" of history. It took the destruction of the structure by a section of brave Hindus (yes! — in India, non-Hindus can do simply anything and get away with it, but Hindus can do similar things only at mortal peril, and it requires bravery to do it), the excavation and detailed study and analysis of the demolished structure by eminent archaeologists, and the court judgment on the basis of their archaeological reports, for the Truth to be finally accepted. So ultimately that turned out to be a failed attempt by the Leftist rewriters and falsifiers of history.

2. The Identity of the Rigvedic Sarasvati river: Ever since Indologists started studying the Rigveda, the Rigvedic Sarasvati has been identified with the Ghaggar-Hakra river system which passes through Haryana and moves out into the Arabian Sea from Sind. The first western scholar to propose that the Ghaggar-Hakra was the Vedic Saraswati was the French geographer Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin in 1855 in his very massive and detailed book "Geography of India’s North-West According to the Vedic Hymns".

After that, this identification has been fully endorsed by almost every single eminent Indologist, geologist and archaeologist in the last over 160 years. A representative list, first of the western scholars down the ages, and then the Indian (and Pakistani) ones: Max Müller, Keith and Macdonell, Monier-Williams, Pischel, Geldner, Hopkins, R.D.Oldham, C.F.Oldham, Wilson, Renou, Benfey, Muir, Lassen, Stein, Jane McIntosh, Wilhelmy, Mortimer Wheeler, Bridget and Raymond Allchin, Gregory Possehl, JM Kenoyer, Jean-Marie Casal, Kenneth Kennedy, Rosen, Southworth, Pargiter, Gowen, Burrow, Basham, Shamsul Islam Siddiqui, AH Dani, BB Lal, SP Gupta, VN Misra, Dilip Chakrabarti, M. Israil Khan, S.R.Rao, K.S.Valdiya, A.D.Pusalker, H.C.Raychaudhary, D.C.Sircar, Ashok Aklujkar, and many more.

A few scholars (Bergaigne, Lommel, Lüder), on the basis of the present-day poor condition of the Ghaggar-Hakra, had expressed doubts, and concluded that the Rigvedic river may have been "a celestial river" and not an earthly one, and on the same grounds Roth suggested that it could be another name for the Indus. Roth's suggestion was partially accepted by Zimmer, Griffith, Hillebrandt and Ludwig, and yet all these scholars, Roth included, accepted that in many hymns of the Rigveda, it did indeed refer to the Ghaggar-Hakra!

Only a few scholars, such as Brunnhofer, Hertel and Hüsing held that the Rigvedic Sarasvati was in Afghanistan or even in Iran: but since these scholars located the whole of the text in Afghanistan and Iran, and this identification of the Sarasvati was only a part of their whole scenario, their writings on this point were outright rejected by all the other Indologists.

Michael Witzel is now frequently cited as an authority for the Rigvedic Sarasvati being in Afghanistan. Here is what Witzel himself had to say on this matter before the full implications, for the AIT, of the identification with the Ghaggar-Hakra, were made clear by me in my books:

In this paper on Rigvedic history written in 1995, Witzel categorically tells us “Sarasvatī = Sarsuti; Ghaggar-Hakra” (WITZEL 1995b:318). He concludes the paper/article with a summary of the “Geographical Data in the Rigveda” in detailed charts covering ten pages (WITZEL 1995b:343-352), giving the geographical data classified into columns as per five areas (which he classifies as West, Northwest, Panjab, Kurukṣetra, East) from west to east.

In these charts, he specifically locates every single reference (mentioned by him) to the Sarasvatī in Books 6, 3 and 7 exclusively in Kurukṣetra: VI.61.3,10 (WITZEL 1995b:343, 349), III.23.4 (WITZEL 1995b:343, 347), VII.36.6 (WITZEL 1995b:344, 349), VII.95.2 (WITZEL 1995b:344, 349) and VII.96.1,2 (WITZEL 1995b:344, 349). Further, wherever, in the main body of the article, he gives geographical areas in sequence from west to east in these three Books, the Sarasvatī is inevitably to the east of the Punjab (WITZEL 1995b:318, 320).

 

The turnaround started when the new evidence of satellite photography showed that the majority of Harappan sites were located on the banks of the Ghaggar-Hakra when it was in full flow, and new and detailed geological studies showed that the Ghaggar-Hakra had started drying on a major scale by 1900 BCE and was a mere shadow of its former self  by 1500 BCE. This was the calibrated date at which, according to Indologists and the AIT — in accordance with the evidence of Linguistic Analysis (of the date of commencement of separation of the twelve branches of IE languages from each other in the Original Homeland being around 3000 BCE) — had required the Indologists to date the first entry of Indo-Aryans into India at 1500 BCE at the earliest.

The new evidence made it impossible that the Indo-Aryans could have started trickling in into India after 1500 BCE, and then composed the long text of the Rigveda many centuries later, after all the earlier "non-Aryan" inhabitants had vanished without leaving a trace or memory behind them, all the local rivers had been given new "Indo-Aryan" names (leaving not a trace of any former names — a situation unprecedented in World History), and the composers had lost all memories of any immigration or even of any extra-Indian past; and yet given glowing references in their hymns to the banks of the Sarasvati river, in full spate, as their native habitat.

This definitely meant that the Vedic Aryans were natives of the area, and that the sites discovered on the Sarasvati in full spate were Indo-Aryan sites and the Harappan civilization was inextricably linked to the Vedic civilization, and that the area where the twelve branches split from each other in 3000 BCE was in northwestern India and not in the Steppes.

Even Witzel, before the full implications, for the AIT, of the identification with the Ghaggar-Hakra, were made clear by me in my books, had accepted the logical implications of all this:

“[…] since the Sarasvatī, which dries up progressively after the mid-2nd millennium B.C. (Erdosy 1989), is still described as a mighty stream in the Ṛgveda, the earliest hymns in the latter must have been composed by c.1500 B.C.” (WITZEL 1995a:98).

“Prominent in book 7: it flows from the mountains to the sea (7.59.2) ― which would put the battle of ten kings prior to 1500 BC or so, due to the now well documented dessication of the Sarasvatī (Yash Pal et al. 1984) […]. Two hymns (7.95-96) are composed solely in praise of the Sarasvatī.” (WITZEL 1995b:335, fn 82).

 

However, the bell rang somewhat late in the day, and in the last two decades a veritable Crusade has been launched by AIT writers to rewrite history by identifying the Rigvedic Sarasvati with the Afghan river Helmand rather than with the Ghaggar-Hakra. And the most stunning part of this whole massive Crusade, which is massively and fully backed by all the academic writers and media persons (and outright politicians) who control all discourse, is that it is the persons who continue to maintain that the Vedic Sarasvati is the Ghaggar-Hakra river who are being tarred as the "revisionists" and "rewriters of history"!

So, in short, being accused of "rewriting history" is nothing to be ashamed, apologetic or concerned about: it is something to be proud of. Yes, Hindus want to rewrite history, in order to correct lies and distortions, and take the writing of history "From Untruth to Truth". The only thing we must be careful is not to allow the project to be hijacked by people on our own side who want to take the rewriting "From One Untruth to Another Untruth".

 

 II. How should Indian History be Rewritten?

I have written on this before, so some of this will be repetition.

 

Basically, if the aim is to write Indian history from an Indian perspective, the perspective should be a truly and completely Indian one. There are basically two major facets to a true history of India, and historians usually concentrate on only the first one.

 

The first facet is the history of the Classical Indian civilization. The standard official history of India runs on the following lines: it starts with the Indus Valley civilization, followed by the Aryan Invasion and the Vedic Period, followed by the Buddhist period, the Maurya Period, the Gupta Period, (after a gap) the Islamic invasions and the Delhi Sultanate, and finally the Period of the Mughals, Marathas, Sikhs, Rajputs, Bahmanis and Vijayanagar, leading to the European Colonial Period, and finally the long-drawn out Independence movements followed by Independence itself in 1947. There are sometimes fillers in between of religious movements, from Adi Shankaracharya to the saints of the various Bhakti movements.

 

This standard history suffers from two glaring lacunae in its representation of the Classical Indian civilization. The first (and the more serious) lacuna is the absence of a definite indigenous history for the period prior to the Buddha.  An attempt is made to fill this gap with the help of the totally hypothetical Aryan Invasion theory, which was invented by linguists three centuries or so ago to explain the similarities between the languages of North India and the languages of Europe. As I have irrefutably proved, the Indo-European languages originated in India, and the ancestral forms of the Indo-European languages of Europe and of other parts of Asia were originally taken to those areas by migrants from India: mainly the Anus and Druhyus described in the Vedic and Puranic texts, but also (in the case of the ancient Mitanni and Kassites of West Asia) by sections of the Purus who developed the Vedic culture, and in later times by the Gypsies or Romany. The true history of the period attributed to the “Aryan Invasion”, and for a few thousand years before that (including the identity of the Harappan civilization), can be reconstructed from a rational analysis of the data in the Vedic and Puranic texts.

 

The second big lacuna is that while the Maurya dynasty and the Gupta dynasty (the overwhelming importance of which two dynasties in Indian history cannot be denied) are given their rightful place in Indian history books, little is said about the great dynasties of the south: the Pandya, Chola and Chera. Incredibly, while the Maurya dynasty lasted for around 137 years (322 BCE to 185 BCE) and the Gupta dynasty lasted for around 230 years (from 320 CE to 550 CE), the three southern dynasties lasted from the time of the Buddha at least (say from 500 BCE) to well into the second millennium CE, each a period of over 1500 years, and they left us some of the greatest extant masterpieces of Indian literature, art and architecture.

There are other famous and extremely important dynasties in other parts of India, like the Ahom dynasty in Assam. The main concentration of Indian history books in the ancient period is on the Gandhara to Bihar belt, and little attention is given to most other parts of India. This approach requires to be thoroughly balanced out.

 

The second facet is the total fact of India itself. India is culturally the richest area in the world. It has the widest range of climate, topography, flora and fauna. It is the only area in the world which has, native to it, all the three races of the world (Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid, and arguably a fourth in the Australoid Vedda of Sri Lanka); and it has, native to it, six (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austric, Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski and Andamanese) of the nineteen or so language families in the world, three of them restricted to India. The range and variety, and the richness, of its culture, and the richness and importance of its fundamental contributions to the world in every field (music, dance, literary forms, games, physical and martial systems, culinary arts, sculpture and architecture, attire, arts and sciences, etc, etc,) is unparalleled. It gave birth to the widest range of philosophies, and some of the major religions of the world (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism), and is the only area in the world which will go down in history for giving asylum to the followers of all other religiously persecuted people (Jews, Zoroastrians, Syrian Christians, etc.) from all parts of the world since long before the modern era.

 

But:

 

1. The essential details of the richness of all these different aspects of India’s culture find no place in history books. To most historians, the study of richness in different fields of culture is not vital to the study of Indian history.

 

It is said that the Mahabharata declares about its contents: "what is here is nowhere else; what is not here is nowhere". This is definitely the case about Indian culture. India is the world in microcosm. Everything is there in India. There are aspects of Indian culture which look as if they are aspects of the cultures of aboriginal Australia, Africa or native pre-Columbian America. There are aspects of Indian culture which look as if they are aspects of Mongol, Tibetan, Chinese, Malay, Arab, or Persian culture (and I am not referring here to Islamic aspects) — and the truth is that all these are native aspects of our very own Indian culture: I personally feel proud when I see an Andamanese tribal or a Ladakhi hill-dweller or a northeasterner — proud that I and that person are brother members of the same great Indian family.

 

It is time to inculcate in all Indians this same awareness of the richness, diversity, unity and greatness of our total Indian culture. And this has to be a central ideal in the rewriting, presentation and propagation of Indian history. 

 

2. In the last few hundred years of western scholarship, there have been sustained efforts to ignore India’s contributions to the world in every field, or to obfuscate them by attributing them to other sources, or to misattribute important aspects of Indian culture to the invention of immigrant or invader groups in historical times. Correcting these misattributions is also a task which has remained largely untouched. [Again a word of caution here: this does not mean a chauvinistic campaign to claim that everything in the world originated in India, or to deny the genuine contributions of the rest of the world, or of immigrants into India from the rest of the world, to India’s culture and ethos. A case in point is an acrimonious and endless debate going on in internet circles over the Greek origins of certain aspects of Indian astronomy and astrology].

 

A deep and detailed understanding of India's immense contributions to the world in every field of human experience and activity should be an essential part of history rewriting.

 

3. Indian culture is rich because in addition to the cultural richness of the Classical Indian civilizational stream (including both Vedic/Sanskrit culture and the culturally, even if not linguistically, fraternal “Sangam” culture of the south), India has a second stream consisting of many rich ethnic (mainly regional and “tribal”) strands of culture equally Indian and independent of the Classical Indian civilization. On the one hand, we have leftist-secularist elements, and most particularly the extremely powerful international missionary lobbies, striving to create a cleavage between the two to facilitate the balkanization (or at least weakening) of India or the religious conversion of sections of the population (notwithstanding the fact that the two streams, apart from both being Indian, are typologically identical to each other, and both are typologically opposed to Christianity, Islam and western civilization — both equally kafir and heathen and "hellbound"). On the other, we have nationalist elements trying to create paradigms (often with the help of Puranic myths interpreted in convenient ways) where the cultural (and sometimes even the linguistic!) strands of the second stream can somehow be shown to be derivatives of the Classical Indian (Vedic/Sanskrit) stream. A logical understanding of the true situation is completely absent among historians.

 

Hence a fundamental understanding of the essential unity of the diverse native cultural elements in India is vital, and must be a part of historical discourse.

 

4. Further, an understanding of Indian history is incomplete without an understanding of the ideals which contributed to this great civilization. And, to be frank, this cannot be done without understanding exactly how or why these ideals differ from the ideals of the powerful international forces which, though mutually hostile to each other outside the Indian sphere, have united to form an ultra-formidable front of what has been correctly named by Rajiv Malhotra as the "Breaking India Forces". And for this, history writers must take up the task of spelling out in graphic terms and propagating to every Indian not only the greatness of Indian ideals (represented in the Hinduism and Indian history) but also the opposite brand of anti-ideals enshrined in the texts and doctrines of its enemies. Voice of India Books, under Sita Ram Goel and Ram Swaroop, had taken up this vital task and done immense work in this field. But today the atmosphere is such that governments elected on "Hindu" votes are eager to beat all others in appeasement and rewarding of anti-Hindu forces and in turning a blind eye when Hindus speak the Truth and are rewarded by death threats and actual death.

 

But here in this article it is only my job to give my views on the "whys" and "hows" of rewriting Indian history. It will be the job of Indian historians to fill out all these shortcomings in the writing and presentation of Indian history.

 

It is possible I may have failed to make myself clear in what I wanted to say. The subject requires greater (non-politicized and non-acrimonious) discussion and debate among Indian historians, certainly at least among those who want to write a truly objective history of India from an Indian perspective free of the anti-Hindu biases which dominate Indian historiography today.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

BASHAM 1956: The Wonder that was India. Basham, A.L. Rupa and Co, Calcutta-etc., 1956.

WITZEL 1995b: Rgvedic History: Poets, Chieftains and Politics. Witzel, Michael. pp. 307-352 in “The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia”, ed. by George Erdosy. Walter de Gruyter. Berlin, 1995.

 

 

 

Michael Witzel — The Perennial Compulsive Liar

 

Michael Witzel — The Perennial Compulsive Liar

Shrikant G. Talageri

Am I indulging in "ad hominem" right from the title of this article? If anyone thinks so, they are free to do so: the Truth is the Truth, by whatever name you call it; and the cold Truth (call it "ad hominem" if it pleases you)  is that Witzel is a perennial Compulsive Liar: he lied 25 years ago, he lied 20 years ago, he lied 15 years ago, he lied 10 years ago, and he is still continuing to lie without pausing for rest, and with no shame or self-respect, even as late as 3 years ago in 2019, when he wrote this article "Beyond the Flight of the Falcons" pp. 1-29 in a small volume "Which of Us are Aryans?" (Aleph Book Company, New Delhi 2019) edited by the inevitable culprit and usual suspect Romila Thapar. This book was given to me for reviewing may be two months ago, but, as I was almost obsessively engrossed in preparing my article "The New Words and Other New Elements in the Rigveda" (which I uploaded on 22-6-2022), it is only today (23-6-2022) that I have finally turned to this book. And this is my reaction to it after even a primary perusal: Witzel cannot stop lying, and will never be able to stop lying even to please a dying grandmother. [Note, this is just a phrase, though I am sure to have internet illiterates accusing me of insulting Witzel's grandmother, as they once accused me of insulting his wife].

From what I thought was his comparative silence through most of the last ten years, I assumed Witzel had decided to call it a day so far as scholarly fraudulence was concerned, and to stop his inveterate lying, but, as we say in Konkani,  "sūṇyᾱ:  bᾱl  vɑ:ṅkḍ  tɛ̄ṁ  vɑ:ṅkḍɛ̄ṁci" ("the dog's tail is crooked and will always remain crooked" — again, just a traditional idiomatic saying!).

 

This book contains articles by five AIT protagonists, Witzel, Thapar, Jaya Menon, Kai Friese and Razib Khan. I was probably expected to deal with Khan's article, which deals with Genetics, as does the article by Kai Friese, but as both of them (as well as the science of Genetics itself, totally irrelevant to the IE/Aryan debate), have nothing new to say after my last few articles and my fourth book in 2018 ("Genetics and the Aryan Debate") except to reiterate faith-declarations, I am frankly in no mood to waste time and energy in repeating data, facts and arguments again and again as if they were the dialogues in a vaudeville cross-talk comedy show. But the repetition of language-and-text-related lies by Witzel (whose "status" is still so clearly considered as among the most "eminent", as shown by his being chosen by our own Indian preeminent historian to cast the first stone in this book), even as late as the year 2019, cannot be lightly passed over — so this article.

 

From a first reading, the article by Jaya Menon on the archaeological aspect (even if on the AIT side) seems more measured, neutral and scholarly, and she does accept that "there is no consensus between archaeogeologists differing over the species of Equus found at Harappan sites: Equus hemionus (the Asiatic half-ass) or the Equus caballus (the 'true' horse)" (p.112), and that "As far as biological data is concerned, a study of skeletal data in the early 1990s suggested that there was no evidence of the incursion of a new population into the subcontinent in the period after Harappan decline. Instead, two discontinuities, one between 6000 and 4500 BCE, and the other between 800 and 200 BCE have been suggested based on dental and craniometric evidence [….] However, this debate was priior to recent studies on ancient DNA" (p.113). And, referring to the Reich report on Genetics, she notes that "Reich's study did not have access to ancient DNA from the subcontinent" (p.114). Also, she stresses: "As far as language is concerned, it must be reiterated that the advent of Old Indo-Aryan or Sanskrit into South Asia is an issue to be dealt with by linguists, not by archaeologists. At most, if the Harappan seals had been deciphered, they may have provided a clue to the languages(s) that the Harappans spoke. Similarly, while skeletons can be recovered archaeologically, it is futile to link them with speakers of a particular language. An equally futile tendency has been to try and associate a language (in this case, Sanskrit) and speakers of that language with archaeological material, such as the PGW" (p.115). About Genetics, she could well have similarly pointed out that an equally futile tendency was to associate a language with haplogroups and DNA types, such as the R1a1!

 

The whole book (excepting the article by Menon) is an exercise in academic lies and fraud. Academic Fraud is defined (for example on Google) as "plagiarism; the deliberate falsification, misstatement, and alteration of evidence or data; the deliberate suppression of relevant evidence or data; and the deliberate misappropriation of the research work and data of others". I do not know if there is any plagiarism in this book, but there is plenty of the underlined part of the rest of this definition in this book, although I will only touch briefly upon Witzel's part in this fraud: the usual vapid meaningless talking-in-the-air by Thapar does not call for any comment or answer.

 

The Title of Witzel's Article:

Michael Witzel, the prime and usual suspect in such matters, tellingly illustrates the fraudulent aspect at the very beginning of his article (pp.1-29) by telling us that the title of his article "Beyond the flight of the Falcon…" "refers to the Vedic and Avestan designation of the Hindu Kush Mountains: upariśyena/upairi.saēna. It suggests the path of the migration of some Indo-Iranian tribes into Eastern Iran and, subsequently, into Northern India" (p.1).

The phrase upariśyena is not found even once in the entire text of the Rigveda, the oldest Vedic text. In fact, the two elements of the word, upari and śyena, are not even found in any common hymn: the word upari is in fact a Late Rigvedic word found only in the latest Books of the Rigveda: I.24.7, 34.8; VIII.19.12; 101.9; X.34.9; 73.8; 128.7; 129.5. The word śyena is found in the following hymns and verses: I.118.1,11; 163.1; II.42.2; III.43.6; IV.26.2; 38.2,5; 40.3; V.44.11; 45.9; 78.4; VIII.34.9; 82.9; IX.87.4; 89.2; X.144.4,5. As this shows, the two words are not even found in the same hymns, let alone as a significant historical clue suggesting "the path of the migration of some Indo-Iranian tribes into Eastern Iran and, subsequently, into Northern India" as Witzel fraudulently suggests it does!

In fact, the phrase upariśyena is not found even in the other three Veda Samhitas! It is found first, and once, only in the Jaiminiya Brahmana 209.2! And it is on the basis of this very late phrase that Witzel deciphers a reference to "the path of the migration of some Indo-Iranian tribes into Eastern Iran and, subsequently, into Northern India", a "memory" which seems to have completely bypassed the composers of the four early Veda Samhitas! This Witzellian deduction is on the same scholarly level as similar deductions of Lokmanya Tilak, who deduced, from the fact that Kumbhakarṇa in the Ramayana was supposed to sleep for six months and remain awake for six months, that this represented a memory of the Arctic origin of the Vedic people of a place where there was a night of six months and a day of six months! The entire book is based on the principle of suppressio veri suggestio falsi, and consequently the book is one more in a long line of instances of academic frauds gaining currency on the strength of "academically" accredited scholars and "peer-reviewed" research.

In fact, the phrase highlighted by Witzel proves once more that the common words found in the Rigveda and the Avesta do not represent pre-Rigvedic elements, but Late Rigvedic or even post-Rigvedic elements which were part of the common "Indo-Iranian" culture which developed after the Vedic people (the Pūrus) had expanded, in the Late Rigvedic and post-Rigvedic period, into the northwest and Central Asia where the proto-Iranians had preceded them in their historical migrations/expansions from India.

My article uploaded on 22-6-2022 ("The New Words and Other New Elements in the Rigveda", a detailed data-based greatly expanded version of my earlier article "The Chronological Gulf Between the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda"), puts the last and most massive and unextractable nail in the AIT coffin. As I have repeatedly written before, the sharp distinction between the vocabulary of the Old Rigveda and the New Rigveda, for which the evidence is piling up by the day, is the key to solving most of the problems and mysteries of the earliest "Indo-Aryan", "Indo-Iranian" and Indo-European history. And the AIT supporters who continue to tout their ware by stridently stonewalling the actual evidence are only digging the pit for the AIT coffin: when the fall comes it will be a very hard one. Hence, reading these lies by Witzel only strengthens my resolve to set out the Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But The Truth.

Incidentally, even the title of the book itself shows a dubious attitude which can in no way be considered "scholarly": can such a question ("Which of Us are Aryans?") be asked in India (ignoring the fact that one of the questioners is an American citizen of German origin who certainly does not fit into the definition of "Us" when the discussion seems to be about "Aryans" in India) in the year 2019 CE, on the basis of a totally hypothetical "Aryan invasion/migration" which is supposed to have taken place, even according to the questioners, some centuries before 1000 BCE?

 

Compare a similar/different case: in England, there was no English language even as late as 500 CE. The earlier inhabitants of the British isles are supposed to have been a primitive people about whose language and ethnic identity nothing is known. They are simply called the Beaker-folk. The earliest known IE-speaking immigrants into the British isles were different types of Celtic people who are supposed to have come into the British isles between 1000 BCE and 500 BCE from the European mainland, and then occupied the whole group of islands: first the Picts, then the Britons. It was only around 500 CE or so that Germanic people from northwestern Europe, the Anglo-Saxons (Jutes from Frisia in northern Holland and NW Germany, Angles from Schleswig-Holstein in Germany, and Saxons from the region between the Elbe and the Rhine in Germany), migrated into Britain: they brought the earliest seeds of the Germanic English language (though their language, as it remained and changed over many centuries, would be completely incomprehensible to present-day speakers of English). They soon became dominant in England (merging with the local pre-Celtic and Celtic people), while the Celts remained predominant in the areas of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, and in Ireland. The Normans were the next major immigrants after 1000 CE: they came from northern France, and spoke a (then) variety of French. A lesser known, but equally important, immigration was that of the Danes from Denmark just before the Normans.

We are using the word "immigrants" and immigrations", but unlike the totally hypothetical Aryan invasion/migration into India, these were all brutal invasions with the names of the people and tribes involved, and the bloody battles continuously being  fought, all being a matter of detailed recorded history!

Even then, can we imagine a scholarly book being seriously written and published today, with eminent and pre-eminent writers from different countries contributing to it, and titled "Which of us are Beaker-folk?" or "Which of us are Celts?" or "Which of us are Anglo-Saxons?" or "Which of us are Normans?" or "Which of us are Danes?" — "Us" being the present-day English people?

The Big Lie about the Mitanni people:

While Witzel's article is full of brazen lies, the most blatant Big Lie is about the Mitanni kingdom of West Asia. Witzel, writing in the year 2019, tells us: "Incidentally, the Indo-Aryan loanwords in Mitanni confirm the date of the Rig Veda for c. 1200-1000 BCE" (p.11). Then, after giving his totally discredited and fake arguments about the "forms with -az" in Mitanni, he reiterates: "Clearly, the RV cannot be older than c.1400, and taking into account a period needed for linguistic change, it may not be much older than c.1200 BCE" (p.11).   

Witzel's date for the Mitanni kingdom in this article is "Mitanni kingdom (c.1600 BCE)" (p.10). So, according to him, the Rigveda in India dates more than 200-400 years after the Mitanni kingdom!!

The brazen shamelessness of western academics like Witzel — I am sorry, but I cannot curb my fingers to avoid typing out what polemicists will fatuously call "ad hominem": the utterly brazen western academic culture, with its stranglehold over scholarly discourse, its complete stonewalling of the Truth, and its legions of monkeys (a large proportion of them Indian monkeys) clapping their hands and dancing to the "peer-reviewed" tunes and beats of fraudulent University academics, is something which will be noted with disbelief and wonder by future generations of scholars (assuming that this stranglehold does not last forever) — has to be named, shamed and universally recognized.

 

I have shown in my book ("The Rigveda and the Avesta - The Final Evidence") in 2008 that the Mitanni personal names and other items of vocabulary (especially the crucial word maṇi) developed during the period of composition of the New Rigveda (books 5,1,8,9,10), whose geographical area is spread out from western U.P. to Afghanistan, and that the older Old Rigveda (books 6,3,7,4,2), whose geographical area is restricted to the eastern half of this area, precedes this period of composition of the New Rigveda by several centuries. Therefore, if the Mitanni kingdom is dated at 1600 BCE, the Rigveda has to be dated long before this, far beyond 2500 BCE in its earliest parts.

I have repeated this data and evidence in every book and article written by me in the fourteen years that have elapsed since 2008. Witzel knows fully well about these books and articles (on a discussion in an internet site in 2008, he had refused to comment on my 2008 book), and about all this data and evidence. He also knows very well that "the timeframe of the Rig Veda" can only be determined by "a combination of textual and linguistic data that indicates the beginning of the Vedic period" (p.2). And yet, as late as the year 2019, instead of lying low if he has no answer to this data and evidence, Witzel is still going strong, lying brazenly through his teeth (like some other such western academic crooks), in the secure knowledge that he is protected by a crooked and monopolistic academic superstructure which protects and promotes this kind of fraudulent "scholarship".

 

 A brief look at some other major Lies in his article:

 

1. "the people of the Vedic civilization were semi-nomadic and its people did not dwell in the post-Harappan agricultural villages of Haryana and its surroundings; instead they were constantly on the move with their cattle (Aryavarta — 'the turning around of the Arya') [….] pastoral ethnicities [….] We still need to find clear pastoral remains of the period, such as in Gujarat and Tajikistan (Meadow and Patel, 1997)" (p.4). Also, "the Andronovo Indo-Aryans were semi-settled cattle breeders" (p.13). Elsewhere (p.7), he even postulates a new alternate route for "another path of migration into India, via the mountains of the Tien Shan and Pamir" on the ground that this area has scope for "extensive inter-regional pastoralism" because it "provided excellent grazing ground" for the cattle!     

A series of lies:

1a. Has Witzel found archaeological remains of these "semi-nomadic people", who "were constantly on the move",  of whom he speaks so confidently? If so, he is definitely in line for a Nobel Prize.

1b. Note the references to the cattle and pastoral culture of the "Aryans". [And likewise other references to the "pastoral Aryans"in the article by Razib Khan: "pastoralists brought R1a1-Z93 to the Indian subcontinent 4000 years ago" (p.146); "ancient DNA from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and South Asia all seem to indicate that the intrusion of Central Asian pastoralists dates to the period after 2000 BCE" (p.150); "the variant of lactase persistence, the ability to digest milk sugar as an adult, found in modern northwest India is the same as that found in Northern Europe" (p.151-152); "details of how these pastoralists spread across South Asia in the centuries after their arrival will be highly conjectural" (p.154). Note also that he admits that "Geneticists cannot assert definitively that particular peoples spoke particular languages" (p.151)].

Yet, in spite of the fact that we cannot assert the languages of particular peoples on the basis of genetics, but can assert whether cattle remains belong to western cattle or Indian (zebu) cattle, and that all the archaeology and genetic (and other historical) reports show that there were never any western cattle in India before modern times, only Indian cattle, yet these academic liars consistently describe their imaginary "Aryan" intruders as bringing a "pastoral culture" (and large numbers of cattle) with them from the Steppes which contrasted with the local "agricultural culture"!

1c. The word "Aryavarta", which according to Witzel indicates that the "Aryans" "were constantly on the move with their cattle (Aryavarta — 'the turning around of the Arya')", is not found in any of the four Veda Samhitas, or even in the Brahmana and Aranyaka texts, but is first found in the Sutras! Apparently, by his logic, the incoming "Aryans" were settled people right till the late period of the Sutras, at which time they started turning round and round all over the place with their cattle! Or perhaps this is another Kumbhakarṇa-like proof of the Aryan invasion, like the phrase upariśyena?

1d. Have the archaeologists Meadow and Patel actually found, at two extreme locations in Tajikistan and Gujarat,  remains of western cattle brought in by the "Aryans" from the Steppes?

 

2. "All (archaeological) reports about 'Indus horses' as spurious (R. Meadow and A. Patel, 1997): skeletons of horses, onagers and donkeys can only be distinguished by their phalanges, but we still do not have good specimen collections" (p.5).

If Witzel believes this to be so, should he not then accept that all assertions about there being, or not being, horses in the Harappan civilization stand invalidated till "good specimens" of "phalanges" are actually found? Yet he finds assertions about Indus horses "spurious", but has no compunctions in strongly asserting that there were no horses in the Indus sites and that therefore the sites represent a "non-Aryan" civilization!

 

3. Witzel even gives a long diatribe (p.8-9) against "revisionists", his favorite term for Indians who do not accept the AIT, for their failure to accept linguistics as a science, and tells us that linguistics is "constantly attacked by revisionists and Hindutva writers as '(colonial) pseudo science'"; and he plaintively asks: "Why does linguistics work worldwide, but not in India?" (p.8). [As we see the way in which Witzel constantly turns linguistic rules upside-down at every turn, this a question that should actually be posed to him!].

The old cowardly tactic of attacking a straw man, or of treating the weakest and most indefensible argument of some fringe from the opposing side as "the" argument of the entire opposing side, and then "winning" the debate by demolishing the straw man or the weakest argument! Our OIT case very definitely treats Linguistics as a science, and completely demolishes the AIT, and proves the OIT, purely on the basis of Linguistics. And so, naturally, our OIT case is completely stonewalled by the crooked academicians!

It is as if we were to show the AIT to be untenable by treating the entire AIT case as based on the hypothesis of a massive armed invasion, and one-time conquest and destruction of the Harappan civilization, by a huge army of "Aryan invaders" with massive regiments of fierce charioteers, and then conclusively "disproving" this "AIT case"!

 

4. Witzel's lies do not end here: another very major Lie is about the Uralic languages of eastern Europe: "the speakers of its ancestral Proto-Indo-Iranian language clearly lived in the Russian/Central Asian steppe belt [….] This is obvious as they have left many loanwords attested in the various Uralic languages, through all their stages from Proto-Uralic to the ancestors of Finnish, Hungarian, Komi, Mari, etc. such as pakas 'Bhaga', Asura, *śata '100', orja "aryan slave', *kekra (cakra) 'wheel', *resma (rasmi) 'rope' etc." (p.11).

Do we call this extremely gross stupidity or a tendency to write fraudulent Lies? The facts:

4a. “The earliest layer of Indo-Iranian borrowing consists of common Indo-Iranian, Proto-Indo-Aryan and Proto-Iranian words relating to three cultural spheres: economic production, social relations and religious beliefs. Economic terms comprise words for domestic animals (sheep, ram, Bactrian camel, stallion, colt, piglet, calf), pastoral processes and products (udder, skin, wool, cloth, spinner), farming (grain, awn, beer, sickle), tools (awl, whip, horn, hammer or mace), metal (ore) and, probably, ladder (or bridge). A large group of loanwords reflects social relations (man, sister, orphan, name) and includes such important Indo-Iranian terms like dāsa ‘non-Aryan, alien, slave’ and asura ‘god, master, hero’. Finally a considerable number of the borrowed words reflect religious beliefs and practices: heaven, below (the nether world), god/happiness, vajra/‘Indra’s weapon’, dead/mortal, kidney (organ of the body used in the Aryan burial ceremony). There are also terms related to ecstatic drinks used by Indo-Iranian priests as well as Finno-Ugric shamans: honey, hemp and fly-agaric” (KUZMINA 2001:290-291).

But all these borrowings are one-way borrowings: from Indo-Aryan and Iranian to Uralic. Over a century of examination with magnifying glasses has failed to yield a single credible borrowing in the opposite direction:  from Uralic to Indo-Iranian.

Does it require anything more than the most elementary logic to realize that this shows that "Indo-Iranians" were never in the area of the Uralic people in eastern Europe, but that one group (or more) of "Indo-Iranians" from South Asia migrated to, and settled down in, eastern Europe, where there was an exchange of vocabulary between the two groups, which never affected the "Indo-Iranian" languages back home?

If anyone is stupid enough to ask "what happened to the Indo-Iranians who migrated to eastern Europe? Why aren't they there now?", he must answer the same question about the alleged original Indo-Iranians who were allegedly in eastern Europe before allegedly migrating to South Asia. Or about the Indo-Aryan Mitanni who were definitely there in West Asia in 1500 BCE. Or the speakers of Witzel's "Para-Munda" and "Language X" in the Harappan areas. Or even the Hittites in West Asia and the Tocharians in Central Asia. What happened to them all? Where are they now? Obviously they merged into their surrounding populations and their languages became extinct.

And we have exact parallel cases all over the World: e.g.  speakers (or active users) of Arabic came to India in medieval times, and have left countless Arabic loanwords in the Indian languages; speakers (or active users) of Sanskrit went to southeast Asia in (earlier) medieval times, and have left countless Sanskrit loanwords in the southeast Asian languages. But there was no reverse borrowing of Indian words into the Arabic spoken in Arabia, or southeast Asian words into the Sanskrit spoken in India. And the Arab migrants to India, and the Sanskrit migrants to southeast Asia have not survived as speakers of those languages in the migrant areas.

4b. Note, above, that one of the borrowings is the word for Bactrian camel.

According to this "peer-reviewed" Harvard professor, the Indo-Iranians migrated from eastern Europe to South Asia through Bactria (without bringing a single Uralic word with them, but leaving a rich and important "Indo-Iranian" lexicon in the Uralic languages). And then one group of conscientious Indo-Iranians, having borrowed a new word for the Bactrian camel in Bactria, went all the way back to eastern Europe to add this new word to the Uralic lexicon!

 

5. Witzel then goes on, treating Logic as a soiled toilet-paper to be tossed into the swirling toilet, to give us various categories of common Indo-Aryan and Iranian words allegedly borrowed from various hypothetical and unrecorded languages on the hypothetical migration route from the Steppes to South Asia (I will not count Indra and ṛṣi, the inclusion of which words  is the height of ultra-brazen super-insolence on the part of Witzel and his cohorts):

Mujavant,  Atharvan/Gandharva/Śarva,  iṣṭa,  uṣṭra,  khara, godhūma, kāca.

As pointed out umpteen times in the last twenty years, ever since Witzel concocted his "Bactria-Margiana loanwords" argument, all these words are totally missing in the Old Rigveda: they are first found either in the New Rigveda, or in later Vedic texts, or in even later Sanskrit texts. So how can they represent "evidence" of pre-Rigvedic borrowings by Indo-Aryans allegedly still on their way to South Asia?

But to those bitten sharply by the Kumbhakarṇa bug — which leads to the hallucination that post-Vedic things (like Kumbhakarṇa sleeping for six months and remaining awake for six months) are actually clues to the pre-Vedic extra-Indian locations of the Indo-Aryans (like the North Polar Arctic area with a night of six months and a day of six months) — there is no cure. Whether they are actually bitten by the bug or just Liars pretending to be so bitten!            

        

But enough of this wading through the pathetic "scholarly" lies of these Academic Politicians with their Hate Agendas!

I myself volunteered to do this review of the book under question, and so felt it my duty to complete the task for which I had volunteered. But, very frankly, repeatedly dealing again and again and again with the same brazen lies is not a pleasing or interesting task, but a nauseating one — especially knowing that this repetition, like all the previous ones, is going to meet with the same stonewalling by the academic mafia.

 

But I think it is time to make two things very clear:

1. There is no more sense in repeatedly replying to (unless a genuinely new and interesting point is raised), or debating issues with, dishonest crooks who will stonewall you anyway. It is now time for them to deal with our unchallengeable OIT case with its irrefutable arguments.

2. But even this is not the answer anymore. The question is not only of discussing and debating, but of honesty in discussion and debate. And since no-one can guarantee honesty on both sides, this is also a superfluous procedure. So something else is required.

Take a similar case: the "discussion" or "debate" between the Ramjanmabhoomi side and the Babri Masjid side on the issue of whether or not there was a demolished Hindu temple under the Babri Masjid structure: discussions and debates were going on and on and on. They would still have been going on and on and on at this very moment, and would still have been going on and on and on fifty years hence. The entire National and International Academia  and Media had made it their life's mission to propagate on a military basis the idea that there never was a Hindu Temple under the Babri Masjid structure.

 

It took a panel of learned and impartial judges to examine and take into consideration all the evidence from both the sides, and give their judgement on the basis of the evidence only.

Today no-one dares to claim that there was no Hindu temple under the Babri Masjid structure. [Sorry! I take back that statement immediately: there must still be hate-filled extremist leftist groups who may still be making those claims. After all, referring to the "pain" and "oppression" that Indian Muslims suffered on the demolition of the structure is still a popular staple in leftist articles and discourse. But then, there are still Flat-Earth societies even in the "Civilized West"!].

So the only solution now is a panel of learned and impartial judges to examine and take into consideration all the evidence from both the sides, and give their judgement on the basis of the evidence only.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

KUZMINA 2001: Contacts Between Finno-Ugric and Indo-Iranian Speakers in the light of Archaeological, Linguistic and Mythological Data. Kuzmina E. E. in “Early Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European: Linguistic and Archaeological Considerations”. Ed. Carpelan, Parpola, Koskikallio. Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, Helsinki, 2001.