A number of participants in the Aryan invasion debate as relayed in the
fall/winter 2002 issue of the Journal for Indo-European Studies have
alluded to the role of political predilections in influencing and distorting
the argument. In particular, Aryan
invasion skepticism, presented there by Prof. Nikolas Kazanas, is painted by
some of its critics as essentially a political ploy by Hindu nationalist (or "Hindutva")
forces. In India, apolitical scholars
known to have crossed over to this position, most notably archaeologist B.B.
Lal, have been accused of political motives for doing so. Questioning the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT)
is now widely presented as a part of the alleged hinduization or "saffronization"
of history by the BJP-led government in India.
This much is true, that in its tentative and clumsy manner, the BJP
(Indian People's Party) and the nationalist movement behind it, the RSS
(National Volunteer Corps), have been trying to effect glasnost in the
Marxist-dominated history establishment.
Through the media, the West has vaguely heard an echo of the commotion
about this development among Indian Marxist historians trying to hold on to
their power positions. The focus has
mostly been on deplorable gaffes like the planned introduction of astrology as
an academic subject and the attempt to weed out reference to cow-slaughter in
the Vedic age, not on the serious and perfectly valid reasons for the attempted
reform, esp. the entrenched distortions of history imposed by the
Marxists. It is a pity that the BJP
doesn't have the resources and the competent people to achieve a proper and
satisfactory overhaul of the textbooks (the Marxists having blocked
Hindu-minded young historians from access to academic careers for decades), so
that its reforms have been less than adequate and in a few cases downright
laughable. Fortunately, however, AIT
skepticism is a trend far older and wider than the recent politics of
"saffronization", and should be dealt with on its own terms.
Anyone familiar with the uncertainties inherent in historical research
will be amazed to notice the immense self-assuredness with which most spokesmen
for either side in the Aryan invasion debate are making their case. In reality, a lot in this question of
ancient history is undecided: the Harappan script remains undeciphered and the
archaeological findings (e.g. Lal 2002) are open to interpretation. Analysis of the historical data in the
Rg-Veda fails to find any trace of an Aryan invasion (pace Witzel 1995:321, as
shown by Elst 1999:164-166, Talageri 2000:425-476), though along with the
Puranas it alludes to episodes of Aryan emigration (Renu 1994:26-33,
Talageri 1993:359-370, 2000:140, 256-265), but these textual findings cannot be
deemed conclusive. Even if they are
accepted as solid historical data, scenarios of immigration at an earlier date
than hitherto assumed remain compatible with them. So the claim by linguists that the genealogy of the Indo-European
language family is best explained by an (as yet not firmly dated) invasion
scenario should not be dismissed lightly.
We are faced here with an open and undecided question, a fit object for
intense but open-minded research.
One of the reasons for the absolutist rhetoric bedevilling the Aryan
invasion debate is the enormous investment of various political messages in the
competing theories. Their political use
in India will be discussed below; but the Western scholar may be expected to
know about their political uses in the West, which predate the Hindu
nationalist involvement by at least a century.
The Out-of-India Theory (OIT) was briefly popular in Europe in the Romantic
age as part of the Orientomanic fashion, but the AIT had many more political
uses. By relating an ancient instance
of white colonization in a dark subcontinent, it confirmed the colonial
worldview.
The AIT specifically justified the presence of the British among their
"Aryan cousins" in India, being merely the second wave of Aryan settlement
there. It supported the British view of
India as merely a geographical region without historical unity, a legitimate
prey for any invader capable of imposing himself. It provided the master illustration to the rising racialist
worldview:
(1) the dynamic whites entered the land of the indolent dark natives;
(2) being superior, the whites established their dominance and imparted
their language to the natives;
(3) being race-conscious, they established the caste system to preserve
their racial separateness;
(4) but being insufficiently fanatical about their race purity, some
miscegenation with the natives took place anyway, making the Indian Aryans
darker than their European cousins and correspondingly less intelligent and
less dynamic;
(5) hence, for their own benefit they were susceptible to an uplifting
intervention by a new wave of purer Aryan colonizers.
The AIT was consequently a must in all Nazi textbooks on race (e.g.
Günther 1932, 1934). In this
controversy, the AIT camp happens to be Hitler's camp. I would like to caution those who expect to
trump the indigenist argument by insinuating political motives: you have no
chance of winning that game, for no ugly name, not even "Hindu chauvinism", can
trump "Hitler" in branding an opponent with guilt by association and blowing
him out of the arena.
Contemporary Euro-nationalists uphold the pro-invasionist tradition,
e.g. Meerbosch 1992, Van den Haute 1993.
Certain rightist circles, vaguely known on the Continent as the Nouvelle
Droite, devote particular attention to the Indo-European heritage,
invariably claiming a European homeland, e.g. Schuon 1979; de Benoist 1997,
2000; Benoît 2001:13; or Venner 2002:63.
This trend has enlisted the contributions of eminent scholars, and their
political views need not detract from the validity of their argumentation, but
the political dimension is undeniably and explicitly present, e.g. AIT
supporters Varenne (1967:25) and Haudry (1985, 1987, 1997, 2000) are, or were
members of the Scientific Committee of the French nationalist party Front
National. Conversely, the French
Left has tried to delegitimize any research into the "tainted" topic of
Indo-European ("Aryan"!) culture and origins, leading to the closure of the Institut
d'Etudes Indo-Européennes in Lyons.
Likewise in the US, the Journal for Indo-European Studies has
been under attack for alleged rightist connections.
Western AIT proponents, right-wing or otherwise, may not realize very well who their allies in India are, and vice versa. The Indian uses of the AIT predate any political use (or even the mere articulation) of the OIT. On this topic, the Western scholars who so unhesitatingly parrot denunciations of the Indian indigenists by Indian invasionists, are simply babes in the wood. For their information, a brief overview of the several AIT-exploiting movements is given here:
(1) Dravidian Separatism. Sponsored by the British
colonial government, a movement of the middle castes in the southern Tamil
region started attacking Brahmin and North-Indian interests and symbols, taking
the shape of a political party, the Justice Party (later Dravida Kazhagam)
in 1916. Given the Brahmin leadership
in the independence movement, Dravidian self-assertion had obvious uses for the
colonial status-quo. To beef up
Dravidian pride, a claim was made that the whole of Indian culture, or at least
all the good things in it (including, from ca. 1925 onwards, the Harappan
cities), belonged to the aboriginal Dravidians, while the Aryans had mostly
brought destruction and reactionary social mores. After independence, the
movement opted for a separate Dravidian state, a demand which never caught on
outside Tamil Nadu and was abandoned even there after the Chinese invasion of
1962. In the next years the movement
got integrated into the political system and after a split the two successor
parties have been alternating with each other in power at the state level ever
since, but with an ever-decreasing fervour for Dravidian separateness. The
movement's greatest success was when, in 1965, it joined hands with the
English-speaking elite in Delhi to thwart the Constitutional provision that
from that year onwards, Hindi rather than English be the sole link language of
India, -- surely a fitting thanksgiving for the British patronage which had
groomed the movement into political viability.
(2) Dalit neo-Ambedkarism. Dalit, "broken" or "oppressed", is a term applied to the former Untouchable
castes, sparingly by the late-19th-century reform movement Arya
Samaj, and more officially by mid-20th-century Dalit leader Dr.
Bhimrao Ambedkar and by his followers ever since. Today, the term has eclipsed the Gandhian euphemism Harijan. Ambedkar himself (1917:21) rejected both the
AIT and its caste-racialist implication that lower castes sprang from the
native race while upper castes were the invaders' progeny. Yet, his followers (e.g. Theertha 1941,
Rajshekar 1987, Biswas 1995), along with his 19th-century precursor,
the Christian-educated Jyotirao Phule, took the more conformist road of
adapting the AIT and staking their political claims in the name of being
"aboriginals" deprived of their land, culture and social status by the "Aryan
invaders". Among these
neo-Ambedkarites, who claim Ambedkar's mantle but have turned against him on
many points (e.g. favouring conversion to Christianity or Islam, which Ambedkar
energetically rejected in favour of native religions, esp. Buddhism), strange
international alliances abound, e.g. with Islamic militancy, Evangelical
fundamentalism and cranky American Afrocentrism. Many of V.T. Rajshekar's brochures are transcripts of lectures at
Christian institutions, and one wonders if the latter are aware of the more
eccentric parts of his work, e.g. he is the only Indian to merit a mention in
an authoritative study (Poliakov 1994) of contemporary anti-Semitism. His anti-Brahminism is also moulded after
the anti-Semitic model, e.g. just like both capitalist plutocracy and
Bolshevism have been blamed on the Jews, Rajshekar (1993) treats both religious
Brahminism and Brahmin-led Indian Marxism as two hands of a single Brahmin
conspiracy. Note that his anti-Brahmin
plea opens with a profession of belief in the AIT: "The fair-skinned
foreigners, the Aryan barbarians, who strayed into India, came into clash with
India's dark-skinned indigenous population - the Untouchables" (1993:1). This
kind of company ought to worry those who rely on the principle of "guilt by association"
in their argument against the AIT skeptics.
(3) Tribal separatism. Whereas the first
tribal revolts of the colonial age (Santal Hool, Birsa rebellion) had a
distinctly anti-British and anti-missionary thrust, administrators and
missionaries tried to redirect tribal frustration and aspiration in an
anti-Hindu and anti-Indian sense. This caught on quite well among the more
peripheral, least "aryanized" tribes, particularly in the Northeast. The claim of being primeval Indians
displaced from the fertile plains by the Aryan invaders was a logical
rallying-point for their new self-consciousness. To a very large extent, this "pre-Aryan" identity was a total
novelty tutored by the Christian missions, who made the tribals their
privileged focus of activity and rechristened them as "aboriginals" (âdivâsî),
a pseudo-indigenous term falsely suggesting that non-tribals had all along been
seen as foreign intruders. Given the
frequency with which journalists and even scholars swallow the invasionist
implication of the term âdivâsî, this coinage deserves a gold medal as a
brilliantly successful one-word disinformation campaign. Some of the Northeastern tribes have been
converted to Christianity in toto and refuse to give "Indian" as their
nationality during the census, preferring their tribal identities as "Naga" or
"Mizo" instead, thus confirming Hindu nationalist suspicions against
Christianity. Ironically, it is these
Northeastern tribes who have the least right to be called "aboriginal", as
their immigration from the East in the medieval period, much later than any
Aryan invasion, is well-documented.
Even the older Munda-speaking tribes are widely assumed to originate in
Southeast Asia, still the centre of gravity of their Austro-Asiatic language
family; while the Dravidians have variously been traced to Central Asia, Elam
and even Africa. If the Aryans must
perforce pass as invaders, they are not the only ones.
(4) Christian mission. The single biggest promoter of
the AIT as the bedrock of new political group identities has undeniably been
the Christian mission, incidentally also the biggest operator of elite
educational institutions in India and a major media owner, hence a powerful
moulder of public opinion. Christian
missionary authors in the 19th century such as Sir Monier
Monier-Williams, Friedrich Max Müller, Bishop Robert Caldwell and Rev. G.U.
Pope laid the intellectual groundwork for Dravidian, Tribal and Dalit political
movements and for a new fragmented self-perception of Hinduism. Quite deliberately, Hindu self-esteem was
undermined by breaking the Hindu pantheon into a set of native gods like Shiva
and a set of Aryan-invader gods like Indra; by redefining reform movements like
Buddhism and Bhakti as "revolts of the natives against Aryan-Brahminical
impositions"; and by reinterpreting the Dharma-Shâstras as nothing but
an elaborate apartheid legislation for preserving the race and dominance of the
Aryan invader castes.
(5) Indian Islam. In recent years, militant
Muslims such as Muslim India monthly's editor Syed Shahabuddin have
tried to integrate the AIT in their anti-Hindu polemics. The thrust of their argument is that if
Hindus see Muslims as foreigners, they should be told that they themselves, at
least the Aryan elite among them, once were foreign intruders. And that not Muslims but Aryan Hindus were
the trail-blazers of destructive invasions pillaging and destroying native
centres of civilization. Further,
building on the erroneous but by now widespread belief that most Indian Muslims
were low-caste Hindus who sought equality by converting to Islam, it is argued
that they are largely part of the native stock, hence more Indian than Hindu
nationalists, who are (equally erroneously) identified as upper-caste and hence
as Aryan invaders.
(6) Indo-Anglian snobbery. English education and more
recently the westernization of the workplace, of popular music and other
everyday circumstances have generated a class of Indians quite alienated from
and ignorant of native culture. More
than the English-employed Babus of yore, they delight in mocking and belittling
native culture. In their hands, the AIT
is simply an instrument to tease Indian "chauvinists" and deconstruct the very
notion of a distinct Indian or Hindu civilization. With the decline of ideology and the rise of the commercial
outlook in the media, this supercilious and nihilistic attitude is now a rising
force in the opinion landscape, but it has always been around in non-Marxist
sections of independent India's anglicised elite.
(7) Indian Marxism. Among the English-educated
elite, a class of Marxist intellectuals has been very active and increasingly
influential since the 1930s. Around the
time of independence, they emphasized the Leninist theory of national
self-determination, favouring the creation of a Muslim state Pakistan and the
further partition of India into separate linguistic states. Though not actively militating for
separatism later on, they kept on promoting notions like "Bengali nationhood"
and refused to accept the Indian state, for "India was never the solution",
according to Marxwadi Communist Party politburo member Ashok Mitra (1993). In that discourse, the AIT didn't figure
very prominently at first because as Marxists they focused on present social
realities rather than the distant "feudal" past. Well into the 1980s, as long as they thought in terms of
socio-economic class, they refused to cultivate casteist and ethnic identities
and consequently took only a limited interest in AIT-based identity politics. But with the decline of world Communism, the
Indian comrades increasingly compromised with identitarian populism, in some
states even with Islamic fundamentalism, in fact with any force deemed hostile
to the perceived ruling class, characterized as upper-caste Hindu. In the 1990s, when the AIT was getting
challenged, they became its most ardent and most effective defenders, vide e.g.
Thapar 1996; Sharma 1995, 1999. While
the other above-mentioned anti-Hindu or anti-Indian groups merely assume and
use the AIT, the Indian Marxists have seriously invested in intellectually
upholding it.
The common denominator in all these uses of the AIT is that it
undermines or contradicts India's sense of unity. In Hindu nationalist parlance, the AIT is "anti-national". The reason why the votaries of Hindutva have
recently rallied around the position of AIT skepticism is simply to counter
these anti-national uses of the AIT.
To grasp the political dimension of the Aryan invasion debate, it is
necessary to clarify the political power equation in the dominant media and
academic institutions in India. As
former Times of India editor Girilal Jain (sacked in 1989 for developing
Hindutva sympathies) used to say: "Nothing ever dies in India." Movements long dead in the West are still
alive and vigorous in India. That is
why the last Communist will not be called Popov or Zhang or Kim, but Chatterji
or Bose. Numerically, the Communists'
power base in India was always small, but in a few key sectors, including the
bottlenecks in the information flow to the West, their presence was
overwhelming and remains disproportionate even now.
Around 1970, entryist policies (Communists entering Congress, the
ministerial offices and the cultural institutions) and a very gainful quid
pro quo with a besieged Prime Minister Indira Gandhi made Marxism the
dominant ideology in the Indian state and parastatal institutions such as the
Indian History Congress and the National Centre for Educational Research and
Training. While ruling parties came and
went, the entrenched Marxists defended their position and reserved access for
their own kind. The first BJP
government at the centre (1998-99) made no dent in the Marxist academic
hegemony, and the second one (1999-present) only very partially. Even then, the Marxists didn't take kindly
to this first fresh breeze of glasnost, hence their campaign against new
anti-colonial and allegedly "saffron" accents in the textbooks.
The Marxists don't like to be caught in the searchlight. One of the most respected Marxist scholars,
Romila Thapar, chides her critics thus: "Those that question their theories are
dismissed as Marxists!" (1996:17) Well,
apart from her reliance on a Marxist conceptual framework in her publications,
she is also confirmed to be a representative of the Indian Marxist school of
historiography in an authoritative Marxist source, the Dictionary of Marxist
Thought (Bottomore 1988), under its entry "Hinduism", along with R.S.
Sharma. For those still in doubt, Irfan
Habib, one of the deans of the Marxist school, has put his cards on the table
in a book subtitled "Towards a Marxist Perception" (1995). Among the print media, the one most active
in the anti-indigenist crusade is the Chennai-based fortnightly Frontline,
a consistent defender of the Cuban and North-Korean regimes and of the Chinese
occupation of Tibet. After the mock
referendum in Iraq in the autumn of 2002, Frontline displayed its
nostalgia for Soviet mock elections by treating Saddam Hussein's 100% approval
rate as a genuine democratic endorsement.
Judging from its record, we may take the Frontline initiative to
prominently feature pro-AIT contributions by Asko Parpola and Michael Witzel,
participants in the present JIES debate, to be motivated by something else than
a concern for good scholarship.
To be sure, the Marxist motives of the Frontline editors and of
the old history establishment have no logical implications for the correctness
or otherwise of the pro-invasionist argument.
Of course not. But then it is
not invasion sceptic Prof. Kazanas who tried to twist this debate to his
advantage by raising the issue of political motives; that was the doing of some
of his critics. If they don't feel
troubled by their de facto alliance with crackpots like V.T. Rajshekar
or with the Marxist school and its record of history distortion, they have no
reason to mobilize (false!) rumours of Hindu nationalist connections against
Prof. Kazanas.
For all their focusing on the all-purpose bogey of Hindu nationalism (or
worse isms), it is remarkable that Indian Marxists and their Western disciples
have completely failed to study this ideology.
During my Ph.D. research on this very topic (vide Elst 2001/1), I found
that practically all secondary publications in the field, including some
influential ones (e.g. Pandey 1993, McKean 1996, more recently Hansen 1999),
dispensed almost completely with the reading of primary sources. Typically, a few embarrassing quotations,
selected by Indian critics of Hindutva from some old pamphlets (mostly
Golwalkar 1939), are repeated endlessly and in unabashedly polemical
fashion.
A shameful example of the total reliance of Western scholars on outright
partisan secondary Indian sources while passing judgment on a Hindu nationalist
position was the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute, as I discussed in detail in
Elst 2002. Until the late 1980s, there
was a complete consensus among all Hindu, Muslim and Western sources about the
fact that the mosque had been built in forcible replacement of a temple, a very
common occurrence throughout Muslim-conquered territories. This consensus, nowadays mischaracterized as
the Hindu nationalist position, was since confirmed by new findings and
remained strictly unchallenged by any counter-findings. Note indeed that all the official and
unofficial argumentations against the temple limited themselves to downplaying
the impact of some of the evidence for the temple, and never offered even one
piece of positive testimony for an alternative scenario. Yet, the dominant Marxist circles decreed
that there had never been a temple at the site (e.g. Sharma et al. 1991) and
lambasted Western scholars who had earlier confirmed the consensus as
handmaidens of Hindu fundamentalism (Gopal 1991:30),-- enough to send these
scholars into prudent retirement from the Ayodhya debate, vide Van der Veer
1994:161. Lately the Marxists have had
to swallow that maximalist position and revert to the more reasonable political
position that temple demolitions of the past do not justify mosque demolitions
in the present; but for more than a decade, their leaden dogma has stifled the history
debate, viz. that the temple demolition was merely a "Hindu chauvinist
fabrication".
Those who stuck to the old consensus view, the one confirmed by the
evidence, have had tons of mud thrown at them not just by Indian Marxists but
by their Western dupes as well, e.g. Hansen 1999:262. Not one of the latter ever took issue with the actual evidence,
behaving instead as obedient soldiers carrying out and amplifying the Indian
Marxist ukase. At the time of
this writing, Indian archaeologists are digging up more Hindu religious
artefacts from underneath the temple/mosque site (Mishra 2003), yet the Financial
Times (Dalrymple 2003) carries a long article extolling Romila Thapar and
Irfan Habib, ridiculing the consensus view on Ayodhya along with the
non-invasionist "myth", denouncing Ayodhya consensus representative K.S. Lal
(conveniently dead and unable to defend himself), and bluffing about "all the
evidence" disproving the Ayodhya temple's existence but not actually mentioning
any of it.
The same pattern, though less extreme, is in evidence concerning the
specific involvement of declared Hindu nationalists in the Aryan invasion
debate. Their positions are
systematically ignored or misrepresented, and false motives are attributed to
them according to the accuser's convenience.
A brazen-faced example is Thapar 1996:8, about the Vedic revivalist
movement Arya Samaj, a social-reformist society founded in 1875 whose spokesmen
incidentally also rejected the AIT: "The Arya Samaj was described by its
followers as 'the society of the Aryan race'.
The Aryas were the upper castes and the untouchables were
excluded." In reality, the Arya Samaj
made its mark in Indian history by working, often at great personal sacrifice,
to undo the exclusion of the untouchables; and by redefining "Arya" as
"Vedic", away from both its old Indian casteist and its new Western racist
interpretation. As for the expression
"society of the Aryan race", while I am unaware of its application to the Arya
Samaj specifically, it is true that around the turn of the 20th
century, the expression "Aryan race" was fairly commonly used by Indian
nationalists in the sense of "Indian nation", neither more nor less.
Romila Thapar's use of "Aryan" cited above, by contrast, is a
transparent attempt to play on its post-Nazi connotations, as if its meaning
hadn't radically changed at some dramatic point between 1875 and 1996 (this
exploitation of the confusion and hysteria about the term "Aryan" is standard
fare in Indian anti-indigenist polemic, e.g. Sikand 1993). And yet, Romila Thapar remains the most
celebrated Indian historian among Western India-watchers, a status recently
confirmed by her honorary doctorate at the Sorbonne. In the laudatio, the authorities of France's most
prestigious university repeated the well-known Indian Marxist rhetoric against
"saffronization", with the unusual extra of specifically denouncing the French
pro-Indian journalist François Gautier, a well-known critic of the AIT
(1996). Nobody took the trouble to
verify the criticisms raised against the scholarly performance of the honorary
doctor.
If we want to know about Hindu nationalist involvement in the Aryan
invasion debate, the Indian Marxist school and its Western spokesmen cannot
help us. The one extant critical review
of the various Hindu nationalist positions regarding the Aryan problem was
written by Shrikant Talageri, ironically but significantly a declared Hindu
nationalist himself. The following much
briefer review is indebted to his input.
(1) Acceptance of the AIT
A number of Hindu nationalists have accepted the AIT. Most prominent among them is Hindu
nationalist seed ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. In his influential booklet Hindutva ("Hinduness"), he
wrote of how migrations had "welded Aryans and non-Aryans into a common race"
(1923:8) and how "not even the aborigines of the Andamans are without some
sprinkling of the so-called Aryan blood in their veins and vice-versa"
(1923:56). This way, he rejected the
divisive implication of the AIT that India was composed of several distinct
nations, arguing instead that they had biologically mingled and culturally
fused into a single Hindu nation. Like
his leftist opponent Jawaharlal Nehru, he accepted that the nation was a
product of historical processes, not an age-old God-given essence. There is no organic link between Savarkar's
positions on nationalism and ancient history: as a non-specialist, he merely
accepted the dominant paradigm and tried to accommodate it into his political
views. But note at any rate, all you
who identify OIT with Hindutva, that the founder of the Hindutva ideology was
an AIT believer.
Sharply to be distinguished from Hindu nationalists, who are modernists
and social reformers for the sake of national unity, there is also a dwindling
school of Hindu traditionalists. Among
them, you find pandits who are steeped in Sanskritic lore and have never even
heard of an Aryan invasion, which is after all unattested in Vedic
literature. The one traditionalist who
must be mentioned here as accepting the AIT was a Western "honorary Hindu", the
French musicologist Alain Daniélou (1971, 1975), companion of the
traditionalist leader Swami Karpatri.
Here again, there is no organic link between his Hindu-traditionalist
view of society and his historical beliefs, which were borrowed wholesale from
the dominant Western school of thought.
The most well-known Hindu nationalist to actively support the AIT and
explore its implications was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an Indian National Congress
leader in the early 20th century.
His chronology, worked out in dialogue with Hermann Jacobi (and still
upheld by archaeo-astronomers, e.g. Kak 2003), was sharply incompatible with
the currently dominant theory: he put the Rg-Veda ca. 4000 BC rather than 1500
BC (Tilak 1893, 1903). If the Vedas were
that old, the invasion would have to be pushed back accordingly, as the Vedic
geographical setting is obviously South-Asian; but Tilak solved this problem by
having the Vedic seers compose their hymns far outside India, in an
Indo-European homeland situated in the Arctic region. Except for a handful of European rightist non-scholars, nobody
takes this eccentric scenario seriously anymore, not even the Tilak loyalists
in Maharashtrian Brahmin circles which happen to be the cradle of both the
Savarkarite and RSS-BJP strands within the Hindu nationalist movement. All the same, Tilak's acceptance of a
version of the AIT again disproves the identification of the OIT with Hindu
nationalism.
(2) Rejection of the AIT
Few among the Hindu nationalists have really studied the relevant
evidence. Some even reject the whole
notion of historical evidence as pertinent to this question. From Jaimini's Mimânsâ-Sûtra (BCE)
down to Arya Samaj founder Swami Dayananda's Satyârtha Prakash (ca. AD
1875), a school of Vedic scholars has believed that the Vedas were not a human
creation, but were created by the Gods aeons ago and then revealed in complete
form to the Vedic seers. Oddly, for
people who held the Vedas in such awe, their theory flies in the face of the
Vedic testimony itself: unlike the Quran, the Vedas never take the form of a
statement by God addressing man.
Instead, they take the form of hymns in which man is addressing the
Gods. The names of the seers composing
the hymns are also given, and they are put in a historical context, often with
their mutual relations, genealogical kinship and faction feuds detailed in the
texts themselves. Moreover, a number of
presumably historical events are described or alluded to, most famously the
Battle of the Ten Kings. All this
points to the historicity of the Vedas: they came about as a creation of human
poetry in a specific society at a specific phase in its development. But Vedic enthusiasts like Dayananda and to
a lesser extent Sri Aurobindo Ghose chose to disregard this information and
reinterpreted all these mundane data as spiritual metaphor. Though they also happened to reject the
invasion hypothesis, they excluded the Vedic information as possible source of
evidence for their own indigenist position.
Aurobindo's correct observation (1971:242-251) that the Vedas contain no
mention of an Aryan invasion, thereby loses its force.
After Aurobindo's death, his otherwise loyal secretary K.D. Sethna
(1982, 1992) abandoned this position and started using Vedic data on material
culture to argue the chronological precedence of Rg-Vedic over high Harappan
culture, e.g. that the Harappan cultivation of cotton goes unmentioned in the
older Vedic layers so that its early-Harappan introduction must coincide with
some mid-Vedic date. More perhaps than
the archaeologists' acknowledged inability to discover any remains of an Aryan
invasion (Shaffer 1984, Rao 1991, Lal 1987, 2002, etc.), Sethna's theses truly
were the opening shot in the Hindu nationalist mobilization against the AIT. Within the Aurobindo circle, this work was
continued by Danino & Nahar 2000.
Since Sethna's publications, many Hindu authors of divergent levels of
qualification have felt emboldened to contribute to the anti-invasionist
argument. Some of them lose themselves
in projects they are not up to, such as the decipherment of the Indus script,
but in matters of textual interpretation and of matching archaeological and
genetic data with cultural history, they are often better equipped than their
invasionist opponents. Those who care
to read this literature, will notice how it belies its characterization by
hostile commentators as "far-rightist" and the like. It actually taps into the discourse of anti-colonialism,
anti-racism and anti-orientalism (e.g. Rajaram 1995, 2000), which most
Westerners would spontaneously describe as leftist. A lone Indian Marxist (Singh 1995) has also contributed to the
anti-invasionist argument, predictably focusing on material and economic data
suggesting Harappan-Aryan continuity, and thus upholding the more usual Third
World Marxist tradition of anti-colonialism as opposed to the Indian
card-carrying Marxists' championing of the colonial view of history.
The political instrumentalization of theories about Indo-European
origins has yielded coalitions of strange bedfellows. On the side of the hypothesis of an Aryan invasion of India, we
find old colonial apologists and race theorists and their marginalized
successors in the contemporary West along with a broad alliance of anti-Hindu
forces in India, most articulate among them the Christian missionaries and the
Marxists who have dominated India's intellectual sector for the past several
decades. This dominant school of
thought has also carried along some prominent early votaries of Hindu
nationalism. On the side of the
non-invasionist or Aryan-indigenist hypothesis, we find long-dead European
Romantics and a few contemporary Western India lovers, along with an
anti-colonialist school of thought in India, mainly consisting of contemporary
Hindu nationalists. Obviously, among
the subscribers to either view we also find scholars without any political axe
to grind. And even in the writings of
politically motivated authors, we do come across valid argumentations. Consequently, it is best to continue this research
without getting sidetracked by the real or alleged or imagined political
connotations of certain scholarly lines of argument.
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(April 2003)