PREFACE

This book on the developing arguments concerning the Aryan Invasion Theory consists of adapted versions of papers I have read: the first at the World Association of Vedic Studies (WAVES) conference on the Indus-Saraswati civilization in Atlanta 1996, the third at the 1996 Annual South Asia conference in Madison, Wisconsin and in a lecture at the Linguistics Department in Madison; the fifth contains material used in my paper read at the second WAVES conference in Los Angeles 1998; the second and fourth were read at lectures for the Belgo-Indian Association, Brussels, and at the Etnografisch Museum, Antwerp. Overlaps have been kept to a minimum. Here and there, sections of my book Indigenous Indians (Voice of India 1993, outdated as far as the fast-moving Aryan invasion debate is concerned) have been reused in adapted form. My thanks are due to the late Dr. Lèon Poliakov and to Dr. Bernard Sergent for our correspondence; to Prof. B. B. Lal, Prof. A. K. Narain, Prof. Andrew Sihler, Prof. Lambert Isebaert, Dr. Herman Seldeslachts, Drs. Erik Seldeslachts, Dr. Edwin Bryant, Dr. Beatrice Reusch, Mr. Jose Calazans, Mr. Bhagwan Singh and Mr. Shrikant Talageri for the enlightening discussions; and to Mrs. Yamini Liu, Mrs. Manju Jhaver, Mr. Krishna Bhatnagar (and friends), Dr. Manohar Shinde and Mr. Shrichand Chawla for their material help. I also thank the publishers for their patience: it so happens that the writing and editing process has been bedeviled by technical and other hurdles. The greatest hurdle has been my own anxiety in treading unsure ground, where every hypothesis which is now carrying the day may be blown away by a new discovery tomorrow. Even now, it hurts to release a book in mid-debate, knowing that much of it will be dated by the time a new consensus will have evolved. But then, I am confident that this painful awareness of uncertainty has been the right attitude and the best starting-point for uprooting the false certainties of some and for clearing the bewilderment of others. While too many debaters are still at base one, unfamiliar with the newest arguments and insufficiently alert to the strong and weak points of the several types of evidence in the balance, I hope this books helps the debate in moving on and reaching its conclusion.

Koenraad Elst Brecht

Belgium

20 May 1999.

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1. Political aspects of the Aryan invasion debate

1. 1. POLITICIZING A LINGUISTIC THEORY

1. 1. 1. Aryavarta for the Aryans

Until the mid-19th century, no Indian had ever heard of the notion that his ancestors could be Aryan invaders from Central Asia who had destroyed the native civilization and enslaved the native population. Neither had South-Indians ever dreamt that they were the rightful owners of the whole subcontinent, dispossessed by the Aryan invaders who had chased them from North India, turning it into Aryavarta, the land of the Aryans. Nor had the low-caste people heard that they were the original inhabitants of India, subdued by the Aryans and forced into the prisonhouse of caste which the conquerors imposed upon them as an early form of Apartheid. All these ideas had to be imported by European scholars and missionaries, who thought through the implications of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AM, the theory that the Indo-European (IE) language family had spread out from a given homeland, probably in Eastern Europe, and found a place in Western and Southern Europe and in India as cultural luggage of horse-borne invaders who subjugated the natives. One of the first natives to interiorize these ideas was Jotirao Phule, India’s first modern Mahatma, a convent-educated low-caste leader from Maharashtra. In 1873, he set the tone for the political appropriation of the AIT: “Recent researches have shown beyond a shadow of doubt that the Brahmins were not the Aborigines of India (…) Aryans came to India not as simple emigrants with peaceful intentions of colonization, but as conquerors. They appear to have been a race imbued with very high notions of self, extremely cunning, arrogant and bigoted.” ⁽¹⁾ Ever since, the political reading of the AIT has become all-pervasive in Indian textbooks as well as in all kinds of divisive propaganda pitting high and low castes, North and South Indians, speakers of Indo-Aryan and of Dravidian languages, and tribals and non-tribals, against each other. Today, out of indignation with the socially destructive implications of the politically appropriated AIT, many Indian scholars get excited about supposed imperialist motives distorting the views of the Western scholars who first introduced the AIT. They point to the Christian missionary commitment of early sankritists like Friedrich Max Müller, John Muir and Sir M. Monier-Williams and of dravidologists like Bishop Robert Caldwell and Reverend G. U. Pope, alleging that the missionaries justify their presence in India by claiming that Aryan Hinduism is as much a foreign import as Christianity. They quote Viceroy Lord Curzon as saying that the AIT is “the furniture of Empire”, and explain how the British colonisers justified their conquest by claiming that India had never been anything but booty for foreign invaders, and that the Indians (or at least the upper-caste Hindus who led the Freedom Movement) were as much foreigners as their fellow-Aryans from Britain. ⁽²⁾ About the use of the AIT in the service of colonialism, there can be no doubt. Thus, during the 1935 Parliament debates on the Government of India Act, Sir Winston Churchill opposed any policy tending towards decolonization on the following ground: “We have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except perhaps for the Depressed Classes [= the Scheduled Castes and Tribes], who are the native stock.” ⁽³⁾ SO, the British Aryans had as much right to Aryavarta as their Vedic fellow-Aryans. Indian loyalists justified the British presence on the same grounds, e.g. Keshab Chandra Sen, leader of the reformist movement Brahmo Samaj (mid-19th century), welcomed the British advent as a reunion with his Aryan cousins: “In the advent of the English nation in India we see a reunion of parted cousins, the descendants of two different families of the ancient Aryan race.” ⁽⁴⁾. However, it doesn’t follow that the AIT was conceived with these political uses as its deliberate aim. The scholars concerned were children of their age, conditioned by prevalent perceptions and prejudices, but they sincerely believed that this theory explained the available data best.

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1. 1. 2. Hitler’s Aryans

Even the 19th-century race theories which would feature so dramatically in crimes against humanity in 1941-45 were not originally conceived as political ploys. In the prevailing Zeitgeist, most of their theorists genuinely thought that the race concept provided the best explanation for the incoming data of nascent sciences like sociology and anthropology. Nonetheless, the disruptive effects of their work have reached beyond Europe as far as India. In the proliferating race theories of the late 19th and early 20th century, “Aryan”, an early synonym of “Indo-European” (IE), became a racial term designating the purest segment of the White race. Of course, the identification of “white” with “Aryan” was an innovation made by armchair theorizers in Europe, far from and in stark disregard for the self-described Aryas in India. Better-informed India-based Britons like Rudyard Kipling summed up the Indian type as “Aryan brown”. Incorporated in the theme of Aryan whiteness, the AIT became a crown piece in Adolf Hitler’s vision of white supremacy: here was the proof of both white superiority and of the need to preserve the race from admixture with inferior darker races. Had not the white Aryan invaders of India subdued the vastly more numerous brown-skinned natives, and had they not lost their superior white quality by mixing with the natives and becoming more brown themselves? In the Nazi view, the Aryan invaders had retained a relative superiority vis-à-vis the pure black natives by means of the caste system, but had been too slow in instituting this early form of Apartheid, so that their type was fatally contaminated with inferior blood. One of Hitler’s admirers, Mrs. Maximiani Portas alias Savitri Devi Mukherji, reports: “In the Third Reich, even schoolchildren knew from their textbooks that this [= the Aryan] race had spread from the north to the south and east, and not the other way around.” ⁽⁵⁾ Establishment historians in Nazi Germany, such as Hermann Lommel, were quite explicit about their doctrine that “by invading India, the Aryans, powerful conquerors, have violated the culture which had been established there”. ⁽⁶⁾ The subjugation of the black natives of India by the white Aryan invaders was, in the Rassenkunde (“racial science”) courses in Nazi schools, the clearest illustration of the superiority of the white and especially the Aryan race.

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1. 1. 3. Hindu and Aryan

The “Aryan” theme failed to kindle any sympathy in Hitler for the brown Aryans of India. He spurned the collaboration offer by freedom fighter and leftist Congress leader Subhash Chandra Bose because he preferred India to be under white British domination. And he ordered the extermination of the Gypsies, Indian immigrants into Europe. Nonetheless, anti-Hindu polemicists cleverly exploit the ambiguity of the term “Aryan” to associate Hindus with Hitler. Consider this crassly false statement by a leading Marxist historian about the reform movement Arya Samaj, founded in 1875 and well-known for its anti-untouchability campaigns: “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.” ⁽⁷⁾ The second sentence is precisely the Western indologist reading of the term Arya which the Arya Samaj sought to counter: The Samaj restored the original meaning of the term, viz. “civilized”, in particular “belonging to or expressive of the Vedic civilization”. ⁽⁸⁾ While the Samaj was not slow in acknowledging that in its own day, the untouchables were being excluded from learning the Vedic rituals and philosophies, it worked hard to undo this exclusions. ⁽⁹⁾ As for the first sentence quoted, it is not known to me where a Samaj spokesman called his own organization “the society of the Aryan race”. It is quite impossible that the term was ever used in the sense in which the quoter wants the reader to understand it, viz. in the Hitlerian sense. However, it is not altogether impossible that the expression was used, because in those days the word “race” in English (as opposed to German and post-1945 English) had a more general, non-biological and non-racist meaning, viz. “nation, people”. Sri Aurobindo, for one, has definitely used the term “Aryan race”, thereby not meaning what Hitler and post-Hitlerian readers will understand by that term, but “Hindu nation”. For all his “Aryan race” talk, Aurobindo was among the most clear-sighted analysts of the problem which Nazism posed. In 1939, Aurobindo advocated India’s total support to the Allied cause as a matter of principle, because he saw in Hitler a force of evil; this at a time when many Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, were very fond of Hitler, and when others advocated participation in the British war effort on purely tactical grounds. On 19 September 1940, he briefly broke his self-imposed seclusion to make a public statement: “We feel that not only is this a battle waged in just self-defence and in defence of the nations threatened with the world domination of Germany and the Nazi system of life, but that it is a defence of civilization (…) To this cause our support and sympathy will be unswerving whatever may happen; we look forward to the victory of Britain and, as the eventual result, an era of peace and union among the nations”. ⁽¹⁰⁾ On one occasion, already in 1914, Aurobindo did express his doubts about the term “race” as follows: “I prefer not to use the term race, for race is a thing much more difficult to determine than is usually imagined. In dealing with it the trenchant distinctions current in the popular mind are wholly out of place.” ⁽¹¹⁾ At any rate, when he and other Hindus used the expression “Aryan race”, they meant something totally unrelated to Nazism, for both terms had a meaning totally distinct from their Nazi interpretation. ⁽¹²⁾ To quote Hindus as speaking of the “Aryan race” without explaining the semantic itinerary of the expression is tantamount to manipulating the readership into reading something into the phrase which Arya Samaj spokesmen and Aurobindo never intended. To Hindus, Arya, or “Aryan” in English texts, simply means “Hindu”, nothing more, nothing less.

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1. 1. 4. Indo-European and the Nouvelle Droite

The positive association of the IE theme with racist or Nazi ideas is quite dead in Europe except in a few extremely marginal groups. It is not really present in the main focus of contemporary ideological interest in the IE past, the French intellectual current known as the Nouvelle Droite (“New Right”). ⁽¹³⁾ By the 1980s, this movement, ultra-rightist in the 1960s, had shifted from “race” to “culture”, from authoritarianism to participatory democracy, from crude nationalism to the celebration of multicultural difference (e.g. its leading ideologue, Alain de Benoist, was one of the rare French intellectuals to support the right of Muslim girls to wear the hijab in school). The Nouvelle Droite shows a sincere interest in and respect for traditional cultures, though sometimes forcing them conceptually into the mould of its own pet concerns. In contrast with the -mushrooming xenophobic parties, it believes in European integration and seeks to underpin it with an awareness of pan-European cultural identity, hence its interest in the IE cultural heritage. ⁽¹⁴⁾ Unlike the Left with its nostalgia for the victorious 40s, which it tries to recreate by perennially invoking the bogey of “renascent fascism”, the Right has had to learn from its defeat and move on. So, the focus is not on some “Aryan race” anymore, but on “Indo-European culture” as reconstructed by modern philologists. One of the better known IE motifs is the theory of trifunctionality elaborated by Georges Dumézil. The idea is that PIE society had a tripolar worldview, which it applied to cosmology (Sanskrit triguNa: the transparent, turbid and dark energies) as well as to society. The three social functions were identified as spiritual-intellectual, martial-political, and productive-economic, the medieval oratores, bellatores, laboratores (worshippers, fighters, workers), or in Indian caste terms: brAhmaNa, kshatriya, vaishya. Apart from the questions whether this scheme is typically IE (which is doubtful) and whether it effectively applied to ancient IE societies (where four-fold divisions are more common), it is not clear what its relevance to modern politics could be. Further, it is strange that European patriots put all their eggs in the IE basket, when ancient European culture had important non-IE tributaries (Megalithic, VinCa, et al), of which the Basque language is the only linguistic remnant. And not only is Europe a plural entity, but “IE culture” itself was probably never a homogeneous unity, nor was it necessarily all that distinct from neighbouring cultures (e.g. the Scythians were Iranian-speaking but were feared and loathed by the sedentary Iranians, and resembled the non-IE Turks in religion and lifestyle). Indeed, of IE motifs like trifunctionality, as of IE myths like that of the dragon-slayer (Indra), it could be argued that they are not coterminous with the IE world, and perhaps even that some of them are just universal. If IE is the basis of European identity, one can understand that a European Urheimat for IE would be preferred over an Asian one. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Consequently, some of the Nouvelle Droite authors are very attached to the idea of the Aryan Invasion as a necessary implication of the presumed European character and origin of the IE family.

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1. 1. 5. The Nouvelle Droite on race and the Aryans Invasion

As a corollary to their Eurocentric view of IE history, Nouvelle Droite authors tend to accept the AIT and, along with it, the view of the caste system as an apartheid system between IE immigrants and Indian natives, possibly because they have no reason to rethink the specifically Indian chapter of IE history. The net result is that in spite of their declared anti-racism, they end up reconnecting with 19th-century racist assumptions, at least as far as India is concerned. The chief sources for Nouvelle Droite musings about India are the late Jean Varenne, an eminent indologist who was less outspoken on the present debate, and Jean Haudry, sanskritist and IE linguist, who by contrast has involved himself quite strongly in this debate. Haudry, member of the Scientific Committee of the French national-populist party Front National, maintains that the Proto-Indo-Europeans were tall, blue-eyed, fair-haired, long-skulled and straight-nosed. ⁽¹⁶⁾ Of course, he supports the AIT: “The Vedas and Brahmanas mention the Aryan invasion in India” (actually, they don’t), and: “It is probable that the Aryans left from the site of Jamna on the Volga” and that some of them “came to India where they first arrived towards the beginning of the second millennium BC”. ⁽¹⁷⁾ There are frequent allegations, generally exaggerated but sometimes true, of unsavoury connections between the Nouvelle Droite and certain veterans of the Nazi and Fascist regimes. The Marxist critic Maurice Olender claims that one of the original patrons of the Nouvelle Droite publication Nouvelle Ecole was Herbert Jankuhn, once an officer of the SS research department, and that the movement also republishes indo-europeanist studies by Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss and Hans F. K. Günther, editors of the Nazi periodical Rasse (“Race”). ⁽¹⁸⁾ In a “right of reply” which the Paris Appeals Court forced the periodical to publish (February 1994), Nouvelle Droite ideologue Alain de Benoist denied the allegation and listed his own publications in which he had argued against all forms of racism, defended democracy against its critics, deconstructed Western ethnocentrism, and criticized totalitarianism, nationalism, social darwinism and sociobiology. ⁽¹⁹⁾ He also pointed out that his periodical Krisis, which Olender had described as “extreme-Rightist”, has published many Leftist authors who never felt they were in bad company. ⁽²⁰⁾ The antagonism between Left and Right is indeed giving way to new political fault-lines. On the other hand, if we just stick with the information which Nouvelle Droite publications themselves furnish, it is undeniable that there are some personal connections with the pre-1945 Right. Thus, among the members of the patronage committee of Nouvelle Ecole, we find not only scholars above suspicion, like Manfred Mayrhofer, Edgar Polomé, Colin Renfrew, the late Arthur Koestler or the late Marija Gimbutas, but also the famous scholar Mircea Eliade, who had been close to the fascist Iron Guard in his homeland Rumania. That Herbert Jankuhn was a member of the patronage committee is also uncontroversial. My own impression is that the Nouvelle Droite is by and large a respectable intellectual movement of the Right, but that precisely this respectability makes it attractive as an umbrella for nostalgics of the 1930s, for IE romantics, as well as for plain crackpots. The same phenomenon is in evidence in related movements throughout Europe: their periodicals present a curious mixture of healthy non-conformism and sarcasm vis-à-vis the dominant “political correctness”, often in the form of thoughtful and original critiques, with deplorable flare-ups of obsolete race thinking and starry-eyed “traditionalism”, i.e. a dogmatic kind of nostalgia for pre-modern culture. The main problem with the Nouvelle Droite in the present context is that it continues to see other cultures, and India in particular, through the ideological lenses developed by European thinkers in the 19th century. The Nouvelle Droite people, rather than acquaint themselves with the reality of other cultures, often prefer to stay with their own coloured versions of them, e.g. René Guénon’s explanation of Taoism rather than living Taoism. ⁽²¹⁾ This is the way to remain stuck in Eurocentric theories of bygone days, which is more or less the story of the whole pro-AIT argument.

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1. 1. 6. Fondness for caste

The caste system as a religiously sanctioned hierarchical organization of society has exerted a fascination on Western nostaligics who felt lost in the modern world and longed for a kind of restoration of the pre-modern world. Among these nostaligics, one of extraordinary stature was certainly Julius Evola (1898-1974), an Italian aristocrat and an independent Rightist ideologue who, after years in the margin, ingratiated himself with the Fascist regime by developing a “truly Italian” version of the Race Theory, “more spiritual than the purely biological German Rassenlehre”. Thus, he rejected biological determinism in favour of will-power, preferring chivalrous values like courage over the modern rigid bio-materialist subjection of man to the verdict of his genes. On the other hand, his occasional conflicts with the ideologues and the authorities of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, now eagerly highlighted by his remaining followers, hardly suffice to make him acceptable, e.g. there is no excuse for his writing a foreword to the Italian translation of the anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Though a declared racist, his views were at odds with those of most White racists, e.g. he glorified Asian cultures because of their hierarchy and traditionalism, esp. the martial virtues as preserved (or so Western romantics thought) in imperial Japan. ⁽²²⁾ He professed a premodern aristocratic “horizontal racism”: the European aristocracy was one “race” bound to intermarry, the common people were the other “race”, with national borders and identities being less important. After being hit during a bombardment in Vienna at the end of World War 2, he spent his last thirty years in a wheelchair, writing political-cultural essays and fairly accurate but always “traditionalist” accounts of Oriental religions. Evola is interesting because he presented a premodern (and anti-modern) viewpoint, a living fossil in the 20th century. Those who have been duped by the dominant Marxist discourse into classifying Fascism as Rightist would do well to study Evola’s Rightist critique of Fascism. He attacked Fascism on the following points: its anti-traditionalism and zest for newness and youth (as exemplified by its term Duce/“leader”, i.e. one who takes the people to a distant goal, a utopia, as opposed to the premodern “ruler” who merely maintains the existing order); its superficial modernist optimism (best seen in Fascist, Nazi, Stalinist and Maoist visual art); its equalizing “Jacobin” nationalism which minimizes class differences; its totalitarianism, as opposed to premodern culture’s sense of measure and division of powers; its secularism, which creates an opposition between the political and the sacred; its socialism; its personality cult (one ought to revere the institution of kingship, not the person of the king); and its natalist policy based on the vulgar cult of numbers, neglecting quality for the sake of quantity. ⁽²³⁾ In the absence of a living traditional society, some moderns like Evola have tried to recreate a sense of tradition, called traditionalism (term launched by his contemporary René Guénon), but this is often distortive. The whole traditionalist movement, including most of its votaries whom I have personally known, is characterized by a rigid attachment to certain typically modern (though anti-modernist) Western concerns, leading to great distortions in its numerous attempts to link up with ancient European or contemporary Asian traditions and surviving traditional societies. Among the projections of European intellectual fashions onto other societies was of course the racialist understanding of the caste system. Thus, Maximiani Portas (1905-82), a French-Greek lady, converted to Hinduism on the assumption that the Hindu caste system was an institution imposed by the Aryan race on the non-Aryan natives, so that the upper castes had preserved the ancient Aryan race and culture till today (for more about her, see Ch. 1. 4. 9. below). A related distortion was Evola’s assumption that the spiritual caste is subordinate to the martial caste, an assumption which he maintained even in the analysis of a Vedic ritual in which the king “marries” his priest. ⁽²⁴⁾ The traditional and Vedic view is that worldly action is subordinate to contemplation, so that ritually, the king is the bride and the priest is the groom. Evola turned this upside down, affirming the primacy of the royal function: partly, this was an exaggerated exaltation of the martial function typical of the interbellum period (when marching in uniform was an almost universal style for all kinds of movements, due to the militarization of a whole generation in World War 1); partly, it was a projection of a medieval conflict in the Holy Roman Empire between the Emperor and the Pope, a conflict in which Evola’s retrospective sympathies lay with the Emperor. At any rate, it took a top-ranking scholar genuinely rooted in a genuine tradition, the Brahmin art historian and philosopher Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy, to correct the deviations of the Western enthusiasts of “Tradition”. He commented: “As it is, Evola’s argument for the superiority of the Regnum, the active principle, to the Sacerdotium, the contemplative principle, is a concession to that very ‘mondo moderno’ [= modern world] against which his polemic is directed.” ⁽²⁵⁾ But the problem with the Traditionalist school is that they never listen: why should they listen to an Oriental scholar, when they already have Evola’s or Guénon’s version of Oriental wisdom? So, the subordination of genuine Asian tradition to the pet concerns of some Western seekers and weirdos has continued. The late Frithjof Schuon, a Traditionalist who (like Guénon) converted to Islam, finding it the best embodiment of the “perennial wisdom”, has written a eulogy of the caste system: “Like all sacred institutions, the caste system is based on the very nature of things (…) to justify the caste system, it is enough to ask this question: do heredity and diversity of qualities exist? If yes, the caste system is possible and legitimate.” ⁽²⁶⁾ Yet, it must be said in his favour that he takes a nuance view, valuing egalitarianism as well, viz. as a natural implication of the fact that apart from difference in qualities, all human beings also have something in common: their immortal soul. Moreover, he has partly abandoned the racial view of caste: “Even the Hindu castes, originally purely Indo-European, could not be limited to a race: there are Tamil, Balinese, Siamese Brahmins.” ⁽²⁷⁾ Even more recently, a passionate defence of caste has been published by the late Alain Daniélou, musicologist and India-lover of socialist persuasion and homosexual inclination. Like many orientalists before him, he had a distorted perception of Hindu culture, transparent of his own likes and dislikes, e.g. greatly exaggerating the degree of sexual freedom or permissiveness in Hindu society. He considered the caste system as a primitive but highly effective form of guild socialism. Daniélou’s book Histoire de l’Inde includes an imaginative processing of the AIT in all its implications, describing how the white Aryans subdued the dark natives and forced them into the menial castes, etc. His book Les Quatre Sens de la Vie (“The Four Meanings of Life”) is a passionate plea for the caste system conceived as a way to preserve the racial and cultural identities of different ethnic groups. ⁽²⁸⁾ it remains odd, though, to read a glorification of caste by a Westerner who will never have to live in that system. Should it not be possible to appreciate certain historical merits of the caste system (e.g. its decentralized structure which helped Hindu society to survive centuries of Islamic occupation) without going all the way in glorifying it? Daniélou was an associate of the late Swami Karpatri, a pure Hindu traditionalist whose pro-caste political party, the Ram Rajya Parishad, occupied a few seats in the Indian Parliament in the 1950s and 60s. Note, however, that real Hindu traditionalists with a purely traditional Sanskrit-medium education uphold caste without believing in the invasionist or racial theory of caste. Till today, quite a few of them have not even heard of the AIT.

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1. 1. 7. Aryan racism today

An unquestioning faith in the AIT, not in some sophisticated or sanitized modern form but in its unadulterated racist version, is still in evidence in ultra-Rightist fringe groups. Consider the following lament by a Belgian critic of Peter Brooke’s theatre version of the Mahabharata: “Incomprehensible and shocking is that some major roles have been played by actors of African origin. It is certainly commendable to include Italians, Englishmen etc. , but Africans? Nothing in the epic permits such a deviation. Let there be no mistake about it: the Mahabharata is not an epic written for some entity called humanity. It is a narrative by and for the Aryas as an Indo-European caste which had imposed its authority in India”. ⁽²⁹⁾ The man seems unaware that “Aryan” Mahabharata protagonists like Krishna and Draupadi, as well as some of the Vedic rishis, are explicitly described as dark-skinned while nearly all upper-caste Hindus are at least black-haired, a far cry from the Blond Beast (to borrow Friedrich Nietzsche’s sarcastic term) which was the white racists’ idea of the Aryan Superman. ⁽³⁰⁾ The far-Right French monthly Rivarol still analyzes Indian politics, including the Lok Sabha elections of February 1998, in racial terms. its commentator makes fun of the plight of Western Leftists who, supposedly anti-racist and anti-colonial, feel constrained to oppose the allegedly “rightist” BJP with its programme of cultural decolonization, and to support the anti-BJP alliance led by Sonia Gandhi, a beneficiary of an alleged Indian racial prejudice: “In the West, India’s election campaign has been reduced to the presence of Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi’s widow, presented as the bulwark against the expected gains of the BJP, considered as sectarian, facist and anti-Muslim. However, the anti-racist supporters of the pretty Italian are forgetting a decisive factor in her unusual popularity (…): the whiteness of her skin. Living in the myth of Aryan superiority, the Indians, including those from the south, are obsessed with paleness: the paler your skin colour, the better your chances of finding a job or a marriage partner. So, the fascination for Sonia is largely an Aryan fascination!”⁽³¹⁾ Significantly, no such comments have appeared in the Indian press, much less in the Hindu nationalist press (where Sonia is denounced as an agent of the Vatican and derided as the “white elephant” and “the shroud of Turin”) or in Indian anti-AIT publications. To Hindu nationalists, paleface does not mean “Aryan”; if anything, it could only connote “neocolonialist”. Meanwhile, Sonia Gandhi’s first year in office as Congress Party leader (1998) undeniably gave her a fast-increasing popularity in spite of her poverty in ideas and leadership. The foregoing examples show that the political reading of the AIT in terms of 19th-century colonial conceptions is not entirely dead yet in Europe. But at least, it has been definitively marginalized. Though noteworthy as a tenacious relic of the world-view of a bygone age, it is now without political importance, nor does it have a presence in the academic world (the above-mentioned Prof. Jean Haudry has retired, and his institute for IE studies in Lyon is being closed down). The only consequential political motive for Western academics to uphold the AIT is not- a lingering commitment to colonial causes, but solidarity with their Indian counterparts who have their own reasons for defending the AIT against its challengers. By contrast, Indian political readings of the AIT still weigh heavily on the present-day political climate of that country.

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Footnotes:

^1. J. Phule: Slavery (1873), republished by the Government of Maharashtra, Mumbai 1991, as vol. 1 of Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule, p. xxix-xxx.

^2. A survey of British colonial thought about the Aryan theory is given in Thomas R. Trautmann: Aryans and British India, University of California Press, Berkeley 1997; see also the review by C. A. Bayly: “What language hath joined”, Times Literary Supplement, 8-8-1997. See also Christine Bolt: Victorian Attitudes to Race, Routledge & Kegan, London 1971.

^3. Reproduced in C. H. Philips ed. : Select Documents on the History of India and Pakistan, part IV, OUP, London 1962, p-315.

^4. Keshub Chunder Sen’s Lectures in India, p. 323, quoted by Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 8.

^5. Savitri Devi Mukherji: Souvenirs et Refléxions d’une Aryenne, Delhi 1976, p. 273.

^6. Quoted by André van Lysebeth: Tantra, Le Culte de la Féminité, Flammarion, Fribourg 1988, p. 24, from Hermann Lommel: Les anciens Aryens, Gallimard, Paris 1943.

^7. Romila Thapar: “The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics”, Social Scientist, Delhi, January-March 1996, p. s.

^8. The term is still used in that sense in the Constitution of the Hindu Kingdom of Nepal, which enjoins the King to “uphold Aryan culture”.

^9. For a first acquaintance with the Arya Samaj and the causes it fought for, see J. T. F. Jordens: Swami Shraddhananda, His Life and Causes, CUP, Delhi 1981.

^10. Sri Aurobindo: India’s Rebirth, institut de Recherches Evolutives, Paris 1993, p. 228. For his views on Nazism, see also op. cit. , p. 206, 209, 210, 221.

^11. Sri Aurobindo: India’s Rebirth, p. 104.

^12. Sri Aurobindo was also a critic of the AIT, e.g. in an appendix on IE-Dravidian relations in his book The Secret of the Veda. His line of argument has been developed further in a meritorious booklet by Michel Danino and Sujata Nahar: The Invasion that Never Was, Mira Aditi Centre, Mysore 1996.

^13. Not to be confused with the Anglo-Saxon Reaganite-Thatcherite New Right tendency of the 1980s: the Nouvelle Droite is, among other things, anti-American, anti-capitalist, and pro-multiculturalist. By far the best English-language introduction to the Nouvelle Droite is the winter 1993-94 issue of the American periodical Telos. A political manifesto of the Nouvelle Droite was published in its quarterly Eléments, February 1999.

^14. The very idea that IE heritage could include other cultural items beside language is argued and pleasantly illustrated in Shan M. M. Winn: Heaven, Heroes and Happiness. The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology, University Press of America, Lanham MD 1995.

^15. A defence of the European Urheimat hypothesis is given by Jean Haudry and Alain de Benoist in the Nouvelle Droite periodical Nouvelle Ecole, 1997 (issue title Les Indo-Européens), along with an exhaustive survey of the development of the field of IE studies. it was praised sky-high for its completeness by Edgar Polomé. (who is a member of the periodical’s patronage committee) in the review section of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, spring-summer 1997. The 1995 issue of Nouvelle Ecole was devoted to the theme of “Tradition”, with articles on the IE heritage in India, academically sound but of course full of the Aryan-Dravidian opposition and the inevitable Aryan invasion.

^16. Jean Haudry: Les Indo-Européens, PUF, Paris 1985, p. 122-124.

^17. J. Haudry: Les Indo-Européens, p. 114.

^18. “Au panthéon de la Nouvelle Droite”, Maurice Olender interviewed in L’Histoire, October 1992, p. 48-51. Reference is, among others, to the republication of Hans F. K. Günther: Religiosité Indo-Européenne, Pardès, Puiseaux 1987 (1934), with a foreword by the Belgian Rightist ideologue Robert Steuckers, who tries to whitewash Günther from his reputation of being “Hitler’s official anthropologist”. On closer reading, we find that Günther’s occasional criticism of Nazi policies hardly exonerates him, e.g. he opposed the equal allotment of social security benefits to all Germans regardless of their degree of racial “fitness” (p. 12). Of course, Günther also assumes the Aryan invasion of India.

^19. Reference is to A. de Benoist’s books Racismes, Antiracismes (with Pierre-André Taguieff, Julien Freund et al. ), Klincksieck 1984; Democratie: le Probléme, Labyrinthe 1985; and Europe, Tiers-Monde, Même Combat, Laffont 1986.

^20. It is telling how even a Rightist has to invoke Leftist company to gain respectability. The well-known French Leftist author Régis Debray, former fellow-traveller of Che Guevara, has remarked that “there is no life left in the French intellectual scene” (that much is true) “except in the Nouvelle Droite”. This Left-Right collaboration was the target of a Leftist campaign in 1993, appealing to all institutions and media to boycott the Nouvelle Droite. The campaign, led by Roger-Pol Droit, author of a meritorious book on the decline of India’s stature in Western thought during the 19th century (L’Oubli de l’lnde, Paris 1989), backfired: the targeted authors published a counter-statement condemning the witch-hunt, and many of the signatories of the campaign withdrew their own signature.

^21. René Guénon: La Grande Triade, Gallimard, Paris 1980 (1957). Remark how the basic division in three, deemed typical of IE culture, is presented here through Chinese philosophy (heaven, atmosphere, earth, corresponding with the Hindu triad sattva/transparent, rajas/turbid, tamas/dark), an unwitting argument against the exclusively IE character of “trifunctionality”. As the chief ideologue of “traditionalism”, Guénon also wrote about Hinduism: L’Homme et son Devenir selon le Vedanta, and Etudes sur l’Hindouisme.

^22. Sometimes, Evola did make straight pleas for the white racist case, e.g. in an article against racial integration in the USA: “L’Amérique négrifiée”, in J. Evola: L’Arc et la Messue, Guy Trédaniel/Pardes, Paris 1983 (1971), p. 31-39.

^23. J. Evola: Le Fascisme Vu de Droite, Totalité, Paris 1981.

^24. J. Evola: Rivolta contra il Mondo Moderno, Milan 1934, p. 105; I have used the French translation: Révolte contre le Monde Moderne, Editions de l’Homme, Ottawa/Brussels, p. 115ff.

^25. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power in the Indian Theory of Government, Munshiram Manoharlal, Delhi 1978 (1942), P. 2.

^26. Frithjof Schuon: Castes et Races, Arché, Milan 1979, p. 7.

^27. Frithjof Schuon: Castes et Races, p. 37.

^28. A. Daniélou: Histoire de l’Inde, Fayard, Paris 1983 (1971); Les Quatre Sens de la Vie: La Structure Sociale de l’Inde Traditionnelle, Buchet-Chastel, Paris 1984 (1975).

^29. Ralf van den Haute: “Le MahAbhArata ou la mémoire la plus longue”, L’Anneau (Brussels), #22-23 (1993)

^30. When I communicated the present criticism to him in November 1998, Mr. Van den Haute replied that he had already changed his mind after actually reading a Mahabharata translation. He maintained nonetheless that Peter Brooke had only included Africans in his cast because “this would please the commissars of political correctness who control the subsidy purse strings”.

^31. P. P. B. : “Elections indiennes: la longue marche des hindouistes”, Rivarol, early March 1998.

Contents

1. Political aspects of the Aryan invasion debate

1. 2. THE ARYAN INVASION THEORY IN INDIAN POLITICS

1. 2. 1. The AIT and the “anti-national forces”

There are quite a few cases worldwide of late-medieval and modern history having repercussions on contemporary politics, witness the role of bad memories in ex-Yugoslavia. By contrast, I do not know of any question of ancient history which is as loaded with actual political significance as is the AIT in India. The AIT was turned into a political tool in order to question the Indian identity of the Indians, and thereby weaken the claims of Indians to their own country. This political use of the AIT continues till today, especially at the hands of what Hindu nationalists call “the anti-national forces”. Christian “liberation theologians”, Islamic missionaries, assorted separatists and like-minded anti-Hindu or anti-India activists are still highlighting the AIT in order to: 1) Mobilize lower-caste people, supposedly the “subdued natives” forced into the Apartheid prisonhouse of caste by the invaders, against the upper-caste people, supposedly the progeny of the “invading Aryans”. All this propaganda is carried out in the name of the low-caste leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, eventhough Ambedkar himself had strongly rejected the AIT and the notion that caste status has a racial origin: “European students of caste (…), themselves impregnated by colour prejudices, very readily imagined it to be the chief factor in the Caste problem. But nothing can be farther from the truth, and Dr. Ketkar is right when he insists that ‘all the princes whether they belonged to the so-called Aryan race or to the so-called Dravidian race, were Aryas. Whether a tribe or a family was racially Aryan or Dravidian was a question which never troubled the people of India until foreign scholars came in and began to draw the line. ’” ⁽³²⁾ 2) Mobilize Dravidian-speakers against speakers of IE languages, esp. through the Dravidian separatist movement which was started under British patronage in 1916 as the Justice Party, later refounded as the Dravida Kazhagam, and which reached its peak in the 1950s. One of its gimmicks was the glorification of the “black Dravidian” hero Ravana against the “white Aryan” hero Rama, disregarding the Ramayana information that Ravana was actually an Aryan coloniser of Sri Lanka and a performer of Vedic rituals, while Rama was dark-skinned. ⁽³³⁾ Its most consequential success was the sabotage (masterminded by the English-speaking elite in Delhi, not in the Dravidians’ but in its own interest) of the implementation of the Constitutional provision that Hindi, a North-Indian IE language, replace English as official language by 1965. 3) Mobilize the tribals, who have been given the new name “aboriginals” (AdivAsI) as part of this strategy, against the non-tribals, who are to be treated on a par with the European invaders of America and Australia. This in spite of the demonstrable foreign (East-Asian) origin of the Munda and Tibeto-Burmese languages spoken by the most vocal tribes. 4) Mobilize Indian politicians towards delegitimizing Sanskrit, that “foreign language brought by the Aryan invaders”, as India’s culture language and as a school subject, in order to further dehinduize India and weaken her cultural unity: “Sanskrit should be deleted from the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution because it is a foreign language brought to the country by foreign invaders - the Aryans.” ⁽³⁴⁾ 5) Mobilize world opinion against the “racist Aryans”, meaning the Hindus, since they are the “Aryan invaders who imposed the caste system as a kind of Apartheid to preserve their racial purity and dominance”, never mind the fact that the association of “Aryan” with “race” is a strictly European invention unknown to Hindu tradition. Now that “idolater” and “heathen” have lost their force as swearwords, “racist” is a brilliant new way of demonizing Hinduism.

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1. 2. 2. Crank racism

The explicit use of the AIT for political purposes is in evidence in a string of publications aimed at pitting the lower castes and the tribals against Hinduism, from Swami Dharma Theertha’s The Menace of Hindu Imperialism (1941) to S. K. Biswas’s Autochthon of India and the Aryan Invasion (1995). ⁽³⁵⁾ It is most obvious in the militant anti-Brahmin movement spearheaded by the Bangalore fortnightly Dalit Voice, edited by V. T. Rajshekar, a former Indian Express journalist fired because of his links with Khalistani terrorism. This extremist wing of the broader Dalit movement (Dalit meaning “oppressed”, ex-Untouchable) ⁽³⁶⁾ has formulated an Indian variant of Afrocentric history, copied from the Black Muslims in the USA, with whom it co-operates closely. ⁽³⁷⁾ Thus, the theory of continental drift, first suggested by Abraham Ortelius in the 16th century, and formulated scientifically by Alfred Wegener in 1915, is harnessed to the cart of Dalit Afrocentrism: “The Dalits were the original inhabitants of India and resemble the African in physical features. It is said that India and Africa were one land-mass until separated by the ocean. So both the Africans and the Indian Untouchables had common ancestors.” ⁽³⁸⁾ Actually, the break-up of the Urkontinent Gondwanaland took place millions of years before mankind spread across the face of the earth. More importantly, physical anthropology does not bear out the African connection of India’s lowest castes: though their ancestors may well have migrated from Africa along with those of every other homo sapiens, they are racially far closer to the Indian upper castes than to the Africans. It does not even bear out the racial dividing-line between upper and lower castes: lower castes are genetically closer to the upper castes of their own region than to people of the same caste rank in other parts of India. ⁽³⁹⁾ A recent survey has yielded this conclusion: “Detailed anthropomorphic surveys carried out among the people of Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bengal and Tamil Nadu revealed significant regional differences within a caste and a closer resemblance between castes of different varnas within a region than between sub-populations of the caste from different regions.” ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Yet, cranky as it is, Dalit Voice is strongly supported by militant Islamic centres, by Christian Liberation Theology circles and by many Western academics because they share its anti-Brahminism. ⁽⁴¹⁾ Their reason probably is that they share Dalit Voice’s motto: “What Hindus hate, we must love, and what Hindus love, we must hate.” ⁽⁴²⁾ In fairness to the Dalit cause, it must be emphasized that Dalit Voice is not representative (and often diametrically opposed to the goals) of the broader Dalit movement as envisaged by Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (1891-1956), a most necessary movement given the slackness of the other castes in implementing social reform. Thus, while Ambedkar became a Buddhist, Dalit Voice downplays the liberating message of Buddhism in favour of Christianity and Islam, religions criticized and rejected by Dr. Ambedkar.

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1. 2. 3. Anti-Brahminism and anti-Semitism

Describing the Brahmins as the “Jews of India”, V. T. Rajshekar combines anti-Brahminism with anti-Semitism: “Since the Brahminical Social Order is much more ancient it is quite likely that the Zionist founding fathers got their inspiration from the BSO (…) Dalit Voice has thus proved right in predicting that the Jews and the ‘Jews of India’ will join hands to crush Muslims, Blacks and India’s Dalits.” ⁽⁴³⁾ He publishes calls to “get a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion from the Iranian embassy in Delhi to understand the Zionist hatred against Blacks and Muslims.” ⁽⁴⁴⁾ Rajshekar also copies some of the classics of anti-Semitism: “The First World War, the Second World War, the establishment of Communism, the rise of Hitler, were also systematically planned and executed by Zionists.” ⁽⁴⁵⁾ With his sex scandal, Bill Clinton was the “victim of a Zionist conspiracy”, for the Zionists, who “control the entire American politics, economy and the media as well”, are “angry that Clinton refused to finish the ‘demon’ of Islam and render all-out support to Israel”. ⁽⁴⁶⁾ Rajshekar’s constant railing against the CIA-Zionist-Brahminical world conspiracy has earned him a mention in a recent authoritative survey of contemporary anti-Semitism. ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Even apart from this confabulated conspiracy, an analysis of anti-Brahmin rhetoric shows that it is approximately, and in considerable detail, the Indian equivalent of anti-Semitism. Thus, Brahmins think they are the chosen ones; they (at least the orthodox) distinguish themselves by funny dress and hairstyle; they are cowards but past masters at manipulation and pitting outsiders against one another; they are pale bookworms with a transregional language of their own; they always help their own kind and deceive the others; and they monopolize wealth. For an early example, Jotirao Phule wrote: “The Brahmin’s natural (instinctive) temperament is mischievous and cantankerous, and it is so inveterate that it can never be eradicated.” ⁽⁴⁸⁾ Moreover, just as in the Nazi view the antagonism between Soviet “Judeo-Bolshevism” and American “Jewish plutocracy” was but a deceptive front for the omnipresent Jewish hand, the Indian conflict between traditionalist Brahmins and socialist Brahmins (e.g. the founders of the Communist Party of India, mostly Brahmins) is also a mere puppet-show masking the hand-in-glove cooperation between these two types of Brahmins. ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Even their occasional shows of goodness and concern for the common good always turn out to be exercises in manipulation. And worst of all, as per the AIT, the Brahmins are foreigners, usurping the rightful inheritance of the sons of the soil. This line of anti-Brahmin rhetoric on the model of anti-Semitism comes full circle with the following allegation, originally made in 1971 by K. K. Gangadharan, a Leftist sociologist from Maharashtra working in Christ College in Kanpur, and since then adopted by the likes of V. T. Rajshekar: the Chitpavan Brahmins, a caste in Maharashtra which immigrated from Afghanistan (hence their taller build and lighter colour) when that region was islamized in the 10th century, and which took a leadership role in the struggle against the Moghuls, the British Raj and Congress secularism, are so “arrogant” and “fanatical” because, unbeknownst to other Indians, they actually have Jewish ancestors! ⁽⁵⁰⁾ That Brahmins monopolize wealth has even less basis in fact than the same stereotype of Jews. Brahmins always had an ideal of “simple living and high thinking”, and observed a prohibition of “selling” their Vedic knowledge and ritual status; Brahmins with lucrative posts counted ipso facto as lower in rank. Moreover, the traditional sources of wealth for certain Brahmin families have dried up (abolition of maharaja courts, nationalization or expropriation of temples) and today poverty is rampant among most non-westernized Brahmins. But it is easy to sell the notion that the ritually highest caste must also be the richest, esp. to Western audiences brought up on one-dimensional materialism. However, the wealth aspect of anti-Semitism does find an Indian counterpart in the Bania merchant caste, which in the past few centuries and particularly in the most islamized parts of the Subcontinent occupied exactly the same niche in society as the Jews in medieval Europe: often they were the only Hindus who could buy themselves the safety which allowed them to preserve their Hindu identity, and as non-Muslim money-lenders they were allowed to practise “usury”, which is prohibited to Muslims. As a devout and vegetarian class, they are stereotypical Hindus, and at the same time they are a natural object of envy, just like their successful Hindu relatives in Britain and Africa. This makes them another excellent scapegoat for anti-“Aryan” crank racism in India, as exemplified by Dalit Voice’s regular tirades against the most famous Bania, Mahatma Gandhi, and against the Bania core constituency of the BJP.

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1. 2. 4. Foreign support for anti-Brahminism

According to the politicized version of the AIT, the following is the grim truth about the situation of the pre-Aryan populations of India: “The Aryan invasion has been a disaster for India, just like for all the other Alpino-Mediterranean peoples invaded by the steppe nomads. Let us imagine that the Huns had overpowered us, destroyed our civilization, and that we would be their slaves till today, as well as our descendents for thousands of years to come, and we will understand the drama of the defeated Harappan civilization.” ⁽⁵¹⁾ These are the words of a locally well-known Belgian yoga teacher, André van Lysebeth, someone who owes a lot to Hindu tradition and who is probably dubbed “that Hindu” by his neighbours. Yet, in attacking the Brahmins he is merciless. The chief instrument of this racist enslavement was the caste system. In describing the horrors of caste, Mr. Van Lysebeth has the good sense to draw attention to the two separate concepts of jAti (the thousands of actual endogamous communities) and varNa (the theoretical four layers of society: Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras), which Europeans have lumped together in the Portuguese term caste. But the next thing he does is to re-equate them, this time as being both terms of racial purity: “The Sanskrit term jati, which designates what we call the castes, means ‘race’, neither more nor less. It’s simple, it’s clear.” ⁽⁵²⁾ And: “The prime criterion of discrimination, purely racial, is varna, a Sanskrit word meaning colour (evidently of the skin).” ⁽⁵³⁾ Actually, jAti has all the meanings which the word “race” had in the 18th-19th century: kinship group, nation, race, species. Thus, mAnava-jAti means “the human race”, or more accurately, “the human species”. And varNa, “colour”, has nothing to do with skin colour, but refers to symbolic colours allotted to the elements, the cardinal directions, and likewise also to the layers of society. But the notion of caste as a form of racism is well-entrenched: “Compared with the imposed racism of the Aryans in India, the Apartheid in South Africa is a gentle joke, and I am weighing my words.” ⁽⁵⁴⁾ The villain of the piece is easily identificable: “Aryanized India is under the thumb of the racist Brahmins, smug and full of their superiority over all other human beings, even over all of creation.” ⁽⁵⁵⁾ They set the tone for all the ills of Hindu society: “Venality, hypocrisy, callous unconcern, are the characteristic traits of the Aryans, starting with the Brahmins.” ⁽⁵⁶⁾ But Mr. van Lysebeth, who equates Brahminism with Hitlerism, sees the problem as even larger than India: “From India to Europe, the same drama has repeated itself everywhere. Leaving their icy steppes, from 3000 BC onwards nomadic plunderers invade the pre-Aryan civilizations, making the defeated natives their serfs. These barbarians were neither of pure race, nor superior, except in brute force. Everywhere they have destroyed civilizations.” The only revenge left to the natives was to smuggle their own traditions, supposedly centred around a Mother Goddess cult, into the new orthodoxies as a counter-current against “the foreign patriarchal system, imported from the cold”. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ In this age of multiculturalism, we had just learned to scrap the word “barbarian” from our dictionaries, and that we should see the complex cultural motifs and structures even in the most illiterate and primitive cultures. But the Barbarian is back, and his name is Brahmin. It is perfectly OK to say about Brahmins those things which anti-racist legislation has prohibited in many countries in the case of Blacks and others. Be that as it may, the remarkable point here is the zeal with which a Western yoga adept has thrown himself into the anti-“Aryan” struggle. That is how deep the AIT has moulded public opinion in an anti-Hindu sense: the very people whom you would expect to sympathize with India and with the community which has preserved ancient traditions through the millennia, have been enlisted in the opposite camp, for no other reason than their belief in the AIT and the concomitant racial understanding of caste. The same thing is true of the Western Indology departments, where many professors share the positions of anti-Brahminism to a greater or lesser extent. In my student days in Leuven University’s Asian Studies department, I saw students of Chinese develop into zealous defenders of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and students of Islam become apologists of Islam. The Indology students, by contrast, never developed such feelings for Hinduism, and this was in large measure due to the negative light cast on Hinduism by its original sin of the Aryan invasion and the “racist imposition of caste”. Of course it is legitimate to criticize caste; but it is perverse to do so on the basis of false history.

Contents

1. 2. 5. The Aryan conspiracy

The anomaly that the Aryan invasion is the key event in Indian history but that no Hindu ever heard of it, has led to a new species of paranoia. Wherever an invasionist looks around in India, he will always see reminders of the devastating Aryan invasion. Often, these reminders are of an “occult” type: those who pass them on to future generations are not aware of their true meaning. It sounds like the story, popular among enthusiasts of the divinatory Tarot cards, that Egyptian Masters of Wisdom decided to encode their secret knowledge in the designs of ordinary playing-cards, so that man’s propensity to play games would ensure the transmission of the ancient knowledge to future generations until such time as people would once more be worthy of being initiated into it. In the case of the Aryan invasion, the time has come: after 3000 years of silence and forgetfulness about the Aryan invasion, the secret has been uncovered, and the hidden meaning of all manner of cultural elements is finally being understood. Thus, Malati Shendge claims that a number of hymns of the Rg-Veda were composed to celebrate the victory of the Aryans over the non-Aryans, while at the same time incorporating some of the traditional lore of the more civilized defeated non-Aryans. In her view, this explains the prohibition for Shudras (low-caste people supposed to be the natives) of listening to Vedic recitation: “The Shudras were especially debarred from the practice of the Vedic religion. This was not so much for preserving the purity or the monopoly as for the fear which constantly haunted the Aryan mind and of which it could never be free, viz. the revolt of the non-Aryans leading to their (Aryan) expulsion from this land. Thus the Shudra was prohibited even from listening to the Vedic literature simply because if he understood the basis of this religion he might rebel, jeopardizing the social peace. Secondly, if he understood the dirty trick that was played on him, i.e. the borrowal of the Asura lore and its transformation into an Aryan religion, he may once again be reminded of his past glory.” ⁽⁵⁸⁾ One wonders why these natives, who vastly out-numbered the Aryans and lived their separate lives in their designated corner of the caste system, were unable to preserve the true story about the usurpation of their land and power by these foreign invaders. But then, gullible Westerners listening to the invasionist reinterpretation of Hindu lore by Indian agitators have been made to believe that the true story has effectively been preserved in the popular Tantrik tradition. Thus, Mr. Van Lysebeth suspects that Hindu ritual and symbolism is all about the struggle between Aryan invaders and Dravidians. Even Shiva’s trident, now a symbol of militant Hinduism as well as a mystical symbol into which all manner of philosophical profundities have been read, is really a symbol of pre-Aryan resistance against the Aryan invaders: “India is a volcano where the pressure mounts under the crust constituted by the millennarian Aryan structure. (…) Shiva’s trident is ‘officially’ the three gunas [the three qualities: light, turbid, dark] of Samkhya [=cosmological philosophy], or the three nadis (subtle energy channels) of yoga. But for those who know, it is all different, for the trident was the preferred weapon of the Dravidians, while its Aryan counterpart had four teeth. The Rgveda says: ‘With their four-pointed weapon (caturashri) Mitra and Varuna kill the bearers of the trident. ’ The Indian Rajmohan Nath (…) comments on this verse: ‘This gives an indication of the ancient conflict between the two camps which still continues in India. ’”⁽⁵⁹⁾ Those who care to look up the Vedic verse (1:152:2) will find that it merely says, in Ralph Griffith’s literal translation, that “the fearful four-edged bolt smites down the three-edged”. The passage as a whole is one of the many difficult points in Vedic translation, and every modern translator has a different version; but though they are mostly well-grounded in the AIT, no serious translator has turned this passage into a reference to aboriginal tridents against invaders’ quadridents. The most logical explanation available is the one given by the classical commentator Sayana: in glorifying the might of the truth (satya) in the sage’s power-word (mantra), mentioned in the first half of the verse, it is asserted in general (as if it were a well-known proverb at that time) that he who has more or stronger weapons defeats him who has fewer or less effective ones. ⁽⁶⁰⁾ As for the meaning of trirashri, which was translated as “(Shivaite) trident”, its dictionary meaning is simply “three-cornered”⁽⁶¹⁾; it is part of a series which includes caturashri and even shatashri, “having a hundred angles or edges (said of the thunderbolt)”. ⁽⁶²⁾ There is no hint that the trident is meant. ⁽⁶³⁾ More decisively, there is nothing un-Aryan about the trident, considering that it was an attribute of the Greco-Roman god Poseidon/Neptune, both names with IE etymologies. In Germanic and Celtic folk art, three-armed (triskel) and four-armed (tetraskel) variations of a given symbol (fylfot, swastika) coexist. That the three-armed version is anti-Aryan and the four-armed one pro-Aryan, is without foundation. Likewise, Malati Shendge and others have made much of the Vedic myth of the Dragon-slayer: Indra defeating the dragon Vrtra would be the Aryan invader defeating the native Vrtra. Since this killing is associated with the release of the waters which were withheld by Vrtra, it is also imagined that the Aryans had destroyed the impressive waterworks with which the Dravidian Harappans ensured the fertility of their lands. However, the myth of the Dragon-slayer is a pan-IE myth, even known among non-IE people like the Babylonians (Marduk defeating Tiamat). Have they all invaded Harappa and killed its chief water-engineer? Mr. Van Lysebeth was invited to attend a Vedic fire ceremony (agnihotra) once, but those wily Brahmins were not able to deceive him: “They are careful not to tell us that it is in commemoration of the destruction of the enemies, the Dasas, that several ingredients are thrown into the fire, among which the grains symbolize the destruction of the harvest, the cities and the forts, nor [do they tell us] that the pieces of meat represent the enemies burned to death.” ⁽⁶⁴⁾ Is it not far-fetched to explain the ritual use of fire, which exists in a great many cultures that have flourished on earth, as a commemoration of the burning down of Harappan cities? And the ingredients of the offering as representing the enemies who were burnt alive in those genocidal bonfires? Especially when no traces of this Aryan campaign of burning and destruction have ever been discovered. Numerous allegorical interpretations can be imposed on any text or symbol; in New Age bookstores, you can find books on the “esoteric meaning of fairy tales”. But this is mostly just what the Germans call Hineininterpretieren, “interpreting meanings into the text”. None of the authors imposing an invasionist interpretation on Hindu scriptures, rituals and symbols, has ever shown how their reading is anything more than just that. They are merely, as the saying goes, elated to discover the Easter eggs which they themselves have concealed.

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1. 2. 6. Indian Marxism

Among the most active and determined academic opponents of any serious reopening of the AIT debate, we find Marxists such as Prof. Romila Thapar (whose positions will be discussed below) and Prof. Ram Sharan Sharma. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Let us make it clear from the outset that there is nothing controversial about the label “Marxist”: in India, Marxism is still the dominant paradigm in the Humanities, and hundreds of academics are still proud to call themselves Marxists. It is therefore a bit bizarre when Romila Thapar insinuates that the non-AIT school merely uses the label “Marxist” as a cheap way to dismiss the Indian pro-AIT scholars like Sharma and herself without proper refutation: “Those that question their theories are dismissed as Marxists!”⁽⁶⁶⁾ If confirmation from an unsuspect Marxist source is needed, Tom Bottomore’s standard dictionary of Marxism mentions and quotes both R. S. Sharma and Romila Thapar as representatives of Indian Marxism. ⁽⁶⁷⁾ The Marxist dominance of India’s cultural sphere is not a convenient rumour, it can easily be documented and its genesis traced and explained. Nehru was fond of Communism though personally too bourgeois to join it. It was chiefly his daughter Indira Gandhi (guided by her secretary P. N. Haksar) who, when she was critically dependent on Communist support during her intra-Congress power struggle, promoted Communists (often unregenerate Stalinists till today) and created many new institutes for them, including Jawaharlal Nehru University. In 1975, when the Communist bid to take over the Congress Party from within was thwarted by Indira’s son Sanjay Gandhi, the Communist power position in the intellectual sector was left untouched: its importance escaped the Gandhi family, who only focused on immediate political power. When in 1998, the new BJP Government nominated people of its own choice to the Indian Council of Historical Research, a roar of indignation went up among Indian Marxists against this “politicization of scholarship”, highlighting to the alert observer the extent to which the Marxists themselves had treated the ICHR as their own playground, and how, like spoilt children, they couldn’t stand losing it. ⁽⁶⁸⁾ Marx’s Indian followers have a confused but predominantly negative attitude to the question of India’s legitimacy as a united republic. They are willing to accept the unified Indian state as long as it is useful to their own ends (as in 1959-62, after their election victory in Kerala gave them hope of taking over India, a hope crushed by the embarrassing Chinese invasion of 1962), but they are just as ready to discard it, because they do not believe in it and have no loyalty towards it. Around the time of independence, they actively campaigned for the Balkanization of India, hoping to gobble up one fragment after another. They never tire of denouncing anything that bolsters India’s unity as a “myth”. For them, India is an artificial unit, a prisonhouse of nations, bound to fall apart. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ In contrast with other colonized countries, Marxists in India played no important role in the freedom movement, except negatively. According to a Western Marxist observer: “Uncompromising opposition to Gandhi and his cherished Hindu convictions meant that communists were cut off in a considerable measure from the mainstream of the patriotic struggle”. ⁽⁷⁰⁾ Ever since, they have supported every antinational cause: the crushing of the Quit India movement (1942), Partition (1947), the Razakar terror campaign to prevent the merger of Hyderabad with India (1948), the Chinese claims to Indian territory (up to 1962: “China’s chairman is also India’s chairman”). As late as 1997, Communist leader Sitaram Yechury refused to admit that China had been the aggressor in 1962. ⁽⁷¹⁾ In the 1990s, they have threatened secession of the states they control in the event of a Hindu-nationalist election victory. ⁽⁷²⁾ It is a different matter that by the time this victory took place, in 1998, the Communist movement had become too weak and grey to hazard such action. To complete the picture, it should be realized that as born upper-caste Hindus alienated by westernization, Indian Marxists are animated by a seething hatred of their ancestral culture. Unlike the British who felt some patronizing sympathy for the heathens whom God had entrusted to their civilizing care, anglicized Hindus feel a need to exorcize the remainders of Hindu heritage from themselves and their surroundings.

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1. 2. 7. Marxism against India

To understand the compulsion on Indian Marxists to hold out against changes in the dominant AIT paradigm as long as possible, we should know a few things about their unique position as compared to that of Marxists elsewhere. Their animosity against the native culture of India and against a theory which would strengthen their own country’s prestige is somewhat surprising, for in most Third World countries, Marxists have also been ardent nationalists in the struggle for cultural as well as political and economic decolonization. In Communist countries, national history was rewritten not only to vilify the reactionary forces (e.g. Confucius) but also to highlight and glorify the nation’s contribution to material culture and scientific progress. This is or was true of China, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and of their supporters abroad. Thus, Cambridge scientist historian Joseph Needham’s loyalty was to Mao’s version of Stalinism as a system, but he got enamoured with China itself and wrote a very Sinocentric history of Science and Civilization in China, highlighting the unexpectedly large contribution which China has made to human progress. Along the same lines, we must note in India the lone Marxist historian Bhagwan Singh, who has contributed to the critique of the AIT, focusing specifically on the material culture and the economic data available in Vedic literature and the archaeological record of the Harappan cities, to show that the two match. ⁽⁷³⁾ Also, Western Marxists of an earlier generation have protested against the imperialist projection of colonial racism onto the colonized native society, as in the AIT-related racial theory of caste: “The early Indo-Aryans could no more have thought in modern terms of race prejudice than they could have invented the airplane.” ⁽⁷⁴⁾ Finally, Soviet historians have extolled ancient Hindu contributions to science and political culture which were ignored by their political allies in India. ⁽⁷⁵⁾ Most Indian Marxists, by contrast, along with their supporters in Western Indology departments (when it comes to controversial issues, most Western India-watchers are incredibly gullible parrots of whatever their privileged Indian contacts tell them), go out of their way to belittle India and to vilify as “chauvinistic” or worse any attempt to revalue India’s contribution. The mainstream of contemporary Indian Marxism is true to Karl Marx’s own contempt for and worst-possible interpretation of all things Indian. Marx thought that Hinduism “was the ideology of an oppressive and outworn society”; he “shared the distaste of most Europeans for its more lurid features. (…) he was as sceptical as his Hindu followers were to be of any notion of a Hindu ‘golden age’ of the past.” ⁽⁷⁶⁾ Marx acknowledged the colonialists' historical mission of eliminating the “Asiatic mode of production”, and claimed that colonial rule could only be compared (to its obvious advantage) to the memory of Turkish or the threat of Czarist rule, but not to native rule, for which India was historically unfit because it had never been a nation. In an 1853 letter, Marx wrote that “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.” ⁽⁷⁷⁾ The idea of a continuous and glorious civilization in North India dating back more than 5,000 years does not fit in well with this vision. That of the barbaric Aryans imposing foreign rule on the hapless natives is much more useful, esp. for characterizing Indian society as “oppressive”. This way, lingering colonial prejudices of Western scholars and the class interests of India’s anglicized elite and anti-Hindu intelligentsia reinforce each other to create the strange spectacle of Indians and indologists virulently opposing any rethinking of India’s past which might increase the weight of India’s own contribution to her own history. For instance, Romila Thapar questions the term “Indus-Saraswati civilization”, which “evokes the Rigveda” (by bringing the Vedic river Saraswati, where the biggest concentration of Harappan cities has been found, into the picture), for its “ideological and political dimensions”, and she imputes to its proponents the following motive: “The equating of the Harappan and Vedic culture is not essentially an attempt at correlating archaeological and literary sources (…) There are other agendas which are being addressed in the attempt.” ⁽⁷⁸⁾ It is bad form and bad scholarship to bypass someone’s arguments to attack his motives, and even worse to replace his stated motives with imputed motives, but this is one phenomenon which outside observers of the debate will have to get used to: Indian Marxism has given wide currency to the approach of “I don’t care what arguments you come up with, I’m going to tell you what your true motives are, you reactionary pig”. But then, even if reprehensible, this imputation of motives may once in a while hit upon the truth. 1 believe Prof. Thapar is right when she guesses this reasoning in the minds of Indian AIT critics: “If it can be argued that the Harappan culture is in fact Vedic or that the Rigveda is earlier even than the Harappan, then the Vedas continue to be foundational to the subcontinental civilisation of South Asia and also attract the encomium of representing an advanced civilization, superior even to the pastoral-agrarian culture actually described in Vedic texts.” ⁽⁷⁹⁾ However, I think that in saying this, Prof. Thapar has also revealed what exactly goes on in the minds of Indian Marxist critics of AIT criticism. Indeed, Vedic tradition does gain in stature by being identified with the vast and advanced Harappan civilization: that is why Indian nationalists like it, and just as precisely, it is why Indian Marxists abhor it.

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1. 2. 8. The establishment vs. the outsiders

Since the Marxists have occupied the seats of academic and media power for decades, it is no surprise that their attacks on others often take the form of a haughty dismissal. David Frawley’s contributions are laughed off with reference to his lack of western academic training (he studied the Vedas in a traditional Indian setting, becoming an acknowledged vedacarya). The fact that he published about Ayurveda and Vedic astrology are sufficient to denounce him as a “quack”. With reference to Subhash Kak and N. S. Rajaram, indeed complete outsiders to the Indian history establishment, Romila Thapar dismisses the contribution of these “American-trained professional scientists researching on ancient India” as essentially “nineteenth-century tracts [though] peppered with references to using the computer so as to suggest scientific objectivity”, typical for amateurs who do history “as a hobby”. ⁽⁸⁰⁾ Should people be allowed to speak out on subjects not mentioned on their diplomas? Romila Thapar seems to think so when it comes to her own case, e.g. as a non-linguist she invokes the authority of the linguistic evidence several times: “Such an early date for the Rigveda is untenable on the available linguistic evidence nor is there support for the argument of a westward flow of people from northern India, neither from linguistic nor from archaeological sources”⁽⁸¹⁾ And: “These reconstructions disregard the linguistic data, probably because it would puncture their argument. It is conveniently stated that the linguistic models arise out of political and cultural factors and presumably therefore may be ignored.” ⁽⁸²⁾ The latter sentence is an incorrect rendering of N. S. Rajaram’s rejection of the linguistic evidence. Though he does make much of the political context behind the linguistic theory of an East-European Urheimat, his point is, rather, that the reconstruction of a proto-language can never reach beyond the stage of mere hypothesis, for it cannot pass the decisive scientific test of empirical verifications. ⁽⁸³⁾ This critique is pertinent, though by no means as devastating for the scientific value of historical linguistics as Prof. Rajaram assumes; it is at any rate more than a “convenient” excuse. I believe AIT critics are wrong to disregard the linguistic evidence, but I also believe that for those who rightly choose to take it into account, evaluating the linguistic evidence requires specific competence. The US-based scientists’ exaggerated skepticism vis-à-vis linguistics has at least made them abstain from dabbling in a subject they don’t sufficiently understand. By contrast, Romila Thapar discusses not only the linguistic but also the astronomical evidence, if only to dismiss it as unreliable. ⁽⁸⁴⁾ Now, here is a subject on which I would rather trust a NASA scientist like Prof. Rajaram than a bookworm from JNU’s History department. Likewise, the evidence of Vedic mathematics (Baudhayana’s Shulba Sutra as logical ancestor of Babylonian and Greek mathematics) is a subject which I would rather leave in the care of professional mathematicians like Rajaram and Subhash Kak. If anything looks “19th-century” in this debate, it is the conspicuous negligence by Prof. Thapar and other invasionists of the input from the exact sciences, an input which has gone far in strengthening the anti-AIT case. True, there is often something naive about exact scientists when they enter the field of the Humanities. But then, people from the Sciences have a logic and a lucidity and a healthy aversion to compromise with prevalent opinion (natural laws not being bendable to opinion), so that, once they have learned the ways of the Humanities, they often do much better than the established authorities. This is particularly true in India, where bright students are invariably guided towards the scientific departments, so that the Humanities typically attract the second-rate students, quite a few of whom go on to become professors. Anyone can master the art of providing erudite footnotes, but the Vedic and Harappan evidence, particularly the evidence reachable through the “hard” sciences (astronomy, geology), is a much more serious nut to crack. Another Marxist historian, Parvathi Menon, has ridiculed Dr. Natwar Jha, who has elaborated a Sanskrit-based decipherment of the Indus script, as “just a schoolmaster”. ⁽⁸⁵⁾ Comments N. S. Rajaram: “This is not true, but it doesn’t matter. The great mathematician Ramanujan was a clerk in the Madras port, while Einstein himself was serving as a clerk in the Swiss patent office when he discovered Relativity. (…) The idea of objectivity is beyond such minds; status means everything.” ⁽⁸⁶⁾ Mercifully, Romila Thapar and her friends haven’t found occasion to comment on Shrikant Talageri yet. His bright and innovative contributions, quite literally written after working hours “as a hobby”, would not suggest to the readers that he actually makes a living as a bank clerk. There was a time when Marxists denounced academic ivory towers and applauded the contributions of working people, but in India they have been too privileged to be even polite towards people who make an honest living.

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1. 2. 9. Indian Marxists abroad

In their campaign against India and Hinduism, Indian Marxists get plenty of patronage from Western universities. When Non-Resident Indians raise money to fund a chair of Indian Studies in a Western university, what they get for their money is in most cases the appointment of an Indian Marxist academic who comes to confirm the Western audiences in their most negative stereotypes about India, e.g. by reducing every single aspect of Hindu civilization to “caste oppression” (it is Axioma 1 of contemporary Indian Studies that Hinduism is caste, wholly caste and nothing but caste). Thus, the Hinduja Foundation has set up an Indic Studies programme in Columbia University, but its staff includes determinedly anti-Hindu characters who even vilify their own sponsors at conferences elsewhere. One occasion where I saw US-based Indian Marxists in action was at the 1996 Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in a panel purportedly dealing with the AIT debate. I knew that excellent and innovative papers by N. S. Rajaram and Shrikant Talageri had been rejected by the organizers, so I felt entitled to expect presentations of top-notch scholarship dwarfing even that of Rajaram and Talageri. Instead, what the audience got, was a canvassing session for the “Forum of Indian Leftists” without any scholarly papers. The speakers disdained to even mention any of the argumentative contents of the AIT debate, except “David Frawley’s paradox” (the AIT’s puzzling implication pointed out by Frawley, viz. that the Harappan civilization had numerous cities but no literature, while Vedic civilization had a vast literature but no cities) ⁽⁸⁷⁾, which they simply laughed off without discussion ad rem. But Frawley’s paradox is entirely pertinent: what are the chances that a literate culture leaves the biggest conglomerate of archaeological sites behind, but only a handful of short inscriptions as the complete corpus of its literature; while the illiterate conquerors produce a vast and sophisticated literature within a few centuries, but leave no sizable architecture behind? What are the chances that the largest civilization of the world loses its language to a conquering band of nomadic tribesmen? The AIT has the weight of probability against it. The one interesting piece of information in the whole session was presented by Vijay Prashad: about the impact of the Aryan race theory on the position of (Asian) Indians in the USA in the past century. It turns out that for much of the time, they were counted as “white” thanks to their IE connection, and that they strongly held on to this profitable classification rather than to show solidarity with other non-white minorities. But in the 1970s, when the policy of positive discrimination for ethnic minorities started to have a serious impact, Indians were not slow to parade their skin colour as entitling them to minority privileges. If true, this is yet another interesting instance of the political use of the AIT. However, Prashad revealed his destructive intentions when he called Dalit Voice “a wonderful paper” and praised its disruptive positions, esp. its division of Indians in aboriginals and invaders. Biju Matthew insisted on the Stalinist position that in the social sciences, no theory ever comes without a political agenda. So, he reduced the whole AIT debate to a question of cultural policy of the Indian bourgeoisie, which was badly trying to be European. This was indeed part of the motive for the 19th-century acceptance of the AIT by the likes of Keshab Chandra Sen, but not of the present-day rejection of the AIT. But Matthew had not cared to notice the diametrical opposition between the former, colonial, and the latter, anti-colonial positions, perhaps because he counted on a knee-jerk reaction of hostility to anyone who merely utters the word He was all the more serious about deciding the burning question whether Non-Resident Indians should call themselves “Indian” or “South-Asian”; he himself opted for the latter “because it has the advantage of being antinational”. He wanted South-Asians in North America to shake off their religious and national identities and develop an “identity project” on the model of the African-Americans, which would only leave race as the distinctive trait of South-Asians in the US, a self-identification which approximates racism in its original meaning. I am in no position to berate African-Americans for defining their own identity in racial terms, for the reduction of their complex ethno-religio-linguistic identities (Yoruba, Ashanti etc. ) to their skin colour was forced on them by Arab (7th-20th century) and later also by European slave-traders (15th-19th century); but to deliberately drop existing non-racial identities for a racial one, that is another matter.

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Footnotes:

³² Thus spake Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in his paper “Castes in India”, reproduced in his Writings and Speeches, Gvt. of Maharashtra, 1986, vol. 1, p. 21, with reference to S. V. Ketkar: History of Caste in India, Low Price Publ. , Delhi 1990 (1909), p. 82. Though he condemned the Hindu caste system in the strongest terms and ended up converting to Buddhism, Dr. Ambedkar shared may doctrinal points with the Hindu nationalists, often even being more outspoken than they: he was a merciless critic of Islam, opposed the conversion of low-castes to foreign religions, ridiculed Mahatma Gandhi’s extremist pacifism and religious fantasizing, lambasted Jawaharlal Nehru’s foreign policy, and rejected the AIT.

³³ Note the agreement between the Indian Left and the European racists. In his L’arc de Civa. poèmes antiques, the 19th-century French poet Charles Leconte de Lisle wrote: “Rama, toi dont le sang est pur, toi dont le corps est blanc, (…) dompteur étincelant de toutes les races profanes” (“Rama, you whose blood is pure, you whose body is white, bright subduer of all the profane races”). In fact, the Ramayana is about a struggle between two heroes who were both Aryan and both dark-skinned.

³⁴ Frank Anthony, a Christian former Member of Parliament, quoted with strong approval by Razia Ashraf, a Muslim protester against the Sanskrit news service on All-India Radio, in a letter to Indian Express, 9-2-1991.

³⁵ Swami Dharma Theertha’s book has been republished as History of Hindu Imperialism, Dalit Educational Literature Centre, Madras 1992.

³⁶ The term Dalit as a social category was introduced by the Hindu reform movement Arya Samaj in the late 19th century in its campaign for dalitoddhAra, “upliftment of the oppressed”. Its English counterpart “depressed classes” was used by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as a more precise alternative to Mahatma Gandhi’s religious term Harijan, “people of God”, a term which has recently given way to Dalit or to the legal term scheduled Caste in ordinary usage.

³⁷ E.g. , a few years ago, Black Muslims opposed the renaming of a street in Atlanta, Georgia, as Mahatma Gandhi Square, in deference to the hatred of the Mahatma’s integrationist views by the polarizationist Dalit Voice group. It must be admitted, though, that they had a case in collecting all the statements by Gandhi (during his South-African period 1893-1914) which could be construed as derogatory to Blacks, see e.g. “Gandhi’s anti-African racism”, chapter 2 of Fazlul Huq: Gandhi Saint or Sinner?, Dalit Sahitya Akademy, Bangalore 1992.

³⁸ V. T. Rajshekar: Dalit - the Black Untouchables of India, Clarity Press, Atlanta 1987, p. 43.

³⁹This was already argued by Dr. Ambedkar, e.g. in Writings and Speeches (1989 ff. ), vol. 7, p. 301, with reference to G. S. Ghurye: Caste and Race in India, Popular Prakashan, Mumbai 1969 (1932). It is significant that the vast majority of the numerous publications on caste fail to mention Ghurye’s important work even in their biblography; as for Ambedkar, his explicit rejection of the AIT-cum-racial explanation of caste goes equally unmentioned in the copious pro-Dalit and Indian Marxist literature.

⁴⁰ Kailash C. Malhotra interviewed by N. V. Subramaniam: “The way we are. An ASI project shatters some entrenched myths”, Sunday, 10-4-1994.

⁴¹ See e.g. the Flemish missionary monthly Wereldwijd, March 1986 and February 1991; some of V. T. Rajshekhar’s separately published brochures (from Dalit Sahitya Akademi, Bangalore) are transcripts of speeches given at Christian conferences.

⁴² Dalit Voice, 16-2-1992.

⁴³ Dalit Voice, 16-1-1993.

⁴⁴ Dalit Voice, 1-12-1991.

⁴⁵ Dalit Voice, 16-1-1993.

⁴⁶ “Clinton, victim of Zionist conspiracy?” Dalit Voice, 1-9-1998.

⁴⁷ Léon Poliakov, ed. : Histoire de l’antisémitisme 1945-93, Paris 1994, P. 395. The phenomenon of anti-Semitism in a vocal though marginal and unrepresentative section of the Dalit movement is attributed somewhat patronizingly to the “mental confusion among India’s poor Dalits”.

⁴⁸ Collected Works of Mahatma Jotirao Phule, vol. 2, Government of Maharashtra, Mumbai 1992, p. 73, quoted with approval in Dalit Voice, 16-12-1992.

⁴⁹ See e.g. V. T. Rajshekar: Dialogue of the Bhoodevatas. Sacred Brahmins versus Socialist Brahmins, Dalit Sahitya Akademy, Bangalore 1993.

⁵⁰ K. K. Gangadharan is quoted to this effect in Gérard Heuzé: Où va l’Inde moderne?, L’Harmattan, Paris 1993, p. 87. As for V. T. Rajshekar to this effect, see Dalit Voice, 1-2-1995 and 1-3-1995; and V. T. Rajshekhar: Brahminism, Dalit Sahitya Akademy, Bangalore n. d. , p. 28.

⁵¹ André Van Lysebeth: Tantra, le Culte de la Féminité, Flammarion Fribourg 1988, p. 59.

⁵² A. Van Lysebeth: Tantra, p. 46.

⁵³ A. Van Lysebeth: Tantra, p. 47.

⁵⁴ A. Van Lysebeth: Tantra, p. 26.

⁵⁵ A. Van Lysebeth: Tantra, p. 58.

⁵⁶ A. Van Lysebeth: Tantra, p. 62.

⁵⁷ A. Van Lysebeth: Tantra, p. 30.

⁵⁸ Shendge: The Civilized Demons. The Harappans in the Rg-Veda, Abhinav Publ. Delhi 1977, p. 378. Asura originally “god”, since late-Vedic times “demon”, enemy of the Devas or “gods”. The shift is the result of a confrontation between Iranians, who mostly addressed their gods as Asura/Ahura (esp. Ahura Mazda), and Indians who mostly addressed their gods as Deva. On both sides, the enemy’s term was forthwith demonized: Asura for Indians and Daeva for Iranians were turned from “god” into “demon”.

⁵⁹ A. Van Lysebeth: Tantra, p. 211, with reference to Rajmohon Nath: Rigveda Summary, Shillong 1966, p-83.

⁶⁰ Ralph A. T. Griffith: The Hymns of the Rgveda, Motilal Banarsidass reprint, Delhi p. 102n.

⁶¹ M. Monier-Williams: Sanskrit-English Dictionary, entry Trir-ashri, p. 461.

⁶² M. Monier-Williams: Sanskrit-English Dictionary, entry Shatashri, p. 1050.

⁶³ There are non-weapon interpretations, e.g. on the model of shaDyantra (literally “six-pointed star” but effectively “conspiracy”), trirashri may, in opposition to caturashri (“square”), have a connotation of “not (fair &) square” in a figurative sense. Swami Dayananda Saraswati (Rigveda, vol. 3, p. 76) translates it as “wicked”.

⁶⁴ André Van Lysebeth: Tantra, p. 196. Similarly on p. 195, with reference to Malati J. Shendge: The Civilized Demons: the Harappans in Rigveda.

⁶⁵ See e.g. R. S. Sharma: Looking for the Aryans, Orient Longman, Delhi 1995, and the interview with him in a programme by the Dutch Hindu broadcasting foundation OHM, 1997.

⁶⁶ Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 17.

⁶⁷ Tom Bottomore: Dictionary of Marxist Thought, Blackwell, Oxford 1988, entry “Hinduism”.

⁶⁸ The ICHR controversy is discussed in Arun Shourie: Eminent Historians, Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud, ASA, Delhi 1998.

⁶⁹ This assessment-cum-prediction is made quite cheerfully by Romila Thapar in her 1993 interview in the French daily Le Monde.

⁷⁰ Tom Bottomore: Dictionary of Marxist Thought, p. 205.

⁷¹ “China vs. India: who is Yechury batting for?”, Indian Express, 28. 2. 1997.

⁷² According to Ashok Mitra, a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal, in an interview in the Rotterdam daily NRC Handelsblad, 20-3-1993, “India was never the solution”.

⁷³ Bhagwan Singh: The Vedic Harappans, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 1995.

⁷⁴ Quoted from Marxist theorist Oliver Cromwell Cox: Caste, Class and Race (1948), p. 91, in Ivan Hannaford: Race, the History of an Idea in the West, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1996, p. 383. Hannaford summarizes: “The relationship between Brahmans (white), Kshatriyas (red), Vaishyas (yellow) and Shudras (black) was not a color [“varNa”] relationship in the ‘racial’ sense but a metaphor identified with dharma - ‘a way of life virtue complex (p. 95) - that was acquired by “the mode of livelihood” or “the inherent qualities of nature”. His fundamental argument was that the case for color as a dominant factor in the development of caste was not supported by the evidence of historical literature, and that it was foreign scholars who had made it so.”

⁷⁵ K. Antonova, G. Bongard-Levin, G. Kotovsky: A History of India, 2 vols. , Progress Publ. , Moscow 1979 (1973), discussed in Arun Shourie: Eminent Historians, Their Technology, Their Line, their Fraud, p. 189ff.

⁷⁶ Tom Bottomore: Dictionary of Marxist Thought, p. 203, paraphrasing K. Marx: The First Indian War of Independence, Moscow 1959 (a compilation of Marx’ columns on the 1857 Mutiny in the New York Daily Tribune), p. 156.

⁷⁷ Quoted with approval by S. K. Biswas: Autochthon of India and the Aryan Invasions, Genuine Publ. , Delhi 1995, p. 10.

⁷⁸ Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 16.

⁷⁹ Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 16. It is one of Bhagwan Singh’s main theses (in The Vedic Harappans) that the image of the Vedic people as rustic pastoralists is wrong, e.g. it is in conflict With many indications of long-distance and overseas trade. To the extent that the Rg-Veda describes a more primitive cultural setting than what the ruins of Harappa suggest, this is explained by identifying the Rg-Vedic culture with an earlier stage of Harappan culture, before its most impressive urbanization, e.g. by K. D. Sethna: KarpAsa in Prehistoric India: a Chronological and Cultural Clue, Impex India, Delhi 1984.

⁸⁰ Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 16-17.

⁸¹ Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 15.

⁸² Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 17.

⁸³ N. S. Rajaram: Politics of History, pp. 174-196.

⁸⁴ “The use of astronomy in dating an entire text is regarded as unreliable since the references to planetary positions could have been incorporated from an earlier tradition which need not have been Vedic”, according to Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 12.

⁸⁵ Parvathi Menon in the Communist fortnightly Frontline, 21-2-1997; see also JNU professor Shereen Ratnagar’s hostile review of N. S. Rajaram’s work in Frontline, 9-1-1996. The principle of the decipherment is presented in N. Jha: Vedic Glossary on Indus Seals, Ganga Kaveri Publ. , Varanasi 1996.

⁸⁶ N. S. Rajaram: From Harappa to Ayodhya, p. 12.

⁸⁷ D. Frawley (with N. S. Rajaram): Vedic ‘Aryans’ and the Origin of Civilization, WH Press, Québec 1995, p. 23. Note that the authors, or their publisher, took care to put “Aryans” in quotation marks; and that the publisher changed his name from “World Heritage Press” to “WH Press” to obscure the word “heritage” (German Erbe, as in Ahnenerbe, “Ancestral Heritage”, the name of the SS research department): so intense is the fear that the vaguest allusion to terms employed by the Nazis would be deemed indicative of Nazi intentions. Also see Georg Feuerstein, Subhash Kak & David Frawley: In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, Theosophical Publ. , Wheaton IL 1995.

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1. Political aspects of the Aryan invasion debate

1. 3. POLITICIZATION AS AN OBSTACLE TO RESEARCH

1. 3. 1. Taboo on Indo-European studies

The association of racist doctrines with the term “Aryan”, introduced in Western languages as a synonym of “Indo-European”, had as one of its side-effects that after the collapse of Nazi Germany, the entire field of IE studies came under a shadow. Specialists of IE culture were ipso facto suspected of Nazi sympathies. Sometimes this was not altogether baseless, e.g. the Dutch scholar Jan de Vries, whose studies on Germanic and Celtic culture are still standard works, was chairman of the Kulturkammer, the collaborationist institution which controlled the purse strings for all cultural activities under the German occupation of the Netherlands. Under his supervision, Nazi themes were cunningly interwoven with legitimate Dutch or Germanic folklore. Though arguably not a full-blooded Nazi by conviction, he could hardly be considered innocent. In other cases, this suspicion is quite misplaced, e.g. in the case of Georges Dumézil, actually a critic of Nazism, cautious in public but quite outspoken in his minor writings and private communications. ⁽⁸⁸⁾ It is true that Dumézil sympathized with Italian Fascism, but Fascism stricto sensu contrasted with Nazism in very important respects, esp. in not being racist (the Communist-imposed usage of “fascism” as a generic term or as a synonym of National-Socialism, resulting from Stalin’s desire to avoid staining the term “socialism” with Hitlerian associations, obscures the contrast between the two systems). It has been shown that Dumézil’s sympathy for Fascism and contempt for Nazism may have influenced his views of ancient Germanic religion, which he contrasted unfavourably with ancient Roman religion. ⁽⁸⁹⁾ In Dumézil’s studies ca. 1940, Germanic religion is criticized as a defective evolute of IE religion, having lost the spiritual and overemphasized the martial function: this was at least partly a projection onto the past of the militarization of Germany in Dumézil’s own day. As late as 1982, a survey of Swedish national history had its chapters on the settlement of the Indo-Europeans in Scandinavia cut out. Not rewritten but cut out, for the very mention of the Indo-Europeans (not even “Aryans”) was considered irredeemably tainted. ⁽⁹⁰⁾ The hysterical nature of this act of censorship comes out more clearly when you realize that the settlement of IE immigrants coming to Scandinavia from the southeast goes against the Nazi predilection for a North-European Urheimat of the “Aryans”. Even now, normalcy in this department of historical research has not been entirely restored yet. This taboo on IE studies emanates from lazy or superstitious minds: rather than identifying exactly what was wrong with Nazism, they simply label everything which was ever associated with the Nazi regime, albeit accidentally or even illegitimately (as with the swastika, borrowed without permission, through the Theosophy-led “occultist” revival, from Hindu-Jain-Buddhist tradition) ⁽⁹¹⁾, as being somehow the root cause of the Holocaust. All kinds of things justly or unjustly associated with the Nazi regime are still under a cloud eventhough they have in any case nothing to do with the crimes of that regime. Thus, in 1997, the German Minister of Postal Services, Wolfgang Bötsch (belonging to the right-wing Christlich-Soziale Union), stopped the printing of poststamps commemorating the 200th anniversary of the liberal German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) because they showed the years of his birth and death with the runic signs Man (a glyph resembling a tree with upward branches, suggesting life) c. q. Yr (“yew”, a tree with branches hanging down, signifying death), still a common usage in North-European graveyards. Someone had protested that runes are tainted by their association with the Nazi elite corps, the SS, whose sigil carried the letters SS in runic script. In reality, the rune script is thousands of years old and has nothing to do with the Nazi ideology, even less than the Roman script in which the orders for exterminating the Jews were written. In some cases, this fear of anything that was in any way related to Nazi Germany is simply silly, e.g. the tirades in the leading Belgian daily La Libre Belgique in the post-war years against plans for a national motorway network, citing the grim objection that the German motorways had been built by Hitler. It is a modern form of superstition, as if all these items are somehow magically tainted with the Nazi evil. In other cases, the tendency to cast the net of Nazi guilt as widely as possible is a deliberate strategy born from self-interested calculation. Thus, many members of the post-war generation enjoyed putting the entire generation of their parents in the dock, telling them that their values (order, discipline, morality), which Hitler had also extolled, had “led to” Auschwitz. Communists still try to capitalize on their victory against Nazism in their struggle against other opponents, arguing e.g. that liberal democracy is deeply flawed and that this is proven by Hitler’s rise to power through democratic elections: so, down with democracy, for it has “led to” Hitler’s regime. In the present case, Christians and secularists who try to make the (largely mythical) association of ancient IE Pagan culture with Nazism stick to the old enemy: Pagan religion, including the neo-Paganism now emerging in many European countries. ⁽⁹²⁾ For all we know about ancient IE culture, or certainly about the ancient Celtic, Baltic, Slavic and Germanic ancestors of the modern Germans, they were very freedom-loving, they had a decentralized polity and a pluralistic religion, and they had of course no notion of anti-Semitism. They would never have felt at home in Hitler’s regimented and racially obsessed Nazi state.

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1. 3. 2. Paradigm inertia

From the usefulness of the AIT for political ends, it does not follow that the AIT was coined simply as a political weapon. Both in Europe and in India, many scholars have believed and still believe that the AIT is simply the most convincing hypothesis to account for a number of actual data in linguistics and other disciplines. The tendency in some Indian circles to denounce linguistics as a “pseudo-science” for having generated the AIT, or to allege that the AIT was “concocted” by political schemers, must be rejected. On the whole, the scholars concerned genuinely believed in their own hypotheses, and were sincerely trying to make sense of newly-discovered facts such as the linguistic kinship between the languages of Europe and northern India. But if the Western scholars are not guided by political motives, their Hindu critic might ask, why are they so stubborn in refusing to acknowledge facts which may disturb the AIT? Why, for example, have they failed, all through the past decade, to acknowledge the relevance of the twin fact that archaeology locates the Harappan civilization mostly in the Saraswati river basin, and that Vedic literature places Vedic civilization in the same Saraswati basin, in both cases before the river dried up in ca. 2000 BC? If historians and linguists sometimes display great ingenuity in explaining away (or just ignoring) facts inconvenient to their pet theory, this should be seen as merely a case of the universal tendency to stick to established beliefs until the evidence to the contrary becomes really overwhelming. Scientists - in any field - abhor the disorder created by information which is incompatible with the established theory, and therefore rightfully continue to assume that a second look will smoothen this initial incompatibility and “domesticate” the new information. They have a very functional kind of immunity to facts disturbing the paradigm which underlies their research. Even a first-rate and patriotic Indian historian like R. C. Majumdar had the same capacity to keep on ignoring facts disobeying the theory to which his mind had become accustomed, viz. the AIT. After describing how many cultural elements of the “pre-Aryan” Indus civilization have survived till today, Majumdar displays that typical academic skill of not taking even registered facts into account once they come in conflict with the paradigm: “How such a great culture and civilization could vanish without leaving any trace or even memory behind it, is a problem that cannot be solved at the present state of our knowledge.” ⁽⁹³⁾ Such a huge anomaly should call the theory itself into question, esp. when an alternative is ready at hand, and is even suggested by facts mentioned by Majumdar himself, viz. that there is a straight continuity between the Indus civilization and the later stages of “Aryan” culture. For another example, the allusions to armed conflict in the Rg-Veda have always been taken to refer to the confrontation between the Aryan invaders and the defenders of the indigenous culture. Madhav M. Deshpande remarks about these references: “It is extremely important to recognize that all of these references to dasyu-hattya[= killing of the Dasyu enemies] are found in those parts of the RV which are traditionally regarded to be late parts of the text.” ⁽⁹⁴⁾ This should imply that the invaders were at first on good terms with the natives (like the Mayflower pioneers with the Native Americans) but became hostile later; or that the Vedic people were stable inhabitants of the region which forms the permanent background of the Vedic hymns, and were confronted with these Dasyus at a later stage, viz. when the Dasyus invaded the Vedic-Aryan territory; or that this hostility had nothing to do with a confrontation between invaders and natives. But Deshpande doesn’t even consider any of these possibilities: “This would most probably mean that even by the time of the late parts of the RV, the attitudes of the Vedic Aryans had not significantly changed, and that they still regarded the dasyus as those who deserve to be killed by Indra.” ⁽⁹⁵⁾ After saying in so many words that the earlier layers of the RV do not contain this hostility, he claims that the late parts “still” have it, and that the Aryans’ attitude “had not significantly changed”, when it had actually changed from neutral to hostile, as per his own summary of the Vedic data. When facts challenging the AIT stare him in the face, the scholar tends to prefer the familiar theory to the unwilling facts, and this phenomenon can exist quite separately from any possible political bias.

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1. 3. 3. Political excuse for non-argumentation: the West

One consequence of the political connotations of the rivalling theories is that people feel justified in dismissing the theory they don’t like as “politically motivated” and therefore obviously wrong and not worth refuting. This phenomenon is in evidence in both wings of the political pro-AIT coalition, a certain European Right and a certain Indian Left (plus its friends in the West). Thus, the survey of IE studies in the French periodical Nouvelle Ecole devotes exactly one footnote to the entire argumentation for an Indian Urheimat, which it dismisses as “in self-evident contradiction with all the data of linguistics and comparative mythology” and as the symptom of “an exacerbated Indian nationalism”. ⁽⁹⁶⁾ Consequently, it does not care to mention the Indian Urheimat theory in its discussion of “the five existing (Urheimat) hypotheses”. ⁽⁹⁷⁾ This is, of course, a case of the “genetic fallacy”: to assume that a position must be wrong because of the motive in which it allegedly originates. Quite apart front the fact that this motive is merely imputed, and often falsely so, no good or evil motive can make a proposition right or wrong; it is perfectly possible to speak the truth for the wrong reasons. Bernard Sergent, in an otherwise brilliant book, can equally dispose of the anti-invasionist argument in a single footnote, in which he accuses American archaeologist Jim Shaffer of “manipulations”, which consist in “simply ignoring the linguistic data”. ⁽⁹⁸⁾ He misrepresents scientist N. S. Rajaram’s argument against the linguistic evidence for the Aryan invasion as follows: “Linguistics is not a science because it doesn’t reach the same conclusions as I do.” (In reality, Rajaram’s critique concerns the tendency common among linguists to treat hypothetical reconstructions as historical facts, and the impossibility for historical linguistics to satisfy two tests of real science, viz. reproducing its findings and defining test criteria which can show up its claims as false.) ⁽⁹⁹⁾ Sergent also dismisses conferences such as the 1996 conference of the World Association for Vedic Studies in Atlanta on the Indus-Saraswati civilization as propaganda exercises betraying a crusading rather than a dispassionate scholarly spirit. This is rather poor as refutation, but then his whole point is precisely that theories construed as emanating from a political agenda are simply not worth discussing or refuting. There are cases where the impression of political usefulness of a theory has stimulated research without really obstructing the researchers’ objectivity and sincerity. Thus, in the 19th century, French scholars eagerly explored the possibility that the Italic and Celtic branches of the IE language family had, after separating from PIE, continued for long as a single language group: such a scenario would have helped in strengthening the French nation’s historical identity, otherwise split between a biological Celtic ancestry and linguistic Latin roots. This research ultimately led to the non-desired conclusion that Celtic and Italic were, after all, not much closer to each other than either is to Germanic or Greek. Ironically, recent research has revived and given new support to the idea that Italic and Celtic did share a common itinerary for some centuries after the break-up of IE unity, and this is not any less true just because it has been a pet theory of French chauvinists. Another example of the refused to discuss “politically motivated” research is the treatment given to Shrikant Talageri in a prestigious book specifically setting itself the task of countering the rising tide of doubts voiced by archaeologists and philologists about the AIT. One may or may not agree with Talageri’s anti-AIT position, but he has undoubtedly built up a painstaking argumentation with ample reference to state-of-the-art scholarship, and he deserves better than this comment by George Erdosy, who locates him in the “lunatic fringe” and judges: “Unfortunately, political motivation (usually associated with Hindu revivalism) renders this opposition devoid of scholarly value”. ⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ In the same volume, Michael Witzel dismisses his work as “modern Hindu exegetical or apologetic religious writing”. ⁽¹⁰¹⁾ So far, so good; Erdosy and Witzel are entitled to their opinions, even to calling a fellow scholar a “lunatic” (though I doubt that they could get their articles past the editor of an academic journal if they applied this term to a Western scholar). ⁽¹⁰²⁾ But the point is: they don’t show even the least acquaintance with the actual arguments offered by Talageri. Both Erdosy and Witzel refer to: “S. K. Talageri: Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism, Aditya Prakashan 1993”. That is how the book’s data were given in a (laudatory) review by Girilal Jain in the Times of India of 17 June 1993. Unfortunately, the author’s real name is Talageri, and the book’s publisher is not Aditya Prakashan (though there is another edition of the same book under a different title by Aditya Prakashan, hence the reviewer’s confusion), but Voice of India. ⁽¹⁰³⁾ This indicates that the book which Erdosy and Witzel dismiss in such strong terms has never even been on their desk.

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1. 3. 4. Political excuse for non-argumentation: India

In India too, proponents of the AIT use the alleged political connotations of the rival theory as a handy pretext for avoiding discussion of the actual evidence. Thus, historian Romila Thapar devotes a 27-page lead article in a social science periodical (which admits in an editorial note that the article’s publication is a political move to counter “the Hindutva forces”, and falsely narrows the non-AIT school down to “the RSS”) to “The Theory of Aryan Race and India” practically without mentioning the evidence presented by the non-AIT school. ⁽¹⁰⁴⁾ She invokes “the linguistic evidence” twice as proof of a late chronology for the Vedas (1500 BC), without telling us how the linguistic data prove her point. Off-hand, she brings in “the Indo-Iranian links” as proof of the same “since the earliest suggested date now for Zoroaster is circa 1200 BC”, ignoring the fact that the dating of Zoroaster’s Avesta is itself based on the late chronology of the Vedas (the Avestan language being a slightly younger offshoot of Indo-Iranian than Vedic Sanskrit). This cavalier way of dealing with evidence apparently stems from the feeling that the anti-AIT case need not be taken seriously. Most importantly, Romila Thapar’s entire article could easily have been written several decades ago, for she totally disregards all the evidence from archaeology and archaeo-astronomy presented by her opponents in recent years. She does mention the existence of a non-AIT school, but explains it away as partly an RSS conspiracy, partly a symptom of a psychological identity crisis in Non-Resident Indians, meaning US-based scientists N. S. Rajaram and Subhash Kak and historian Sushil Mittal of the International Institute for Indian Studies in Québec. The same disregard for recent evidence is noticeable in R. S. Sharma’s book Looking for the Aryans, which went to the press in November 1994 but fails to mention the pre-1994 argumentations against the AIT by K. D. Sethna, S. P. Gupta (the only RSS man in the non-AIT school), David Frawley, Shrikant Talageri and others, even in the bibliography. Thus, Sharma repeats the old identification of Painted Grey Ware with the invading Aryans, in stark disregard of the fact that the scholars whom he is countering (as well as some who never opposed the AIT) have demonstrated that PGW was but one “Aryan” art form among others, and that it is not traceable to Central Asia as a marker of invading Aryans. ⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ The derivation of a judgment on the Urheimat question from the alleged motives of the proponents of the contending theories is all-pervading and vitiates the whole debate. Yet, if a theory can be considered wrong simply because it is being used for political ends, it is clear that the AIT itself must be the wrongest theory in the world: one looks in vain for a historical hypothesis which has been more tainted with various political uses including the most lethal ones.

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Footnotes:

⁸⁸A list and rebuttal of the allegations against Dumézil is given in Didier Eribon: Faut-it brûler Dumézil? (“Should Dumézil be burned at the stake?”), Flammarion, Paris 1992. Of course, malafide authors keep on repeating the refuted allegations.

⁸⁹Bruce Lincoln: “Rewriting the German war god: Georges Dumézil, politics and scholarship in the late 1930s”, History of Religions, Feb. 1998.

⁹⁰The work affected is R. & G. Haland: Bra Böckers Världhistoria, vol. 1, Höganäs 1982, as reported in Christopher Prescott & Eva Walderhaug: “The Last Frontier? Processes of Indo-Europeanization in Northern Europe: the Norwegian Case”, Journal of Indo-European Studies, autumn/winter 1995, p-257-278.

⁹¹In its final report (1997), the Belgian Parliamentary Enquiry Committee on Cults counted the Mahikari movement of Japanese Shinto origin among the dangerous cults and accused it of “extreme Right” connections, citing no other evidence than that a swastika had been seen on its premises. Buddhist temples in the West have been targets of serious vandalism because of the swastikas on their walls. The swastika is used to prove the essentially evil character of Hinduism in Evangelical propaganda, e.g. the 1980s’ movie Gods of the New Age by Jeremiah Films, discussed with indignation by a more fair-minded missionary, Richard Young, in Areopagus (Hong Kong), Christmas 1990.

⁹²A Christian attempt to associate Paganism with Nazism is Robert A. Pois: National Socialism and the Religion of Nature, Croom Helm, Beckenham GB 1986. A secularist attempt to impute a proto-Nazi mind-set to Paganism is found in numerous passages in Bernard-Henry Lévy’s books Le Testament de Dieu, Grasset, Paris 1979, and L’Idéologie Française, ibid. 1981.

⁹³R. C. Majumdar: Ancient India, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1991 (1952), p. 19; emphasis added.

⁹⁴M. M. Deshpande: “Genesis of Rgvedic Retroflexion”, in M. M. Deshpande & P. E. Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, Ann Arbor 1979, p. 300.

⁹⁵M. M. Deshpande: “Genesis of Rgvedic Retroflexion”, in M. M. Deshpande & P. E. Hook: Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, p. 300.

⁹⁶Alain de Benoist in Nouvelle Ecole 49, Paris 1997, p. 44.

⁹⁷Alain de Benoist in Nouvelle Ecole 49, Paris 1997, p. 50.

⁹⁸Bernard Sergent: Ganèse de l’Inde, Payot, Paris 1997, p. 477. Shaffer is also derided for consulting only English-language publications.

⁹⁹ See e.g. N. S. Rajaram: Aryan Invasion of India, the Mob and the Truth, Voice of India, Delhi 1993, p. 42, and Politics of History, ibid. 1995, p. 163ff.

¹⁰⁰ G. Erdosy, ed. : Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, Waiter De Gruyter, Berlin 1995, p. x. This comment also extends to Paramesh Choudhury: The Aryans: a Modern Mob, Eastern Publ. , Delhi 1993.

¹⁰¹ M. Witzel in G. Erdosy: Indo-Aryans, p. 116-117. Referring to a likeminded piece by A. K. Biswas (whom he mistakenly associates with Talageri), he ridicules “the ulterior political motive of this ‘scientific’ piece”; op. cit. , p. 111.

¹⁰²In spite of all the “multiculturalism” and “globalization” buzz-words, numerous Westerners still treat Indians as a lesser breed which is not to be taken seriously. Prof. U1rich Libbrecht, the Flemish pioneer of Comparative Philosophy, told me how at an international conference in Honolulu on that subject, multicultural par excellence, the average American participant treated the lectures by Indians as coffee breaks. I too have noticed many times that proposals for talks or publications by Indians are dismissed without a proper hearing on the assumption that Indians are cranks unless they have an introduction from a Western institution.

¹⁰³Shrikant Talageri: Aryan Invasion Theory, a Reappraisal, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 1993, with a foreword by Prof. S. R. Rao and minus the three more political introductory chapters of the Voice of India edition: Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism, with foreword by Sita Ram Goel.

¹⁰⁴R. Thapar: “The Theory of Aryan Race and India: History and Politics”, Social Scientist, Delhi, January-March 1996, p. 3-29. RSS: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, “National Volunteer Association”, a Hindu Nationalist organization founded in 1925, now several million strong, and closely linked with the Bharatiya Janata Party which came to power in March 1998.

¹⁰⁵R. S. Sharma: Looking for the Aryans, p. 12.

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1. Political aspects of the Aryan invasion debate

1. 4. A CASE STUDY IN AIT POLEMIC

1. 4. 1. A primer in AIT polemic

For a case study in anti-AIT polemic, I have chosen the article “An obscurantist argument” by the Dutch-Canadian scholar Robert J. Zydenbos. ⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ His bona fades is unquestionable, and he represents the majority of AIT-believing scholars in that he merely accepts the predominant opinion without having a political axe to grind, though this makes him susceptible to being influenced by AIT defenders who do have political motives. He is emphatically not a representative of the anti-Brahminism so prevalent among Western India-watchers, being in fact the author of an informed critique of this ideological distortion of much contemporary scholarship. ⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ Some of the rhetoric in this article typifies the way in which certain AIT defenders in positions of authority tend to over-awe the public with references to overrated evidence, and to vilify spokesmen of the dissident non-AIT school. The piece is an attack on N. S. Rajaram, a scientist from Karnataka (in AIT parlance: a Dravidian, not an Aryan) working in the USA, who has contributed decisive insights to the AIT debate. ⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ I disagree on some important points with Prof. Rajaram, most of all with his rejection of the linguistic reconstruction of an IE protolanguage; but that is no reason to dismiss his work as “a textbook example of the quasi-religious-cum-political obscurantism that is so popular among alienated Non-Resident Indians”, which is moreover “out of touch with what serious scholars both in India and abroad hold at present”, as Zydenbos alleges. “The linguistic evidence for the Indo-European origin of Sanskrit outside India is Overwhelming”, he claims, in almost verbatim agreement with Prof. Romila Thapar, whom he defends against Rajaram’s critique of her article “The Perennial Aryans”. ⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ Neither in his nor in Prof. Thapar’s much lengthier article is even one item of this “overwhelming evidence” mentioned. However, Dr. Zydenbos can claim the merit of being one of the first (to my knowledge, the very first) among the defenders of the AIT to actually respond to the rising tide of anti-AIT argumentation.

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1. 4. 2. Ethnically pure Aryans

Zydenbos starts his crescendo of allegations by stating something Rajaram never disputed: “No scholar seriously believes that there are any ‘ethnically pure’ Aryans in India today (and perhaps anywhere else, either). And why should anyone care?” Actually, Rajaram himself is among those who reject the notion of ‘ethnically pure Aryans’, not because of the obvious fact that countless inter-ethnic marriages have taken place, but because he rejects the use of “Aryan” as an ethnic term in the first place. As he and many others have argued time and again, the Sanskrit word Arya was not an ethnic term, it is Western scholars who have turned it into one. And it is the Western participant in this duel, Dr. Zydenbos, who, even after reading Prof. Rajaram, just continues to use “Aryan” as an ethnic and even as a racial term: “Those who called themselves ‘Aryan’ 1000 years ago were already very different from the various Aryan tribes that came over 3500 years ago (…) This too is historical fact. One only needs to learn Sanskrit to find this out.” I fear that there is something very wrong with Sanskrit courses if accomplished indologists can read Arya in a racial sense unattested in the whole of Sanskrit literature. The anti-AIT authors may nonetheless be wrong in denying an ethnic meaning to Arya altogether. While Arya was definitely never a racial or linguistic concept, it may have had a precise ethnic usage at least in some circles in one specific period. As Shrikant Talageri has shown, in the Rg-Veda, the term Arya is exclusively applied to the Puru tribe, including the Bharata clan, the community which generated the Rg-Vedic texts. Thus, when something negative is said about “Arya” people, these turn out to be non-Bharata Purus; and when the merits of a non-Puru king or sage are extolled, he may be called any term of praise but never Arya. ⁽¹¹⁰⁾ Likewise, it seems that the Iranian Avesta uses Airya in referring to a specific community, the cultivators in the Oxus river basin, contrasting it with nomadic barbarians who were similar in race and equally Iranian-speaking (generically known as Shakas/Scythians), but who were not part of the sedentary Mazdean “Airya” world. ⁽¹¹¹⁾ The matter must be studied more closely, after freeing ourselves from the AIT-related misconceptions. For now, I speculate that the term Arya spread over the Hindu world, which included many non-Vedic Indo-Aryan-speaking tribes (Aikshvaku, Yadava, Pramshava, etc. ), along with the Vedic tradition which was originally the exclusively local tradition of the Paurava tribe and Bharata clan settled on the banks of the Saraswati river. And that it originally had an ethnic connotation, something like “the Puru tradition”, even when used as the name of a religious tradition and civilizational standard, viz. the Vedic culture, somewhat like the ethno-geographical term Roman came to mean “Catholic”. At any rate, in classical Sanskrit, Arya means “civilized”, specifically “following the norms of Vedic civilization”, and this might imply a reference to the ancient situation when Vedic culture typified the metropolis, the Saraswati region (well-attested as being the centre of both the Rg-Vedic world and Harappan civilization), which the provinces tried to emulate. In the ShAstras and in literary works, the term Arya typically takes the place which would nowadays be filled by the term Hindu, or of “the Hindu ideal”, Hindu in a normative rather than in a descriptive sense. It is in this (by that time definitely the usual) sense that the Buddha used the term Arya, as in the catvAri-Arya-satyAni, “the four noble truths”, and the Arya-ashtANgika-mArga, “the noble eightfold path”, meaning that his way (more than the petty magic with which many Veda-reciting priests made a living) fulfilled the old ideals of Vedic civilization. It is with a similar intention that the modern Veda revivalists of the Arya Samaj chose the name of their organization. While conceptions may differ concerning what the real essence of the Vedic worldview was, there has been a wide pan-Indian agreement for at least 3,000 years that Arya means a standard of civilization, regardless of language, race or even ethnicity.

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1. 4. 3. Rajaram vs. Hitler

Next, Zydenbos attacks Rajaram’s reading of Romila Thapar’s article, esp. her insinuation (uttered much more explicitly elsewhere by other Marxist authors in India) ⁽¹¹²⁾ that the anti-AIT case is motivated by some kind of Hitlerian vision of Aryanism: “Romila Thapar does not ‘obviously refer to Nazi Germany’ when she speaks of the fantasy of an ‘Aryan nation’, but to the new Indian tendency among obscurantists towards creating something parallel.” So, alleging that someone wants to “create something parallel to Nazi Germany” does not imply a reference to Nazi Germany? In that case, we might perhaps focus on the implied allegation that those Indians who question the AIT are entertaining a fantasy of creating an “Aryan nation”. I challenge Prof. Thapar and Dr. Zydenbos to produce any publication of any Indian scholar presently questioning the AIT which contains even a hint of this “fantasy”. And I reprimand them both for using the term Arya(n) uncritically, i.e. without explicitating that it has two distinct meanings, viz. “Hindu” for Hindus, and “of Nordic race” for the Nazis. If that distinction is made, the alleged connection between Rajaram and Hitler (through the “common” term Aryan) vanishes, and this seems to go against the AIT defenders’ intentions. In the current opinion climate, accusing someone of Nazi connections is the single gravest allegation possible. I don’t think that in an academic forum, one can simply get away with such extremely serious allegations; one has to offer evidence, - or apologies. If even scholars of Zydenbos’s rank entertain the confusion between Aryan/Nordic-racist and Arya/Hindu, it is no surprise that this confusion vitiates much journalistic reporting on Hinduism and Hindu nationalism. Thus, the French monthly Le Choc du Mois once commented that the “sulphurous” BJP takes inspiration from “Bharat, the first Aryan prince in North India”. By all accounts, Bharata, patriarch of the Vedic Bharata clan, came later than many other Aryans in North India: Manu, Ikshvaku, Mandhata, Yayati, Bharat’s own ancestor Puru, et al. Anyway, here is the key to Hindu political thought: “The basis of the ‘Hindu nation’ will therefore be Aryanity, a warlike and conquering Aryanity which owes its imperial territory only to an unceasing struggle on the side of the gods.” ⁽¹¹³⁾ This mixes a projection of stereotypes concerning Islamic fundamentalism onto its Hindu “counterpart” with the AIT-based Aryan lore. But seriously: are Hindu scholars, if only just a few of them, thinking along the lines of “Aryan” racism? Apart from reading the works of the Indian scholars concerned, I have also privately talked with most of them, and I feel certain that no such “fantasy” is at the back of the anti-AIT polemic. In fact, what they reject in Western scholarship is precisely the creation of the conceptual framework which has made the racialist misuse of the term “Aryan” possible: “Indian Marxists in particular are singularly touchy about the whole thing and hate to be reminded that their pet dogma of the non-indigenous origin of the Vedic Aryan civilization is an offshoot of the same race theories that gave rise to Nazism.” ⁽¹¹⁴⁾

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1. 4. 4. The importance of being white

Dr. Zydenbos continues: “This includes the endorsement of blatant racism by certain Indian scholarly personalities. Thus, the archaeologist S. R. Rao, who also figures in Rajaram’s article, said at a recent seminar in Mysore in response to a student’s question about the Aryans that we should not listen to what ‘white people’ say.” I don’t know how Hitler would have felt about this slur on white people, but Zydenbos is quite mistaken when he infers that there is any “racism” behind Prof. Rao’s remark. Rao obviously did not mean that whiteness makes one unfit for researching the question of the “Aryans”. What he meant was, of course, that at present, Westerners in general are still basing their opinions about this question on theories rendered outdated by the recent findings of Indian scholars like himself, and of some paleface scholars as well, - but the latter have so far not carried Western or “white” opinion in general with them. Dr. Zydenbos, who is described editorially as a European indological scholar living in Mysore, must have found out for himself that being “white” still connotes authority and reliability for most Indians. ⁽¹¹⁵⁾ In heated debates like the one on the Aryan question, reference to Western opinion is still treated as a trump card. Often, this reference is used as a “circular argument of authority”: first Western India-watchers borrow their opinions from the Times of India or the Economic and Political Weekly, then they express these opinions in the New York Times or the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, and finally, these same opinions are quoted in the same Indian media as authoritative endorsements by “independent” Westerners of their own positions. If a student has been over-awed by the apparent Western consensus in favour of the AIT, Prof. Rao was right to break the spell and to put the student with his feet back on the solid ground of self-reliance, esp. in a field where. Western indological opinion happens to be out of touch with the latest research. Indeed, in his article, Dr. Zydenbos himself unwittingly plays the same game of over-awing the Indians with references to Western indologists, viz. to K. V. Zvelebil, H. Kulke and D. Rothermund, as sheer arguments of authority. ⁽¹¹⁶⁾ Zydenbos refers to Zvelebil to support this statement: “That the Indus Valley people were Dravidians is an unproven hypothesis; but the real, as yet undeciphered writings of that civilization give more support to this hypothesis than to any other.” In fact, the scholars working from the Dravidian hypothesis have, after decades of intensive labour, not conclusively deciphered a single line of the Indus writings, and Zvelebil admits as much: “[The Soviet scholars] have not convincingly deciphered even one single short Harappan description, and they have not been able to offer a verifiable reading of any Harappan text.” ⁽¹¹⁷⁾ Of the other teams working on the decipherment, Zvelebil has no hard results to quote either, though he praises their (and the Soviet scholars’) merits in structural analysis, preparing concordances etc. He does not mention a single definite and positive (non-circular) indication that the language on the Harappan seals is Dravidian. In Kulke and Rothermund’s book A History of India “can be found in detail the up-to-date view concerning the Aryan migration, and confirming it”, according to Zydenbos. in fact, their book does not confirm (with independent research findings) but merely restates the AIT, without refuting or even taking into account the research findings on which Prof. Rajaram and Prof. Rao base their case.

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1. 4. 5. Nehru’s testimony

Dr. Zydenbos sums up “a few interesting questions”, starting with: “Why should leading, respected Indian scholars (and even Nehru, who can hardly be accused of being politically naive or a colonial collaborator) accept the idea of the migration, if it is as patently false as our author claims it is?” We forego the occasion of preparing a list of factual reasons why “leading, respected scholars” have been found to defend the wrong position on numerous occasions in history. The interesting term in the question is “colonial collaborator”, which Nehru is claimed not to have been. In fact, while politically an anti-colonial campaigner, Jawaharlal Nehru was culturally the archetypal “collaborator” with colonialism and with the colonial view of India. Free India’s first Prime Minister never properly mastered his native Hindustani language and like his father, he demanded from his relatives that they speak only English at the dinner table. He was in most cultural respects a typical colonial Englishman (“India’s last Viceroy”), fully equipped with the concomitant disdain for Indian and particularly Hindu culture, of which he was 100% ignorant. About the Sanskrit traditions which provide the information relevant to the Aryan question, he knew strictly nothing (in spite of his hereditary caste title Pandit), and he could not possibly have written anything about it except what he had read in the standard English textbooks. This can easily be verified in his book ‘The Discovery of India’, which reads like the history chapter of a tourist guidebook, but which according to Dr. Zydenbos “in essence still holds good” in its picturesque description of the Aryan invasion. ⁽¹¹⁸⁾ Nehru shared with many contemporary establishment academics an ideological reason to welcome the AIT. Just as the British liked to flatter themselves with the idea that they had “created” India as a political unit, so Congress politicians liked to see Nehru as the “maker of India”. ⁽¹¹⁹⁾ in this view, prior to Queen Victoria and Jawaharlal Nehru, no such cultural entity as “India” ever existed, merely a hunting-ground for ever new waves of invaders, starting with the Aryans. Nehru didn’t mind such a past for India, because as a Leftist utopianist, he believed that a great future could be built on any national past, even a very depressing one. It must be said to his credit that from a vision of a fragmented and invasion-ridden India of the past, he did not deduce the impossibility of creating a united and prosperous India in the future, unlike contemporary casteists and separatists. It must also be admitted that other Indian leaders have accepted the idea of an Aryan invasion without being any the less patriotic for it. Congress leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak (Arctic Home in the Vedas, 1903) and Hindu Mahasabha ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (Hindutva, 1923) had also interiorized the AIT, simply because it seemed hard to refute. To most English-educated Indians of their time, the prestige of Western scholarship was so overwhelming that it seemed quixotic to go against it. But it was not hard for them to combine patriotism with a belief in a fragmented and conflictual origin of their nation, 3,500 years ago. After all, most nations in the world are younger than that. The USA was built on broken treaties, slavery and genocide, only a few centuries ago, yet there exists a heartfelt and legitimate American patriotism. The strange thing is not that Tilak, Nehru and Savarkar could be Indian patriots all while believing in the AIT, but that Marxists and missionaries question the legitimacy of Indian nationhood on the basis of a theory pertaining to events thousands of years in the past.

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1. 4. 6. From Harappa to Ayodhya

Dr. Zydenbos summons Prof. Rajaram to own up some responsibility for India’s communal conflict: “Does he really not see the parallel between Nazi attacks on synagogues in the 1930s and what happened in Ayodhya on December 6th?” We would not have believed it, but it is there in cold print: an academic tries to score against a fellow academic by arbitrarily linking him with an event which had not yet taken place when the latter’s paper was published, and with which he had strictly nothing to do, viz. the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992. In a later paper, Prof. Rajaram has accepted the challenge: ‘From Harappa to Ayodhya’, read at the Indian institute of World Culture in Bangalore (4 September 1997), discusses the parallels between the historians’ debates on the Indus-Saraswati civilization and on the temple/mosque in Ayodhya. He argues that “what the history establishment has done through the models it has proposed for both the ancient and the medieval periods is to exactly reverse the historical picture”. ⁽¹²⁰⁾ Most importantly, for the ancient period, Indian Marxist and other anti-Hindu historians posit a massive conflict (between Aryan invaders and natives) in spite of the total absence of either textual or archaeological evidence for such conflict; while for the medieval period, they wax eloquent about an idyllic “composite culture” and deny a massive conflict spanning centuries (viz. between Muslim invaders and Hindu natives), against the copiously available evidence for this conflict, both textual and archaeological. This observation is entirely correct: both ancient and medieval history have been rewritten in the sense of belittling and blackening Hindu civilization and extolling its enemies. As a Westerner I may add that in both cases, there has been a wholesale, painfully naive endorsement of the Indian Marxist line by Western India-watchers in academe as well as journalism. There are exceptions, mostly in the past, e.g. Fernand Braudel who described Muslim India as a “colonial experiment” which was “extremely violent”. ⁽¹²¹⁾ Braudel explained: “India survived only by virtue of its patience, its superhuman power and its immense size. The levies it had to pay were so crushing that one catastrophic harvest was enough to unleash famines and epidemics capable of killing a million people at a time. Appalling poverty was the constant counterpart of the conquerors’ opulence. (…) The Muslims (…) could not rule the country except by systematic terror. Cruelty was the norm, burnings, summary executions, crucifixions or impalements, inventive tortures. Hindu temples were destroyed to make way for mosques. On occasion there were forced conversions. If ever there were an uprising, it was instantly and savagely repressed: houses were burned, the countryside was laid waste, men were slaughtered and women were taken as slaves.” ⁽¹²²⁾ Braudel was not a Hindu chauvinist, just a scholarly observer, but in today’s climate, he would be blacklisted. While there is solid evidence that the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya had been built in forcible replacement of a Hindu temple, rubble of which was used in the Masjid’s construction, this fact has been denounced as “Hindu chauvinist propaganda”, and an entirely fictional claim was upheld that the Masjid had been built on an uncontroversial site, so that there was of course no trace of evidence for a preceding temple demolition. ⁽¹²³⁾ Indian Marxists could reasonably have taken the position that while the temple demolition was a historical fact, this was no reason for a counter-demolition today. However, inebriated by their power position, they went farther and denied the temple destruction altogether, against the evidence, thinking they could get away with it. As usual, they could count on their Western contacts to cover them: to my knowledge, not a single Western academic has critically examined the Indian Marxist claim that the historical temple demolition at the Babri Masjid site was Hindu chauvinist fiction. All of those who have actually written about the Ayodhya affair, have acted as amplifiers to the Indian Marxist propaganda, explicitly or implicitly defaming those Indian colleagues who stuck to the evidence that a Hindu temple at the controversial site had indeed been destroyed. One of these was Prof. B. B. Lal, one of the greatest living archaeologists, who has been attacked for his expert testimony about the demolished temple at the Babri Masjid site (e.g. in an editorial in the Marxist-controlled paper The Hindu) ⁽¹²⁴⁾ as well as for his progressively more determined support to the identity or close kinship of Vedic and Harappan culture. ⁽¹²⁵⁾ Indeed, on both sides in the Ayodhya debate and in the AIT debate, both in academic and journalistic platforms, we find the same names. Without conspicuous exception, those who fight for the AIT have also fought for the Ayodhya no-temple thesis (and more generally for the view that the Islamic occupation of India was benign), and those who fought for the demolished-temple thesis are now fighting for the Vedic-Harappan kinship. So, Dr. Zydenbos is right in positing a parallel between the Ayodhya and AIT debates, though perhaps it is not the parallel he intended.

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1. 4. 7. The denial of history

As for an Indian counterpart to the Nazi attacks on synagogues, any Hindu worth his salt will definitely welcome the simile. The demolition of literally hundreds of thousands of Hindu places of worship (often along with their personnel and customers) by Muslims, from the first Arab invasion in AD 636 to the destruction of hundreds of temples in Pakistan and Bangladesh and the vandalization of twenty-odd Hindu temples in Britain in “retaliation” for the demolition of the Babri Masjid, is often described in Hindu pamphlets as a “Holocaust”. I disapprove of the ease with which every crime is nowadays likened with the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes; but in the present debate, it is Dr. Zydenbos who has uninvitedly introduced Nazi references. While the erratic and violent manner in which the Babri Masjid was disposed of is certainly deplorable, there is something badly disproportionate in the holy indignation of so many India-watchers about the Ayodhya demolition, when you notice how it is combined with a stark indifference to the vastly larger and longer record of Islamic destruction in India (including a million Hindus killed by the Pakistani Army in East Bengal as late as 1971), often even with a negationist denial of that very record of Islam in India. Here again there is a parallel: informed Hindus are pained by the denial of their centuries of suffering at the hands of Islam, and are likewise pained by the denial of their millennia of civilization-building, a denial which goes by the name of Aryan Invasion Theory. There may yet be another point to Zydenbos’s comparison between Nazi attacks on synagogues and the attacks on places of worship in India. The Islamic swordsmen considered Pagan temples as monuments of Jahiliyya, the Age of Ignorance, and they wanted to destroy them in order to stamp out this evil superstition of Paganism and all reminders of its history. In Islamic countries with a great pre-Islamic past, history courses in schools start with Mohammed, and pay minimal (if at all any) attention to the long and fascinating history of the Pharaohs, the Achaemenids or Mohenjodaro; the intention is to deny an unwanted, “impure” part of history. As recently as 1992, this rejection of history led to raids to the ruins of Buddhist temples in Afghanistan to deface any remaining Buddha statues; and in 1992 and 1997, bomb attacks were committed against the pharaonic temples of Karnak. One could arguably hold it against the demolishers of the Babri mosque that they too have tried to wipe out an unwanted chapter of Indian history embodied in the Islamic architecture of the temple building. Bad enough, but its relevance for our topic is this: for Indians, the AIT likewise implies the denial of a long stretch of Indian history. The AIT denies principally the history of the Solar and Lunar dynasties and other tribes living in Aryavarta (the area from Sindh to Bihar and from the Vindhyas to Kashmir), as covered in the Flu for a period from the dawn of proto-history to the 1st millennium BC. The major motifs (epics, artistic standards, schools of philosophy) of Indian civilization are embedded in that history, which is simply denied in its long pre-1500 BC phase, and vilified as merely the cultural superstructure of an ethnic subjugation of pre-Aryans by Aryans in its post-1500 BC phase.

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1. 4. 8. Blood and soil

Dr. Zydenbos continues: “Why should it be so important that the Aryans, or the extremely remote ancestors of anyone in India for that matter, have been in the subcontinent since all eternity? That would come close to the Blut und Boden [blood and sod] ideology of Nazism, with its Aryan rhetoric. Why the xenophobia?” Accusing Prof. Rajaram of something “close to” Nazi ideology looks like an old trick to associate someone with Nazism without taking the responsibility for calling him a Nazi outright and risking a frontal rebuttal if not a court case. I wonder: how would he fare if he accused a Western colleague in the same vein in a Western paper, considering the extreme importance which academics attach to reputation? There, slurs against a colleague’s scholarly integrity are normally made to backfire on the slanderer himself. At any rate, AIT defenders display a tendency to exceed the topic of debate and launch unwarranted attacks ad hominem. Favouring the idea that the “Aryan” ancestors of the contemporary Indians have lived in the subcontinent “since all eternity” is what Zydenbos dubs “xenophobic” and “close to the Blut und Boden ideology of Nazism with its Aryan rhetoric”. Actually, the historians in the SS research department were inclined to embrace the theory that the Nordic Aryans originated in Atlantis, whence they had fled to northern Europe after the inundation of their homeland. Hitler’s attachment was not to the German territory but to the German race, which was free to wander and colonize other lands. Then again, most ordinary Nazis who cared, tended to accept some variation of the European Urheimat Theory, locating their own Aryan ancestors in Germany itself or nearby, “just as” Hindus nowadays locate their Urheimat in or near India itself. However, it is not Rajaram’s school of thought which has given political implications to the question of the geographical provenance of India’s population. As we have seen, it is precisely the AIT which has been used systematically as a xenophobic political argument against those groups considered as the progeny of the “Aryan invaders”. Even most AIT opponents subscribe to the prevalent theory that mankind probably originated in Africa, so that all Indians, like all Europeans, are ultimately immigrants. The ridiculous argument of doubting the legitimacy of a community’s presence in India on the basis of an ancestral immigration of 3500 years ago has been launched in all seriousness by interest groups wielding the AIT as their major intellectual weapon, not by the critics of the AIT.

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1. 4. 9. Nazis in India

As for the Nazi connection, let us at any rate be clear about an easily verifiable fact: in so far as the Nazis cared about Indian history, they favoured the AIT. On the AIT, not Rajaram but Zydenbos is in the same camp with Hitler. The only avowed Nazis in India, the Bengali scholar Dr. Asit Krishna Mukherji (ca. 1898-1977) and his French-Greek wife Dr. Maximiani Portas (Lyon 1905-Sible Hedingham, Essex, 1982) alias Savitri Devi Mukherji, had made the AIT itself the alpha and omega of their philosophy. ⁽¹²⁶⁾ The one Indian who interpreted the AIT explanation of the Hindu caste system in Hitlerian terms, i.e. as a positive realization of the natural hierarchy between the races achieved by the conquering Nordic Aryans and imposed on the dark-skinned natives, was Asit Krishna Mukherji, “Brahmin conscious of his distant Nordic roots”⁽¹²⁷⁾ who published a pro-Hitler paper, the New Mercury, “the only truly Hitlerian paper ever to have appeared in India”⁽¹²⁸⁾, from 1935 until the British closed it down in 1937. He was instrumental in establishing the links between the Axis representatives and the leftist Congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose, who formed an Indian National Army (1943-45) under Japanese tutelage. His wife Savitri Devi cited with approval B. G. Tilak’s version of the AIT, viz. that the Aryan tribes had come from the Arctic where they had composed the Rg-Veda. This erratic theory is inordinately popular among Western racists for providing “independent” Indian confirmation to a North-European Homeland Theory (in reality, Tilak had tried to bend the Vedic evidence, often ludicrously, to bring it in conformity with fashionable Western theories). ⁽¹²⁹⁾ She also repeated the usual AIT annexe that the upper castes are Aryan immigrants, that the lower castes are largely and the tribals purely “aboriginals”, a theory implicitly endorsed (see next para) by Dr. Zydenbos in this very article. ⁽¹³⁰⁾ In fact, after reading her autobiography, “Memories and Reflexions of an Aryan Lady”, there is not the slightest doubt left that for her and her husband, their belief in the AIT, along with their distortive reinterpretation of Hindu tradition in terms of the AIT, was the direct cause of their enthusiasm for Hitler. If Zydenbos shuns theories with Hitlerian connotations, he should drop the AIT at once. Indeed, the AIT happens to have the same historical roots as the race theories centred on white superiority which culminated in Nazi racism. in the 19th-century race theories, Indian civilization had to be the work of white people, who, like the modern Europeans, had colonized India by subjugating the dark natives; later, the mixing of the white Aryans (in spite of a belated attempt to preserve their purity through the caste system) with the dark natives caused the decline and “feminization” of the conquering Aryan culture, which invited a new conquest by Europeans taking up the “white man’s burden” of bringing order and enlightenment to the dark-skinned people living in social, intellectual and spiritual darkness. The AIT was an essential part of this view, and Nazism a slight radicalization. While we let the topic of Nazism rest, we have to mention another “blood and soil” movement which has emerged in India, and again its basis was not Rajaram’s denial of the AIT, but Zydenbos’s AIT itself. The Dravidian movement, started with colonial and missionary funding and aid in 1916 (founding of the Justice Party in Madras, later renamed as Dravida Kazhagam) to counter the Freedom Movement, was based precisely on the AIT notion that the North Indians as well as the South Indian Brahmins were “Aryan invaders” who had stolen the land from the Dravidian natives. Militants of this movement roughed up Brahmins and Hindi-speaking people, and its leader Ramaswamy Naicker gained notoriety with statements like: “We will do with the Brahmins what Hitler did with the Jews.” When the Chinese invasion of 1962 made Indians aware of the need for national unity, the demand for a separate Dravidian state was abandoned, and the anti-Brahmin drive lost its edge as Brahmin predominance in public office diminished. Meanwhile, the AIT-related doctrines of this movement have started a second life in a section of the Dalit (ex-Untouchable) movement, which attacks upper-caste people as “Aryan invaders”, a notion which they could have borrowed directly from Dr. Zydenbos’s article. Here again, slurs of “Nazism” against the supposed “Aryans” mask a vision of Indian society directly rooted in the very views which generated Nazism itself.

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1. 4. 10. Aryans vs. Indians

The closing paragraph of “An obscurantist argument” reiterates the outdated notion that India’s upper castes are the progeny of the “Aryan invaders” and pride themselves on it: “We can briefly sum up the ‘Aryan problem’ and the interest it creates among certain people as follows. Whatever problem is there, will not be solved by constructing a new bit of mythology on the theme of the evil foreign hand and the Indian academic community that is supposed to have no mind of its own. This has no basis in fact. Only certain people in certain castes who identify themselves strongly with the Aryans and pride themselves on being ‘Aryan’ rather than Indian, and thereby stress their difference from (and assume superiority to) other Indians, have a problem. As soon as the author [= N. S. Rajaram], and people of his ilk, make up their minds as to whether they are Indian or not, and whether they want to identify themselves with India and other Indians or not, the problem is solved.” That the Indian academic community “has no mind of its own” has the following basis in fact: India has only just begun to decolonize at the intellectual level, and the view of Indian history instilled in the pupils of India’s elite schools is still strictly the view inherited from colonial historiography. In another sense, however, the anglicized academic establishment certainly has a mind of its own: while the colonial British still had a condescending sympathy for native culture, the new elite is waging a war against it as a matter of cultural self-exorcism and of political class interest. It knows its own mind very well and has concluded that the AIT serves its interests better than a version of history which would boost native Indian self-respect. Of course, India is not the Soviet Union of Stalin’s and Lysenko’s days, so when the international academic opinion shifts away from the AIT, the Indian establishment will have to follow suit; but as long as the matter is in the balance, it throws its entire weight on the side of the AIT. If certain people in certain castes “pride themselves on being ‘Aryan’ rather than Indian”, it means they have accepted the AIT, which posits the initial non-Indianness of the “Aryans” and identifies them with the upper castes. Of course, this view has no takers among traditionalist upper-caste Hindus, who pride themselves on being the progeny of the Vedic poets and epic heroes revered as the sources of Indian civilization. For them, it is not “Aryan rather than Indian”, but “Arya, or Indian par excellence”. Prof. Rajaram “and people of his ilk” have long made up their minds about whether they are Indian or not. That is why they feel strongly about the divisive effect to which the AIT has been used, first by interested outside forces (Zydenbos’s sarcastic “evil foreign hand”) who have tried to stress the difference- of the “Aryans” from other Indians as a weapon against native self-reassertion, and subsequently by sectional interest groups in India. Their first motive for arguing against the AIT is the sound academic consideration that it seems to bit contradicted by the evidence. And this evidence is not nullified at all by their secondary, political motive: the desire to stop the pernicious influence of the AIT on India’s unity and integrity.

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Footnotes:

¹⁰⁶Indian Express, 12-12-1993, in reply to a piece on a lecture by Prof. N. S. Rajaram, Indian Express, 14-11-1993, of which an expanded version constitutes the first chapter of Rajaram’s book: Aryan Invasion of India, the Myth and the Truth, Voice of India, Delhi 1994.

¹⁰⁷Robert J. Zydenbos: “Virashaivism, caste, revolution, etc.” , Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1997, p. 525-535, a review of the very Christian (and anti-Brahminical) look at the Virashaiva sect by Rev. J. P. Schouten: Revolution of the Mystics: On the Social Aspects of Virashaivism, Kok/Pharos, Kampen (Netherlands) 1991.

¹⁰⁸Apart from other works by Rajaram mentioned elsewhere, note also N. S. Rajaram: From Saraswati River to Indus Script, Diganta Sahitya, Mangalore 1998, an elaboration on the Sanskrit-based decipherment of the Indus script by N. Jha: Vedic Glossary on Indus Seals, Ganga Kaveri Publ. , Varanasi 1996.

¹⁰⁹Romila Thapar: “The Perennial Aryans”, Seminar# 400 (1992).

¹¹⁰Shrikant Talageri: The Rg-Veda, a Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, Delhi, forthcoming.

¹¹¹It is as yet unclear whether in this consideration we should include the self-description of the Kalash Kafirs, the last semi-Vedic Pagans in the Hindu Kush mountains (unaffected by all the later developments in the Indian plains which now constitute Hinduism), as Arya-e-Koh, “Aryas of the mountains”. Rather than authentic testimony, this could be the result of interiorizing theories learned from Western visitors.

¹¹²E.g. Yoginder Sikand: “Exploding the Aryan myth”, Observer of Business and Politics, 30-10-1993, discussed below.

¹¹³Olivier Tramond: “Inde: le réveil identitaire de la droite”, Le Choc du Mois, Sep. 1992.

¹¹⁴N.S.Rajaram: The Politics of History, p. 98.

¹¹⁵It is one of Mahatma Gandhi’s achievements that “he made India safe for the white man”, as the Indian Communists used to say around the time of Independence. Fact is that he must take credit for the friendly character of the decolonization of India, which led to the situation that Westerners who feel a strong hostility in countries like China and Malaysia, feel like honoured guests in India.

¹¹⁶K. V. Zvelebil: Dravidian Linguistics: An Introduction, Pondicherry Institute of Linguistics and Culture, 1990; and H. Kulke and D. Rothermund: A History of India, Rupa, Delhi 1991.

¹¹⁷K. Zvelebil: Dravidian Linguistics, p. 90.

¹¹⁸Dr. Zydenbos’s use of Nehru as an argument of authority, along with his use of Indian English, has raised questions. A source inside the Indian Express office suspected that he had merely lent his name to an article by an Indian author. Zydenbos denied this when I asked him personally about it.

¹¹⁹See e.g. M. J. Akbar: Nehru, the Making of India, Penguin 1992.

¹²⁰N. S. Rajaram: From Harappa to Ayodhya, Sahitya Sindhu Prakashana, Bangalore 1997, p. 6; emphasis in the original.

¹²¹Fernand Braudel: A History of Civilizations, Penguin 1988 (1963), p. 236.

¹²²Fernand Braudel: A History of Civilizations, p. 232.

¹²³See K. Elst: “The Ayodhya debate”, in G. Pollet, ed. : Indian Epic Values, Peeters, Leuven 1995, p-21-42; and K. Elst: “The Ayodhya demolition: an evaluation”, in Swapan Dasgupta et al. : The Ayodhya Reference, Voice of India, Delhi 1995, p. 123-154.

¹²⁴“Tampering with history”, editorial in The Hindu, 12-6-1998. B. B. Lal wrote a reply: “Facts of history cannot be altered”, The Hindu, 1-7-1998.

¹²⁵B. B. Lal: New Light on the Indus Civilization, Aryan Books International, Delhi 1997.

¹²⁶About Savitri Devi and her husband, see Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke: Hitler’s Priestess. Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth, and Neo-Nazism, New York University Press, 1998, a book full of details but suffering from the same basic misconceptions as Dr. Zydenbos’ article and most Western writing on the “Hindu-Aryan” connection. Also see K. Elst: The Saffron Swastika, Voice of India, Delhi 1999.

¹²⁷Savitri Devi Mukherji: Souvenirs et Réflexions d’une Arjenne, Delhi 1976, p. 41.

¹²⁸Savitri Devi Mukherji: Souvenirs et Réflexions, p. 41.

¹²⁹Savitri Devi Mukherji: Souvenirs et Réflexions, p. 27 and p. 272, with reference to B. G. Tilak & Hermann Jacobi: Arctic Home in the Vedas, Pune 1903. Tilak and Jacobi had met after separately concluding that astronomical data in the Rg-Veda indicated its time of composition as ca. 4000 BC, see B. G. Tilak: Orion, or Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas, Pune 1893. A detailed and convincing refutation of Tilak’s arguments for the polar homeland is given by N. R. Waradpande: “The Home of the Aryans: an Astronomical Approach”, in S. B. Deo & Suryanath Kamath: The Aryan Problem, Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti, Pune 1993, p. 123-134, and in Shrikant Talageri: The Rg-Veda, a Historical Analysis, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, forthcoming.

¹³⁰Savitri Devi Mukherji: Souvenirs et Réflexions, p. 157.

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1. Political aspects of the Aryan invasion debate

1. 5. SOME RED HERRINGS

1. 5. 1. Aryans and social mobility

Like Dr. Zydenbos in the passage discussed in the preceding section, some Indian scholars impute to the AIT critics motives or presuppositions which themselves imply the AIT, and which exist only in the eye of the beholder, meaning the AIT believer. Thus, Prof. Romila Thapar argues against a rigid view of caste history which she imputes to the Hindu nationalists: “Moralizing on the evils of caste precluded the need to (…) recognize the large area of negotiation which, to some degree, permitted certain castes to shape their status. For example, families of obscure origin and some even said to be of the lower castes, rose to political power and many legitimized their power by successfully claiming upper caste kshatriya status. To concede these facts would have contradicted the theory that the upper castes are the lineal descendants of the Aryans”. ⁽¹³¹⁾ It will be dear that “the theory that the upper castes are the lineal descendants of the Aryans” is part of the standard version of the AIT. While an earlier generation of Hindu nationalists may still have believed this theory in deference to the prestige of Western scholarship, this is not the case at all with the post-Independence Hindu nationalists, and most certainly not with the Hindu nationalist AIT critics whom Prof. Thapar is countering. They have no problem with the insight that “lower castes rose to political power and legitimized their power by successfully claiming upper caste kshatriya status”. On the contrary, such historical processes of social mobility corroborate the unity of the Hindu nation: even if there were such a thing as Aryan invasions, such upward (and corresponding downward) social mobility would have ensured that you find both Aryans and non-Aryans in both the upper and lower layers of Hindu society. An ethnic divide which may or may not have existed in Hindu society is neutralized and dissolved by such social processes, and this gives Hindu nationalists reason to applaud them.

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1. 5. 2. Role of the non-Aryans

Another example of how AIT champions impute to the AIT critics motives or presuppositions which themselves imply the AIT, is this remark by Marxist columnist Yoginder Sikand: “It is significant that while asserting the indigenous origins of the Aryans, the existence of the Dravidian and other non-Aryan races native to India is not denied. After all, if it were asserted that all Indians are Aryans, it would not be possible to justify the racist caste system. While acknowledging the presence in India of non-Aryan indigenous races, their cultural contributions are completely ignored in the discourse of Hindutva. (…) the Hindutvawadis now assert that the Indus Valley civilization, which is generally accepted to be of Dravidian and pre-Aryan origin, was built by the Aryans. By asserting the native origins of the Aryans, and by attributing all the finer aspects of Indian culture to their supposed genius, the rich cultural legacy of the non-Aryan Indian races is effectively denied.” ⁽¹³²⁾ We may forego discussion of Sikand’s obvious lack of knowledge of the present state of research, e.g. his mistaken assumption that there exists any evidence for the oft-assumed Dravidian character of the Harappan civilization. The point is that he imputes to the AIT critics the desire to “justify the caste system”, the consent to the common belief that the caste system has a “racist” basis, the belief in a division between “Aryans” on the one hand and “Dravidian and other non-Aryan races” on the other, and the denial of the “cultural contributions” of these “non-Aryan indigenous races”. Underlying all this, and very conspicuous in Sikand’s discourse, is the assumption that it is a “racial” affair, an assumption emphatically criticized and rejected in practically all anti-AIT publications of the past decade. ⁽¹³³⁾ Likewise, the specific theory of a “racial” basis of the caste system has been denied by Hindu and other nationalists from Dr. Ambedkar on down. That the AIT is criticized in a bid to “justify the caste system”, racist or otherwise, is not suggested by a reading of any of the AIT critiques known to me, let alone any cited by Sikand, who doesn’t mention any of the recent and learned critiques. Like a cowardly big boy picking fights with little boys, Sikand prefers to focus on Hindu Nationalist ideologue (and non-historian) M. S. Golwalkar’s 1939 musings about the “Arctic home” of the Aryans having been in India before the earth’s polar axis shifted to its present position. ⁽¹³⁴⁾ Much of his attention is also devoted to semi-literate pamphletists who argue that everything worthwhile in the world has been created by Hindus, citing as evidence some silly pseudo-etymologies like Jerusalem=Yadu Shalyam, “shrine of Yadu/Krishna”. But he bravely avoids any confrontation with serious historians. The only historian cited is Balraj Madhok, former president of the Jana Sangh, predecessor (1952-77) of the BJP (1980): “He is of the view that the Aryans were the natives of the Sapta-Sindhu region while various non-Aryan tribes inhabited the rest of India”. Though Madhok is by no means a specialist of ancient history and the Arya debate, his view makes good sense; it is one of the several possible interpretations of the evidence supporting the rejection of the AIT. Yet Sikand calls him one of those who “care little for historical truth, academic objectivity and consistency”. The identification of “Aryan” with the Indo-Aryan speech community of the northern subcontinent and Sri Lanka, hence the conception of “Aryan” as the opposite of “Dravidian”, is also extraneous to the Hindu tradition. Many AIT critics emphasize that a Dravidian could be classified as Arya while a speaker of Indo-Aryan languages could be an-Arya if he abandoned the practice of Vedic tradition (e.g. by converting to Islam). Some of these critics, from Sri Aurobindo to N. R. Waradpande and Subhash Kak, go as far as to question the linguistic concept of Indo-European and Dravidian as distinct language families. ⁽¹³⁵⁾ I believe they are mistaken, but at any rate, their views are strictly incompatible with the political programme of Aryans locking native Dravidians into the racist caste system, which Yoginder Sikand imputes to them.

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1. 5. 3. Hitler again

Hitler’s use of the Sanskrit-derived term “Aryan” was bound to suggest a new line of Hindu-baiting. And effectively, while commenting on the enthusiasm in Hindu Nationalist circles about recent discoveries supporting the Indian origin of the Indo-European or “Aryan” language family, Yoginder Sikand alleges that “the Hindutvawadis, like their Nazi counterparts, fanatically believe in the thoroughly discredited Aryan master-race theory”. ⁽¹³⁶⁾ Having read most of the Hindu Nationalist writings on the Aryan question, I am confident that there does not exist a single statement on their part which admits of the interpretation given by Yoginder Sikand. Historically, Hitler’s Aryan master race theory and Yoginder Sikand’s cherished Aryan invasion theory have the same roots. It is precisely the refutation of this Aryan Invasion Theory which is a hot issue in Hindutva circles; and it is the anti-Hindutva polemicists like Yoginder Sikand who uphold the European racists’ AIT and who ridicule the attempts to refute it. Some earlier Hindu leaders, esp. Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Veer Savarkar, had accepted the voguish Aryan Invasion theory, though they (rightfully) refused to attach any practical importance to this issue of geographical provenance. But the dominant opinion in Hindutva circles today is that the native Hindu (Vedic and Puranic) tradition had it right when it consistently assumed Sanskritic culture to be native to India. Indeed, Yoginder Sikand’s own article was written in anticipation of a symposium organized by the RSS-affiliated Deendayal Research Institute to bring together different scholarly contributions to the refutation of the Aryan Invasion Theory so dear to the Nazis.

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1. 5. 4. The Muslim factor

Indian Marxists have the power but lack the numbers, so they have cultivated alliances with all actual or potential enemies of Hinduism. Most importantly, they have assiduously sought to ingratiate themselves with India’s large Muslim community (about 13% of the population), and in any debate with Hindu nationalists, they will invariably try to drag in some Muslim angle to the topic at hand. Their last trump card against the anti-AIT argument is that it is somehow anti-Muslim: “The Hindutva version of the theory became a mechanism for excluding some sections of Indian society, specifically Indian Muslims and Christians, by insisting that they are alien.” ⁽¹³⁷⁾ Or: “If Muslims have to be projected as the sole invaders of this land, the Aryans need to be presented as natives… If the Muslims are to be projected as traitors, bereft of any attachment to this land, they need to be presented as the only outsider.” ⁽¹³⁸⁾ Dr. Edwin Bryant reports: “Although in various other academic fields and area studies, such as race science, postcolonial scholarship has completely deconstructed and exposed the colonial investment in the propagation of certain theories, the field of Indology, at least in present-day Western academic circles, has been very suspicious of these voices being raised against the theory of the Aryan invasions”⁽¹³⁹⁾ He cited distrust of “political subtexts”, in particular hidden anti-Muslim motives, as the reason why Indologists are reluctant to take up the rethinking of the Aryan question. However, the deduction of exclusionary politics from a theory of Aryan origins has for a hundred years been the monopoly of the invasionist school. Its central argument has always been that the Brahmins and other upper-caste Hindus are foreign invaders in illegal occupation of whatever power they have in India. If “political subtexts” render a theory unrespectable, those Indologists should stay away from the AIT, and take a very critical second look at their own anti-Brahmin prejudice. The non-invasionist school has strictly refrained from this line of rhetoric. Thus, no non-invasionist critic has so far tried to incorporate the fairly popular theory of a Dravidian invasion as an extra polemical point against the Dravidian separatists, much less to deduce from it that Dravidians are mere invaders with no right to stay in India. Most of them reject the hypothesis of a Dravidian invasion along with that of an Aryan invasion. In certain factions of Hindu nationalism, it is not uncommon to find Muslims described as traitors. ⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ After the Partition, which turned millions of Hindus into foreigners in their places of birth overnight, which put at least seven million of them to flight, and which may have killed up to half a million of them, it is not surprising that many Hindus remember how that Partition was imposed on an unwilling Hindu majority by an intransigeant Muslim minority. Of course, generalizations about groups of people are dangerous and unwarranted, and the simplistic crudeness of some RSS discourse about Muslims is deplorable. Yet, even the grossest RSS blockhead hasn’t stooped to calling them “alien”. Though their religion is undeniably of alien origin, and though many of them cultivate imaginary Arab genealogies for themselves, the Indian Muslims are mostly the progeny of Hindu converts to Islam. This fact, far from being denied, is frequently cited in RSS literature as a basis for reclaiming these Muslims for Indian nationalism if not for Hinduism. At any rate, most AIT critics have never had anything to do with anti-Muslim politics, e.g. K. D. Sethna and B. B. Lal are elderly scholars who try to stay out of politics. A few have made legitimate critiques of specific Islamic policies in India, e.g. Shrikant Talageri has discussed the glorification of Islamic elements in Indian culture and the corresponding disparaging of purely Hindu elements by schoolbooks and the Mumbai film industry. ⁽¹⁴¹⁾ No Muslim has died because of that. For many, the Aryan debate in the mid- 1990s came as a fresh breeze after the intense Hindu-Muslim conflict of ca. 1990. At last, a revolution without enemies! Conversely, most Islamic polemicists have taken to using the AIT in their anti-Hindu writings. As Syed Shahabuddin once put it in an editorial of his monthly Muslim India: if invaders have to quit India, the Aryans as the first invaders will have to quit first.

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1. 5. 5. Pakistani Indus, Bharatiya Saraswati

Another frequently-heard red herring is that the anti-AIT school is emphasizing the Saraswati basin as the centre of Harappan (and Vedic) culture at the expense of the Indus because the Indus now lies in Pakistan. Thus: “The discovery of Harappan sites on the Indian side of the border between India and Pakistan is viewed as compensating for the loss of the cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa which are located in Pakistan.” ⁽¹⁴²⁾ Here again, we are faced with a projection by an outsider to Hindu nationalism. For Hindu nationalists, the Indus basin has not ceased to be part of India just because a state of Pakistan was created. To the indignation of Indian Marxists, the Hindu nationalists take a long-term view of their motherland: over the centuries, numerous empires have come and gone, native as well as foreign, and they all had their temporary borders, but the basic identity of India was not affected by these. The Marxists don’t believe in this timeless India, but the Hindu nationalists are confident that the territory which is now Pakistan will revert to the bosom of Mother India in due course. The insistence that a political motive explains the renewed emphasis on the Saraswati basin ignores a more obvious reason for paying due scholarly attention to the Saraswati basin: that is where most of the “Harappan” cities have been found. When people conspicuously disregard facts, it may be appropriate to wonder what motive they might have for this strange behaviour. But when they fully take the facts into account, there is no reason to suspect ulterior motives, except in the minds of the suspecters.

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1. 5. 6. Aryans as servants of imperialism

The reduction of Brahminism or Hinduism to the residue of the Aryan invasion Is deductively taken to the most absurd lengths. Thus, a Christian theologian involved in Dalit politics alleges that the upper castes collaborated with the Muslim conquerors for the following reason: “Perhaps as descendants of the Aryan invaders into this country prior to the Moghuls and the British the advocates of Arya dharma could not outright condemn aggression and exploitation.” ⁽¹⁴³⁾ Well, most aggressors and exploiters don’t feel that much solidarity with those who come to subject them in their turn to aggression and exploitation. Likewise, Yoginder Sikand alleges: “The British invasion is, of course, not to be talked of at all, in line with the consistent and time-tested pro-imperialist line of the Hindutva brigade.” ⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ In fact, of the four Hindu leaders he attacks in his article, two were prominent leaders of the freedom movement who spent years in British prisons (Tilak and Savarkar), and the two others (Golwalkar and Madhok) have never lagged behind in anti-imperialist rhetoric, against fading British as well as against threatening Soviet and Chinese imperialism; all four are known for their critical view of Islamic imperialism. This kind of wild allegation has to do with the Communists’ bad conscience about their collaboration with the British against the freedom movement in 1941-45. Any detailed analysis of politicized AIT polemic ends up having to deal with the whole history of Indian Marxism, the Pakistan movement and other anti-Hindu forces.

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Footnotes:

¹³¹Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 11.

¹³²Yoginder Sikand: “Exploding the Aryan myth”, Observer of Business and Politics, 30-10-1993.

¹³³Most prominently in Paramesh Choudhury: The Aryan Hoax that Dupes the Indians, Calcutta 1995, which reproduces in appendix the UNESCO statement on racism, The Race Question in Modern Science, ca. 1950, and quotes from it on the cover: “The so-called Aryan ‘people’ or ‘race’ is a mere myth.”

¹³⁴Reference is to M. S. Golwalkar: We, Our Nationhood Defined, Nagpur 1939.

¹³⁵See e.g. Subhash Kak: “Is there an Aryan/Dravidian binary?”, www. indiastar. com, 1998.

¹³⁶Yoginder Sikand: “Exploding the Aryan myth”, Observer of Business and Politics, 30-10-1993.

¹³⁷Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 10.

¹³⁸Yoginder Sikand: “Exploding the Aryan myth”, Observer of Business and Politics, 30-10-1993.

¹³⁹Edwin Bryant: “The Indo-Aryan invasion debate: the politics of a discourse”, WAVES conference, Los Angeles. August 1998, abstract.

¹⁴⁰See e.g. M. S. Golwalkar: Bunch of Thoughts, Jagarana Prakashan, Bangalore 1984 (1966).

¹⁴¹Shrikant Talageri: Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism, introduction.

¹⁴²Romila Thapar: “The theory of Aryan race and India”, Social Scientist, January-March 1996, p. 16.

¹⁴³Israel Selvanayagam: “The roots of Hindu fundamentalism - a historical overview”, Asia Journal of Theology, Bangalore, Oct. 1996, p. 445.

¹⁴⁴Yoginder Sikand: “Exploding the Aryan myth”, Observer of Business and Politics, 30. 10. 1993.

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1. Political aspects of the Aryan invasion debate

1. 6. CONCLUSION

Prof. Edmund Leach, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, has aptly written: “Why do serious scholars persist in believing in the Aryan invasions? (…) Why is this sort of thing attractive? Who finds it attractive? Why has the development of early Sanskrit come to be so dogmatically associated with an Aryan invasion? (…) The details of this theory fit in with this racist framework (…) The origin myth of British colonial imperialism helped the elite administrators in the Indian Civil Service to see themselves as bringing ‘pure’ civilization to a country in which civilization of the most sophisticated (but ‘morally corrupt’) kind was already nearly 6,000 years old. Here I will only remark that the hold of this myth on the British middle-class imagination is so strong that even today, 44 years after the death of Hitler and 43 years after the creation of an independent India and independent Pakistan the Aryan invasions of the second millennium BC are still treated as if they were an established fact of history”. ⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ Today, the unquestioning belief in the Aryan invasion is giving way to a debate. However, many bonafide scholars hesitate to participate in that debate because they correctly sense that all kinds of political strings are attached to the different positions. The present paper has mapped a few of these political influences. The debate on the Aryan Invasion Theory is not logically affected by the political motives of its participants, though these motives are sometimes palpable through the rhetoric used. Mapping these motives as a matter of history of ideas (and not as a way to decide the AIT question itself by means of political association) allows us to point out the following: on the pro-AIT side, justification of European colonialism, illustration of the racist worldview, delegitimation of Hinduism as India’s native religion by missionaries of foreign religions, Indian Marxist attempts to delegitimize Indian nationalism, and several separatisms in India seeking to bolster the case against Indian unity; and on the anti-AIT side, Indian nationalism seeking to make India’s civilisational unity more robust, and to score a point against the aforementioned “anti-national forces”.

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Footnotes:

¹⁴⁵E. Leach in E. Ohnuki-Tierney, ed.: Culture through Time, Anthropological Approaches, Stanford 1990, p. 242-243, quoted by Dilip K. Chakrabarti in his review of Asko Parpola: Deciphering the Indus Script, Cambridge University Press 1994, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, November 1995, p. 428-430. Leach was among the first to recognize that the word rice, from Tamil-derived Greek oryza, ultimately stems from Sanskrit vrihi, and not some other way around. The etymology of vrihi as allegedly Dravidian was always a showpiece of the Dravidian substratum theory, hence of the AIT.

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2. Astronomical data and the Aryan question

2. 1. DATING THE RG-VEDA

The determination of the age in which Vedic literature started and flourished has its consequences for the Aryan Invasion question. The oldest text, the Rg-Veda, is full of precise references to places and natural phenomena in what are now Panjab and Haryana, and was unmistakably composed in that part of India. The date at which it was composed is a firm terminus ante quem for the entry of the Vedic Aryans into India. They may have come from abroad or they may have been fully native, but by the time of the Rg-Veda, they were certainly Indians without memory of a foreign homeland. In a rather shoddy way, Friedrich Max Müller launched the hypothesis that the Rg-Veda had to be dated to about 1200 BC, and eventhough he later retracted it, that arbitrary guess has become the orthodoxy. ⁽¹⁾ It is forgotten too often that in his own day, other scholars rejected this extremely late date on a variety of grounds. Maurice Winternitz based his estimate on purely philological considerations: “We cannot explain the development of the whole of this great literature if we assume as late a date as round about 1200 BC or 1500 BC as its starting-point.” ⁽²⁾ Isn’t it refreshing to find how logical and unprejudiced the early researchers were? You cannot credibly cram the complicated linguistic, cultural and philosophical developments which are in evidence in Vedic literature, into just a few centuries. But since this argument of plausibility can always be countered with the argument that unlikely developments are not strictly impossible, we need a firmer basis to decide this chronological question. The most explicit chronology would be provided by astronomical markers of time.

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Footnotes:

^1. The story of Max Müller’s chronology and its impact is told by N. S Rajaram: The Politics of History, Voice of India, Delhi 1995, ch. 3.

^2. M. Winternitz: History of Indian Literature (1907, reprint by Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1987), vol. 1, p. 288.

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2. Astronomical data and the Aryan question

2. 2. ANCIENT HINDU ASTRONOMY

2. 2. 1. Astronomical tables

One of the earliest estimates of the date of the Vedas was at once among the most scientific. In 1790, the Scottish mathematician John Playfair demonstrated that the starting-date of the astronomical observations recorded in the tables still in use among Hindu astrologers (of which three copies had reached Europe between 1687 and 1787) had to be 4300 BC. ⁽³⁾ His proposal was dismissed as absurd by some, but it was not refuted by any scientist. Playfair’s judicious use of astronomy was countered by John Bentley with a Scriptural argument which we now must consider invalid. In 1825, Bentley objected: “By his [=Playfair’s] attempt to uphold the antiquity of Hindu books against absolute facts, he thereby supports all those horrid abuses and impositions found in them, under the pretended sanction of antiquity. Nay, his aim goes still deeper, for by the same means he endeavours to overturn the Mosaic account, and sap the very foundation of our religion: for if we are to believe in the antiquity of Hindu books, as he would wish us, then the Mosaic account is all a fable, or a fiction.” ⁽⁴⁾ Bentley did not object to astronomy per se, in so far as it could be helpful in showing up the falsehood of Brahminical scriptures. However, it did precisely the reverse. Falsehood in this context could have meant that the Brahmins falsely claimed high antiquity for their texts by presenting as ancient astronomical observations recorded in Scripture what were in fact back-calculations from a much later age. But Playfair showed that this was impossible. Back-calculation of planetary positions is a highly complex affair requiring knowledge of a number of physical laws, universal constants and actual measurements of densities, diameters and distances. Though Brahminical astronomy was remarkably sophisticated for its time, it could only back-calculate planetary position of the presumed Vedic age with an inaccuracy margin of at least several degrees of arc. With our modern knowledge, it is easy to determine what the actual positions were, and what the results of back-calculations with the Brahminical formulae would have been, e.g.: “Aldebaran was therefore 40’ before the point of the vernal equinox, according to the Indian astronomy, in the year 3102 before Christ. (…) [Modern astronomy] gives the longitude of that star 13’ from the vernal equinox, at the time of the Calyougham, agreeing, within 53’, with the determination of the Indian astronomy. This agreement is the more remarkable, that the Brahmins, by their own rules for computing the motion of the fixed stars, could not have assigned this place to Aldebaran for the beginning of Calyougham, had they calculated it from a modern observation. For as they make the motion of the fixed stars too great by more than 3” annually, if they had calculated backward from 1491, they would have placed the fixed stars less advanced by 40 or 50, at their ancient epoch, than they have actually done.” ⁽⁵⁾ So, it turns out that the data given by the Brahmins corresponded not with the results deduced from their formulae, but with the actual positions, and this, according to Playfair, for nine different astronomical parameters. This is a bit much to explain away as coincidence or sheer luck.

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2. 2. 2. Ancient observation, modern confirmation

That Hindu astronomical lore about ancient times cannot be based on later back-calculation, was also argued by Playfair’s contemporary, the French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly: “The motions of the stars calculated by the Hindus before some 4500 years vary not even a single minute from the [modern] tables of Cassini and Meyer. The Indian tables give the same annual variation of the moon as that discovered by Tycho Brahe - a variation unknown to the school of Alexandria and also the Arabs.” ⁽⁶⁾ Prof. N. S. Rajaram, a mathematician who has worked for NASA, comments: “fabricating astronomical data going back thousands of years calls for knowledge of Newton’s Law of Gravitation and the ability to solve differential equations.” ⁽⁷⁾ Failing this advanced knowledge, the data in the Brahminical tables must be based on actual observation. Ergo, the Sanskrit-speaking Vedic seers were present in person to record astronomical observations and preserve them for a full 6,000 years: “The observations on which the astronomy of India is founded, were nude more than three thousand years before the Christian era. (…) Two other elements of this astronomy, the equation of the sun’s centre and the obliquity of the ecliptic (…) seem to point to a period still more remote, and to fix the origin of this astronomy 1000 or 1200 years earlier, that is, 4300 years before the Christian era”. ⁽⁸⁾ All this at least on the assumption that Playfair’s, Bailly’s and Rajaram’s claims about the Hindu astronomical tables are correct. Disputants may start by proving them factually wrong, but should not enter the dispute arena without a refutation of the astronomers’ assertions. It is something of a scandal that Playfair’s and Bailly’s findings have been lying around for two hundred years while linguists and indologists were publishing speculations on Vedic chronology in stark disregard for the contribution of astronomy.

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2. 2. 3. The start of Kali-Yuga

Hindu tradition makes mention of the conjunction of the “seven planets” (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Sun and Moon) and Ketu (southern lunar node, the northern node/ Rahu being by definition in the opposite location) near the fixed star Revati (Zeta Piscium) on 18 February 3102 BC. This date, at which Krishna is supposed to have breathed his last, is conventionally the start of the so-called Kali-Yuga, the “age of strife”, the low point in a declining sequence of four ages. However, modern scholars have claimed that the Kali-Yuga system of time-reckoning was a much younger invention, not attested before the 6th century AD. Against this modernist opinion, Bailly and Playfair had already shown that the position of the moon (the fastest-moving “planet”, hence the hardest to back-calculate with precision) at the beginning of Kali-Yuga, 18 February 3102, as given by Hindu tradition, was accurate to 37’. ⁽⁹⁾ Either the Brahmins had made an incredibly lucky guess, or they had recorded an actual observation on Kali Yuga day itself. Richard L. Thompson claims that in Indian literature and inscriptions, there are a number of datelines expressed in Kali-Yuga which are older than the Christian era (and a fortiori older than the 6th century AD). ⁽¹⁰⁾ More importantly, Thompson argues that the Jyotisha-shAstras (treatises on astronomy and, increasingly, astrology, starting in the 14th century BC with the VedANga Jyotisha as per its own astronomical data, but mostly from the first millennium AD) are correct in mentioning this remarkable conjunction on that exact day, for there was indeed a conjunction of sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Ketu and Revati. True, the conjunction was not spectacularly exact, having an orb of 370 between the two most extreme planetary positions. But that precisely supports the hypothesis of an actual observation as opposed to a back-calculation. Indeed, if the Hindu astronomers were able to calculate this position after a lapse of many centuries (when the Jyotisha-ShAstra was written), it is unclear what reason they would have had for picking out that particular conjunction. Surely, such conjunctions are spectacular to those who witness one, and hence worth recording if observed. But they are not that exceptional when considered over millennia: even closer conjunctions of all visible planets do occur (most recently on 5 February 1962). ⁽¹¹⁾ If the Hindu astronomers had simply been going over their astronomical tables looking for an exceptional conjunction, they could have found more spectacular ones than the one on 18 February 3102 BC. And why would they have calculated tables for such a remote period, sixteen centuries before the Aryan invasion, nineteen before the composition of the Rg-Vedic hymns, a time of which they had no recollection?

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Footnotes:

^3. Playfair’s argumentation, “Remarks on the astronomy of the Brahmins”, Edinburg 1790, is reproduced in Dharampal: Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century, Academy of Gandhian Studies, Hyderabad 1983 (Impex India, Delhi 1971), p. 69-124.

^4. John Bentley: Hindu Astronomy, republished by Shri Publ. , Delhi 1990, p. xxvii; also discussed by Richard L. Thompson: “World Views: Vedic vs. Western”, The India Times, 31-3-1993. On p. 111, we find that Bentley has "proven" that Krishna was born on 7 August in AD 600 (the most conservative estimate elsewhere is the 9th century BC), and on p. 158ff. , that Varaha Mihira (AD 510-587) was a contemporary of the Moghul emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605).

^5. J. Playfair in Dharampal: Indian Science and Technology, p. 87.

^6. Quoted in S. Sathe: In Search for the Year of the Bharata War, Navabharati, Hyderabad 1982, p. 32.

^7. N. S. Rajaram: The Politics of History, p. 47.

^8. J. Playfair in Dharampal: Indian Science and Technology, p-118.

^9. J. Playfair in Dharampal: Indian Science and Technology, p. 88-89.

^10. R. L. Thompson: Vedic Cosmography and Astronomy, Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, Los Angeles 1989, p. 19-24. Unfortunately, he gives no examples of the early use of Kali-Yuga, contenting himself with references to Indian publications offering such examples, unlikely to convince Western scholars, viz. S. D. Kulkarni: Adi Sankara, Bombay 1987, and G. C. Agrawala: Age of Bharata War, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1979. Kulkarni’s book (p. 281ff) offers Kali-Yuga dates such as 509 BC, but from marginal Sanskrit sources which most Western scholars would consider unreliable.

^11. On that day, Hindu astrologers gathered for prayer-sessions on hilltops to avert the impending catastrophe; they were moderately successful.

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2. Astronomical data and the Aryan question

2. 3. THE PRECESSION OF THE EQUINOX

2. 3. 1. The slowest hand on the clock

The truly strong evidence for a high chronology of the Vedas is the Vedic information about the position of the equinox. The phenomenon of the “precession of the equinoxes” takes the ecliptical constellations (also known as the sidereal Zodiac, i.e. those constellations through which the sun passes) ⁽¹²⁾ slowly past the vernal equinox point, i.e. the intersection of ecliptic and equator, rising due East on the horizon. The whole tour is made in about 25,791 years, the longest cycle manageable for naked-eye observers. If data about the precession are properly recorded, they provide the best and often the only clue to an absolute chronology for ancient events. If we can read the Vedic and post-Vedic indications properly, they mention constellations on the equinox points which were there from 4,000 BC for the Rg-Veda (Orion, as already pointed out by B. G. Tilak) ⁽¹³⁾ through around 3100 BC for the Atharva-Veda and the core Mahabharata (Aldebaran) down to 2,300 BC for the Sutras and the Shatapatha Brahmana (Pleiades). ⁽¹⁴⁾ Other references to the constellational position of the solstices or of solar and lunar positions at the beginning of the monsoon confirm this chronology. Thus, the Kaushitaki Brahmana puts the winter solstice at the new moon of the sidereal month of Magha (i.e. the Mahashivaratri festival), which now falls 70 days later: this points to a date in the first half of the 3rd millennium BC. The same processional movement of the twelve months of the Hindu calendar (which are tied to the constellations) vis-a-vis the meterological seasons, is what allowed Hermann Jacobi to fix the date of the Rg-Veda to the 5th-4th millennium BC. ⁽¹⁵⁾ Indeed, the regular references to the full moon’s position in a constellation at the time of the beginning of the monsoon, which nearly coincides with the summer solstice, provide a secure and unambiguous chronology through the millennial Vedic literature. It is not only the Vedic age which is moved a number of centuries deeper into the past, when comparing the astronomical indications with the conventional chronology. Even the Gupta age (and implicitly the earlier ages of the Buddha, the Mauryas etc.) could be affected. Indeed, the famous playwright and poet Kalidasa, supposed to have worked at the Gupta court in about 400 AD, wrote that the monsoon rains started at the start of the sidereal month of Ashadha; this timing of the monsoon was accurate in the last centuries BC. ⁽¹⁶⁾ This implicit astronomy-based chronology of Kalidasa, about 5 centuries higher than the conventional one, tallies well with the traditional “high” chronology of the Buddha, whom Chinese Buddhist tradition dates to ca. 1100 BC, and the implicit Puranic chronology even to ca. 1700 BC. ⁽¹⁷⁾

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2. 3. 2. Some difficulties

These indications about the processional phases may be unreliable insofar as their exact meaning is not unambiguous. To say that a constellation “never swerves from the East” (as is said of the Pleiades in the Shatapatha Brahmana 2:1:2:3) seems to mean that it contains the spring equinox, implying that it is on the equator, which intersects the horizon due East. But this might seem insufficiently explicit for the modern reader who is used to a precise and separate technical terminology for such matters. But then, the modern reader will have to accept that technical terminology in Vedic days mostly consisted in fixed metaphorical uses of common terms. This is not all that primitive, for the same thing will be found when the etymology of modern technical terms is analyzed, e.g. a telescope is a Greek “far-seer”, oxygen is “acid-producer”, a cylinder is a “roller”. The only difference is that we can use the vocabulary of foreign classical languages to borrow from, while Sanskrit was its own classical reservoir of specialized terminology. Another factor of uncertainty is that the equinox moves very slowly (10 in nearly 71 years), so that any inexactness in the Vedic indications and any ambiguity in the constellations’ boundaries makes a difference of centuries. This occasional inexactness might possibly be enough to neutralize the above shift in Kalidasa’s date - but not to account for a shift of millennia (each millennium corresponding to about 14 degrees of arc) needed to move the Vedic age from the pre-Harappan to the post-Harappan period, from 4000 BC as calculated by the astronomers to 1200 BC as surmised by Friedrich Max Müller. On the other hand, it is encouraging to note that the astronomical evidence is entirely free of contradictions. There would be a real problem if the astronomical indications had put the Upanishads earlier than the Rg-Veda, or Kalidasa earlier than the Brahmanas, but that is not the case: the astronomical evidence is consistent. Inconsistency would prove the predictable objection of AIT defenders that these astronomical references are but poetical tabulation without any scientific contents. However, the facts are just the opposite. To the extent that there are astronomical indications in the Vedas, these form a consistent set of data detailing an absolute chronology for Vedic literature in full agreement with the known relative chronology of the different texts of this literature. This way, they completely contradict the hypothesis that the Vedas were composed after an invasion in about 1500 BC. Not one of the dozens of astronomical data in Vedic literature confirms the AIT chronology.

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2. 3. 3. Regulus at summer solstice

In the Shulba Sutra appended to Baudhayana’s Shrauta Sutra, mathematical instructions are given for the construction of Vedic altars. One of its remarkable contributions is the theorem usually ascribed to Pythagoras, first for the special case of a square (the form in which it was discovered), then for the general case of the rectangle: “The diagonal of the rectangle produces the combined surface which the length and the breadth produce separately.” This and other instances of advanced mathematics presented by Baudhayana have been shown by the American mathematician A. Seidenberg to be the origin of similar mathematical techniques and ‘discoveries’ in Greece and Babylonia, some of which have been securely dated to 1700 BC. So, 1700 BC was a terminus post quem for Baudhayana’s mathematics, which would reasonably be dated to the later part of the Harappan period which ended in ca. 1900 BC. However, Seidenberg was told by the indologists that these Sutras, or any Vedic text for that matter, were definitely written later than 1700 BC. But mathematical data cannot be manipulated just like that, and Seidenberg remained convinced of his case: “Whatever the difficulty there may be [concerning chronology], it is small in comparison with the difficulty of deriving the Vedic ritual application of the theorem from Babylonia. (The reverse derivation is easy)… the application involves geometric algebra, and there is no evidence of geometric algebra from Babylonia. And the geometry of Babylonia is already secondary whereas in India it is primary.”