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BOOKS
Are You Aryan and Elite?
A provocative study that intends to mitigate Indological
McCarthyism
By Nayanjot Lahiri
The Indo-Aryans
are as renowned for their physical features as they are for the quarrels
that have erupted around them. Were they fair, blond and blue-eyed or
dark and brown-haired? Can they be described as peaceful agriculturists
or were they horsebacked, aggressive pastoralists? How, when and where
did they come from? Anyone interested in a detailed, lucid review of the
sprawling controversies that this most (in)famous colonisation saga of
India has generated will find much that is useful in this book.
Edwin Bryant's critique in The Quest for the
Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Debate has two aspects-empirical
and historiographical. The first examines the philological, linguistic
and archaeological data and how these have been interpreted both to support
Aryan inroads and to contest them. The second focuses on the ways in which
the Aryan question has been used over two centuries by various people,
from European Orientalists and First World Indologists to Indian scholars
and religious reformers.
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THE QUEST
FOR THE ORIGINS OF VEDIC CULTURE
By Edwin Bryant
Oxford
Price: $55
Pages: 387 |
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The empirical minutiae underlines how the same
"evidence" is capable of being explained in different ways.
For example, there are 35 non-Aryan names for individuals, tribes and
clans in Rigvedic vocabulary. On the one hand, this can suggest a non-Sanskritic
linguistic substratum which infiltrated into the language of the ruling
Aryan elite. On the other hand, foreign words and syntactical features
continue to be accepted into our languages today without any foreign "linguistic
substratum, so it is legitimate to ask why this had to be the case in
the protohistoric past". In which case, non-Aryan words in Vedic
texts cannot be considered as sure proof of a linguistic "substratum"
and could, instead, have been an "adstratum".
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TOUGH CODE TO CRACK: The
Indus seals |
Bryant's historiographical critique is more provocative
in the sense that it proposes to mitigate "a type of Indological
McCarthyism creeping into areas of western, as well as certain Indian,
academic circles, whereby ... anyone reconsidering the status quo of Indo-Aryan
origins is instantly and a priori dubbed a nationalist, a communalist
or, even worse, a Nazi". Arguing forcefully for rigorous examination
of the arguments put forward by Indian scholars against Aryan migrations,
he believes that most Indologists in western academia would be willing
to "change their views if appealed to with informed reason and arguments
that address all the evidence".To put it most charitably, it is naive
to think that the "ignorance" in influential western circles
of indigenous writings on the Aryan question can be made to go away simply
by producing a book about such writings, which Bryant has tried to do.
There is politics that girds academic writings
which is related to larger sociopolitical realities. First World academics
frequently fail to consider Third World scholars as "agents of knowledge"
whose views about their own history need to be taken seriously at all.
Even before the onset of globalisation, this asymmetry was there for all
those who cared to look. For instance, in a paper called "Trade Mechanisms
in Indus-Mesopotamian Interrelations", C.C. Lamberg Karlovsky (who
prominently figures in this book) examined the stimulus behind the creation
of the Harappan civilisation. Karlovsky's paper, published in 1972, did
not think that such writings or issues were important to the question
of the formation of the Indus civilisation. In fact, his citations would
suggest that as far as he was concerned, there had been no writings by
Indians on the civilisation since 1949-the only two works by Indian scholars
cited there, those of Madho Sarup Vats and M.G. Dikshit,were published
before 1950.
On a lighter note, the reactions of some Indians
to the idea that they belonged the same Aryan lineage as the Europeans
make for hilarious reading. Of all of them, the most ingenious seems to
have been Pandit Visnu Sakharam who in 1920, filed an immigration court
case in America on the plea that he was a Brahmin and therefore an Aryan/European.
Apparently, the argument was entertained for a while, until a court in
California ruled that "the Aryan invasion theory was precisely that:
just a theory, and therefore not citable as credible proof for immigration
purposes".
If scholarship had also treated the "presence"
of the Aryans in the same way as the California court, perhaps, a more
inclusive, multilineal story of ancient India may have been in place,
instead of the same old saga of Indian history through the Aryan prism.
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