Sememe: ayana; sun and property

[vidya at cco.caltech.edu]

> 

Aditya Mishra wrote - 

> 
On Wed, 7 Jun 1995, Dominik Wujastyk wrote:
> Dear Dr Kalyanaraman,
---
> step, for every phonological change you mention.  It isn't good enough
> to throw every word that reminds you of anything similar together in a heap
> and call it an argument.  And your current posting seems to me --
> an ignorant outsider -- to be just like that.

I was on vacation therefore cannot comment on the original post which I
have not seen but I do highly disapprove the use of words "ignorant outsider"
howsoever illogical Dr Kalyanraman's comments may have been but he must have
some credentials to have earned a doctorate and does not deserve ad
hominem invectives.
> 


Dominik seems to have used "ignorant outsider" to refer to himself, rather
than Kalyanaraman. 

I also think it is neither polite nor reasonable to ask Westerners for their
motives in studying things Indian. What are my motives for studying 
chem engg in a Western university, inspite of my own Indian heritage? People
have their own reasons for what they do in life, and it is somewhat unfair
to view today's researchers as being similar to the missionaries of a century
ago. 

That said, I do not think any and every Indian researcher who says something
different and unorthodox is part of a Hindutva group. Dr. Kalyanaraman's 
etyma may be criticized on purely scholarly grounds, but to view this as part
of a Hindutva motivated revisionism is uncalled for, in the absence of any
evidence. I have read some of Dr. Kalyanaraman's posts on soma and alchemy
before, but I haven't seen anything that would brand him a Hindutva-vadi. 

The mention of Indus/Saraswati in his post is no excuse for this either. It
is evident from the Landsat images of the region that most archeological 
sites lie along the basin of a river that does not exist any more. Purely 
from an objective standpoint, there is no harm in labelling this as an
Indus/Saraswati civilization. Whether the inhabitants of the Saraswati basin
were Aryans or Dravidians is a vexed question. I haven't seen any proof from
the revisionists that these were the Rg Vedic Aryans. On the other hand, all
I have seen from the traditional Indus = Dravidian = Tamil theorists is 
denial. Both sides engage in tons of circular reasoning to "prove" their
points. That the traditional theory has been around for 150 years is no great
asset to it. As a scientist, I hate to accept a statement like, "All these
great people could not have been wrong". Great scientists like Newton and
Einstein were wrong in some of their theories. That does not prevent today's
scientists from correcting their wrongs and coming to a better understanding
of things. So long as the Indus script is not deciphered satisfactorily, I 
see little reason to accept either theory as entirely right. This only makes
me an objective person. It does not make me part of the Hindutva-vadi crowd,
my Indian name notwithstanding. 

Regards,

S. Vidyasankar