Tampering with history

[Luis Gonzalez-Reimann]

At 08:53 AM 6/19/98 -0500, Subrahmanya wrote:

>Please give details, as to what has not been discarded and what the new
>evidence is.


Dear Subrahmanya,

How can you ask for details only to dismiss them with one-liners such as:

>Witzels reconstruction of Vedic Textual history demands all kinds
>of reminiscences !!.  Let us not get into that again.

M. Witzel has been providing a lot of information that requires careful
consideration, not condescending statements such as the one above (whatever
it means).

Superficial generalizations won't do, such as:

"The Vedic religion is the Indian source (more specifically Puru)."

>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>I suspect that by the
>>year 1000 BCE, Northern India was a bit like Latin America 300 years ago:
>>Lots of Europeans streaming in, mostly Spanish speaking, and confronting the
>>local populations.
>>
>Wrong!. First you have to prove that whatever area in Central Asia could
produce
>the population needed to overwhelm all of North India and impose its own
culture
>and language on a more advanced civilization.
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hasn't Witzel (and others) repeated this ad nauseam; it is not an invasion
of millions of people crushing everything in sight, it is an intruding
linguistic and cultural influence.  Or are you implying that millions of
Spaniards descended on Latin America, and that is why Spanish is now the
dominant language there (and Catholicism the main religion)?  Did Spain have
"the population needed to overwhelm all of" Latin America?

Please pay more careful attention to opinions that are derived from years of
careful analysis.  Please also dispel the ghosts of racist prejudices.  You
need to realize that you insist on attacking a long extinct enemy, at least
as far as discussions on this list are concerned.  Nobody on this list (that
I am aware) is attacking India, however you wish to construct it.


Luis Gonzalez-Reimann
University of California, Berkeley