Indo-Aryan im/e-migration (collation of bibl. references)

[Jan E.M. Houben]

Suggestions on literature connected with "Indo-Aryan Invasion / im/e-migration"
(a personal bibliographical collage):

Several people requested me to send them my collation of bibliographical
references in the Indo-Aryan im/e-migration discussion, in spite of my warning
my collation is very incomplete and only partly edited. I want to add that I
left the references mostly in their shape as they were given, whether complete
or incomplete, and that I did not check them (I hope to do this for a few which
interest me most).

Well, here follows what I collected the last few months:

***

Fri, 27  Feb 1998, Lmfosse at online.no, on Indo-Aryan Invasion

. . .
magnum opus on the genetics of the world by Cavalli-Sforza called The History
and Geography of the Human Genes, Princeton University Press, 1994
. . .

****

G. Thompson mentioned (somewhere in March?):
Hock H.H. "Pre-rgvedic convergence between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian: A survey
of the issues and controversies" [esp. relevant for discussion on retroflexion]
in: Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the
Sanskrit Language, ed. by J.Houben, Leiden, Brill 1996.

****
G. Thompson, 16 Mar:
P. Oktor Skjaervo's article in Erdosy, Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia, 1995;
and his: "The state of Old Avestan scholarship" JAOS 117.1 (1997).

****

Lars Martin Fosse <lmfosse at ONLINE.NO>, ca. 10 March, on Indo-Aryan Invasion
(proposal for virtual sattra)


I would like to suggest another paper appearing in the same volume as
Erdosy's (The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, Material Culture
and Ethnicity). [The paper is written by Michael Witzel and is called
"Rgvedic history: poets, chieftains and polities"). Then not only the
linguistic and the archaeological dimension would covered, but also the
historical.
[note JH: publisher: Walter de Gruyter: Berlin/New York, 1995; According to a
note in Witzel's "The Vedic Canon and its Political milieu" in Inside the Text -
Outside the Text, ed. by M. Witzel, Harvard Oriental Series, Opera minora vol.
2 (p. 262 note 21): "The Volume has now been reprinted, at an affordable rate,
by Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi."]

********


Palaniappa <Palaniappa at AOL.COM>, 12 March

The views of late Candrasekaraendra Sarasvati (ZankarAcArya) of Kanchi should
also be considered here. According to him, the racial connotation of the terms
Arya and Dravida was due to the Divide and Rule policy of the Whites.
(teyvattin2 kural, vol.2, 35). In a discussion of the 'research of the Whites:
good and bad' ("veLLaiyar ArAycci:nallatum keTTatum" teyvattn2 kural, vol. 2,
p. 234-244), he discusses the work of Indologists and Orientalists (Max
Mueller, William Jones, Arthur Avalon) and their approach to Vedic studies and
Vedic chronology.

By the way, is there any reason why the IA experts do not seem to consider
Kuiper's book (in which he discusses Deshpande's thesis) as worthwhile to
include in their discussion, Indo-Aryan Invasion "focussed discussion"?



************

Luis Gonzalez-Reimann <reimann at UCLINK.BERKELEY.EDU>, 13 March on
 Indo-Aryan Invasion (proposal for virtual sattra)

A topic that I have never seen mentioned when the discussion comes up is
whether we can draw any conclusions from references to weather or the
environment in the Rg Veda and Iranian texts.  More specifically, the fact
that whereas water plays an important role in both Rg Vedic and Iranian
mythologies, in Iran it is mainly through images of rivers, while in the Rg
Veda rain is added as an important element, and it grows in importance as
times goes on.  This coincides with the fact that monsoon weather covers the
subcontinent but it doesn't reach Iran.
A recent article that mentions this is  G. V. Vajracharya's "The Adaptation
of Monsoonal Culture by Rgvedic Aryans: A Further Study of the Frog Hymn,"
in the Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 3,2 (1997).

*****

JH: For instance, Hock's article on retroflexes (see earlier postings) pre-
fixes a period of Aryan-Dravidian harmony to the Vedic period, but it does not
say anything directly on Aryans coming into or going out of India. It is only
relevant to the Indo-Aryan im/e-migration debate to the extent that it places
great question marks behind ONE of the traditional arguments for emigration. On
the other hand, Erdosy's "Language, material culture and ethnicity" (see
earlier postings) seems more centrally important for the debate.

In the mean time, in the archive of this very Indology List I found a posting
of Raoul Martens, dated 16 Jan 1998, with several references on "the Indus
script", "Aryan Invasion Theory" and "horse in Indus valley". This could form
the basis of a list of literature for "the other side of the argument".

The posting mentions also addresses of various websites, but several of these
seem to have become outdated. I was only successful at the site
http://www.indiastar.com
This contains postings with reviews of recently appeared books, and it seems
that books "debunking Aryan Invasion" are extremely popular (does this reflect
the popularity of the subject with Indian readers or the policy of the
maintainers of the site?).
Under the sub-address
http://www.indiastar.com/ancient.htm
a review of four "new age" antiAryanInvasion books may be found: In search of
the Cradle of Civilization, by Feuerstein, Kak and Frawley; Myth of Aryan
Invasion by Frawley; Politics of History: Aryan Invasion and Subversion of
Scholarship, Navaratna Rajaram; Return of the Aryans by Bhagwan S. Gidwani.



***

"N. Ganesan" <GANESANS at CL.UH.EDU>
on Indo-Aryan invasion

A) Language Change:
*******************

When the incoming Indo-Aryans have attained sufficient political power
and population numbers, the existing people abandoned and/or were made
to abandon their native language (some form of Dravidian?) and started
to use Indo-Aryan tongues. Is this formulation written by anyone?
Much like how Spanish in Mexico or Portugese in Brazil spread as a
"prestige" language, as suggested by Dr. Fosse. I searched academic
databases,
could come up with interesting, but did not see anything for Indic
situation.
Is this because scarce written data from Dravidian side exists, to a lesser
extent from Indo-Aryan.

William Labov, On the mechanism of linguistic change, NY
J. P. Lantolf, Linguistic change as a socio-cultural phenomenon, PhD
P. S. Ureland, Prehistoric bilingualism and pidginization as forces
of Linguistic change, J. IE studies, 7, 77-104, 1979
L. M. Torres, Linguistic change in a Language contact situation: A
cross-generational study, PhD, 1988
etc.,

*************************************************************************

B) Place Names:
***************

The vast databank of Indian settlement names is under-researched.
Lot more work can be done. For example, I give a section of an old posting
in Indology. Old names from inscriptions should be special, in this regard.

MICHIGAN-LAUSANNE INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR
"ARYANS AND NON-ARYANS IN SOUTH ASIA :
EVIDENCE, INTERPRETATION, AND IDEOLOGY"

October 25-27, 1996
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan

DRAVIDIAN PLACE NAMES IN MAHARASHTRA

F. C. Southworth (University of Pennsylvania)

In their book _The_Rise_of_Civilization_in_India_and_Pakistan_ (1982),
the Allchins state that there is a substratum of Dravidian place names in
Maharashtra. This statement, based probably on the ideas of H. D.
Sankalia, has never been properly investigated. Fortunately there exist
two lists of Maharashtrian village names which provide the data for such
a study. My investigation of these names turned up a number of candidates
for Dravidian origin among the suffixes of Marathi place names. Among
these suffixes, the most promising is -vali/oli, both because of its high
frequency and because its Dravidian origin is not questioned (< Drav.
paLLi 'hamlet, camp, place to lie down' < paT- 'lie,fall').

A study of the spatial distribution of village names with the suffix
-vali/oli shows 90% or more of them concentrated in the coastal region
known as Konkan. In the remainder of the Marahi-speaking area, the
greatest concentration is in the southern part of the Desh, i.e. in the
districts of Kolhapur and Solapur. A number of other suffixes of probable
Dravidian origin are also found in these areas, though they are of lower
frequency of occurrence. Thus these suffixes of Dravidian origin are in a
continuous distribution with the Dravidian paLLi, as well as with similar
suffixes in the state of Gujarat (discussed in Sankalia's doctoral
thesis, which is based on early inscriptions in Gujarat). Thus there can
be little doubt that these areas were previously inhabited by speakers of
some Dravidian language(s).

>The paper will also discuss reflexes of Dravidian paLLi in place names in
>Sindh and Pakistani Panjab, where the evidence is somewhat less clear.
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Satyanarayana Dasa, Dravidian in North Indian toponymy, Varanasi, 1987
V. Khaire, Dravida Maharashtra, 1977
K. Nachimuthu (editor), Perspectives in place names,
1987, Trivandrum has a paper by
Lalitha Prabhu on Palli and its variants in Central India.
(I don't know whether Prof. F. C. Southworth has seen this one)
Parso Gidvani has written on Sindhi names from Dravidian.
Krishnapada Goswami, Place names of Bengal, 1984
H. D. Sankalia, Prehistory of India, 1977
H. D. Sankalia, The prehistory and protohistory of India and
Pakistan,
N. Lahovary, Dravidian origins and the West, 1963
G. S. Ghurye, Caste and Race in India, Bombay, 1979
For years, F. C. Southworth has written on related topics:
a) The reconstruction of Prehistoric South Asian language contact,
in E. H. Bendix(ed.), The uses of linguistics, p. 207-234, NY 1990
b) Dravidian and Indo-European: The neglected hypothesis,
Int. J. Dravidian linguistics, 11, 1, p.1-21, 1982
c) Lexical evidence for early contacts between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian,
in Aryan & Non-Aryan in India, UMich. 1979
d) F. C. Southworth, Ancient economic plants of South Asia:
Linguistic archaeology and early agriculture.
in Language and Culture: Studies in honor of E.C. Polome,
p. 649-648, 1988
e) Linguistic masks for power: some relationships between semantic and
social
change.
Anthropological linguistics, 16, p. 177-191
f) Linguistic stratigraphy of North India, IJDL, 3, 2, 1974

C) Substratum theory:
*****************

von Munkwitz-Smith, Jefrrey C.
Substratum influence in Indo-Aryan grammar,
PhD thesis, 1995, U. Minnesota

O. Szemerenyi, Structuralism and substratum:Indo-Europeans and Aryans in
the Ancient Near East, Lingua 13, 1-29, 1964

Jaroslav Vacek, The non-IE linguistic substratum in the IE
languages of India, with reference to the Ashokan inscriptions.
1969

C. A. Winters, The Dravidian and Manding substratum in Tokharian,
Central Asiatic Jl., 1988, v.32, 1-2, p. 131-

D) Retroflexion in Sanskrit:
********************************

M. B. Emeneau in Collected papers says:
"The fact, however, that the later in Indo-Aryan linguistic history we go,
the greater is the incidence of retroflex constants and the further fact
that
most of the Dravidian languages and the proto-Dravidian itself have this
type of
consonants in abundance, can only lead to the conclusion that the later
Indo-Aryan developments are due to a borrowing of indigenous speech
habits through bilingualism, and to the well-grounded suspicion that
even in the early development of retroflexes from certain IE consonant
clusters results from the same historic case."

A recent article:
Eric P. Hamp, On the IE origin of retroflexes in Sanskrit,
JAOS, 116, 4, 719-

****


 Palaniappa <Palaniappa at AOL.COM>, 6 May, on
Indo-Aryan im/e-migration (scholarly debate)

In a message dated 98-05-04 23:26:06 EDT, bhk at HD1.VSNL.NET.IN writes:

<< Apparently the present generation of Indologists are not familiar with the
 arguments of Jules Bloch why OIA has ghoTa(ka) 'horse' > Hi. ghoDaa, etc.,
 which has no IE-etymology (unlike Skt. as'va-). . . . >>

Indologists also should consult the following view of T. Burrow.
. . . The reference is "Dravidian Studies-I: Notes on "Convertibility of Surds
and
Sonants" in Collected Papers on Dravidian Linguistics, by Prof T. Burrow,
1968, Annamalai University, Annamalainagar, S. India. This is a reprint of a
BSOS IX [1937-39] article.

****

Georg von Simson <g.v.simson at EAST.UIO.NO>, 7 May, on Horses

Paul K. Manansala asks me:
>
>Could you explain this high position of the horse in other
>Indo-European cultures.  Preferably not Scythian ones as there has
>always been some argument over whether the Scythians were truly IE.
>What part did the horse play in Greek or Persian culture?

See the article "Horses" by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, in The Encyclopedia
of Religion (Ed. Mircea Eliade). Vol. 6 (New York, 1987), p. 463-468.
I cannot quote the whole article; let me just quote the following (p. 463):
"Ancient Indo-European Horse Sacrifices: With the Greeks and the Vedic
Indians, and later with the Romans, the horse truly came into its own as a
religious symbol, one that pervades both myth and ritual. Rituals involving
horses, more particularly rituals that involve the killing of a white
stallion, are attested throughout the Indo-European world."
In the following she mentions ancient Norse, Greek, Roman, Persian and
Celtic ritual and mythological traditions which confirm her statement. See
also the Bibliography added to her article for further references.

****

"N. Ganesan" <GANESANS at CL.UH.EDU>, 9 May on Horses

To an outsider, horse looks important in ancient Persia.

A. Cotterell, The Penguin Encyclopaedia of Classical
Civilizations, 1993  p.153 has a cylinder seal
with cuneiform letters. In this seal, Darius I
of the Achamenid empire around 520 BC is shown
hunting lions. Two palm trees are there.
The King of Kings is shooting an arrow from
chariot. There are horses, charioteer, etc.,

See also,
Jaan Puhvel, Comparative mythology, Johns Hopkins univ. press,
1989.
Some chapter names: The concepts of Indo-European and
Indo-Iranian, Vedic India, Ancient Iran, Ancient Greece,
Rome, Celts, HORSE and ruler, ...

Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (1854-1933)
The bas-relief of Behram Gour at Naksh-i-Rustam and the
horse in ancient Iran.
Bombay: Educational society's steam press, 1895

Bahram was dead at 438.

Regards,
N. Ganesan


*****

JHOUBEN 10 May:
Here, "the horse is missing" refers only to the oldest paintings. The absence
of the horse becomes more striking if placed against the background of its
conspicuous presence in later paintings. The dating of the different paintings
is crucial, and for this I have to lean heavily on the preliminary publication
which I cited, namely
Bhimbetka: Prehistoric Man and his Art in Central India by Virendra Nath Misra
et al., Deccan College: Pune, 1977.

***

Note: there were a number of important references to "horse in megalithic
culture" which I have not yet included in this list. It should be not too
difficult to find them in the INDOLOGY archive of March, April, May this
year . . .

JH